The following is an excerpt from A Cavalry of Griffons. Tess Sothos, wife of Gram Sothos, a powerful nobleman, takes her children to temple and receives unsettling news.

4

Duty

Saint Halford’s Temple smelled of incense, myrrh, and dust. Enough dust to irritate the noblewoman’s nose and pitch her into a sneezing fit so blinding that she lost count of which prayer bead she held between thumb and forefinger.

         No child of five would allow an adult’s disruption to pass by unsung, naturally. Her youngest, Elyse, looked up from the necklace in her hands, smiling shyly, as if she’d just caught her mother doing something unspeakably naughty.

         Tess Sothos knew every word working its way through her daughter’s mind. Still kneeling beside her in the pew, she leaned close to her ear. “It’s improper to speak during temple prayer, even when someone sneezes, as I did,” she began in a hushed tone of voice, “but you may always bless them in—”

         “Divna bless you, Mother!” Willard, her second-youngest, blurted enthusiastically, to echoes through a mercifully vacant temple.

         Any mother worth her salt knew how to scold with a look, and this was triply the case for the firstborn daughter of Lady Annabloom Trambar. Willard had more courage than sense. He weathered his mother’s stare, up until she grabbed a fold in his fleshy belly and turned it like a corkscrew.

         “—in your head,” Tess finished her sentence. Seeing his pained expression, she released him from her pinch, passed down through her ancient house over the generations like an ancient weapon. “Add another ‘Forgive me my errors, Maetha’ to your counting, Will.”

         His chubby cheeks flushed pink. Huffing, he lowered his eyes and counted backward to the first ivory bead in his prayer necklace, asking forgiveness of the mother goddess.

         Tess let slip a weary, affectionate smile. It was quick to come and went even more quickly, and it felt like a strain for the muscles in her face. By Felos, when was the last time I actually smiled? she asked herself inwardly. Before the bloody Kingstrials . . . maybe even before Remembrance Day . . . 

         Scanning the empty pews around her, the fluted marble columns and sunlit stained-glass windows, Tess gave thanks for small favors. Brother Symon had closed temple so that she could teach her small ones how to pray the pearls. Today was the Day of Maetha—one of the temple’s busiest times on the holy calendar—and Saint Halford’s served three villages, the only ones in Loran seemingly immune to the pox of treason.

         Only the Lady of Saxhold Castle could depend on such kindnesses. Only the wife of Lord Gram Sothos, she thought.

         She sensed the darkness digging its claws into her from the rear of her mind, that familiar, melancholic darkness, and willed herself back to present. Back to duty. “The gods first,” she remembered her father telling her, early and often, his self-assured voice as firm as the ground beneath her feet, “and duty just a breath behind them.”

         She waited until Elyse whispered her amen, and until Willard finished sliding his last bead in ten. “Now,” she said sturdily, “who’d like to pray the pearls for me?”

         Willard flashed her a surly side-eye, daring for a boy with a plum-purple bruise under his doublet. “Elyse remembers,” he muttered.

         Tess resisted pinching him again for that. Her poor lad. He’d been through so much already, just like the rest of her children. Just like their mother. Oh, Justen . . .

         She blinked away the blur in her right eye. “Elyse?” she asked her girl, before she noticed the tear.

         Elyse nodded dutifully. She started off well enough with the first and easiest step, signing the four points of a diamond with her thumb, forehead to shoulders and heart.

         It was the soup of words expected to follow that overwhelmed. “My soul . . .” Elyse creased her brow. “It belongs . . .” Her green eyes flitted to her mother, her lips grasping for the words.

         “To the twelve gods,” Tess encouraged her.

         “To the twelve gods,” Elyse tried more confidently, “who are separate . . . separate from . . . Anjan—King Anjan—”

         Will sighed. “‘SeparatefromandsiredbytheHighGod,’” he broke in, running his sentence together impatiently, “‘who gave to us King Anjan Half-Elf, whose heir will rise again.’ See? It’s not that hard. You’re just daft.”

         His words riled even Tess. She pursued a fold of squishy skin, thumb and forefinger itching to clamp down like a crab’s pincer. Willard clenched his eyelids shut in anticipation of pain.

         It was Elyse’s touch on her elbow that gave Tess pause. “Do you not see, Mother?” There was a sureness and patience to her voice well beyond her five years. “Will wants to cry for what’s happened to Justen and Father, but tears won’t come. They leak out as mean words.”

         Tess looked at her daughter, proud and rueing her angry response.

