The Book of Blood and Shadow (53 page)

Only the
Lumen Dei
and its allies and enemies—the
Hledači
and
Fidei Defensor
—are pure fiction. But I’d like to think that in this age—with its golems and its magicians, its wild-eyed alchemists chasing the philosopher’s stone, its scientists and philosophers reshaping human knowledge, its religious fundamentalists throwing one another out of windows and slaughtering heretics in the streets, its conquest of the New World and recovery of antiquity, its unicorns and dragons, its angels and demons—there might have been those who sought to combine nature and artifice in pursuit of an ultimate goal, and those willing to do anything to stop them.

Find out more about the people behind the characters and the truth behind the story at
bookofbloodandshadow.com
.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I couldn’t have written this book without my well-worn library card and the towering stacks of books it allowed me to cram into my apartment, including the particularly helpful
Elizabeth Jane Weston: Collected Writings
(edited by Donald Cheney and Brenda Hosington),
Prague in Black and Gold
(Peter Demetz),
The Magic Circle of Rudolf II
(Peter Marshall),
The Code Book
(Simon Singh),
Codebreaker
(Stephen Pincock),
The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century
(Lucien Febvre),
Rudolf II and Prague: The Court and the City
(Eliška Fučiková et al.),
Rudolf II and His World
(R. J. W. Evans),
The Alchemy Reader
(Stanton Linden),
Alchemy Tried in the Fire
(William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe), and
The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes
(Richard Popkin).

These books informed the story; Arthur Koestler’s
The Sleepwalkers
inspired it. Fifteen years ago, this book changed my life, and in a way,
The Book of Blood and Shadow
is a story I’ve been trying to tell ever since.

Unlike Elizabeth, I am not a poet, or anything close, and the Latin poem-cum-treasure map in Elizabeth’s letter was written by Robert Groves. The fragment of an alchemical formula that Elizabeth buried was drawn from a real seventeenth-century text,
The Booke of John Sawtre a Monke;
the part titles are of more recent vintage, each borrowed from William Butler Yeats.

I’m also indebted to Marta Bartoskova and Jacob Collins for their respective translations of Czech and German, and again to Rob Groves, who supplied all the Latin and patiently answered my many annoying questions about the logistics of translation.

A huge thank-you to my editor, Erin Clarke, whose fierce belief in this book forced me to believe in it, too, and to Nancy Hinkel, Kate Gartner, and the rest of the team at Knopf. I also owe
plenty of gratitude, and certainly a few cupcakes, to Holly Black, Libba Bray, Sarah Rees Brennan, Cassandra Clare, Erin Downing, Maureen Johnson, Jo Knowles, and Justine Larbalestier for reading early drafts of the book, and to my agent, Barry Goldblatt, for convincing me I could write it.

Finally, and most of all, I want to thank my history teachers, especially Steve Stewart, Jim Gavaghan, Joan Gallagher, Owen Gingerich, David Kaiser, Margaret Jacob, and Norton Wise—and all the others, from the high school teachers who put up with me when I found the whole endeavor to be a waste of time (and explained this loudly, at every opportunity) to the college professors who showed me my mistake and the graduate school mentors who taught me what really happened and indulged my tendency to wonder,
But what if?

Most of them, I’m sure, don’t remember me. But I remember everything.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robin Wasserman is the author of the Cold Awakening trilogy, the Chasing Yesterday trilogy, and
Hacking Harvard
. She once studied to be a historian of science and, like her characters, is still reaching for answers in the past. She lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York. Visit her at
robinwasserman.com
.