Chasing the Bard

✍ Scribed by Philippa Ballantine

• Publisher: Dragon Moon Press
• Year: 2005
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 212 KB
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

Sive, ancient goddess of the Fey is busy watching her world die.

Darkness creeps over the Fey world, and its once immortal people and creatures are fading away. As much as she despises humans, Sive knows across the Veil that separates the worlds power can be found.

So enlisting the help of her trickster cousin, Puck, she tracks down a mortal bard who may just offer hope. As they watch the child become a man, the brutal and destructive power grows stronger in Sives realm, threatening to spread across to the Veil between words.

Yet as the young bard finds his own strength, he wrestles with his desires for Sive while struggling against her manipulations and her plans for him.

The power of words and magic is at his command, but can Sive find a way master her own nature and persuade William Shakespeare to risk his life to save her world?

The author of The Books of the Order, and the co-author of The Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences weaves a tale threaded with magic, love and the power of creation.

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Review

" I had an idea where the story would go at the close of a life. But it still brought me to tears. I enjoyed this book very much for many reasons. I would definitely suggest this read to anyone who enjoys the fey and a little Shakespearean twisted in."

• My World...In Words and Page

About the Author

Born in Wellington, New Zealand, I always had my head in a book, influenced no doubt by my father who thought Lord of the Rings was suitable material for bedtime reading for an eight year old.

One of my old schoolfriends remembers me trailing about with an green hardbacked journal which I was busy scratching my first 'novel' into. I had run out of stories to read, and found great enjoyment in writing my own. These early scribblings might not be publishable, and cause plenty of amusement now, but they were the stirrings of a need to express myself. But fantasy writing was not highly regarded in literary circles. My 'normal' writings earned me praise and a spot in the school magazine, but what I yearned for was magic. My writing spluttered out.

I studied English Literature and Politics at Victoria University, but soon found myself in the world of libraries. One day, after one of those painful life altering moments, I picked up the pen again, this time determined to enjoy writing for its sake, and not to worry if it bought me acclaim or not. Basically I had learned not to care about the goal- just to enjoy writing itself. I haven't stopped since. Oddly I never considered a career with books, even though they surrounded me from the beginning. Now it feels like I have found my place.

So now writing takes up large portions of my time, and the rest is taken up with various activities, like gardening, collecting dragons and ceramics, doing up our house, reading (of course) and walking around this great place I live. I'm particularly fascinated by renaissance and medieval history in Europe, and the history of my own country New Zealand and for a few years I was the New Zealand history editor at Suite101.