ON BALLADS and DEER: Stealth Song

Somewhere on Isle Shiddonia, a Giant who never trained under her hero speaks anyway - because Silvy taught, without meaning to, that a telling only works if you actually talk to whoever's listening.Fifty tales. Ten questions that were never really about the tales at all. A deer that has been standing at the edge of every single one of them, and has never once explained why.ON BALLADS AND DEER gathers what a Soloist built for stealth and silence learned by refusing to ask for it - the Aos Sí and the Bean Nighe, the Sluagh and the Stoor Worm, a hound that calls three times and a fire that may only ever be the room it promised to lead you out of. Thirteen further shapes a Fae might be wearing right now, seated across the table from you. Twenty-two cards that fold one creature's whole existence into a single circling deck. An eleven-step dance that turns out to be the same loop every adventurer on this isle is already living, whether they've noticed the turning or not.Six songs. A war chant. A warning about something called the Purple Daemonkin Watchers that the teller swears is just as true where you're reading this as it is on the page.And at the end - after the tales, after the questions, after the deer has finally been given a name it may not have wanted - something arrives that the Balladeer never asked to meet, wearing every shape this whole book has already shown you, one after another, until it becomes the one shape nobody in this collection has ever fully explained.