We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Bright Sword: A Novel of King Arthur by Lev Grossman, a brand new epic fantasy novel from Lev Grossman—available now from Viking.
A gifted young knight named Collum arrives at Camelot to compete for a spot on the Round Table, only to find that he’s too late. The king died two weeks ago at the Battle of Camlann, leaving no heir, and only a handful of the knights of the Round Table survive.
They aren’t the heroes of legend, like Lancelot or Gawain. They’re the oddballs of the Round Table, from the edges of the stories, like Sir Palomides, the Saracen Knight, and Sir Dagonet, Arthur’s fool, who was knighted as a joke. They’re joined by Nimue, who was Merlin’s apprentice until she turned on him and buried him under a hill. Together this ragtag fellowship will set out to rebuild Camelot in a world that has lost its balance.
But Arthur’s death has revealed Britain’s fault lines. God has abandoned it, and the fairies and monsters and old gods are returning, led by Arthur’s half-sister Morgan le Fay. Kingdoms are turning on each other, warlords lay siege to Camelot and rival factions are forming around the disgraced Lancelot and the fallen Queen Guinevere. It is up to Collum and his companions to reclaim Excalibur, solve the mysteries of this ruined world and make it whole again. But before they can restore Camelot they’ll have to learn the truth of why the lonely, brilliant King Arthur fell, and lay to rest the ghosts of his troubled family and of Britain’s dark past.
On one unseasonably warm morning in April, two years after he’d come to Dubh Hall, it happened that, miraculously, there was nothing for Collum to do. He’d cleaned the other boys’ boots. He’d been shooed out of the kitchen and the stables. Nobody anywhere needed him. So he wandered out to the practice yard.
Collum had seen the other boys there, training with swords. There were three of them, Alasdair’s son, Marcas, and two fosterlings from other islands. At first he just watched. Nobody looked at him. The boys weren’t fighting one another, they were just cutting and thrusting at the empty air in response to the barked commands of the marshal, a slender, dark-skinned Frank who looked like he had more than a dash of North African blood in him.
This was what Collum had been promised. This was why they’d sent him here. He’d almost forgotten. The boys were red-faced and sweating in their lumpy padded clothes. They complained about the heat. When they stopped for a rest Collum cleared his throat and spoke. It was like a voice spoke through him, he didn’t know how or whose it was. It was like a wonder from the stories— a sword offered up from dark water.
“May I start my training now?”
The boys burst out laughing. The marshal looked at Collum with heavy-lidded eyes: a ragged child, desperately thin and ill-kempt, with a sore on his dirty cheek.
“Not today, boy.”
“But when may I?”
“The hell would I know? Take it up with Lord Alasdair.”
“He won’t say.” Collum’s face was on fire, but he couldn’t let it go. “He promised my father!”
He found he couldn’t say “stepfather.”
“A lord always keeps his promises, but till he does it’s none of my business.”
Every instinct told Collum to slink back off to the smithy. But somewhere inside him, somewhere even he couldn’t see, he had come to the end. He’d waited and suffered as much as he could. It was like a plough hitting a buried boulder in a field, and the blade striking a secret unseen spark underground and stopping dead.
He stepped up to the nearest boy, a wide-eyed, jug-eared child whose name he didn’t even know, and yanked the sword out of his hand. The boy was so surprised he didn’t even resist.
The others grinned and hooted. This was going to be good.
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The Bright Sword
Collum didn’t hear them. He was looking at the sword in his hand. He flipped it round and grasped it by the hilt. He’d never held one before. Branches, broomsticks, any number of pretend swords, but never a real one.
Even this one wasn’t real, it was just a wooden training sword— wasters, they called them. It was surprisingly heavy; later he would learn that they were weighted with lead to be heavier than the real thing. But to Collum it felt like he’d grasped a lightning bolt directly from the hand of Jupiter himself. He had a dizzying, rising feeling, as if he were shooting up from the very bottom of his ocean of acedia, from the black depths all the way to the sunlit surface in one glorious go. The crushing weight was gone, all the colors were bright again, and he could breathe sweet air. It was like waking from a terrible dream.
The jug-eared boy tried to grab his sword back but Collum wasn’t ready to let go. He scurried back out of reach. Jug Ears then made the mistake most boys do in a fistfight, and a lot of men, which is that he reared back to throw a great big punch, which meant that Collum saw it coming a mile away. Before he could throw it Collum whacked the boy on the side of the head then quickly jabbed him in the eye with his free hand. The boy put his hands over his face; Collum punched his face through his hands three more times and then kicked him in the balls.
He wasn’t weak or a coward. He’d just had the bad luck to be in the way when Collum discovered the one single thing in life he was good at.
Now Marcas and the other fosterling closed in, swords held in both hands in front of them. They had him two to one, but Collum understood instinctively that he had several advantages in this situation. They had the numbers, but that made them overconfident. It also meant they had to avoid each other, and that each of them was waiting for the other one to go first. Collum noted that he was the only left-hander in the yard, which made him an unfamiliar challenge, and even though the other boys had always seemed like giants to him, he saw now that he was actually spotting them both a couple of inches. Also unlike them, Collum was untroubled by any inconvenient notions about the correct way to use a sword.
Circling to the left, so his adversaries were lined up in front of him, he batted Marcas’s blade aside with his own, then bashed him on his hands so that he dropped his sword, and rushed in and kicked him hard in both shins, one-two, and kneed him in the nose when he doubled over.
The third boy’s fighting spirit was rapidly deflating. Collum screamed at him and charged, and he turned white and ran for the safety of the house.
To this point the marshal hadn’t interfered, just observed it all silently, arms folded. He was a small, elegant man. His name was Aucassin. Now he sighed and slowly, unhurriedly, bent and picked up Marcas’s fallen waster from the worn grass.
Collum had moved beyond fear into a state of total focus that bordered on the mystical. He was no longer Collum, he was a god among mortals, Jupiter Triumphans. He was Sir Lancelot du Lac himself, the lightning-struck sword Arondight bright in his hand!
He woke up an hour later with bruised knuckles, a splitting headache, and a broken nose.
Excerpted from The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman. Published by Viking, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Cozy Horse Limited.
