They Split the Party: Deleted Scenes
I am a human being as susceptible to blind hero worship as anybody else. So one day, when Matt Colville casually threw out the comment that modern fantasy books were getting too long because editors don’t say no to their authors enough, and that he tended to prefer writers who can actually get their books done in less than five hundred pages, I immediately latched onto that as a new guideline to my own writing.
It helps that this actually turned out to be an opinion that I generally shared with Matt. When I read longer books, I often find myself thinking that much of it could—and maybe should—have been cut, and nothing of value would have been lost, and the story would feel tighter for it. There are exceptions to this, obviously. As a great hero punk once said, “I don’t believe in consistency.”
But, in general, I like my own works to move at a good pace and stay a controlled length. And this time, that wasn’t just preference as a writer, it was a publisher mandate!
Printing things is expensive, CamCat isn’t the biggest publisher in the universe, and I know this may seem shocking to read today now that I’m definitely probably sitting at the top of every fantasy bestseller’s list, but back when They Split the Party was being edited for publishing, I didn’t exactly have the kind of clout and fanbase that could justify the expense of printing longer books. So, much like last time, there were cuts that had to be made to get the book to a printable wordcount.
Some of what got cut was just fat that needed to go. But some of the cut material I thought was really good and worth sharing. And some of it was meh, but I find their existence and my reasoning for their subsequent cuts to be instructive to anyone potentially looking to learn more about how best to kill one’s darling.
So, to all of those ends, please enjoy some deleted scenes from They Split the Party:
Jailed
This scene was born out of an earlier draft where the company’s legal exile from Sasel played a bigger role in the plot, and they got arrested trying to enter the city. It was a fun little scene, and it was also originally supposed to be a setup for later tracking some villains through connections to familiars. Revisions left those plot elements behind, but I still like it for its entertainment value.
Phoenix wondered if it was a busy day for the Sasel city watch, or if the jails were always this crowded. At least two dozen people were caged with him and Angel. Even though there was enough room for everyone to sit on the provided benches, there wasn't much left in the way of personal space. Going by the smell, some of these people had likely been here for a few days.
While most of the crowd on the bridge had simply been happy to be saved, one of the gatekeeper officers had a sense of law and duty that outweighed his gratitude, and Phoenix and Angel were informed that they were both in violation of their exile from the city, and promptly arrested as Wings swore profusely that she would find a way to sort this out.
As soon as they’d arrived at the jail, Angel had opted to make a statement by casually snapping off her shackles, after which the guards and everyone else in the cell had opted to leave her alone.
Phoenix had no such luck.
The man sitting next to him had a scraggly, silver streaked beard and stains on his shirt. After twenty minutes of arguing with someone else about sailboat racing, his attention turned to Phoenix.
"So, what did you do?" he asked, poking Phoenix's shoulder.
"Nothing," Phoenix said. "My wife's getting me out of here right now."
"Sure," the man nodded sarcastically. "My wife's coming to get me too."
Arman nodded, catching the smell of gin hanging off the man's words. Clearly, he was going through something at home. And whatever it was, he preferred knowing as little about it as possible. His silence bought him a few more minutes of peace before the next poke came.
"Hey," he prodded. Even when he wasn't speaking, his mouth hung slightly open. "Are you a mage?
"Why do you ask?"
"They've got you chained up like one."
He gestured to Arman's restraints. His wrists were shackled, the chain connecting them linked with another around his waist. Another set of shackles bound his ankles, and those too were connected to the chain on his waist.
"They only break out the chains for big ones and magic folks, and you're not that big. So are you a mage?"
Arman briefly considered explaining the differences between what the wizards of the academy did and his own spellforging to the man. But something told him that conversation would be more trouble than it was worth, so instead he just shrugged.
"Sort of."
It had been years since he'd actually been in Sasel and experienced things for himself, but he'd heard people weren't the biggest fan of magic these days. Years of freelancing had taught him what to expect from people coming into contact with things they didn't understand. He braced for the worst, but even with his experience, he was utterly blindsided by the words out of the man's mouth.
“Do you know anything about magic cats?”
Arman blinked. “What?”
