Exclusive Extract: The Fell Sword by Miles Cameron

 Exclusive Extract: The Fell Sword by Miles Cameron

Here is your chance, read an all exclusive extract from Miles Cameron's The Fell Sword, the second book in The Traitor Son Cycle.

1)      Wilderness Camping—One of the principle inspirations for ‘The Red Knight’ is my love for the wilderness and all it contains.  I’ve had the chance to walk and camp in Africa and in North America, in the English Lake District, in Scotland and in Greece, and the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York are among my favorite places on earth.  I love the feeling that I have gone somewhere very few people have gone—better yet, somewhere no one has been in many years.  My friends—my camping friends—and I have an area in the Adirondacks we call ‘The Hidden Kingdom’ and some of the details of the Adnacrags come from our hidden kingdom—and no, I won’t share just where it is.   

We do most of our hiking and camping in historical kit, which isn’t as difficult or uncomfortable as it sounds.  Living and camping ‘in the past’ is mostly a matter of carefully reproducing good quality clothes and equipment, and mastering skills that we as a society have only really lost in the last hundred years—like fire management to get just the right cooking heat out of a camp fire, or leather sewing to keep medieval shoes in good repair when they’re wet all the time—which they would have been back in the day.  It is not rocket science.  In fact, it is so much fun that it is vacation for me, and I’ve been at it for twenty years.  And the Wild—herds of elephants, rhinos, bears, deer, remarkable insects, humming birds, a waterspout on a tiny stream in the Adirondacks, trout fishing, deer hunting, or just lying in autumn leaves and watching animals drink at a spring—all these things have contributed to my writing, and especially to The Red Knight  and The Fell Sword.  There’s a scene early on in Fell Sword  where Ser John Crayford is fishing—it is written pretty much as it happened, except that no bogglins attacked me.  But I think—when you are well out in the wild—that when night falls, the human animal is truly in The Wild and anything could happen.

The Fell Sword is out now by Gollancz (£16.99) and can be found in any good bookstore!