The Winter King (The Warlord Chronicles, #1)

by Bernard Cornwell

Potters worked in the houses, goldsmiths stooped over their tables and calves bellowed in a slaughter yard behind the market place that was crowded with country folk selling butter, nuts, leather, smoked fish, honey, dyed cloth and newly sheared wool.

We lost everything. The feast was wonderful.

Kingdoms need kings, and without them they are nothing but empty land inviting a conqueror’s spears.

‘You’re not happy,’ she said to me. ‘I am,’ I insisted, for the young hate to admit making mistakes.

‘But the truth is, Derfel,’ Arthur said when we reached the high platform, ‘that we are only soldiers because that weak man makes us soldiers. He grows the grain that feeds us, he tans the leather that protects us and he polls the ash trees that make our spear-shafts. We owe him our service.’

We can make peace, Derfel, but only if we’re strong enough to make war.

But it was on that happy night, when peace had come at last, that Arthur broke Britain.

There have been many more beautiful women, and thousands who were better, but since the world was weaned I doubt there have been many so unforgettable as Guinevere, eldest daughter of Leodegan, the exiled King of Henis Wyren. And it would have been better, Merlin always said, had she been drowned at birth.

some of us felt a sorrow for Ceinwyn, but Ceinwyn was a child, Guinevere was a woman and Arthur was helpless.

I never had trouble commanding men. You tell soldiers what they must do, do it yourself, punish them when they fail, but otherwise reward them well and give them victory.

‘The last time I saw her,’ I said bitterly, ‘she’d been raped and had lost an eye.’ ‘These things happen,’ Merlin said carelessly.

Meekness is no good, Derfel. Anger and selfishness, those are the qualities that make the world march.’

‘Conversation is one of the civilized arts, Derfel. We can’t all stump through life with a sword and shield, growling.

‘I just wanted to thank you, Derfel,’ he said carelessly. ‘So, thank you. I always hoped you’d be useful some day.’

He was not a good Christian, Bishop Bedwin, though he was a very good man.

‘I think, Lord, that when fate grips you, you do well to put reason aside.’

‘May the Gods forgive me,’ Arthur said, ‘for the deaths I have just caused.’ Then we went to cause some more.

We Irish know one thing above all others: an enemy forgiven is an enemy who will have to be fought over and over again.

‘She could have died,’ I accused him, thinking of the ghouls and cannibals of the Isle. ‘Of course she could! What’s the point of an ordeal if there’s no danger?