A - Adamant

Brief introduction: I have so enjoyed Anne Elisabeth's own A-Z series for her novels that, as I am not actively working on Adamantine and so don't often get the opportunity to talk about it, I decided to follow her lead and begin an A-Z series of my own.  And Adamantine conveniently starts at the beginning of the alphabet.

Adamant
I've talked about the main character of Adamantine before.  She's a shy, naive girl, technically an orphan though she has other relations.  She was born in 1827 and at the time of our story is seventeen years old (and unmarried! but that is less of an issue for her than it is for her harried cousin Margaret).  In writing her I have found her to be a sweet, intuitive, well-meaning girl; though she had lost both her parents, her life with them was one of confidence and safety, which engendered in her a good temper and a pleasant countenance, which was more than her cousins could boast living with their bulldog-jowled father and their wedding-worrying mother.

Unfortunately her quiet life heretofore had not taught Adamant strength and survival, as it had taught her cousins; upon moving from London to live with her relations Adamant experiences a cold shock of jealousy and hatred from her cousins and a sense of unbelonging from within.  But what she lacks in physical strength and worldly knowledge she makes up for with faith, conviction, and charity.  In Faerie, a world of stark ambition and self-serving ideals, of conquest and oppression and racial hatred, Adamant is an alien spirit of sweet loyalty.  While she looks bewilderedly on her friends and relations, uncomprehending their sharp, bitter attitudes toward God and life, they stare back at her in mingled mockery and confusion as she holds fast to the certainty of Christ and her own quest, a servant of the servants of God.

Choking out an angry, crying howl, she jerked the weapon she found at her side from its sheath and found herself running, running for all she was worth, alone, to help the grey-bearded king.adamantine