         To any observer, Elyse Risa Sothos certainly resembled an ordinary five-year-old girl. She had a slender nose, plump rosy cheeks pinched with dimples, and her mother’s wavy chestnut-brown hair, its strands curling like weeds around her fillet and veil. A perfect little mole sat above her upper lip.

         But that was where similarities largely ended. With blush-green eyes that seemed to see everything, even what Tess did not, Elyse had always carried herself like one of her Sothos and Trambar forebears . . . and she sounded like one.

         The wrong one, perhaps.

         “I don’t want to cry,” Willard insisted in a voice that suggested the opposite was true. “Father will be home soon. That’s what Queen Edenia wrote us. Mother—?” His caramel eyes searched hers.

         Tess fought off a stab of fear. She was their mother as well as their father, in her husband’s absence. “Your noble father is safe and en route from the Kingstrials,” she said resolutely. “Not another unkind word from you, Will, or—”

         She pinched her thumb and forefinger together, as if digging into soft, pliable skin. The threat distracted her son well enough, giving her a moment’s peace to iron out fear’s wrinkles within.

         Helsar, this is not your holy day, she prayed inwardly to the goddess who protected warriors, but prove our queen’s words true, and see my lord husband safely home.

         Behind her, oaken doors scraped against stone floor. Tess turned to catch a look from Brother Symon as the priest poked his head through the doors. Not a prodding look, or anything to make her feel worse for the time she’d spent with her children in a temple reserved exclusively for them. He smiled gently, averted his gaze out of respect, and shut the doors so that she could continue to teach her children in peace.

         Yet she didn’t wish to overstay their welcome. This was a temple for all the righteous, not just their lords and ladies. And Loran was a kingdom in need of its houses of prayer, especially during evil times.

         Especially on the Day of Maetha, a day of forgiveness.

         “Let us finish praying the pearls,” Tess said. “I shall start fresh.”

         She resumed modeling the ritual, pulling necklace beads through her long, nimble fingers. Dust motes swirled in light pooling through windows, aggravating her nose. Her children bowed their heads, Willard more solemnly this time.

         “My soul belongs to the twelve gods, separate from and sired by the High God,” Tess said aloud, one bead clacking the other, “who gave to us King Anjan Half-Elf, whose heir will rise again.

         “And I denounce any who refute this holy truth and seek to lead the faithful away from the White Citadel,” she finished, “for truth comes to us only through the priestking, who alone speaks for the twelve on earth.”

         “Amen,” Elyse and Willard echoed her.

* * *

         After genuflecting at her pew, Tess left Saint Halford’s with her children clutching either hand. Outside, a noon sun shone down brightly but not hotly, a welcome reprieve for a summer day on Loran’s Vendayn Peninsula. A salty sea wind rustled the fronds of palm trees fringing the temple, its sigh mingling with the crooning of gulls and the bluster of waves crashing against high cliffs.

         “Such a pretty day,” Elyse chimed beside her.

         Yes, my darling, thought Tess, the world is yours, and you must have faith in that. She was grateful for cool air, at least. The drape of her thick brocade gown would’ve felt intolerable on a balmier day.

         At the end of a winding stone walkway waited coachman and horse-drawn carriage, along with a two-guard escort and the priest himself. With his burly shoulders, bronzed skin, and jet-black hair, Symon Donello struck many as too handsome for a brother of the cloth. Yet he’d renounced title and inheritance to serve the twelve gods. The arch of his aquiline nose testified to his noble pedigree.

         The priest bowed to kiss her hand as a wind ruffled his cream-colored cassock. “It’s a pleasure to have you at temple, as always, Lady Tess.”

         “The honor is mine, Brother Symon.”

         Symon smiled appreciatively. “‘Honor is gold,’” he said, quoting House Sothos’s motto. “And yours one could never question. To rally your children, muster the servants to dress them, and ride your carriage here takes more than honor. It takes something that Amath withheld from us men.”

         “It takes time.” Tess spotted a rogue strand of hair licking the edge of Elyse’s veil and tucked it back under the linen. “A mother’s patience, too, Maetha save me.”

         Something about Symon felt off. Tess knew how to read him as well as any of the Twelve Testaments, and his creased brow and clenched cheekbones forewarned her about a need to speak privately.

         So it didn’t surprise her when he asked her to accompany him on a tour of Saint Halford’s exterior. “The builders recently finished repairing the tilt of two flying buttresses damaged in last month’s storm,” he said. “I’d be glad of your eye for detail.” Tess began walking with her children in tow. “Alone, if I may trouble you for that, my lady.”

