Sunya Mara discovered the magic of jewels while writing Embrace the Serpent

We love reading about authors’ research behind their books so today we are excited to invite Sunya Mara to chat about her research on jewel while writing Embrace the Serpent. The book follows jeweler’s apprentice, Saphira, as her jewelsmithing skills got noticed by the Serpent King and she is forced to leave her safety to marry the monster.

Guest post written by Sunya Mara, author of Embrace the Serpent.

It was about when my boyfriend turned into my fiancé that I became fascinated by jewels. It seemed like the world around me took it for granted that a woman in love must be in want of a shiny jewel.

It boggled me. What do jewels have to do with love? Is it that we want to feel like our love is enduring, and so we want to tie it to something ancient and durable? Thus, through metaphor, we gain confidence in our love?

The idea that jewels have a certain power to convey something deeper was the seed of what became the magic system in Embrace the Serpent.

Saphira, the main character of Embrace the Serpent, is terrified of the world. As a child, she escaped the djinn that killed her mother and forged a new life as a jeweler’s apprentice. She fell in love with crafting magical jewelry. And as her jewelsmithing skills improved, her master’s renown grew throughout the Empire—for she lets him take credit for every piece she makes. She doesn’t mind too much, because letting someone take the credit, and the glory, and the money, means that she’s safe.

Until the Serpent King comes across one of her pieces and sends his cleverest huntsman to find this extraordinary jewelsmith. That huntsman is so clever and so charming that Saphira lets the tiniest detail slip—and the huntsman understands that Saphira’s boorish master isn’t the mind behind such delicate artistry.

But the Serpent King’s attentions don’t go unnoticed, for he’s the monstrous ruler of a hidden kingdom, one that the Empire has long wanted to conquer. The spotlight falls on Saphira, and faced with choosing between falling into the djinn’s grasp or marrying a monster, she chooses the latter—even if it means getting increasingly caught between her cold, serpentine husband and his cunning, handsome huntsman.

It’s the start of an unlikely romance. Both Saphira and the Serpent King have something to hide; they’re two guarded people slowly opening up to each other, and finding that under the fear, there’s something to love.

And as I wrote their romance, I kept coming back to the question: what do jewels have to do with love? To answer that, I had to craft a magic system: jewelsmithing.

And to craft it, I had to dive into the history of jewelry.

I came across so many myths, from all cultures, where something supernatural is ascribed to jewels. In recent history, we have the curse of the Hope Diamond. The Ancient Greeks believed amethysts could protect against the ill effects of over-imbibing wine and spirits. There’s an alchemical text that says emeralds counteract poison (and that if a venomous animal looks at one, it’ll be blinded).

And I found that sometimes folks built a story upon the real properties of gemstones and minerals. There’s an anecdote in the book, which draws on real history—a few thousand years ago, people believed that asbestos was the fur of salamanders. Folks used to believe that salamanders were born from fire, probably because salamanders made homes in logs that were then used for firewood and would run out when their homes started burning. And since asbestos is fire-resistant, and naturally looks like pale tufts of fiber, it all made a certain kind of sense. Some very wealthy people would have those fibers spun into cloth—most famously, a tablecloth that after dinner the owner would toss into the fire, burning away all spills and crumbs, and the tablecloth would be magically untouched.

But I was also inspired by the underlying science of jewels. For instance, rubies and sapphires are both the same mineral, called corundum. They owe their color differences to the inclusion of various trace elements, but structurally, they’re not very different at all. Emeralds, however, are beryls—and so are aquamarines, heliodors, and morganite. I won’t bore you with every type of gemstone (though it is fascinating!)—I’ll just say that digging into the composition and structure of jewels gave me a wealth of information to build a magic system upon.

All the research I did helped me understand Saphira’s art—which in turn, helped me better understand her.

From page one, Saphira is brilliant at cutting jewels and placing them in settings that enhance their power, but she doesn’t see her own worth. As the story progresses, she begins to shape herself the same way she shapes those jewels. She does it out of love for her people, for her rock-golem best friend, for the man she falls for. Her love for those around her showed her who she wanted to become—someone brave enough to protect them.

And there came my answer. A piece of jewelry may consist of a rare and ancient stone set in a casing of precious metal, but it also contains thousands of years of human effort. It contains the sum of the ingenuity of folks who saw a rough stone and developed finer and finer ways to cut it, the artistry of people who found chunks of gold ore and discovered they could melt it into delicate golden settings. And why would all these countless people go through so much effort for a pretty little ornament?

I think the answer is what jewels have to do with love.

Embrace the Serpent by Sunya Mara is out June 26 (Hachette Children’s). Get your copy here.