The man checked around for anyone listening in. Satisfied that everyone else in the jail was occupied enough with their own problems, he spoke in a low voice. “I think my cat's turned magic.”
Phoenix’s jaw hung open as a sense of morbid curiosity overtook him. A part of him was still certain this could only be a nonsense waste of his time. And yet, he had to know what the man was on about. Even Angel looked over from her corner with a confused look on her face.
The man took Phoenix’s lack of protest as the signal to keep talking. “The little man ran off like he always does, but this time when he came back, he was wrong.”
“Wrong how?”
"He stopped playing with all his toys. Barely eats when I try to feed him. All he does is nap, and stare out the window, like he’s waiting for something. And then he disappears again, and the next time I find him he's always somewhere crazy, like on the roof.”
"Maybe he's just sick," Arman said, already feeling a profound sense of disappointment. "Or just being a cat."
The man shook his head. "He gets in places he couldn't get to before! Sometimes when he's napping, he'll just get up, his eyes'll change color, and he'll just leave. I watch him like a hawk when it happens, but I turn my back or blink and he's gone! And then I can't find him anywhere for the rest of the day!"
Arman didn't know much about cats, besides the fact that they didn't like him and he felt similarly towards them, but this was still sounding utterly mundane. Which was, in its own way, a pleasant surprise, given how he'd expected this conversation to go.
"You know, I don't think I'm the right kind of mage for this," he tried to deflect. "Maybe talk to a druid? Or a warden?"
"Where am I going to find one of those in the city?" the man asked. “They all live in the woods, eating bugs and drinking their own piss. And don't say write the watch for a mage either. I've done that three times, and nobody even wrote me back. Same with the church."
"Right." Arman nodded slowly. If not for the chains, he would have gotten up and moved.
"Don't look at me like that!" the man protested. "I know my cat. He's different. Something's wrong. And I've searched every inch of the house. Either that cat is magic or he learned how to open doors and close them behind him!"
"No, I believe you," Arman lied. "This just… sounds like an exponentially complex arcanozoological anomaly. Which would fall outside the parameters of my fields of expertise, to say nothing of my lack of access to analytical instruments here."
The man's head tilted. If the words hadn't confused him enough, the speed Arman threw them out sealed the deal. The man nodded, but whatever understanding he was trying to convey didn't reach his eyes. He stopped asking questions.
The doors of the jail opened again, and Elizabeth walked in, escorted by two members of the city watch. Arman fought through the awkwardness of his shackles to stand up, relieved to see her. But then he saw the other person walking in behind her.
“My exact words to you were to be discreet when entering the city,” Lupolt said, a slight quiver in his voice hinting at a barely contained rage. “Do you know what ‘discrete’ means?”
“Get over yourself,” Angel interrupted.
She sauntered to the door on the holding cell. Her eyes flashing golden for a moment, and with a grunt she delivered a single kick that broke the door open with a clang. The guards nearby immediately leveled their weapons, but she remained unphased. Every other inmate in the jail froze, save for one man who made a break for it and was clotheslined by Angel for his trouble.
“You want our help or not?” she asked.
A deep frown settled onto Lupolt’s face before he motioned for the guards to lower their weapons and unlock Phoenix. The fact of the matter was, he did not want their help.
He needed it.
Ruby Escapes Her Chaperone
This was one of those cuts I made purely for length. It’s a short little exchange that immediately proceeded Ruby running off to practice her magic with Bart’s help, and it was intended to highlight the constant suspicion and hovering Ruby was under, and help explain why she would be so motivated to leave. In the end, I made the tough choice that her conversations with Angel about it would have to be enough. Like I said, I had a wordcount goal to get under.
“Tea, dear?”
Sister Laurel might have been in her forties, with short chestnut hair and shallow laugh lines on her face. She came into the sitting room with a fully stocked tea tray, wisps of steam still curling out of the spout of the pot. She hovered near Ruby, wearing a smile that didn’t quite reach the rest of her face.
The sister’s eyes were searching, flitting up and down Ruby. Her eyebrows knitted together ever so slightly. Ruby knew that look, had seen it on other escorts trying to keep their composure around a client with an obvious short fuse.
Sister Laurel was afraid of her.
