Guest post: Katherine Roberts on Crown of Dreams

Katherine Roberts, author of the Pendragon Legacy, has written us a guest post about the series so far, what we can expect from Crown of Dreams and what the future holds!

Writing the third book of a four-book series can be tricky. The overall quest will not come to a climax until the final book, and yet Rhianna and her friends have already found the Sword of Light (Excalibur) and the Lance of Truth. If you’ve read The Sword of Light and Lance of Truth, the chances are you’ll know my characters and their world of Camelot almost as well as I do!

If you haven’t read them yet, you’ll meet Rhianna’s mist horse Alba, her friend Prince Elphin from the magical land of Avalon, her brave but rather hopeless squire Cai, and her shy maid Arianrhod. You’ll know what happened to Merlin (which probably served him right), and you’ll do battle with the dark knight Mordred, arch-villain of the stories, several times. In other words, the quest is in danger of getting boring… what new angles could I introduce for the third book?

Setting: Having begun book 1 in Avalon, and book 2 at Camelot, I decided to make the dragon’s lair (where the Crown of Dreams has lain buried since a dragon stole it from the battlefield after Mordred killed King Arthur) into a gateway leading to the shadowy land of Annwn. This added a ghostly dimension to the quest, and enabled Rhianna to meet her dead grandfather Uther Pendragon, as well as setting the scene for another encounter with Mordred’s witch-mother Morgan Le Fay.

Magic: The verse I wrote to introduce the Pendragon series names “the Crown of Dreams, which hides the Jewel of Annwn” – i.e. the Jewel is almost as important as the Crown. Since dragons were already involved, I decided this special jewel would contain the secret of dragon riding (which is not quite what you’d think). The smaller jewels were not going to be magical at all, until I realised they could be useful to my plot. Rhianna is given one of these jewels by her mother at the end of book 2, which turns out to contain King Arthur’s secrets… including how to find the Grail of Stars, which has the power to bring her father back from the dead. Unfortunately, the jewel is useless on its own. It needs to be put back into the Crown before Rhianna can see its secrets, while Mordred wants the missing jewel, because while it exists the Crown is dangerous for him to wear – which does not stop him from trying, of course!

I hope I’ve given Rhianna’s third adventure enough intrigue to keep you turning the pages until the final book The Grail of Stars, which is already with my editor and scheduled for publication this autumn (unless Mordred manages to stop Rhianna from completing her quest, that is… good thing she’s got Excalibur!).

You can follow Katherine on Twitter @AuthorKatherine, her website and blog.
Rhianna Pendragon tweets at @PendragonGirl