They Broke the Duke's Bastard, Now She Is His Only Heir novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Shattered Return
The camp steward turns Liora out with a warning to keep silent, and as she crawls up the road she hears him order two riders to make sure she never reaches the city.
The gate of the Greywater Quarry Camp opened at noon, in front of forty guards and every convict still able to stand.
Steward Orrin Moxon read my release aloud from his ledger, so that everyone would hear the end of my three years.
Then he stepped close and lowered his voice.
"Easy now, Ashdown. Go slow on the road, and keep your head down in town. Say nothing about this place. Not the quarry, not the cells, not what was done in the infirmary."
"I won't," I said.
"Good girl. Talk gets people hurt out there, and I'd hate to see it."
He patted my shoulder like an uncle and pressed a folded cloth into my hand.
It held a cold boiled egg.
"The duke's blood will not carry you anywhere," he added, quietly. "Don't look for help from that house."
"Nobody ever stood between me and anything," I said. "I'm not expecting it now."
I bowed my head to him and thanked him for the egg.
An old convict woman, the one whose lungs I had cleared with my hands in the winter, slid a heel of bread into my sleeve as I passed.
She did not look at me.
"Go," she whispered. "Before he changes his mind."
Inside, I was counting the steps to the road.
Three years ago, the whole city of Carrowmere had stood on its bridges to watch me dance the Midsummer lanterns.
I was twenty-one, and they called me the Lantern Dancer.
Now both my knees were shattered, and I could not cross a yard without a wall to lean on.
The guards had done it with a mallet on my first night, and Moxon had written "fell on stairs" in his ledger.
He had also taken my boots and my coat when I came in.
The gate guard tossed me a bundle now.
"Lady Odette sent it," the guard said. "Her own order, with the last coin for your bread, same as every month."
It was a gray wool coat, thick and clean, with a pair of boots wrapped inside.
Odette, my sister in everything but the law, who had held my hand in the dance hall when we were children.
Odette, who had sent sweets to the camp for three years and never once come to see me.
I pulled the coat on.
It was the first warm thing I had touched since I was twenty-one.
Moxon watched me do it, and his eyes dropped to the thin cord at my neck.
The guard reached for it.
"Leave her that," Moxon said. "It's worth nothing."
The cord held my mother's brass ring.
The guards had taken everything else, and they had never once asked for the ring.
I tucked it back under the coat.
My hands were shaking.
I could heal almost any wound on another body just by touching it, and I had healed half the cell block in secret.
I could not touch my own knees and make them whole.
Three years of cold floors and thin soup had drained the gift almost to nothing, and without a real bonesetter, it could not do this.
I put my palm on the stone wall of the gate.
I decided right there.
I would not die in this camp, and I would not die on the road.
So I walked out.
It took me a long time to cross the gravel.
Every step, the broken bone in my knees ground against itself.
I used the wall until the wall ended, and then I used a fence post, and then my own two hands on the ground.
Behind me, the gate shut with a clang I felt in my teeth.
I got as far as the first bend, where a drainage ditch ran along the road and the scrub grass grew tall.
I lowered myself into it, because my legs would not go any farther.
I lay in the cold water and listened to my own breathing.
Then I heard horses.
Two riders came around the bend at a walk, in camp livery, with swords on their belts.
I pressed myself flat in the grass.
They stopped almost on top of me.
"Steward says she's to be gone before dark," the first one said.
"Gone where?"
"Gone, you fool. Orrin was clear. The lady's letter said she must never reach the city."
The second rider laughed, and I heard him draw his sword.
"Then she won't."
My heart hammered, and I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from making a sound.
I had no sword, no knife and no legs to run on.
I had only the brass ring in my fist and the last thin thread of my gift.
The grass moved over my head, and a boot came down in the ditch beside my face.
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