It began, the way most obsessions do, with a name.
My family carried a Scottish name and a longer Scottish story, one that traveled from the Highlands and the Celtic borderlands across an ocean and eventually to the Ozark hills of Arkansas, where the stories changed shape but did not disappear. I grew up inside that kind of inheritance: the sense that a family keeps things it can no longer fully explain, and that the keeping matters anyway.
The love of history came from my mother. So did the door into the old stories: the fairytales and legends of Europe, the folklore running underneath them, the elves and hidden folk, the dark spirits of winter that older centuries took seriously enough to fear. She gave me a way of reading the past that never let it stay past.
This trilogy is, before it is anything else, a remembrance of her. I lost her in 2003, earlier than I should have, to a clot caused by a medicine that had passed every proper trial and should never have passed any of them. It was moved through those trials the way too many things are moved through this world: for profit. I have missed her every day since. If you ever wonder, reading these books, why the enemy of mercy in them is not only zealotry but greed, now you know.
A week after she died, my daughter was born. Grief and gift inside the same seven days. She is my Clara: the song that carries me back to my mother, arriving in the very season the world took her. And my wife, who came later, is my Elizabeth. She taught me both sides of the scales, and she gave me back a love and a kindness for people that I had half lost. The women in these pages are not inventions. They are a family, remembered forward.
Years later the curiosity found its object. There is not one Santa Claus. There are dozens. Sinterklaas in the Low Countries, Father Christmas in England, La Befana in Italy, the Christkind in the German lands, Joulupukki in the far north, Krampus walking one step behind. Every corner of Europe assembled its own winter gift-bringer, and the deeper I read, the less these figures looked like inventions and the more they looked like memories, worn smooth by centuries of retelling. And beneath them all sat a carol nobody can quite explain: the Twelve Days of Christmas, a counting song with the feel of something encoded, a meaning everyone forgot but kept singing anyway.
So I researched. Folklore, hagiography, the winter customs of the old world. And I kept arriving at the same uncomfortable border. The centuries that gave us these legends, the sixteenth and seventeenth, were the centuries of the witch trials. The kindest story the world tells and its cruelest fever, sharing the same ground.
Then came the what if.
What if that is not a coincidence? What if the legend was born there, in the fire, among the persecuted, and everything gentle about it now is simply what survived the crossing? What if the Twelve Days really do count something, and what they count is a story the world needed to forget in order to keep?
The Aelf-King Sagas is my answer. A historical fantasy trilogy that reimagines the origin of Santa Claus through the witch trials of sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe: a story about mercy in a merciless age, and about how legends are made, which is to say, about what we do with the people we cannot bear to lose. These books are not a quarrel with faith. They are a quarrel with what power and profit have always done in its name.
If you have ever felt that the old winter stories are older and stranger than the versions we were given, this is for you.