The entire town of Aenerwin was now. She wasn’t sure what exactly had caused it, whether it was Church’s ritual failing, people finding out more about her “situation,” Church leaving, or some combination of all three, but she absolutely noticed the change.
There had been whispers about her ever since she showed up in Aenerwin. But before, they’d been excited, intrigued by the new stranger coming into town. Now when she came into a room, people looked away. Whenever she walked away, she heard prayers whispered under peoples’ breath.
And Sister Laurel was the worst.
Ever since Church and Brass had left for the capital, Sister Laurel had been Ruby’s chaperone around Aenerwin. Not that she called herself that. No, she was just checking in. Just asking how she was feeling. Just wondering what she was up to.
Just suffocating her. Just treating her like she was about to bite someone or explode.
“No, thank you.”
“Alright.”
It took Sister Laurel another full second to sit down in an adjacent chair and pour herself a cup, which Ruby had to suppress a groan over. For that whole second, she’d dared to hope that Laurel would just leave.
Ruby didn’t even like tea. How entire fortunes had been built off importing it still baffled her. But she would have taken a cup of tea and some peace to more of Laurel’s constant shadowing.
“Any changes lately?” Laurel asked.
“No.”
“Any pain? Mood swings?”
“None.”
“Good. That’s good. If anything happens—”
“I’ll let you know,” Ruby interrupted, immediately getting up out of her chair. Laurel’s eyes lit up, clearly debating whether or not to immediately follow Ruby.
“I need to use the bathroom,” Ruby said, hoping to pacify Laurel.
It worked. Or at least, Laurel stayed seated as Ruby left the room, and found her way to the nearest bathroom—and out the window. Not that she didn’t love getting second hand anxiety from a priestess, but she had other plans for the afternoon. And after looking around to make sure no one had seen her, she made her way out of Aenerwin, and into the woods behind the church.
The Thunderer
This scene actually didn’t survive to publisher-submission, as my alpha-reader insisted it was entirely superfluous, and I usually end up agreeing with her when she labels a scene as such. The intent was have a scene that could serve as a sort of narrative transition—we’d finished the first act of the book that was all about getting the team back together and setting up what they’d be doing and who they’d be going after, time to show that now they’re doing it. And it was also a chance to have another bad guy do some jobbing for Angel before she gets her shit kicked in later in the book.
In the end, the function of narrative transition would end up being dispersed and seeded into all the act two storylines of the various duos hunting their quarries, and I had to confess that I’d already had plenty of people job for Angel even without this scene, so it got cut.
But superfluous or not, I think it’s fun.
The good people of the village of Homel ran screaming in every direction as a boom of thunder rattled every building to its foundation, and their church’s bell tower exploded in a shower of pulverized brick and mortar. The tower’s bell flew from it like a missile, letting out a deafening clang as it crashed to the street and kicked up a cloud of dirt. The Thunderer sauntered to the fallen bell, planted a commanding boot on top of it, and smiled down at his own warped reflection in its bronze face.
Today was a good day.
“HIDE YOUR KIDS! HIDE YOUR HORSES! HIDE YOUR SPOUSE!” he bellowed loud enough to rattle every window on the street. “BECAUSE THE THUNDERER IS HERE!”
He spread his arms out wide, presenting his towering form to the people who’d yet to run for their lives. The Thunderer stood head and shoulders above anyone else in town, broad and barrel chested, with arcane runes carved along the length of both of his thickly muscled arms. With every flex and movement, the runes lit up in sequence, as if the glow was traveling between them.
He was a specimen. Power incarnate. A demigod among men. And he was going to make damn sure everyone here knew that.
With a grunt, he clapped both of his hands together in front of him, and the light of the runes converged in between his hands before detonating in a resounding clap of thunder. A shockwave rippled out from him, kicking up dirt and debris from the village street before tearing the thatched roof clean off of the closest house and dumping it onto the house behind it.
It was probably overkill as far as destruction went. The villagers almost certainly got the point by now. But fuck it. He’d missed cutting loose like this.
And if the trio of terrified looking people with logging and hunting equipment charging him from across the square were anything to go by, some of the villagers hadn’t gotten the point yet.
