On the other side of the square is the Moon Aid clinic. A camp within a camp. Five shipping containers bolted together, surrounded by a cluster of marquees and tents and awnings. Soggy cardboard signs hang from the canvas, written in English and Urdu. WOMEN’S HEALTH CLINIC. MENSTRUAL HYGIENE. SAFE TOILETS. GET AND WASH REUSABLE PADS HERE. There are

‘Don’t start. What do you want?’ ‘England’s in peril.’ Lancelot levels a muddy finger across the park. ‘It’s not the Falklands again, is it? I should have thought I was perfectly clear about that last time. The Falklands aren’t part of England, and they never have been. They’re well outside my purview.’

It might make things easier if he went down to London again and found Marlowe. Report in, like a good soldier. But he swore he wouldn’t work for Marlowe again. Not after Malaya.

It sometimes feels like Regan’s the only one here who actually does any good in the world, making people feel better. She was an old-school peace warrior before the climate war, sneaking onto airfields and disarming fighter jets. Now she’s here helping refugees.

There’s seven of them altogether. Not the smallest force he’s ever marched with, nor even the strangest. He knows the courage of women, from the last war, and from wars before that. Roz and Willow don’t surprise him. He has fought with one-handed warriors before, like Bedwyr. He has fought with men who were born as girls, like Silentius, and known

Death feels like God snapping his fingers. It’s always the same. The old sorcery flies out of him like a raven bursting free of a pie, and the spell is broken. His bones remember their age and turn accordingly to dust. There is always the briefest of moments, while his skin is still curling into parchment, when he can feel the morbid wrongness of i

‘From saving the realm and banishing evil. The tree of time splits ahead of us, as always.’ ‘Not the bloody tree of time again,’ says Kay. Merlin’s scowl grows fiercer. ‘Yes, the tree of time! There are two branches ahead of us. The first is a blasted bough of blackness and corruption, down which we must not travel or the realm will perish and all

The people are starving. The people are angry. New enemies have to be found, to put in front of their anger.

He can’t imagine what could have caused this, except the wrath of some angry sea god. But it wouldn’t surprise him in the slightest to learn that Britain had angered a sea god since the last time he was up and about.