Nyx in the House of Night

and her cooking is definitely magick!)
    Happily, Alan and Denise joined Seoras and me on Skye, and we set out across the island, sloughing through the cold, never-ending rain for several days. And you know what? It was absolutely not as miserable as that just sounded. Not only did we make some fabulous discoveries, like finding the ruins of Sgiach’s Castle, discovering ancient groves that seemed part of the Otherworld come to earth, and happening upon the best dang chip shop in the universe, but we also cemented friendships. We returned in the evenings to sit in a warm B&B and tell stories over fabulous food. This Alan, too, shared stories with me that found their way into the House of Night mythos.
    FUNERAL TRADITIONS
    Sometimes the smallest details that come to light during research can trigger something that just seems to somehow perfectly fit your needs. That’s what happened when Alan told me the story about why there were these strange grooved notches in one of the ruined walls we’d found as we tromped around the Isle of Skye.
    The four of us had stopped to rest at an old stone wall that ended up not being far from Sgiach’s Castle. I noticed the notches because I was sitting on the wall and I ran my hand over them, thinking aloud that this wall was definitely “broken.” Alan smiled and made me study the break in the stones more carefully, and I saw that they were intentional. Then he told me why they were there.
There was a law brought in at the beginning of the seventeenth century (under King James VI ) banning funeral traditions and all they entailed, which often involved transporting bodies over long distances across Scotland, via a stretcher carried by the deceased’s closest friends and family. Each took a turn holding part of the stretcher until he or she had to rest, and then they rotated out and another Clan member stepped up and took their place. Obviously the trip would have been difficult because of the rough terrain, especially in the Highlands, so the tribes and Clans developed a system where folk would take the body a certain distance, mostly through their tribal homelands, to an allocated place beside an ancient wall, or dyke, where they could stop and rest. At the time I was finding out about this I was working with Stewart James, a dyker who had worked all over Scotland on these ancient walls. I was sharing with him the information I had been discovering about the funeral parties that used to crisscross the land, and how they had partied for days, even weeks. How sometimes old rivalries would arise on the journey or, better than that, sometimes folk would meet and marriages would be created, appeasing Clan disputes. We laughed and lamented that these busy thoroughfares that we found ourselves working on in modern Scotland held such a rich and mostly untold history. It was then Stewart showed me the Through Bands. These are big blocks of stone built through the wall to hold the deceased’s litter poles at transfer or even resting points in the journey.
The celebration of this tradition by the tribes of ancient Scotland honored the dead in a way that united the Clans, and it was this that most probably intimidated the power-hungry Kings of Scotland and Britain and led to the laws that forbid the practice.
    I was intrigued by the funeral tradition and knew I was going to have to use part of it in the House of Night—and I did! It’s a tiny detail, but when Zoey is carried into Sgiach’s Castle on a stretcher, she is borne there in this ancient way. To me, this telling added a touch of reverence and authenticity to the scene that set the whole tempo of the rest of the book.
    SGIACH, THE GREAT TAKER OF HEADS
    The funeral story was wonderful and it sparked my creativity, but what I needed most was a setting for a House of Night on Skye. Seoras had originally spoken to me of an ancient warrior queen who lived on Skye and who trained the sons and daughters of kings. Alan picked up this tale, describing a woman who lived some time before the sixth century, and this is how I met Sgiach, the Great Taker of Heads.
    It was right after Alan first mentioned her that Seoras turned a corner in the small road we were traveling down on Skye. There was a lovely little grove to our left. To our right my eyes were drawn to some highland cows grazing in a boggy field very close to a craggy, rocky coastline. Something caught at my vision and I asked Seoras to stop. We both looked and realized at about