The title for episode 4, "A Wake in Riverside," came directly out of our initial writers' retreat when we plotted out the entire season of Tremontaine. I remember someone scrawling that title on the white board propped up in Ellen Kushner's living room, and it has been the title ever since. As those who read the episode will soon learn, it refers cheekishly to a funeral gathering in which our hero, Kaab, learns some very interesting things about the body that washed up in Riverside at the end of episode 3.
During the writers' retreat, all the writers had episodes they were particularly interested in writing. For me, episode 4 was not initially at the top of my list. I had my eye on a certain other episode that takes place later in the season (I got it), but I was happy to take on episode 4 for a sort of unusual reason. All of my previous novels have included funerals in them, and I got a kick out of the idea that I would also write a funeral in Tremontaine. (Indeed, even my as-yet unpublished novels have funerals in them!)
I believe that the reason I've been so funeral-friendly in the past is because before I was a writer, I was a graduate student in cultural anthropology. One of my first advisors was an expert in traditional Chinese funeral rites, and through him I learned just how fascinating and complex our rituals for laying the dead to rest can be. They reveal all sorts of things about class, privilege, and family. Thus in episode 4, I had the opportunity to delve into how Riversiders mourn their dead, especially when those dead were once notorious criminals.
As for the episode that I wanted to write the most, it revolved around the Duchess Tremontaine, who also appears in episode 4. This episode was my first opportunity to write her, and from the start, I felt as if I had been given the keys to a kingdom of deliciously devious possibility. In Swordspoint, she was largely a shadow figure seen from afar, but in Tremontaine she comes into her own — and what a seductive, sophisticated, and viciously intelligent woman she is. I hope that readers will come to admire her as much as I do.
