Fiction
The Golden Spurs
About the Book
Flanders, 1302. Brugge is wealthy, restless, and living beneath the authority of the French crown. When revolt turns working men into soldiers, a fictional Brugge craftsman leaves his family and guild behind to join a militia marching toward Kortrijk. There, ordinary infantrymen must hold their ground against the armored cavalry of one of Europe’s most powerful kingdoms. Seen from inside the Flemish line, The Golden Spurs follows one man through occupation, uprising, fear, mud, and the brutal confusion of battle—and then home again, carrying a victory that has changed both history and himself. The gilded spurs taken from fallen knights become trophies, but the novel asks what triumph costs the common people who survive it.
STORY COMPLETE · PUBLICATION 2027
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Read an Excerpt
A selected passage from the book.
Hendrik Claeys stood beneath the hanging spurs and tried to remember his father’s voice.
That frightened him more than the church.
He remembered hands. Broad hands, rough at the knuckles, with pale cracks that never seemed to heal in winter. He remembered the smell of wet wool on a coat. He remembered being carried once through rain, his cheek against a shoulder, while bells sounded somewhere above the roofs of Brugge.
But the voice was going.
He was thirteen now. Seven years had passed since his father had gone south with the guild men and had not come home.
Above him, gold caught the church light.
Spurs. So many that they seemed less like trophies than pieces of a broken machine.
“Were those his?” Hendrik asked.
Clais DeGraaf looked up.
At twenty-nine, Clais no longer resembled the young man Margriet sometimes described with a tired smile: too quick with his mouth, too sure of his feet, always one bad decision ahead of Willem. A white seam crossed the heel of his left hand. Another disappeared beneath his collar. He stood differently now. Still. Deliberate.
“No,” he said.
Hendrik waited.
“They belonged to French knights.” THE GOLDEN SPURS
“The men he fought?”
“Some of them.”
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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