Vi looked at me with serious eyes. “I felt more of an emotional connection to the inanimate objects in this story than I usually feel toward entire characters in other books,” she explained. “It’s a good story.”

But I wasn’t having any of it. I shook my head, not even looking up at her. “Readers expect certain things. People are going to read this and be disappointed. It doesn’t do what a normal story is supposed to do.”

Then Vi said something I will always remember. “Fuck those people,” she said. “Those people have stories written for them all the time. What about me? Where’s the story for people like me?”

Her voice was passionate and hard and slightly angry. She might have slammed her hand down on the table at this point. I like to think she slammed her hand down on the table. Let’s say she did.

“Let those other people have their normal stories,” Vi said. “This story isn’t for them. This is my story. This story is for people like me.”

It was one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me.

I did not mean to write this story. Or rather, I did not mean to have this story about Auri turn out the way it did.

I started writing it midway through 2012. I meant for it to be a short story for the Rogues anthology edited by George Martin and Gardner Dozois. I’d anticipated it being a trickster story and figured Auri would make a nice complement to the more traditional scoundrel-type rogues who would no doubt show up in that book.

But the story didn’t turn out the way I’d expected. It was stranger than a simple trickster tale, and Auri herself was more full of secrets and mysteries than I had guessed.

Eventually the Auri story hit 14,000 words, and I abandoned it. It was too long. Too odd. And beside all that, it had become clear it wasn’t right for the anthology. Auri was no mere trickster. Most importantly, this wasn’t a rogue story at all.

Despite the fact that I was already over deadline, Martin and Gardner were very kind and gave me some extra time. So I wrote “The Lightning Tree” instead, a story featuring Bast. A much better fit for the anthology.

But Auri’s story was still crawling around in my head, and I realized the only way to get it out was to finish the thing. Besides, I owed Bill Schafer at Subterranean Press a novella from way back. He’d published my two not-for-children picture books, The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle: The Thing Beneath the Bed, and the sequel, The Dark of Deep Below. So I knew he wasn’t afraid of a story that was a little strange.