ACCOUNT 001 / THE BROKEN ISLAND — BOOK 1
The Silent Summer
By Griffin Pendry
BOOK 1 OF THE BROKEN ISLAND
The sea took their country eight thousand years ago. Now they are coming back for ours.
Britain, AD 505. Arthur is twenty-five, a war-leader for hire with forty horsemen, no crown, and a contract paid in cattle. The lord of Lindum wants to know why his farms are emptying.
The answer is standing on the tidal flats.
At the lowest ebb, something tall waits among the stumps of the drowned forest. Each day there are more. They take root in the living, and the taken stand in silent ranks that advance four hundred paces a day. Come close and they know what a man means to do. Any plan to fight them must be kept secret even from the man who makes it.
Arthur came for the pay. When the pay stops, he stays.
Ebbe, an English farm girl, saw them first. Now her people and Arthur’s, enemies all their lives, are shut behind the same crumbling Roman walls with one store of grain between them. Inside the walls there is a prophet who swears he has seen this before, and a grey sword no one can explain.
Only the first hard frost can stop what is coming. It is ten weeks away.
The Silent Summer begins The Broken Island: gritty post-Roman Arthurian fantasy with a folk-horror chill, rooted in the oldest Welsh legends. The war for Britain starts here.