ALERT! ALERTE! ACHTUNG!
FAQ MAY INCLUDE SPOILERS! THE MANAGEMENT ASSUMES NO LIABILITY FOR ANY INNOCENCE LOST AS A RESULT OF READING ITEMS IN THE FAQ!
PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK!
Q: (From a Twitter exchange with @kormantic:)
@mkhobson: Are you asking why Emily’s hair (short in the book) is long on the cover? If so, I got nuthin’, sorry 
@kormantic: the hairsticks – did she have to wear them in her hair to unlock the violet scale? What did her dad’s hair treatment do?
@mkhobson: OK, I get your question now. I’ll post an FAQ with the answer on my site www.demimonde.com sometime today!
A: And, as promised, here I am. Yes, @kormantic, the answer to your question is rather complex because God knows I can’t do anything simple. OK. So let’s start at the beginning.
Volos’ Anodyne was created (and completed) by Alexei Morozovich in the 1850s. Vladimir Lyakhov, his protege (and the person who inherited the “role” of Volos) brought all of Morozovich’s research with him when he came to America. Knowing, however, that the implementation of the Anodyne would have disastrous results for individuals who were cursed (like his wife, Catherine Kendall) Lyakhov applied himself to creating a second version of the Anodyne, one that (at least according to what Perun tells Emily) will have less harmful effects.
OK. So there’s Lyakhov. He’s got both versions of the Anodyne. He has to get this information to the Sini Mira, but it’s hot stuff so he knows he’s got to go to extreme lengths to protect it. So he does about eighteen kajillion things to that end. First, he protects the information by encrypting it. And not just any old encryption, but a double-stage encryption that requires a special key to unlock it. That key is a mathematical value. That mathematical value (stay with me here!!) can be derived from the unique sine curve of Emily’s curly hair (the particular curve of those curls having been “programmed” into her hair follicles by whatever that science-y burny-goo her father put on her scalp.)
(It made sense when I wrote it, OK?)
Anyway, so that’s the first layer of encryption. Lyakhov’s expectation was that the Sini Mira, once they had the hairsticks, would discover that the information on them was encrypted, hear Emily’s story about Baba Yaga, and make the connection (given that they’d used this type of encryption before) that she must be the one in whose hair the key was hidden. And yet, if the hairsticks fell into the wrong hands, they’d have no way of knowing even how to decrypt them, much less where the key was.
OK! So, now the information is safely encrypted. You might think that would be enough, but our boy Lyakhov didn’t stop there. He went the extra mile to hide the information by having it inscribed (in hyper-tiny violet scale, so it could all fit) onto an ordinary everyday-ish pair of hairsticks. Now, you may ask, why did he have BOTH versions of the formula inscribed onto the hairsticks? Why didn’t he just throw away Morozovich’s earlier, imperfect version? Well, damned if I know. Loyalty to his mentor, maybe … a respect for the original research that Morozovich gave his life for. Yeah, that’s a good answer, let’s go with that.
And so that’s the answer. Hope it makes more sense now … having typed it all out I can’t believe I didn’t think of a simpler way to accomplish that plot point. But, well, there it is.
Thanks for reading!
M.K.
Got a question about THE NATIVE STAR or THE HIDDEN GODDESS (or about any of my work, actually)? Well, what are you waiting for? Contact me!