         She held his gaze for a moment, then nodded.

         Leaving Elyse and Willard in the care of her knights, Tess strolled the temple’s grassy premises with the priest. Arched gables and cheerfully colored stained-glass windows decorated Saint Halford’s southwestern wall, reminders of the charity of House Sothos. Around the length of the temple sprouted rows of white carnations and violet daisies that she’d planted herself for the Day of Selyssa. White limestone rocks lined the garden bed; she noticed one askew and nudged it back with her foot.

         Arriving beneath a side aisle roof, Tess observed no signs of malfeasance in the buttresses. “They look firm,” she said, her voice nearly lost in a strong sea wind. “Why the privacy, Sy?”

         “For the best of reasons, Tess, I assure you.” With his tall frame and his hands clutched behind his back, Symon looked as stalwart as his pale cliffside temple. He lacked almost any trace of the unserious youth who’d once tried for her hand.

Almost any trace, anyway.

         “I can smell the cider on your breath, Sy. Priests usually observe the Day of Maetha with a month of sobriety.”

         Symon broke into a boyish smile. Now there he is, thought Tess. “An eye as well as an ear for detail, as always.”

         “Some would say I have two pairs.” Tess padded toward him through the grass. “You did me a kindness by reserving the temple for my children and me on a holy day. For that I thank you, Sy. But you asked me to walk with you alone, while Lord Sothos is away fighting rebels. Gossip spreads like brushfire in the Vendayn. You know this better than most—”

         The priest cut her off with a smoldering look. Hurt lurked behind his pale blue irises, decades of unhealed hurt. “Then I’ll get right to it. I don’t want you or your children coming here.”

         For noble houses across Ansara, it was expected for lords and ladies to teach their children at least three tongues: Elvish, Medecian, and Common, the languages of the holy writ, courts, and market business, respectively.

         But to be born a Trambar required mastering yet a fourth language, one of circuitousness and euphemism, to varnish the rough lumber of the tongue and keep the family’s name free of splinters.

         Tess nearly forgot her fourth tongue as the blood rushed to her cheeks, her impulse to slap the priest. It wouldn’t have been the first time in the history of their relationship.

         Symon raised his palms to her. “You mistake me,” he said briskly. “I do not want you or your children here because I fear for your safety.”

         His ill turn of phrase still smarted. “Choose your words with more caution, then, Symon. You need not fear for Lord Sothos’s wife.”

         Symon tilted his head just slightly, his own priestly way of making a sarcastic observation. “But Lord Sothos isn’t here—”

         “My husband will return soon,” she interrupted him.

         “I pray for that every day,” said Symon. Do you? she nearly rejoined. “But he isn’t here, and in the meantime, the flames of Scythe Road continue to spread. Warchild and his Cloudlanders are marching toward Southpoint, along with this unholy ‘Army of the People’ he’s raised from riffraff.”

         “I’m well aware of Jason Warchild’s peasant army.”

         A more insolent name couldn’t have been chosen for the ratty mobs overrunning Loran. It made mock of the Army of the Gods, the noble force summoned by her lord father and the Worthy Assembly to rescue Alyse Jannus from her adulterous, murderous, mad king of a husband. That Sarah Sinclair’s own bastard, the fruit of the affair that sparked the Long Summer Rebellion, had chosen that name—that name—for a flea-bitten band of pitchfork wielders more than infuriated her.

         It insulted Stoddard Trambar’s legacy. Her father’s legacy.

         And if she were honest with herself, it flung her life’s shame in her face, as if it were a mud pie, all in one stroke.

         “If only his army were the only concern,” added Symon, in a softer tone. “I received a letter from a priest from Wellshire, a Brother Mychell, with news about Lord Tom Gelder. The news was meant for me to give to you.”

         Dread snaked around her heart. “What of him?”

         “He’s dead.” Symon ran a hand through his hair, a nervous tic. “Vengeful peasants had been pursuing him almost since he and his men left Northland. Mychell wrote that they’d lost him in an ambush, then discovered him some days later just outside his castle, disguised as a peasant woman. He and three others were tried for conspiracy and treason against the Commons of Loran, and summarily hanged.”

         Tess finally understood the impetus for the priest’s fears. Like Symon himself, Gelder’s sire, Lord Bremon, had served as one of her father’s aides-de-camp during the rebellion. Of Tom himself she knew little, save for that the acorn had fallen some ways from the tree.

         “You fear that this rabble might target us, all the way from Eastland?”

         “Worse,” said the priest. “Mychell wrote that Lord Tom’s murderers want it known that they don’t answer to Warchild’s army. They call themselves the Hangmen.”

