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    Thank you for reading THE TRAITOR'S
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in the FROSTBORN series, Frostborn:
The Gray Knight (http://www.jonathanmoeller.com/writer/?page_id=4069) .

    ***

Bonus Chapter from FROSTBORN: THE GRAY KNIGHT
    A letter to the surviving kings, counts, and
knights of Britain:
    I am Malahan Pendragon, the bastard son of Mordred,
himself the bastard son of Arthur Pendragon, the High King of all
Britain.
    You know the grievous disasters that have befallen
our fair isle. My father betrayed my grandfather, and perished upon
the bloody field of Camlann, alongside many of the mightiest
knights and kings of Britain. Before that came the war of Sir
Lancelot’s treachery and the High Queen’s adultery, a war that slew
many noble and valiant knights.
    Now there is no High King in Britain, Camelot lies
waste, and the pagan Saxons ravage our shores. Every day the Saxons
advance further and further, laying waste to our fields and flocks,
butchering our fighting men, making slaves of our womenfolk, and
desecrating holy churches and monasteries. Soon all of Britain
shall lie under their tyranny, just as the barbarians overthrew the
Emperor of Rome.
    My lords, I write not to claim the High Kingship of
Britain – for Britain is lost to the Saxons – but to offer hope. My
grandfather the High King is slain, and his true heir Galahad fell
seeking the grail, so therefore this burden has fallen to me, for
there is no one else to bear it.
    Britain is lost, but we may yet escape with our
lives.
    For I have spoken with the last Keepers of Avalon,
and by their secret arts they have fashioned a gate wrought of
magic leading to a far distant realm beyond the circles of this
world, certainly beyond the reach of the heathen Saxons. Here we
may settle anew, and build homes and lives free from the specter of
war.
    I urge you to gather all your people, and join me at
the stronghold of Caerleon. We shall celebrate the feast of Easter
one final time, and then march to the plain of Salisbury, to the
standing stones raised by the wizard Merlin.
    The gate awaits, and from there we shall march to a
new home.
    Sealed in the name of Malahan Pendragon, in the Year
of Our Lord 538.

    ###

    The day it all began, the day in the Year of Our Lord
1478 when the blue fire filled the sky from horizon to horizon,
Ridmark Arban returned to the town of Dun Licinia.
    He gazed at the town huddled behind its walls of gray
stone, his left hand gripped tight around a long wooden staff. He
had not been here in over five years, not since the great battle
against Mhalek and his horde of orcs, and then Dun Licinia had been
little more than a square keep ringed by a wooden wall, an outpost
named in honor of the Dux of the Northerland.
    Now it was a prosperous town of four thousand people,
fortified by a wall of stone. Ridmark saw the towers of a small
keep within the town, alongside the twin bell towers of a stone
church and the round tower of a Magistrius. Cultivated fields and
pastures ringed the town on three sides, and the River Marcaine
flowed south past its western wall, making its way through the
wooded hills of the Northerland to the River Moradel in the
south.
    Ridmark’s father had always said there was good
mining and logging to be had on the edges of the Northerland, if
men were bold enough to live within reach of the orc tribes and
dark creatures that lurked in the Wilderland.
    And in the shadow of the black mountain that rose
behind Ridmark.
    He walked for the town’s northern gate, swinging his
staff in his left hand, his gray cloak hanging loose around him.
When he had last stood in this valley,