“Young Lady?”

House Enaid does not, of course, tolerate subpar servants. But even among those permitted to staff their Manor, Handmaiden Noll is especially approvable. Quiet, discreet, competent, always on hand – and she has never once made her mistress startle like that buffoon Footman Cei.

If one holds strictly to propriety, she should be addressing Rohese as Young Miss. Why, some of the servants even do so! Handmaiden Noll’s particular virtues allow her a rather more complete understanding of matters above her station than is typically permitted: it cannot be aught but full clear to her that it is Rohese, and not her Lady Grandaunt, who shapes the alchemy of this estate.

Rohese Enaid is five generations and a marriage removed from the seat of her House. Her Ducal Grandfather, a Knight in the tradition of their line, is well into his fifteenth decade and unless slain will most certainly outlive her. She is his son’s son’s daughter’s son’s daughter; by rights the Lady Eldred Enaid, wife of her Lord Granduncle – the Second Heir to House Enaid, her grandmother’s younger brother – should have taken the household’s inner affairs in hand well before Rohese’s birth.

Instead, it had been fought over by Young Misses and grown Madams, splintering into petty fiefdoms until even the clerical servants could have their say! It is a perilous thing for a House to be divided against itself. Her years of work have made great strides to redress it, but she expects years more yet; nothing can ever truly be settled while the matriarch of her House is a woman who bends to and fro as readily as a sallowtree in a Scarstorm.

She sets down her empty teacup. A proper servant knows better than to gossip, but it can be so very easy for propriety to slip when properly incentivised. It would hardly do for it to become known that she prefers to take her refreshment steeped more strongly than many fighting men take theirs. Not all whose Oath is held by Enaid are so reliable as Handmaiden Noll.

The precise click of well-placed porcelain fortifies her for the nonsense no doubt bearing down on her.

“I do wonder what could possibly countenance disturbing my afternoon tea.”

“The Young Lady may find it edifying to consider the view of her.. Ducal Grandfather’s fief, before adjourning to his solar as he requests.”

Neither of them allows their mask to break in the silence that follows. If any of her Cousin Isuet’s creatures had heard that pause, however slight, it could be made grounds for execution. Certainly it would at least be leverage; sedition cannot be borne. She despairs of her Handmaiden, sometimes; her competence makes her terribly reckless, when she assumes all is accounted for. Or perhaps it is Rohese’s failing, to have so sheltered her that she cannot feel the knives ever at their necks.

This is no more the time or place to speak of it than it ever is or will be. She absconds to the balustrade while Handmaiden Noll busies herself making the tea service ready to be cleared away.

Rohese’s days are full heavy with duties, and these brief few degrees of the Sun when she takes her afternoon tea are a respite she has fiercely defended. The lower south veranda is high enough not to be overly disturbed by the sounds of the estate going about its day, while still close to the rustle and whisper of the wind in the trees. Stood at the edge, it affords her a commanding view across the gardens and commonwilds of the Enaid Manor and its Oathtown.

Any House of means will have its diversions, and a Ducal House can only be of means. Before all else, however, the Enaid are Knights, Diviners, Warders; their Oathtown sprawls low and wide through the creases of their hills. It’s riddled with training- and sparring-fields, meditative cloisters, and the rows of brutish, buttressed domes wherein Squires will enter and either a Knight or a ravaged corpse will exit. Rune-carven rods and squat obelisks and empty daises are scattered far and wide, anything but as careless as they seem to the untrained eye.

Today, not one of those daises stands empty. Not a training- or sparring-field goes unused, and the hilltops shake and plume with dust as the stronger Knights test their limits. She’s too far to hear the clamour, but the faint shimmer across her mind’s eye makes clear she wouldn’t hear it regardless; only the Enaid blood in her veins permits her to so much as look through the rising siege-wards. It will be days yet before they reach full strength, but they run to the bones of this land, which the Enaid have held – it is said – since the rule of the arch-alchemists.

An early harvest is sweeping through the fields. The schoolhouses have let out, Teachers bringing their charges into the commonwilds to pick fruit and berries. The road to Ogwen – the second-greatest city in all Camlan, whose Mayor has for more than two centuries been an Oathman of Enaid – is choked each way with carts.

