Terrence Dechantagne is a character that I’m very proud of.  He’s very heroic, kind of Indiana Jones on the outside, but he’s completely messed up on the inside– a drug addict and filled with self-loathing.  In Book 1: The Voyage of the Minotaur, he goes from the great hero and just sort of spirals down as far as you can go.  I remember reading his part to my writers group and reveling in their shock at what I did to him.  He barely appears in Book 3: The Drache Girl to make his swan song.

When I went back to write Book 0: Brechalon as a prequel, I just played with the darker Terrence from book 1.  The real challenge was to write him in Book 2: The Dark and Forbidding Land, in which he’s already been broken as much as a human can be.  And yet, he has this important part to play in pulling Yuah into his family.  It’s really not a win for either of them.  I think I ended up with some really good moments for him in the book.  Here is a scene in which he comes to Cissy’s rescue– something I think no one would expect from him.

Cissy made her way around the corner of the motor shed, but stopped short when she almost ran into Shoss.  He was a nondescript lizzie who had come from Chusstuss and had been hired at the Dechantagne house shortly after Cissy.  She started to step around him, but he moved so that he was in her way.

“What do you want?” hissed Cissy.

“Where have you been?”

“None of your business.”

“It is my business now.”

“Leave me alone.”

“I am not going to leave you alone.  I am going to be right here, all the time.  It is known that you have no people.  Tserich doesn’t want you.  None of the other villages will want you either.  Nobody wants you.  That means you have no hut elder.”

“I do not need a village.  I do not need a hut elder.”

“I will be your hut elder.  You are going to give me your copper bits.”

“I will not.”

“If you do not, I will cut that pretty tail of yours.”

“Is there a problem?” 

It took Cissy a moment to realize that the words were not in the lizzie language, but rather the warbling tongue of the humans.  Terrence Dechantagne stepped from behind Cissy, one hand on her shoulder.  With his other hand, he reached out and touched Shoss’s snout.  Shoss was only average height for a lizzie male, but that put him several inches taller than the human, and he was not hunkering down, as he and the others so often did.

“No trodlent,” said Shoss.  His Brech was not as good as many of the other lizzies on staff.

“That’s not what it sounded like to me.”

Shoss looked confused.  It was clear that he was uncomfortable talking to a human.  He still was not making himself small.  He had either forgotten how to act or realizing that this particular human couldn’t see him, decided not to make the effort.

“Go.  No trodlent”

“Is this lizzie causing you a problem?”

Cissy glanced quickly around.  This sentence seemed as though it was aimed at another human, but there wasn’t one around.  It had to have been directed at her.  Before she could say anything though, Shoss, his face beginning to turn dark with frustration hissed out an angry reply in his native language.

“You stupid blind piece of excrement.  You should be left in the forest so that the feathered runners can feast on your entrails.”

Without warning Terrence pulled a revolver out of his pocket and fired.  The bullet hit Shoss in his abdomen, and he dropped to the ground.  The human gingerly kicked him with the toe of his boot, and once sure where he was lying, aimed the gun downward and fired four more times.  Shoss’s body slowly uncurled, ending up in an odd and vaguely unsettling position.  His eyes looked up blankly at the sky.

“I only know a few of those words,” said the man, kicking the now dead lizzie, twice, hard.  “I don’t need you to tell me I’m ghahkut.  I know it every time I get up in the morning and can’t see anything.  And I owe it to your kind!”

Cissy hunkered down as small as she could go, but Terrence didn’t turn toward her.  Suddenly they were surrounded by a dozen humans and lizzies.  Mrs. Dechantagne grabbed hold of her husband around the waist, but he shrugged her off.  Sisson bent down to check Shoss, but there was no doubt that he was dead.

“What is going on here?” demanded Governor Dechantagne-Calliere.

“No need to bother yourself, sister,” said Terrence, anger still hanging on his every syllable.  “I was just disciplining the staff.”

“Are you all right?  He didn’t hurt you, did he?” asked Mrs. Dechantagne.

“Where’s Tisson?” called Terrence.

“Here.”

“Get this piece of ssotook out of my garden.”