Fiction
The Reckoning of Saint Donatian
About the Book
Brugge, 1127. Young clerk Wulfram is building a life around copying work, his growing love for Heilwig, and the exacting guidance of Galbert. Then Charles the Good, Count of Flanders, is murdered at prayer in Saint Donatian’s, and Wulfram’s glimpse of drawn swords becomes something powerful men want turned into names. As siege, fire, and vengeance tear through the city, Heilwig’s household faces dangers rooted in kinship, wealth, and the uncertain boundary between service and freedom. Through the struggle for Flanders in 1127–28, the two must find room for love and ordinary work in a city demanding loyalties neither can safely promise. Drawing on Galbert’s chronicle, The Reckoning of Saint Donatian is a novel of marriage, survival, and the cost of bearing witness—when telling only what you know may be the most dangerous choice of all.
STORY COMPLETE · PUBLICATION FEBRUARY 1, 2027
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Wulfram could not move backward without putting the old man down the stair.
The man had stopped at the turning. His stick sought the next step, missed it, and scraped along the stone. Wulfram took more of his weight. Below them someone complained that people were waiting.
“There is time,” Wulfram said.
He had been saying it since the foot of the stair. He had work to collect and a man who would be displeased if he returned without it. Heilwig had asked him to come after the work. All these things could still be done.
Above, the voices of the churchmen rose together. The old man waited for the response to end before climbing the last steps, as if his breathing might disturb the prayers. Wulfram stayed beside him until he had found his balance.
There was the count.
He knelt before an open book, his face bent to the page. Someone put a coin within his reach. Charles took it and gave it to a woman. The old man freed his elbow from Wulfram's hand and joined those waiting.
Wulfram remained near the stair. His mantle was wet with fog. He could feel the damp where it lay against the repaired wool beneath it. Heilwig had worked that seam the day before. He had promised to come back wearing it.
A man brushed past him.
Wulfram drew closer to the wall. He knew the movement required of him when someone with a sword wanted room. The man had not looked at the altar. Behind him came another, and beneath a cloak iron touched iron.
For a moment Wulfram thought of calling after the old man, though he had no reason he could put into words. The church was full of people. They could see whatever he could see.
He looked toward the count.
The hand which had given the coin was open again. A woman stepped aside from it. Another hand, much nearer Wulfram, closed upon a sword hilt.
He would remember the hands. Later, when men asked him for faces and names, it would be the hands that came back.
Meet the Author
John K. Milius
John K. Milius brings four decades of sales, leadership, customer relationships, and hard-earned commercial judgment to the page. His fiction turns that same eye toward Brugge—a city of water, memory, history, and stories waiting beneath the stones.
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