Spectred Isle (Green Men Book 1)

by K.J. Charles

“Yes, well, that’s— Sorry, have we missed a turning?” “Metaphorically?” “No, literally. I could have sworn it was two miles to Swaffham Prior when we started.”

that's not concerning at ALL

In fact I meant Jo Caldwell, Sam’s sibling, a diviner of remarkable gifts and only relative incomprehensibility.

And you were unenlightened—in name, in fact, and in metaphor—when you went to find those matches. You brought the light back and believe me, the dark was closing in on you.”

“We turned around,” he said. “What a bizarre thing.” “We turned around,” Randolph repeated. “We turned around on a straight road and retraced our steps. Didn’t we?” “Of course we did.” “So how is it that the sun was behind us just before we turned, and is behind us now?”

twenty-one minutes past eleven?”

four hundred and thirty-three steps,

We’ve been caught.”

just under seven hundred steps,

about six hundred paces after that.

It was very normal, natural panic at being hopelessly lost on a straight road in the middle of England. If you could call it England. This grey-green endless flatness didn’t feel like a place that had a name.

gotta love when you fall sideways into fairyland

“We spoke of ritual phrasing in folktales. The phrase currently in my mind is east of the sun and west of the moon.”

saul's power seems to lie in associative thinking & the finding of vernacular truths for the inexplicable

That had been the title of a book of fairy tales his mother had used to read to him. He remembered one of the illustrations now: a small figure in an empty land, under a bleak and indeterminate sky.

aside from some tma-shenanigans & the vast, this makes me wonder if saul's family had once upon a time been some flavor of arcanist

The skies were so large here, so featureless, without sun or cloud or colour. The fens stretched out, neither land nor water, endless and empty and eternal, and they were such tiny specks on the land, flies crawling on a huge carcass...

the ultimate liminal place--a place pf no-place & no-where

It was desert sickness, terror of a landscape that paid not the slightest regard to people.

The locals don’t bloody panic, he remembered Woolley saying to a sobbing first-timer. Open your mind.

a stronger whiff of something green and growing, like ivy.

All he could do was stare, hopelessly lost and wanting, hopelessly trapped.

They were in the open road, visible for miles. They were in an empty land, where no birds sang and the road never ended. He was with Randolph, who’d looked at him and seen beauty. It was all unreal.

He leaned forward and met Randolph’s mouth with his own.

i feel like this is MAYBE NOT THE RIGHT TIME TO SNOG?!

Mouth to mouth and tongue to tongue under the sunless sky, kissing for dear life in a dead land.

“If you meant to raise my morale just now, it worked.” “That wasn’t what I intended to raise.”

But, and I hope I won’t sound too eccentric, I’m not sure how good an idea it would be to fuck on this road. I have a feeling that once we start, we might not stop. Which doesn’t sound like the worst fate in the world, but...”

Saul could feel it. Randolph’s hands on bare skin, his mouth, bodies moving and twisting with pleasure. He wanted to kneel, to let himself be taken, to lose himself in panting and sweat. To give his body up to Randolph and be endlessly, helplessly, timelessly fucked till they were nothing but wanting and spending, wanting and spending, an expense of spirit in a waste of fens.

“Is it—well, a trap? In the same way that one shouldn’t eat or drink i...

The realisation of Randolph’s nightmarish, impossible truth had been creeping up on him for a long time and he hadn’t wanted to believe it. If anything, he was accepting it more easily now because he’d been here before. He knew what it was to feel dreadful awareness dawn like the pitiless desert sun, illuminating everything he thought he knew and scorching it to ashes.

Last time one man had betrayed him. This time his entire known world was a lie but he had one man standing by him. Saul was almost afraid to realise how much better that felt.

“Nonsense. I can’t think of anyone with whom I’d rather be stuck in an endlessly recurring loop of bloody bogland. That said, shall we get out of here?”

Shall we see what happens if we leave it?” “What might happen?” “We might break out of the loop. We might find ourselves in another loop. We might emerge somewhere, or somewhen, else. It might be exactly what they want us to do.

