Baron Zepail is the woman who rules Zepail. And she doesn’t do so because she married a Baron. That would make her Baroness Zepail (or consort Zepail) and if you call her that she’ll have the legal right to kill you.

And she will. 

When the first Shadowalker book was being prepared for print my editor corrected Baron Zepail to Baroness Zepail in the draft. I read it and my heart rate spiked and the hairs on the back of my neck rose in an instinctive terror. I know she doesn’t really exist but for a second there I was worried she’d jump off the page and I’d be looking for a new editor because my current one was missing a head.

But getting back to the Baron (because real reactions to imaginary people is a whole new blog post). Nayndarin society is gender neutral. There is no distinction made in the pronouns used for males and females except when referring to the biological acts of sex and procreation. Because apart from having babies (reluctantly), there is no difference to social roles and psychological make-up of the two genders. Nayndarin women are as aggressive, as unperceptive, as focussed and as disagreeable as the men. 

That’s cool, right? A truly equal society. 

Maybe it is. But who looks after the babies? Because babies need carers (and after being off a battlefield for the 15 months necessary to produce a child that’s not going to be a Nayndarin mother) and aggressive focussed people need partners who aren’t going to attack them right back. So very few Nayndarin marry or have Nayndarin partners. They’ll usually have a consort (or bed partner) who will be referred to, regardless of gender, as Lady or Baroness. 

So, when you call Baron Zepail a Baroness you’re saying she’s an unranked consort or sex-slave. And if you do that you’d better be prepared to run. 

And run fast.

Physically she’s a classic Nayndarin: around 2.16 sl tall (6 ft 6 inches), thin as an anorexic model, with the tintanium musculature and steel-wire tendons that give Nayndarin a strength far in excess of their weight and a speed that no other race on Meldin can match. It’s as if she’s been built for combat.

Like most Nayndarin her skin is black with purple and blue highlights (not brown), her hair is a metallic silver and her eyes are amethyst. She has the long Zepail face and the lines bracketing her mouth declare a lifetime of anger and cruelty. Her hair is crewcut short and as a Baron she is always armed. The laser-edged two-swords hang at her side, attached to a belt with a magnetic clip that undoes as soon as her hands touch the hilts. That action also activates the swords turning a thin diamond shaped line of metal into a weapon that can cut through concrete as easily as it cuts through flesh. 

Not a woman to annoy if you want to see tomorrow. 

As Uriel says

I’m standing in a turreted castle, where skeletons lie frozen in the lifts, their bones bleached by Light.

 ‘I’m not going back to Zepail,’ I say, when I recognize the castle; beautiful as a fairy-tale, in white and silver, standing in a field of flowers, with a perfume like happily ever after. It’s a palace with floors of translucent stone and doors that move to your thoughts and silver tapestries that warp space and time and can hold you trapped for days. 

It’s the Barony of Zepail, where I saw regular hangings and daily floggings and once, when a servant had displeased her, a flash of Baron Zepail’s sword and a man’s head rolling, shocked and empty, on the crystal floor.

Don’t call her a Baroness.