Sub-genre: Epic Fantasy
About Winterbloom:
Sophie Vasilyevich is a teenager growing up in Anglond, the child of exiles. Sometimes grass springs up where she walks, and her future holds an unusual fate: she is going to be kidnapped when she is sixteen, and no one can stop it.
Taken between worlds to the city of Bath in 1920's England, Sophie meets a young man called James Carnwallis, once a pilot in the Great War. But even as she falls in love, she learns more about the forces at work - and her fate in their plans.
As an alliance of shamans, ghosts and gods assembles in a desperate attempt to recover Sophie and prevent the destruction of their worlds, they find that their only hope may lie in Sophie's gift, and in the Greenwood: a power older than time itself.
Excerpt:
Dakker wondered what you would find in an underworld. Perhaps he would meet his ancestors, and see faces he remembered, as well as those he had never known.
He was not expecting the firedrake. It reared up when he entered a cavern loftier than the vault of Agia Sophia. With the body of a snake, the hood of a cobra and blood-red eyes, it looked too smooth, slick as a worm. It had fangs the length of a man’s arm, and flames licked around it and squirted from its mouth, burning the floor of the cave as it rose from the ground. Torches were useless against it; Dakker and El Shur threw theirs down and drew their swords. They carried the gladius, the Imperial sword that had served generations of men.
‘Shura! What is that?’ Dakker shouted against the roar of the flames.
‘Naga,’ said El Shur. And it struck, uncoiling its neck and snapping across the cave like a whip. They jumped clear, and the Naga followed them with its fiery breath. They backed against the wall, trying to remember where they had come in; the cave seemed to have sealed itself, and they could not detect any openings.
‘Is this the underworld?’ Dakker shouted. In spite of his fear, he felt elation at the size and power of the brute. Nothing this big could exist in the upper world; it had brought the underworld to life. El Shur glanced at him.
‘I don’t know, Dakker,’ he said. ‘No-one said there would be creatures like this.’
The flame forced them apart. They confronted the firedrake, balancing on the balls of their feet like gladiators, ready to run, jump or somersault. Dakker had not forgotten the tricks needed to outwit an adversary. As the snake darted out its neck, he brought down the sword, the trusty gladius, on its back; and the blade broke.
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The previous volumes in the Shaman series, Children of the Shaman, The Glass Mountain and Malarat, are available from Amazon and many other outlets
About Jessica Rydill:
Jessica’s novels inhabit a parallel world known as Mir, where shamans have formidable powers, and magic is a part of everyday life. Steam trains and Norman knights live in the same country, and Goddesses appear in person.
Kristell Ink Publishing, part of BFS Award-winning Grimbold Books, have reissued Jessica’s first two books, Children of the Shaman, The Glass Mountain and Malarat. The fourth, never-before-published Winterbloom debuted on February 28th. All four books have cover art by artist Daniele Serra.
Visit Jessica’s web-site at http://www.shamansland.com to learn more about Mir, the shamanworld.
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