With a grin, he crouched low, and catapulted himself through the air with another crack of thunder. He cleared the entire square in a single leap, landing in their midst with a shockwave that sent all of them sprawling. They weren’t resistance. They were ragdolls with sharp objects.
The first one to get back up was rewarded for his troubles with a kick to the ribs, the next had his face reintroduced to the dirt, and the third was sent flying into the closest house with another shockwave.
“TIME TO PRAY, FUCKERS!” the Thunderer cackled. “BECAUSE I AM YOUR NEW GOD!”
The meager trio of defenders the village had mustered remained on the ground as others continued to flee in every direction, and the Thunderer’s grin grew. Let them run a little more. Tire themselves out. Then he’d start cornering them, driving them back into town until they understood that escape wasn’t an option. Once they did, the tributes could begin. Gold. Food. Servants. All the spoils of conquest, and all for him alone. It was so easy, it was almost sad.
That said, he still didn’t appreciate it when somebody threw a brick at the back of his head.
More incensed than injured, the Thunderer turned around, preparing to make an example out of whatever brave idiot had pulled that shit. What he found was a tall, dark skinned woman in a simple tunic. Maybe another logger, if her admittedly respectable muscle was anything to go by. But this one didn’t carry an axe. She didn’t even have another brick to throw.
“Gonna give you one chance to shut the fuck up!” the woman hollered.
The Thunderer scoffed. Credit where it was due, she had no more bricks, but she did have absolutely titanic balls.
“AND WHO’S GOING TO MAKE ME?” The Thunderer shouted. “YOU?”
His voice boomed so loud it rattled shutters off their hinges and made the pebbles on the ground dance around him. People all around covered their ears. Parents shielded their children with their own bodies.
The woman in front of him did not flinch. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
She didn’t even raise her voice to say it, and yet the Thunderer felt something in those words that unsettled him. It was more than bravery, or confidence. It almost sounded like boredom.
The other people of the village had stopped running, stopped screaming, and a hush had fallen over the streets of Homel. People were still hiding and taking cover, but now they were watching the confrontation in their streets unfold in deathly silence. Whoever the woman was, the Thunderer did not scare her. And that gave them a shred of hope to cling to.
Which absolutely could not stand.
“NO,” the Thunder voice boomed. “I DON’T.”
The runes on his arms lit up once again, and with a mighty heave, his hands crashed together, producing another blast. Not enough to turn the woman to paste—why murder when you could subjugate—but more than enough to send her flying and teach her who she was messing with. That was the idea anyway.
Instead, the woman crouched low, dug her heels in, and shielded herself with her arms. The blast whipped up her hair, but for his efforts, he’d barely moved her at all. A muted gasp rippled through the village, and the Thunderer gawked, briefly too surprised to react. He recovered his wits as the woman began to march towards him, and he threw himself into another blast, even stronger than the last.
She weathered it even easier than the last one, barely breaking her stride. The whole village held its breath, daring to believe in the miracle before them. The Thunderer growled in frustration, and clapped his hands together as hard as he could.
Every piece of glass that hadn’t already been shattered ruptured into a thousand pieces. Boards were torn off the fronts of buildings. Carriages overturned, and people clutched at their ears as eardrums burst. As the focus of the blast, the woman was sent flying off her feet and careening straight through the wall of the village schoolhouse. A moment later, the entire thing collapsed on top of her.
The Thunderer stood up a little straighter, satisfied. The cries of despair began to resume in the village, and things began to settle back into how they were supposed to be.
And then the rubble of the building shifted. The remains of an entire wall slowly righted itself before being shoved aside, and from underneath the pile of wood and dirt, the woman rose up. Only now, she was different.
Now, her eyes had become twin suns of blindingly bright light, a golden aura radiating from her body, and a burning halo above her head. In that moment, the Thunderer’s stomach dropped, and the deep rumble of power he normally felt inside himself went silent. He remembered who this woman was now. She shrugged off the last of the debris from the schoolhouse, and stalked toward him. Her hands curled into glowing fists.
Today was a bad day.
“I surrender.” He threw up both of his hands and backpedaled for his life. “I surrender! I SURREND—”
Ink and Quint vs The Cord of Aenwyn
I consider the fights to be one of the major components of the Glintchasers series. I consider them great opportunities for characterization and spectacle both, and it’s just a chance to let my inner child’s imagination run wild when writing. Inevitably, the fights are always the most overwritten part of a Glintchasers draft, and I have to trim them down and refocus more on interiority.
This was one of those rare instances where a fight got cut wholecloth. It didn’t feature any of the main characters, and its resolution had effectively no bearing on the plot, so in the finished product, we just cut right after Quint and Ink square up. At a time when we really needed to cut left and right to get the product to target length, I just couldn’t justify the indulgence of giving two side-characters an extended showmatch, even though the conclusion would have put a neat little bow on the development and backstory we’d gotten from Ink up to this point.
“You realize it’s six against two now, correct?” Quint asked.
“Well darling, for both our sakes, let’s hope you’ve let the Cord fall to shit while I’ve been away.”
“You know I haven’t.”
Ink smiled as her threads crackled with lightning. “Let’s take the children to school anyway, shall we?”
Quint grunted, a smile spreading across his face as he combined his two spears into a single, double-ended one, and Ink spread a tangle of threads between her fingers.
“A blow to the head will do it?”
“As long as it's hard enough.”
Quint nodded. As one, the two of them attacked.
Quint threw his spear forward, scattering the members of the Cord in front of him as he rushed forward. With one hand, Ink whipped a thread out to wrap around the spear and fling it back into Quint’s waiting hand. With the other, she wrapped a thread first around a fence post and then around Point’s neck before pulling hard enough to send the knife wielder face first into the wooden beam. Meanwhile, Quint used his newly returned spear to deflect Fang’s sword, and then spun it around to crack the dragon-soul in the back of the head with the shaft.
Drummer brought his hammer down on the ground, sending a hunk of rock into the air in front of him. With a guttural shout, he smashed his hammer against the rock, catapulting it toward Quint. The Cord’s leader ducked, shouting a warning to Ink as he did. She reacted, stepped between two street posts and wrapped her threads between them into a net that not only caught the flung boulder, but sent it flying back at Drummer.
Quint met Spike in a melee, each of them a blur of precise strikes and counters. His spear gave him reach, and its two points let him be flexible with the angle of his attack, but she was lighter on her feet, and skilled enough to deflect his weapon using her knuckle dusters. Spike was good. Someday, Quint believed she would be leading the Cord of Aenwyn. But today, she still had lessons to learn.
As he forced her back with a feint of a stab, he retreated himself, bringing his spear behind him and stabbing it into the ground. Unable to resist attacking a newly unarmed opponent, Spike charged, only for Quint to sidestep, grab her by the back of the neck, and slam her forehead into the waiting shaft of his spear. The weapon rang like a struck chime, and Spike crumpled to the ground. Quint grunted, and pulled his spear back out of the ground.
Ink danced through the street, her threads whipping around her body as both weapon and shield as Squid and Sting both tried to find their opening. She’d already tried to entangle Squid once, and the sorcerer had just turned into a puddle of water and slipped right out. Sting was staying back, peppering her with arrows that she sliced out of the air with a crack of a thread. Ink was growing tired of the stalemate, and the sooner she put an end to this, the less chance either of them had to actually get lucky enough to land a hit themselves.
She whipped a thread out toward Sting, intentionally wide and more than easy to dodge. But it did herd the archer just a little closer to Squid, which was all she needed. She wrapped a finger around the thread, redirecting its swing so it went from wide and slow on Sting’s side to fast and precise from directly behind. It struck with just enough force to knock the archer even closer to Squid.
At the same time, she twisted another thread tight around the sea sorcerer, forcing him to again collapse into a puddle of water—that Sting stepped right into. While her threads were still touching the water, Ink sent a charge of lighting running through them, tearing into both members at once. Sting lurched and spasmed before Squid resolidified, screaming, and both of them dropped like sacks of rocks.
Ink and Quint both stood, panting, waiting to see if any of the Cord of Aenwyn got back up. Ink glanced over at Quint, at the sweat trickling down his brow, the scuffs and dirt from Drummer’s assault, and the rise and fall of his well- muscled shoulders. Maybe it was the adrenaline. The thrill of fighting side by side again after so much time apart. Maybe it was some damn trace of sentiment and romantic foolishness left in her head from Elizabeth's visit inside her head.
