Chapter: Visitors

The Hold is a fortress built on the shore of the Isle of Golden Trees, an island in the far north where Carnelian and his father, the Ruling Lord Suth, live in exile with their household

a sketch of the black ship that arrives at the Hold through the winter storm

This is the wonderful artwork that Jim Burns did for the cover of the original The Chosen, volume one of the First Edition trilogy, that in this Second Edition has been split into The Masters and The Chosen—depicting the arrival of the Masters in their black ship

Jim Burn’s original concept—a lesson

This concept was the concept that I got for my first ever book cover. You can imagine my excitement. Unfortunately, I fell into ‘first cover syndrome’. . . a condition that many new authors suffer from. This was my first book and I wanted the cover to be ‘just right’. So I interfered—and how! Jim, to his credit, put up with endless nonsense about the exact nature of the baran, the costumes of the Masters and a hundred and one examples of my nit-picking. Of course, if anyone had dared that kind of thing with my own work I would have gone ballistic

The way I see it now, Jim’s first concept would have resulted in a more powerful cover. He saw my book through his own mind’s eye, and I should have trusted his vision

A more sinister take on the arrival of the Masters in their black ship, from the cover of the First Edition of the German Die Auserwähalten (The Chosen), with shades of Nosferatu…

(I can’t credit the artist because I can find no reference to them anywhere)

the Hold is located on a small, bleak island—the Isle of Golden Trees—north across the sea from the Three Lands, as shown in this detail from the map of the Three Lands