It was a one-two punch: I never dreamed of it and it also hit me really hard. The biggest shocker for me was what was being done to Liu. Janine: All the ones I listed above, as well as the last one about Arjun’s sacrifice. What revelations came as an entire surprise to you? I was very happy for the twist though, because I think it helped to heal El somewhat. The rest were all surprising in the sense that I didn’t expect them, but they made sense, you know? Not that the Deepthi revelation didn’t, but it felt like more of a twist, whereas the others felt like new information that in context, made sense. It had just never occurred to me to take that part of the story on anything but face value. Jennie: I really wasn’t expecting the twist with Deepthi.
There are a number of twists in this book-Orion is part maw-mouth, enclaves are powered by malia, Liesel isn’t as unprincipled as we thought, great-great-grandmother Deepthi loves El and made the prophecy to protect her, El didn’t get the sutras for the reasons she thought, Liu is in danger of something horrible, and more. Janine: That would have been so depressing, I can only breathe a sigh of relief. It just felt like signs in the big showdown scene were pointing that way – I mean, they obviously were, on the surface, but even beneath the surface there was this undercurrent of doom and dread that made me think that El killing Orion would be a fitting ending. What about you, were you afraid of a dark ending? So I knew Orion would survive, but nevertheless, when Li was telling El she had to kill him and El was so torn up, I was terrified! Novik did such a good job of scaring me that I had to remind myself about the last page to reassure myself. It stressed me out so much I peeked at the last page. When Gwen told El she sensed this awful hunger in Orion I started worrying about that.
Janine: I read a lot of theories last year, including one that Orion was a maleficer. When he’s in jeopardy much later in the book, did you feel like there might indeed be a dark ending where he didn’t survive? Jennie: It seemed pretty obvious that Orion was not going to actually be dead the first time, at the beginning of the book. In our second post on The Golden Enclaves (you can find the spoiler free part one here), book three in Naomi Novik’s Scholomance trilogy, we discuss spoilers from start to finish, so if you’re spoiler-wary, avoid this discussion or come back after you’ve read the book (if you’re not, please join us in this comment thread we plan to make it chock full of spoilers too).
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