Whatever it was, Ink didn’t much care. She lashed a thread around Quint’s waist, and tugged him close to her before grabbing his head and capturing his mouth in a desperate, longing kiss. His arms, like corded steel, immediately wrapped around her, holding her flush against him while trying not to stab her in the back with the spear he was still holding. Her heart fluttered in her chest, and she pulled harder on the thread to draw him even closer to her. Gods and saints, she had forgotten how much she loved this man.
Love? Now I know this is Elizabeth’s fault.
She broke them apart, still not having caught her breath from the fight. “Dinner. Tonight. Wear something nice, and don’t be late.”
A Taste
One of the questions I ask to guide my cutting is “If I remove this scene and replace it with a sentence-long summary/explanation, do I lose anything of actual value to the story?” And if the answer is no, then that’s a cut, and one of the easiest ways to get a “no” is if a scene really only exists to explain something. Ruby and Bart are side characters, and them successfully convincing the Baron of Loraine to back their evacuation plan can easily be summarized in a sentence once the characters come up with the plan of how to do it, which they already had in a previous chapter.
I also generally don’t like having too many scenes without a clear tension or dramatic question, and because we already know how they plan on doing it, and they have to succeed for the rest of the Loraine scenes to happen, this scene’s resolution is way too much of a foregone conclusion.
There is some novel characterization and setup going on in the scene, which is half of why I wrote it, but not enough, and not for important enough characters, to save it from the chopping block.
In the town keep of Loraine, a strategic meeting of the town’s council, that is to say, a shouting match, was underway. Lorn, the orc who served as both headman of the ruintown and captain of its rudimentary guard, was in the middle of loudly and angrily explaining to one of the richest men in town that they would not be diverting men to protect the man’s estate from anticipated looters, as other members of the council shouted their approval or disdain for the decision, usually based on whether or not they owned Crispin money.
To his credit, if Crispin was at all intimidated by a seven and a half foot tall, muscled bound creature with thick tusks, he didn’t show it at all.
“My family built this place! Turned it from a pile of rocks into a breathing community!” Crispin shouted. “Show some respect!”
“Your father hired people to build this place!” Baron Hitzkopf snapped. Since receiving his title, Crispin’s family had been a constant thorn in the baron’s side. Too arrogant and entitled to tolerate conversing with for long, and yet too useful to dismiss entirely. Normally, he had a lot more patience for dealing with the ripper-prince. But normally, there wasn’t an army of undead bearing down on the city.
“The baron’s right!” a woman on the council chimed in. “You didn’t build shit, and neither did your father! You just made money off it all.”
“That money is what’s going to rebuild this town after our flimsy attempts to defend it from a monstrous horde fall through!” Cripsin said. “If we don’t all just die! We never should have let a fucking orc run this city! He’s run it right into the ground! Especially our defenses!”
A low rumble reverberated in Lorn’s throat. “Big words for a small man. If you think the defenses are weak, you can always help. The guard is taking volunteers. And the frontlines always need more meat.”
“Enough! Both of you!” the baron shouted. “In case you forgot, we have a town to save, not cocks to measure!”
“We can help with that.”
All heads snapped around in unison, as a guard lieutenant escorted in a young woman with bright red hair and a lean, sandy blonde boy in a cleric’s attire. Immediately, confusion and curiosity spread through the council.
“Um, who are they? And how did they get in here?”
“This is a closed meeting. Go back to your homes.”
“Guardsman! What is this?”
As the council’s voices clamored to be heard over each other, Ruby’s eyes scanned over their faces in search of the right one. The guard lieutenant had been a trial run for this moment, to see if she could actually use Hell Speech on purpose.
It came almost disturbingly easy to her. A bit of intent, a few words, and the guardsman was obediently escorting her and Bart directly to the baron. Now it was time for the main event.
It wasn’t hard to spot the baron. He sat at the head of the council’s table, his weathered face etched with deep frown lines and a jagged scar that went from his cheek down to his collarbone. What really gave it away though were the eyes, and the way they burned with determination and ambition.
Ruby looked him dead in the eyes, drew in a deep breath, and put her will into her voice.