         “How apropos.”

         “Tess.” Symon stepped within range of a kiss, the cider on his breath potent. His pale blue eyes were on her, more serious than she’d seen them in years. “I don’t think these ‘Hangmen’ are alone or limited to Eastland. If what Brother Mychell has written me is true, they’ve risen on their own volition, with their own purposes. If this could happen in Eastland, it could happen here, on the peninsula, inspired by Warchild or not.”

         He cupped his large, bronzed hands around hers. “I think it better that you and the children attend prayer in your castle chapel. You will be safe there. It would give me peace.”

         Tess withdrew from his grasp. “I appreciate your concern, as it comes from Maetha, on the Day of Maetha,” she said. “But our subjects depend on our example—now more than ever. If their lords and priests were to cower in castles and temples, we’d almost certainly lose them to this fever.”

         He sighed. “I’ve heard tale that was Cathreen Morley’s reason for holding her justice’s wedding in the open. That ended in one of the revolts that started this mess.”

         “I am not Lady Morley,” she said resolutely. “I am Lady Sothos, who has been a fixture at Saint Halford’s since her father first took her to pray the pearls. Her presence assures the Vendayn that we must all continue worshipping, unafraid. We must trust in King Shaddon, Queen Edenia, and the twelve gods—them above all.

         “The gods first,” she added with an uncompromising look. “Duty, just a breath behind them.”

         She squeezed his hands affectionately, then clutched at her gown and strode past him, to her carriage and children.

         “Must you always be so strong for us, my lady?” Symon called after her. “Will you not see the star of reason?”

         Tess checked him with a cool glance over her shoulder, her strides unbroken. “I remind you, choose your words with caution. And please see to the dust in your temple. The Head speaks, Brother Symon.”

         “The Hands serve,” the priest’s voice reached her over the wind.

* * *

         Their red-cheeked coachman, Reffel Jopsen, beamed as he opened the carriage door. In hopped her children, followed by Tess, who let the satin seats drink up her person. Their men, Sirs Matthis Gibson and Jole Crepp, took position on the rungs of ladders bolted to the back, their lookouts on the bumpy cobblestone road back to Saxhold.

         Willard recovered his toy knight from a cushion crevice and began fighting imaginary battles, pushing aside all memory of his mother’s pinch and temple prayers. Elyse, being Elyse, sat as prim and proper as any lady, gazing out her window at the specks of gliding pelicans.

         Tess allowed herself to find comfort in monotony on the rumbly ride east. She craved sleep, and she needed it. Under the paint of her sheep fat and rouge, she’d aged, aged from the cruelties visited on Justen as much as from concern for Gram. Thirty-eight years old she was, and she felt fifty.

         Symon Donello hadn’t helped. His words clung to her like soaked clothing and resisted coming off the same. Kingstrials had swept Loran’s noble ranks like a plague, robbing them of Sam Wuthers, Tomas Fawkes, and three Thorngales. To think long on what befell High Bishop Peshar Grathos both stoked a rage in her and invited nightmares.

         Now, Tom Gelder, another lord slain, another great house decapitated. This misbegotten Army of the People was rattling its saber at their new king and queen. Now, these Hangmen of Eastland. On and on and on this madness went, it seemed, like a water funnel draining through a pinhole, whirling endlessly.

         The charges unlawfully levied against young Lord Gelder lingered with her. Charges of conspiracy and treason against the Commons of Loran, thought Tess, caught somewhere between the desire to laugh and a genuine interest in understanding just what those ten words meant. Would that you were here, Father. Our kingdom suffers without your example.

         Despite the mask she wore for Symon, beneath it all she swam in an ocean of uncertainty and fear, the spiraling funnel nearby, dragging her round and round, down, down, down . . . And I mustn’t let it, she resolved to herself as she lulled asleep.

         Amid the jostling of the carriage and the soothing rhythm of hooves drumming cobble, Tess sat up at Elyse’s voice. She’d heard only bits and pieces in her sleep, just enough to stab her awake.

         Her daughter stared at her as if she saw all of her right now, and didn’t judge. “Father doesn’t want you to cry,” she repeated. “He wants you strong for us, especially for Stod.”

         “Your prattle makes no sense,” Willard put in bullyingly from her right. “Father isn’t here. Speak sense, Elyse.”

         “I just did,” said her little lady, genuinely baffled.