Your upper lip is an example to us all.”

When one expects terrible things to happen for long enough, it’s almost a relief when they do.”

MOOD

Saul grinned. “Hardly. No, it’s just that things were all going too well. Major Peabody, a safe berth. This feels more how it should be.”

oh, darling

never even occurred to me that he might be an Ottoman agent—or, rather, that his priority was his own land, and not mine. Or me. I didn’t think. I didn’t think I was telling him anything, either. But of course I had to slip out to meet him, we had to arrange assignations—I might as well have handed him the layout of the fort and the rotas, in the end, with everything I told him.”

“I loved him, you see. It wasn’t just casual for me, and I thought he cared for me too. I believed it.”

“It does seem such an easy way out, to those of us left behind. Take the heroic end, and let someone else clear up the mess.

“Well, perhaps he hated you and your touch.” Randolph spoke with clinical calm. “Or perhaps he had to make a choice between love and country. Perhaps he set out to entrap you, but perhaps someone said to him, Get us this information or we’ll expose your man, we’ll kill him. We’ll kill you. There were no easy choices in that bloody war, and no single decisions. And if you were considered as culpable as all that, they’d have shot you.”

I, uh, had some idea that, since I’d served my sentence, I might find a more positive way to atone than blowing my brains out.”

“What if we didn’t have damn fool laws about who to fuck?” Randolph suggested. “Really, dear chap, if we were permitted to conduct our business without fear or shame or gaol, would you have been sneaking secretly out, or would you have been in your bunk with a charming sergeant, or writing letters to the boy you left behind?”

“But me no buts. You were a pawn in a damned complex game, and you were played and sacrificed as such. I’m glad you weren’t taken off the board altogether.”

“Flanders, the War Beneath. My family was there from the start. The Glydes are the oldest family of arcanists in England, with letters patent from half a dozen monarchs. If there is occult aristocracy, it’s us. And we marched out to war: my father, Uncle Jessamy, Aunt Clothide, my cousin Theresa, her brother Gerald and his wife, my cousins Vernon and Valentine, me. Doing our duty under the orders of a pack of power-hungry generals who believed they could wield our knowledge as weapons. “And we let them use us, Saul. We obeyed orders. I did. I— Christ, I am ashamed to say this, but I was part of the circle at Mons, and in three smaller summonings after. I did it, Saul. I played as big a part in ripping the veil to pieces as anyone alive. I saw the damage that was being done, I knew it was wrong even as I did it, but we were at war, we had orders, and I followed them.”

It’s so much easier to obey orders. It’s not much fun to think.”

I said he could pull every British occultist off the job, use his standing to end the madness. The Germans were having exactly the same rows on their side, and we were related to a dozen senior people at Heidelberg. We could have stood together across the battle lines and said no, this weapon is too great, the damage will be incalculable.

the air was full of grease and tin.

He marched the Glydes, my whole family but me, out to fight for our country, and within three minutes they were all dead, their lungs turned to glass.”

“Are you saying that night will come?” “And who knows what with it. I don’t want to be here at night.”

“We’re leaving the road. It’s terribly dull.”

“They’re always worth noting. They shape landscape and human behaviour. The world changes when the wind does.”

“How handy to have an archaeologist around. Of course, the question is whether we can trust the winds here to be as they should, but that keeps life exciting. Very well, over the fields and far away?”

trust saul's belief in it being correct

“To answer your question: I don’t know when we are, if that even applies. I don’t know what’s ruling this. I do, however, know that we have a common factor in everything that’s going on. That blasted medieval thug is a key part of the picture, so the place of his doom should be relevant. I’m banking on that.”

“Protections are not necessarily kindly. In the story you heard, the dear old chap swore an oath to be Master of London, yes? To protect it with all his might. And the holy knights came to make him keep that oath, like it or not. Took him back to the Temple, where they hung him on a tree.”

That was Aunt Clothilde’s job. One can assume it catching fire wasn’t a good sign, though.”