The Lost Son Returns as the Duke novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Horse Without an Ear
Godric rides into Thornwick to judge the family that sold him, finds the reeve's men throwing his mother out, breaks the reeve's son's wrist, and finds a carved horse in the mud.
The old Duke died in August with his hand around my wrist.
"They sold you, Godric," he said. "Twenty silver pennies. Decide what that is worth."
Then he closed his eyes, and I was the Duke of Mercia at twenty-four.
I had spent eighteen years believing I had been stolen.
Now I had two months of mourning, the Crown's seal in my coat, and a name for the village.
Thornwick.
I rode there in November in a plain brown cloak, with no ring and no badge.
I wanted to look at the people who sold me before I decided whether to forgive them or ruin them.
I did not expect to find them being thrown into the road.
The lane ran down toward a mill, mud to the horse's knees.
A cottage stood at the bottom with a thatched roof and a sagging barn behind it.
A loom lay on its side in the mud.
A woman in a grey cap stood over it with both arms spread.
She was thin, with a bad hip, and she held herself like a gate.
Three men were carrying out a bed.
A fourth man stood in the doorway with a switch in his hand.
He was huge, red in the face, with a yellow mustache.
"Twelve marks by Martinmas, Edith Cobb," he said. "Or my father, Osgar Gaunt, the Duke's reeve, takes the croft."
"The Duke never asked twelve," the woman said. "Last year it was three."
"The Duke's order came down this autumn."
"Then show me the order."
"I'm showing you the door."
A girl shoved past her, small and wiry, with black hair cut ragged at the jaw.
She had a pan in her fist and murder in her face.
"Put my mother's bed down, Ranulf," she said.
"Or what, Hild?"
"Or I'll do to your other hand what I did to the first."
Someone laughed on the far side of the lane.
I turned my head.
The alehouse keeper stood in her doorway with her sleeves pushed up and a green kerchief over black curls.
I would learn that her name was Merewyn Tyas.
She wasn't laughing now.
Faces filled the other doors along the lane.
Nobody came out.
A man on the step of the cooper's shop spat into the mud, not at the Cobbs, but in their direction.
An old woman pulled her little girl indoors.
"Child-sellers," someone said, quite calmly, as if it were the weather.
The mother in the grey cap did not flinch.
She had heard it so often it had stopped being a word.
My hand closed on the reins.
I told myself it was none of my business.
I told myself these were the people I had come to judge.
Ranulf lifted his switch and brought it down across the girl's shoulder.
She cried out and swung the pan, and he caught it in his free hand and twisted.
I was off the horse before I knew I had moved.
"That's enough," I said.
He looked at me from under his brows, then at my cloak.
"Keep walking, traveler. This is reeve's business."
"Then your reeve can have it back when you're done."
I took his wrist and turned it the wrong way.
The bone went.
He screamed.
The pan dropped in the mud.
The two men carrying the bed set it down and stared at me.
"Pick him up," I said. "Take him to a bonesetter. Leave the bed."
"Who in the hell are you?" Ranulf said, white to the lips.
"No one."
I put my boot on the switch and snapped it.
"Tell your father no one is staying."
They went, dragging him.
The lane was silent.
The woman with the grey cap looked at me for a long moment.
Her eyes were the same grey as mine.
I felt it in my chest, and said nothing.
"I can't pay you," she said at last.
"I didn't ask."
"Then what do you want?"
I had not planned an answer.
"Work," I said. "A roof. Whatever you can spare."
The girl rubbed her shoulder and looked me up and down.
"You'll want the loft," she said. "It leaks."
I started to speak, and my gaze dropped to the mud.
Something small lay half buried beside the loom, kicked from the cottage with the bed.
I picked it up and wiped it on my cloak.
It was a wooden horse, no longer than my hand.
Someone had carved the mane in careful lines and then slipped, once, and cut off the left ear.
My hand began to shake.
In the bottom of my saddlebag, wrapped in an old shirt, I had carried the same horse for eighteen years.
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend