Annabelle Raveastre is a knight of Highwyn. She travels the country on assignments from the crown, lending her skills to communities that are too small to employ their own host of knights. She finds herself in Essmore on the trail of an arsonist. Annabelle thinks that Essmore is a miserable little town and finds that its cowering townsfolk want nothing to do with her. Her reputation for violence as a means to an end leaves for a civilian population that isn't exactly eager to work with her. When the arsonist burns down an inn, one of the employees manages to escape. He has his secrets but they don't interest Annabelle. What does interest her is that he has people skills she lacks and also possess seemingly endless motivation to assist her. She has to bend the rules a little if he is to accompany her, but no one pays much mind to her activities anymore. Her track record largely allows her to do as she pleases. Things get more complicated as the chase grows longer. The arsonist enlists an assassin to kill them and teams up with a shapeshifter to expand his reach. Annabelle is not so easily dispatched. Even if she loses her companion, even if she loses everything, she knows that this fight can only come to one end. Even if the whole country burns, she will see him dead.

When the learned first gave serious attention to popular ballads, from the time of Percy to that of Scott, they laboured under certain disabilities. The Comparative Method was scarcely understood, and was little practised. Editors were content to study the ballads of their own countryside, or, at most, of Great Britain. Teutonic and Northern parallels to our ballads were then adduced, as by Scott and Jamieson. It was later that the ballads of Europe, from the Faroes to Modern Greece, were compared with our own, with EuropeanMärchen, or children’s tales, and with the popular songs, dances, and traditions of classical and savage peoples. The results of this more recent comparison may be briefly stated. Poetry begins, as Aristotle says, in improvisation. Every man is his own poet, and, in moments of stronge motion, expresses himself in song. A typical example is the Song of Lamech in Genesis—“I have slain a man to my wounding, And a young man to my hurt.” Instances perpetually occur in the Sagas: Grettir, Egil, Skarphedin, are always singing. In Kidnapped, Mr. Stevenson introduces “The Song of the Sword of Alan,” a fine example of Celtic practice: words and air are beaten out together, in the heat of victory. In the same way, the women sang improvised dirges, like Helen; lullabies, like the lullaby of Danae in Simonides, and flower songs, as in modern Italy. Every function of life, war, agriculture, the chase, had its appropriate magical and mimetic dance and song, as in Finland, among Red Indians, and among Australian blacks. “The deeds of men” were chanted by heroes, as by Achilles; stories were told in alternate verse and prose; girls, like Homer’s Nausicaa, accompanied dance and ball play, priests and medicine-men accompanied rites and magical ceremonies by songs. These practices are world-wide, and world-old. The thoroughly popular songs, thus evolved, became the rude material of a professional class of minstrels, when these arose, as in the heroic age of Greece. A minstrel might be attached to a Court, or a noble; or he might go wandering with song and harp among the people. In either case, this class of men developed more regular and ample measures. They evolved the hexameter; the laisse of the Chansons de Geste; the strange technicalities of Scandinavian poetry; the metres of Vedic hymns; the choral odes of Greece. The narrative popular chant became in their hands the Epic, or the mediaeval rhymed romance. The metre of improvised verse changed into the artistic lyric. These lyric forms were fixed, in many cases, by the art of writing. But poetry did not remain solely in professional and literary hands. The mediaeval minstrels and jongleurs (who may best be studied in Léon Gautier’s Introduction to his Epopées Françaises) sang in Court and Camp. The poorer, less regular brethren of the art, harped and played conjuring tricks, in farm and grange, or at street corners. The foreign newer metres took the place of the old alliterative English verse. But unprofessional men and women did not cease to make and sing.

In the final book of the Sister Verse, the rogue ascendant and her grieving party must wander the wastes of a dying world, guided only by the promise of a bitter vengeance. The Dreadlands sink into the Glade once more, the allied nations have been rendered defenseless, and hope is revealed as a fleeting illusion. In a land ruled by hatred and despair, the story at last comes to its end. This book contains scenes of violence that may be unsuitable for some readers.

Though some of the essays in this volume have appeared in various serials, the majority of them were written expressly for their present purpose, and they are now arranged in a designed order. During some years of study of Greek, Indian, and savage mythologies, I have become more and more impressed with a sense of the inadequacy of the prevalent method of comparative mythology. That method is based on the belief that myths are the result of a disease of language, as the pearl is the result of a disease of the oyster. It is argued that men at some period, or periods, spoke in a singular style of coloured and concrete language, and that their children retained the phrases of this language after losing hold of the original meaning. The consequence was the growth of myths about supposed persons, whose names had originally been mere Ôappellations.Õ In conformity with this hypothesis the method of comparative mythology examines the proper names which occur in myths. The notion is that these names contain a key to the meaning of the story, and that, in fact, of the story the names are the germs and the oldest surviving part. The objections to this method are so numerous that it is difficult to state them briefly. The attempt, however, must be made. To desert the path opened by the most eminent scholars is in itself presumptuous; the least that an innovator can do is to give his reasons for advancing in a novel direction. If this were a question of scholarship merely, it would be simply foolhardy to differ from men like Max MŸller, Adalbert Kuhn, BrŽal, and many others. But a revolutionary mythologist is encouraged by finding that these scholars usually differ from each other. Examples will be found chiefly in the essays styled ÔThe Myth of Cronus,Õ ÔA Far-travelled Tale,Õ and ÔCupid and Psyche.Õ Why, then, do distinguished scholars and mythologists reach such different goals? Clearly because their method is so precarious. They all analyse the names in myths; but, where one scholar decides that the name is originally Sanskrit, another holds that it is purely Greek, and a third, perhaps, is all for an Accadian etymology, or a Semitic derivation. Again, even when scholars agree as to the original root from which a name springs, they differ as much as ever as to the meaning of the name in its present place. The inference is, that the analysis of names, on which the whole edifice of philological Ôcomparative mythologyÕ rests, is a foundation of shifting sand. The method is called Ôorthodox,Õ but, among those who practise it, there is none of the beautiful unanimity of orthodoxy.