         Tess stroked Elyse’s veiled head, glad of her prattle. She turned to the rolling wet plains outside her window, glad of their oak mottes and carpet of greenish-yellow grass. She was glad to have lived her life here on the Vendayn, where peasants overwhelmingly prayed in temples with their lords and ladies, where order prevailed. Where things made sense.

         The carriage wended past Earlwich, a study in contrasts with the dying bloat of Loran’s capital city. Perched atop a hill thronged with oaks, the village cascaded down like a tiered cake, each white street neatly cobblestoned and hedged with temples, cruck houses, and market stalls. No brothels were allowed in Earlwich, no poorhouses teeming with fiery-voiced readers, none of the vices ensnaring Southpoint.

         Warchild’s army and Eastland’s Hangmen would never find a foothold here, Sy, thought the noblewoman. Just let them try.

         As Earlwich dwindled with the hills, Saxhold Castle rose ahead. She was told that peasants were often surprised to learn the castle hadn’t always belonged to her husband or his family. House Sothos was Medecian, and it was hers now by marriage. Yet House Trambar had roots in Loran that began some thirty centuries ago, when a Romarian foot soldier, Clydon Trambar, received one acre of land by the bay as a reward for his valor.

         That tiny parcel had since mushroomed to encompass two thousand acres of fallow field and forest rich with game. From its hills vaulted up a formidable smoke-gray fortress surrounded by curtain walls bearded in lichen, their creneled battlements linked to giant rounded towers peppered with arrow slits. A moat festive with fireflies encircled the outer walls, spanned by a warmly torchlit drawbridge that fed into Saxhold’s three concentric baileys, and which awaited their carriage’s arrival presently.

         Great was Saxhold Castle, and yet that wasn’t what drew out admiring castle servants and hostages in droves, like those that Tess espied gathering by the drawbridge. A swirling sheet of light fogged the upper bailey, concentrated in the glittering pearl spike of a spire that adorned Turray’s Keep. Its soothing hue bathed the rooves of the fortress’s halls, apartments, and outbuildings like moonlight, even in daytime.

         Over the centuries, her family had bought or been gifted enough silverstone from kings to erect something special at the center of everything. This silverstone was found nowhere else except at the Silver Walls and barred from every other fortress save this one, the seat of House Trambar, one of the oldest and most respected families across the continent.

         To Saxhold’s staff and Vendayn residents, the silverstone was a sign that the gods favored their peninsula. To Tess, that lamp of a silverstone spire meant one thing only: that she was home.

         She snapped out of her reverie as Willard climbed halfway out of his windowsill. “Stod!” he hollered. “Look, Mother—Stod’s on his Glory, come to greet us. Stod!”

         Tess peered out his window. Yards out, her second-oldest son rode his white garron to a gallop, his shock of chestnut hair aflutter. He narrowed the short distance between him and the carriage. Willard stuck his hand out, to touch his older sibling’s shoulder, if he could.

         Something was wrong. She saw it in Stoddard’s face as the garron slowed. “It’s Father,” he said over the rumble of hooves.

         Peering ahead, she saw a banner rippling over the crowd by the drawbridge, and in its folds white roses on a sable field chevroned with yellow.

         “That’s Lord Redoak’s sigil,” Tess said under her breath.

         “Redoak is Father’s man,” Willard said giddily. “It means he’s home! Father’s home!”

         She was out of the carriage before Reffel had stopped the horses, Willard outpacing her, fast as the wind. She recognized castle servants amid the crowd, but this homecoming seemed to give no one joy.

         Something’s wrong, a voice inside prodded her.

         A servant held Willard by his shoulders protectively, and the crowd opened to swallow Tess and a dismounted Stoddard hurriedly keeping pace with her. She breezed past them to Jon Redoak, the king’s chancellor and her husband’s vassal.

War’s ugliness had changed him. A scar mangled his right cheek, and his arm he braced with a splint. A covered wagon idled inside the gatehouse behind him.

         Jon was telling her something, that he’d just arrived, that his lord was in the carriage. “I’m sorry, my lady, but we need to get him indoors,” was all she heard in the commotion.

         The nobleman had his arms around her, partly to console, partly to keep her from seeing Gram Sothos. She fought him off and staggered into the wagon, where Stoddard knelt by a husk of a body that couldn’t be him. It couldn’t be.

         Tess found herself doubled over, in her young Stoddard’s strong arms, and then on her knees, her face pathetically wet and runny. Duty, duty, she kept willing herself, but her prayers spun out as meaningless drivel.

         In her vision’s periphery, she saw Elyse standing outside the wagon. “He didn’t want you to cry,” she said.

(C) Ryan Schuette 2024