I‘m bored and procrastinating, so I wanted to play a bit and dissect the opening line of The Wolf of Oren-yaro.
They called me “bitch”, the she-wolf, because I murdered a man and made my husband leave the night before they crowned me.
I don’t like wasting words. The rare exception is in dialogue or introspection, but only because thoughts aren’t as clean and sometimes a character being long-winded can still reveal angles about their state of mind and the direction the story will eventually take.
But in any case, it’s interesting how the entire premise of the Annals of the Bitch Queen series can be told with this one line.
The first part of the sentence is clear enough. “They…” refers to certain people. But it’s also ambiguous on purpose. Do I mean everyone? Or just her court? Or history, as it goes on? First person, past tense. We’re reading something that’s already happened and we don’t know if these are thoughts or personal memoirs, penned down by a historian. Foreshadowing? I’ll leave that for the (nerdy) reader to decide.
A few words down and we hit the part of the series title that makes people turn their heads. “Bitch” is a loaded word. We immediately conjure an image of how people see her actions. Two words later, I clarify that it means she-wolf, in reference to the wolf symbol of her people the Oren-yaro, but by then it’s too late–you’re already waiting for her to be irritable, angry, irrational, unpredictable. Maybe it doesn’t even matter that I doubled back and clarified it.
You, as a reader, have already judged her. And maybe it won’t matter as the chapters fly by and we crack her facade and explore her character deeper–maybe that judgment will remain. And that’s the tone the entire series takes. Talyien is hopelessly trying to fix her mistakes, trying to revert prior judgment, but whether she ultimately succeeds is up in the air.
Now we move on to “I murdered a man…” Notice how abrupt it is. Factual. She doesn’t try to mince words or excuse what she did. And yet it’s a stark contrast to her next action, which is described by “…made my husband leave…”
One of the words that can be used to describe Talyien is “dutiful.” So she treats the killing matter-of-factly. But she also uses the word “murder” instead of “kill”, which means a part of her also thinks of it as a crime. We later learn that Talyien is a kind, loving soul underneath a hard exterior, so you can already see how she’s condemned herself. We further see this self-flagellation with the word “made.” I didn’t, after all, write “and my husband left me.” No, she feels responsible somehow…she feels guilt, not just for her actions themselves but for what this signified for her as a ruler and her father’s daughter.
In short, I’ve already established Talyien’s dilemma as a character torn between the weight of her position and herself.
The rest of the sentence is… ” the night before they crowned me.” “They crowned her,” not “the night before I was crowned.” They foisted the position on her. She was born to this, but she never wanted this.
Hey, I guess you don’t have to read the series after all…
