Knight Of The Light

In the world of Knight Of The Light, morning does not simply arrive. It is carried, by hand, from tower to tower, by people who have sworn to keep walking whatever the weather. Tobin never wanted the lamp. He inherits it anyway, on the worst night of his life, and the rest of the novel is what happens when duty outlasts enthusiasm.

I wanted to write a fantasy without a chosen one in it. Tobin is not special. He is stubborn, frequently frightened, and often wrong about people. What he has is a refusal to put the lamp down, and over four hundred pages that turns out to be enough, which is the most hopeful thing I know how to say.

“The light was not his to own, only his to carry, and the difference between those two things was the whole of the oath he had taken without understanding a word of it.”

The towers themselves came from a walking holiday along a stretch of coast dotted with lighthouses, most of them automated now and quietly rusting. Something about a machine doing a job that used to require a whole family living on a rock stayed with me for years.

It is a book about service, and about the small loyalties that keep a person moving through a long night. Read it in winter if you can. It was written in one.