Book 6 Preview

Hello everyone, Book Six of my series is now available for pre-order, and I’m super psyched about it! BTW, If you order an ebook before it is released it is only $0.99, and will rise to $2.99 once it’s out. Anyway, I’m very geeked about this one, mostly because I think it’s one of the stronger entries in the series. It has lots of action and scandal and intrigue. Here I’m going to give you a little sense of what to expect.

It is called Gifts With Hard Swords, a phrase that comes from Le Morte D’Arthur when Arthur is trying to make friends with King Lot and the others who oppose rule of a teenage king and is told “We don’t need the gifts of a beardless boy… instead we will bring gifts with hard swords between the head and shoulders.”

Book One started with Merlin’s birth, and in Books Two and Three we see Merlin engineer the birth of Arthur. Books Four and Five took us through the childhood and adolescence of Arthur, after he pulls the sword from the stone, and this book begins just after he has been crowned king.  

Back into legendary material

While Books Four and Five were largely original books by me, since there is very little source material about Arthur’s childhood, there were lots of elements from the Arthurian legends that had to go into this one. This book covers the story from chapter one of Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, but also incorporates storylines from the larger Vulgate Cycle that Malory chose not to include.

The False Guinevere

One of the characters present in the Vulgate Cycle that may not be familiar to readers who have read only Le Morte D’Arthur is the woman known as the False Guinevere. She is an exact twin to Guinevere except for a birthmark on the future queen’s back, and she has her own adventure later in the saga. There are only a limited number of Guinevere-based storylines in the sources, and thus few opportunities to know her as a character. This story has a lot of intrigue and scandal and I’m excited to get it started now.

Guinevere!

Another exciting feature is the first substantial appearance by Guinevere in the series. We do see her first meeting with Arthur, but separately, Guinevere has issues dealing with her difficult parents and has her own adventure that has nothing to do with the young king.

King Ban and Bors

Kings Ban and Bors do appear in Le Morte D’Arthur, but they have a very substantial presence in the Vulgate Cycle, and have an influence on the overall story that is so massive and consequential I am actually shocked that Malory left it out. The only thing I can think is that it is such a large narrative swerve that including it at all would require a wholesale shift to his narrative, but I am going to add it back to The Swithen’s overall storyline. The story of Kings Ban and Bors, and their descendants, will make up nearly half of the entire saga going forward. 

Arthur’s first battles

The opening premise of the book is that King Lot and five other kings are making war on Arthur because they refuse to hand rule of the country over to a fifteen year old boy. For this reason, the book is filled with battles. We have two sieges and an open battle in a field. I was indeed terrified to try my hand at writing a medieval battle, since I know there is a wide-ranging body of material out there, but I am not unhappy with how they turned out. These battles also have massive demonstrations of Merlin’s magic.

Arthurian Mysticism

This book also has the first extended sequences of Arthurian mysticism. Yes, we’ve had some magic here and there, but what I mean is when a character enters a reality-adjacent dream world where nothing makes sense but nevertheless has very serious consequences for the real world. To me this is one of the elements at the heart of the medieval Arthurian material; events that don’t make logical sense but sing with a poetic resonance about life and mortality. This is also, hopefully, the fruit of my ambition to remain faithful to the medieval material and not try to “correct” it, so that these scenes retain the mystery and mysticism of the earlier works.

All storylines converge

If you have been following the series—and if you have, thank you—you know we have the stories of Arthur’s adoptive family, the family and King Lot and Margause, her sister Morgan le Fay and mother Igraine, Accolon, Balin and Balan, Ulfius and Bretel, Arthur himself, and Merlin (not to mention still others!), but they have all been kept separate. In this book, all of those stories converge and start to intertwine. It was exciting to see Arthur’s group of familiar knights start to fall into place and just for all of these characters to interact. This will also be the culmination of one of the goals of this series—that we have an accumulating sense of meaning as we experience new adventures with characters we have known since childhood.

Read an excerpt from Gifts With Hard Swords: The Swithen Book 6

Mystery events!

I shouldn’t tell you this but I’m excited, so I’m going to be as vague as possible. This book contains two events that are the culmination of themes I have been steadily building toward since Book Two. 

Arthur becomes King Arthur

This book is where Le Morte D’Arthur begins (after a quick rehash of Arthur’s conception). Everything in my first five novels was either left out by Malory or my own additions. So the vast majority of people begin the King Arthur story at this point, not knowing the history of all these characters. Thus, this is the point at which most of us conceive of King Arthur and what he means, and by the end of this book, Arthur fully embodies the conception of the King Arthur we know. With my own slant on it, obviously.

The main storyline begins

On the other hand, the reason Malory left all that stuff out is that this is where the main thrust of the King Arthur story begins, and what that means is that we are now with characters we are going to be with until the end of the saga—the very last book of the series to come—and from now on we are just going to be with them as their lives intertwine and they have their adventures. When Arthur marries Guinevere. When Guinevere meets Lancelot. Camelot. When Galahad is conceived. When Percival joins the story. Gawain’s encounter with the Green Knight. The Fisher King. The quest for the Holy Grail. It’s all coming up, and it’s all part of this story.

So I guess that’s what I’m most excited about. You could say that the first five books were all prelude, leading to this moment. (That’s why I would also say this is a good place to jump into the series.) From now on, with work from me and luck, the promise of the series will hopefully be fulfilled as we follow the same characters through nineteen more novels as they grow from youth to death, a civilization rises and falls and a whole society of characters interact and intersect over the course of about forty years, until it all comes crashing down.

Pre-order a kindle edition of Gifts With Hard Swords: The Swithen Book Six. The free kindle app lets you read their ebooks on any device.