Arthur by Giles Kristian (EXCERPT)

Hello, dear readers! We have an excerpt from a retelling of a tale out of legend for you today, a surefire treat for fans of Ancient Briton.

As the third book of Giles Kristian’s Arthurian Tales begins, the Saxons are now the lords of Britain. Yet the bards still sing of Arthur: In our darkest time, when we need him most, shall he come again.

The ageing mercenary Beran has no love of bards’ songs nor of people, unless they’re paying him to steal or to kill. His latest paying job: to murder a boy. But this is no ordinary child. The son of King Constantine and the grandson of High King Ambrosius, this boy could be the savior of Britain… if he lives.

Betraying his companions and returning to a world he believed he’d forsaken, Beran vows to take the boy to the one place that still holds out against the invader: Camelot.

Hunted by Saxons, Queen Morgana and those he deceived, Beran will seek the help of Guivret, called the Little King, and the Saracen Palamedes who once rode beneath Arthur’s banner. They will meet the doomed lovers, Tristan and Isolde. And they will fight for their lives and for each other.

For if there’s to be any hope for Britain, Beran must deliver the boy to Camelot. And to do that, he must come to terms with his own past…

Read on for an atmospheric excerpt from the book!

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The boy shivered, but he was not cold. He had run through white-mantled fields and silent woods, his leather-soled shoes sinking deep in places, his blood in spate, pulsing in his ears: a ceaseless rhythm that he would not fall behind.

It was late in the day. The sun was low, a bronze disc, and the boy’s own shadow lay stretched across the snow, tall and misshapen, like the spirit of the man he would one day become, looking back at the child he now was.

There!

He stood on a low rise, bare black oaks behind him, a valley below, breathing hard, so that clouds of fog wreathed his head, forming and dissipating with the rise and fall of his chest.

There they are!

He was far from home now and he knew his mother would be worried for him and angry at him for running away. There was a distant thrill in that knowing, but it was nothing compared with the fire that filled him now at the sight below.

He uttered a curse. A man’s words from a boy’s lips, but it felt right, for even a boy of just ten winters knows when he is about to witness something that might never be seen again.

He counted, taking his time because every one mattered.

‘Seventy-eight,’ he said at last, when he was sure. Seventy-eight men and horses, milling in clouds of steaming breath. Helmets and spear blades and ringmail as grey and dull as the clouds now moving in from the north, and the dark blood red of woollen tunics and cloaks and the dyed horsehair plumes flowing from their helmets. And round shields strapped on their left arms, painted red with a yellow ring enclosing a blue circle around the iron boss at the centre, so that it seemed each man carried the strange eye of some foreign god from distant, sun-scorched lands where Roman shrines were slung with smoke fragrant with myrrh, lavender and frankincense.

There was snow on the air now. The boy looked up, closed his eyes, felt for a moment the soft caress of it on his skin. Each snowflake landing like a mother’s gentle kiss. Normally he would revel in the promise of a flurry but this was no time for childish amusements. He opened his eyes and turned his face down to the valley, squinting as the snow came at him on a cool breath laced with leather and lanolin and the sweet, pungent scent of horses.

Those horses and their masters were moving, forming two lines facing west towards the setting sun. Men checking straps and helmets and pushing their cloaks back to free sword hilts. The animals nickering and neighing and pawing at the brittle snow with their iron-shod hooves. Perhaps they, too, felt the weight of the moment. Somehow sensed the passing of an age in the fading light.

The boy had never seen their like.

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From Arthur by Giles Kristian. Copyright © 2025 by the author and reprinted by permission.

Arthur by Giles Kristian will be published July 8 2025 by Penguin and is available for pre-order from all good booksellers.