“Hear us out.”
Ruby felt a cold, prickling sensation bubble in her chest and crawl under her skin. There was the faintest tug inside her. Less like she was being pulled toward something, and more like something was pulling its way toward her.
She felt that same sensation the last time she used Hell Speech, on accident, and it unnerved her. But she kept that off of her face.
“Everyone, quiet!” he shouted. “Let them speak.”
Even before the baron ordered it, a hush fell over the council, and with a start, Ruby realized she'd affected all of them with her words. Equal parts terror and elation seized her heart. It worked. It worked even better than she'd expected. And she'd just hijacked an entire town's leadership without even meaning to.
That wasn't the plan.
Mind controlling the baron into going along with the plan, forcing Loraine to put all of its hopes in four strangers, hadn’t sat right with Ruby. She'd only wanted to bend the baron's ear, steal a few minutes of legitimacy for the leaders of the town to hear their plan, and decide for themselves if it was worth it. She worried for a moment that she'd overdone it, that now this entire room would do anything she said just because she said it.
She searched the eyes of the council for signs of—she didn't actually know what. If there was a way to tell if she'd turned someone into a subservient puppet, she didn't know what it was.
Too late now.
She’d done her part. If she'd overdone it . . . she'd have to live with the consequences later. They had a town to save. So, with all eyes and ears on them, Ruby yielded the floor to Bart.
“Thank you, Lord Baron,” the cleric said. “My name is Bartholomew of the Church of the Guiding Saint, and this is my associate, Ruby. We’re here as representatives of agents of the crown, here to help. Your forces aren’t a match for the Dread Knight. But we have a way to save the people of Loraine. To make sure they live to see another day, and when the time comes, rebuild this place, even greater than before. We can evacuate everyone, safely. But we need your help. Your cooperation to coordinate the people.”
“Evacuate?” Crispin scoffed, unintentionally giving Ruby immense relief with his dissent. “Do you have any idea how large Loraine is, young man? It’s practically a city! To get even a fraction ready to leave, now would—”
“Crispin!” The baron silenced the man with a single bark of his name, his eyes barely leaving the two new arrivals to the council chambers. They were young, practically shaking with adrenaline, and both clearly aware they were in over their heads even as they charged ahead. Unless he missed his guess, the baron knew these young people’s kind. In fact, he'd been their kind, when he'd discovered the ruins of Loraine and, instead of stripping them for everything they were worth, decided to build something with them. And experience held that however much trouble they might bring, glintchasers had a knack for delivering on the impossible.
Baron Hitzkopf's people were in desperate need of the impossible.
“What exactly did you have in mind?” the baron asked.
The Crown
If you asked me to pick one scene that I agonized the most about cutting, it would be this one. I really liked Roland II and Lupolt and their entire dynamic, which I modeled after Queen Clarisse and Joe from Princess Diaries, and I really wanted to include more of it in They Split the Party. This also would have served as a sort of emotional bridge between Roland II adamantly refusing to work with the Starbreakers in the beginning and accepting their aid in the end.
Ultimately, it was decided that not including this scene better preserved the emotional tension between Roland II and the Starbreakers until its ultimate resolution.
Still. This one was the darling, and it killed me to kill it.
There were no windows in the king's war room. Though there was lightstone installed within the ceiling, as Lupolt entered it, the only source of illumination was a table at its center, upon which sat a shimmering, three dimensional map of Corsar and the surrounding territory made of light. Scattered across the map were glowing dots of two different colors. Red dots were confirmed sightings of Oblivion escapees. Blue dots were forces dispatched to stop them.
The red significantly outnumbered the blue.
King Roland II sat at the head of the table, his crutches propped against his chair as he poured over the map. Sitting on the table just next to him was a thin crown, forged of silver and accented with a line of sapphires.
“You should be wearing that,” Lupolt said as he closed the door behind him.
“I’m the king. I can wear whatever I want,” Roland said, not looking up from the map.
"No you can’t."
Roland leaned back in his chair. “No. I can’t.”
He picked up the crown to examine for a moment before tossing it back onto the table. To the hells with it. Nobody else was here, he was tired, and he hated wearing the thing. If there were an ounce of fairness in this world, Roland would still be a prince, and never have to wear the crown. But out of every virtue the gods championed, fairness had never been one of them.
