Music played, and the scent of roasting meat tugged them forward. Tents had been erected, flags snapping and whipping in the wind.
On the banks of the lake, a festival awaited them. Tried to ignore the fact that she would have to cross a lake to get to her new home. Tried to ignore the ever-present roaring of the rivers and waterfalls. Perhaps viewing it through her eyes, he saw it anew. “It is something, is it not?” Envy laced Mordred’s voice. She had not thought men were capable of creating a city so magnificent. The roofs were not all of thatch, but mostly of slate, a dark blue mixed with thatch, so that the castle looked as though it were nestled into a patchwork quilt of stone and thatch and wood. Streets wound through the buildings, veins and arteries all leading to and from the castle, the heart of Camelot. Most of the houses had been carved from the same rock, but some wooden structures intermingled with them. The city of Camelot clung to the steep slope beneath the castle. Twists and knots, demon faces with windows for eyes, stairs curving along the outer edge with nothing but empty space on one side and castle on the other. The gray rock had been chipped away to create fanciful shapes. On the mountain, surrounded on all sides by water, a fortress had been carved not by nature but by generations of hands. Beneath Camelot, a great lake lurked, cold and unknowable, fed by the twin rivers and giving birth to a single great river on its far end.
It still cascaded violently on either side. Over too many years for her mind to hold, the water had split itself, pushed past on either side, and worn away the land until only the center remained. A river had carved it free from the land. Instead, the men around her grew both more relaxed and more agitated - but with excitement. This did not inspire the same fear and wariness as the forest. In spite of the presence of more villages and small towns, they had seen no one. Fields divided the wild into orderly, neat rows, promising harvests and prosperity. On her way to the convent she had seen castles of wood that grew from the ground like a perversion of a forest. In the following excerpt, Guinevere arrives at Camelot to meet her destiny: Kiersten White is a master of re-tellings, and readers will delight that she has delved into Arthurian legend with a feminist twist. We are so happy to end our young adult first editions club this year with the first book in the Camelot Rising trilogy. The final selection for our ParnassusNext subscription box for 2019 is The Guinevere Deception by Kiersten White.
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