Chapter 1 The Bastard

The village of Oakhaven sat in the shadow of Northgate like a beggar at a king's table, forever looking up at the towering stone walls that marked the boundary between the common world and the noble one. It had been that way since Edward was born, and in twenty-three years he had learned to live with the shadow, to accept it as the natural order of things, to understand that some men were born to rule and others were born to serve, and that he belonged to the latter category no matter how hard he tried to deny it. Edward was twenty-three years old, with his father's jaw and his mother's eyes. His father was Lord Gareth of Northgate, a knight of the realm whose name carried weight and whose lands stretched across three valleys and two river crossings. His mother was a woman whose name had been erased from every record, a peasant girl from Oakhaven who had served in the keep and who had died in childbirth, leaving behind a child who was neither welcome nor unwelcome but simply unwanted, a problem to be managed, a reminder of a moment of weakness that the lord preferred to forget. He worked the fields now, though the land was not his. The farmers of Oakhaven paid rent to Lord Gareth, and Edward worked for them the way he worked for everyone, trading muscle and sweat for bread and a corner of a room in the inn where the innkeeper's wife looked at him and saw her dead son, or perhaps saw nothing at all, which was sometimes worse. He ate when he was hungry, he slept when he was tired, he did not complain, and he did not expect better. This was the life he had been given, and he had learned to accept it with the quiet dignity of a man who had no other choice. But on this particular morning, the morning of his twenty-third name day, something in the air was different. It was not the weather, though the sky had that pale, washed-out quality that preceded rain. It was not the sound, though the village was quieter than usual, the doors closed, the windows shuttered. It was something deeper, something that moved beneath the surface of things like a current beneath ice, something that whispered of change, of upheaval, of the end of one era and the beginning of another. He was walking back from the fields when he saw the riders. Three of them, on heavy horses, their armor scarred and dark, their cloaks the deep green of the Northgate banners. They moved slowly through the village, and the people watched them from behind cracked doors and half-open shutters with faces that were not quite relieved and not quite fearful. Something had happened at the castle. Something that required riders sent down the road at full speed, something that had shaken the foundations of the lordship and sent shockwaves through the countryside. Edward did not move out of their way. He stood at the edge of the road and watched them pass, his hands in his pockets, his expression carefully blank. The lead rider looked at him, and for a moment Edward thought he recognized the face. It was a young man, perhaps a few years older than Edward himself, with sharp features and dark hair cut short and an expression that was almost polite in its coldness. Richard. The legitimate son. The heir. The rider did not stop. He did not speak. He simply looked at Edward with eyes that were the same dark brown as his own and then looked away, as if Edward were something unpleasant he had stepped over on the road, something to be ignored, something that did not matter. Edward stood still until the riders were gone, until the sound of their hooves had faded into the distance, until the silence of Oakhaven pressed back in around him like water. Then he walked to the inn and sat in the corner and listened to the whispers. Lord Gareth was dead. The words came in fragments, passed from mouth to mouth like a sickness, each repetition making them more real, more terrible, more final. He had taken ill three days ago—fever, they said, sudden and violent—and had died before the healer could be summoned. The riders had gone to fetch his son from Northgate, but Richard was already there, already claiming the title, already giving orders, already consolidating his position like a man who had been waiting for this moment his entire life. Edward finished his ale in silence. He did not feel grief. He had never known his father. The man was a name on a page, a legend told by people who had never spoken to him, a figure who had once paid the innkeeper's wife a year's rent in thanks for raising his bastard with kindness. Gareth of Northgate had been a knight of honor, they said, a man who kept his word and protected his people. A good lord. A good man. A good father to the son he had acknowledged, at least. Edward left the inn and walked to the edge of the village where a low stone wall separated the common land from the forest. He sat on the wall and looked toward Northgate, a smudge of gray on the horizon, and he felt something stir inside him, something that was not quite anger and not quite sorrow but a mixture of both, sharp and urgent and alive. He had spent twenty-three years accepting his place, his role, his fate. And now, in the space of a single morning, everything had changed. His father was dead. And Richard was now Lord of Northgate. The question was what would Edward do about it? He could not simply return to his life as a peasant laborer, as if nothing had happened. He could not pretend that the death of the man whose blood ran in his veins meant nothing to him. He had to do something, say something, be something. But what? He sat on the wall until the sun began to set, watching the castle grow darker against the evening sky, thinking about nothing and everything, until the cold began to seep into his bones and he realized he had been sitting there for hours. He stood, brushed the dirt from his clothes, and began the walk back to the inn. But as he walked, he made a decision. He would not go back to Oakhaven. He would not return to the fields and the sweat and the endless, grinding poverty of a life without purpose. He would find out what his father had meant by his dying words, and he would find out who his mother had been, and he would discover whether there was something more to his blood than bastardy and shame. He walked away from Northgate in the darkness, toward the east, toward a road he had never traveled and a future he could not yet imagine.