Under normal circumstances, Lupolt might have half-heartedly chastised his king for blatant disregard of protocol, before they both shared a laugh at the stupidity of it. But these weren't normal circumstances.
"How may I be of service?" Lupolt asked.
Roland was silent for a time, still staring at the map of Corsar. "Thirty-five years."
"Sir?"
"My parents governed Corsar for thirty-five years. I've been doing it a fifth as long. And already I'm wondering if I've failed."
"All respect to your parents, but their rule started with two functional territories unifying into a kingdom. Your rule started with the kingdom plunged into crisis and halfway to collapse," Lupolt said. "And your parents had each other. You're doing this alone."
"Maybe I should tell that to everyone living in the north and the east. 'So sorry your lands have fallen into anarchy, but I never got married.' I'm sure they'll understand," Roland said. He buried his hands in his face, trying to rub some of the weariness from it. It didn't work. "I'm failing, Lupolt."
"Sire, you're not—
"Then why did you do it?"
Lupolt didn't need to ask what Roland meant. "You're doing everything you can. Everything anyone could do, given what you have to work with. But it's a question of numbers. We don't have enough."
"You think I don't know that?" Roland snapped.
Roland glowered at Lupolt, his eyes rife with frustration and grief. Those were the eyes that had watched, for the last seven years, as the land his family had worked so hard to unite and defend slowly came unraveled, hemorrhaging from the wound the fall of Relgen had left. That had seen the fight to preserve what was left slowly but surely turn against them as problems mounted and resources dwindled.
"I think you have been given an impossible task. And that there were days even your parents needed help."
Roland's fury fizzled out as quickly as it rose up. He was too tired to be angry. And as the fire of his anger left him, his shoulders sagged. "I can't ask them for help, Lupolt. Even if I could ignore the law, I . . ." He rubbed his face again. "They were my friends. And now I can't look at them without thinking about what Relgen did to us. Or what I did to them."
A guilt years in festering darkened the king's already weary expression, and Lupolt stiffened.
"I know," Lupolt said. "Which is why I did it."
Roland tilted his head, and Lupolt considered himself lucky the king had already spent what anger he could muster.
"You didn't have to face them. I acted without your knowledge or permission. If I were discovered, you could simply punish me as a rogue agent and maintain your own integrity under the law."
"You'd still be punished. Fired at the very least, if not outright imprisoned. Gods and saints, Lupolt, with as much as you know, a court could send you to Oblivion."
Lupolt shrugged. "We do what we have to."
"And you're assuming a court actually believes I had no knowledge of your actions."
"If Carter hadn't said anything, you wouldn't have."
"But now I do."
Lupolt frowned. "Yes."
"I'm not above the law, Lupolt. I can't be, if I want everyone else to follow it," Roland said. "We can't employ freelancers."
"At this point sire, we don't have to," Lupolt stated simply. "They're going after the escapees, whether they work for us or not. And there's no law against the people of this kingdom defending one another from criminals and monsters of their own volition. I'd prefer to be able to oversee and coordinate their efforts, but at this point all we really need to do is stay out of their way."
Roland was silent for a long time.
Lupolt kept his expression neutral, but his tone softened, pleading. "You don't have to work with them sire. Just let them do what they do best; save us."
Roland raised an eyebrow. "I never thought I'd hear you advocating in favor of working with the Starbreakers."
"Neither did I, once. But things change."
Roland nodded, slowly, as if turning the words over in his mind. "Yes. They certainly do."
That does it for this round of deleted scenes. Lots of other bits and pieces got cut, but I either forgot about them because they got cut so early, or I remembered them and just didn’t think they were interesting enough to be worth preserving. There was originally supposed to be a scene in the book where we got to see the book’s final boss actually escape into the world, but I never actually got around to writing it, so it couldn’t be included here.
You know, it’s funny, this is going up right when They Split the Party drops, but I’ve been writing the next book in the series for the last year, so while I was putting this post together, I actually struggled to remember what scenes were and weren’t in the final product.
Remind me to write next year’s Deleted Scenes post while I’m writing the book.