House Enaid is rousing for war, and her Ducal Grandfather has summoned her.

The solar of Duke Ywain Enaid is small, as Ducal solars go. It sits atop their Manor in deliberate imitation of the Dubbing-domes: a glass hemisphere twenty spans across, all one piece in the way of a master so skilled that his craft touches upon higher alchemies. At the end of a long, clear day, it should still be too hot for her to tolerate; she’s known strong Knights to be carried out heatsick after displeasing her Ducal Grandfather sufficiently to be called in at noon.

When she knocks, the doors are cool to the touch. War cannot be unserious, but if he’s spent a Thaumaturge’s time and effort drawing the heat out for her, there must be something at the root of the matter which truly requires the security of an unscryable room.

“Ah, Rohese! Come, petal, sit with an old man a while and talk.”

Perhaps he’s guessing, but she doesn’t believe so. She could be a Page or Footman with an urgent missive. Whether it’s her footsteps, her breathing, her heartbeat – perhaps her perfume? If the strength of a Knight’s senses failed to grow with the strength of his arm, he would quickly become unable to control his own might.

However he knows, he’s never once been wrong.

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She glides past the bootrack and ascends the steps directly; she’s no Knight to bound up the outer face of the Manor and greet her liege with soles crusted in mud and grass. Their servants keep the halls full clean; not a speck of dust mars the delicate calf-leather of her shoes to risk dirtying the thick-piled Cyran carpets.

It’s a statement of power, to import so frivolously. It could so easily be turned against a lesser man; what Duke does not hold the oath of a Carpeter? What son of Camlan would dare let the kingdom’s wealth slip between his fingers to ungrateful outsiders, who look down upon the greatest warriors yet living with the very lax indolence those warriors have bought them in Camlan blood?

Who would dare speak an accusation that the greatest Knight in chronicled history was less than perfectly leal?

“Duke Mithral Lion.”

Her curtsy is deep, head bowed as is mannerly. It has the benefit of affording her a moment to flick her eyes across the room. Bookshelves, scroll racks, what passes as a drinks cabinet for a Knight who quaffs alchemical venoms like ale. No servants are present, nor even his current Pages and Squires – not ordinarily unusual, but this being neither his study nor the family parlour, and under the circumstances, it seems unlikely for this to be a private family matter. The carpets have changed since last she was here, as they always do; the only constant is that her Ducal Grandfather cares little for the sweeping expanse of onyx-dark marble with its veins of gold and mithral ore.

Facing the doors, placed at the natural focus of the room, is a great chair of adamant a careful handspan short of the size of the Thrones. The family histories relate that Squire Ywain Enaid was titled a Knight in his thirteenth year; Rohese would believe it from a stranger, for surely only great magic could fuel such growth as to create a man standing a span high at the shoulder.

“Fagh! Every time, you make me tell you. It’s Grandfather, girl, to you as to any of my blood.” It is his prerogative, as her elder kin, to permit her closer address. Compliance is an effort; court is a churning pit of poisons fit for the Scar, where the least fault in manner can consign a woman to disgrace. Her – Grandfather – is a man whose tales are carried by the Bards to every corner of the Kingdom. The mere thought of greeting him by less than his due rank and title –

Her unease is well covered by a laugh: the courtly chime of bells a girl has no choice but to master. The Mithral Lion, whose bloody claws have swept clear leagues, allows his unlined face to crease in doting affability. He is a man, and one who spends much time away from court seeing to the fighting men of the Enaid and quashing the unruly tides of the Scar, but so too is he a Duke full aged and of great experience. She has never entirely known what of him is true and what is a mask.

“I suppose that girl of yours will have pulled your head out of the clouds, no matter that I called for your soonest attendance? None of that, now.” He waves off her polite incomprehension with an utterly boorish roll of his eyes. “I’ve been Duke of this House for more than a century, in war and in peace. One learns to see these things.”

Loyalty. Yes, the Mithral Lion can certainly judge that. Rohese thinks of Handmaiden Noll’s reserved steadiness; of the even, still attention she places on her mistress and how it looks so very much like the placid disregard with which she allows all but the most immediate of instructions from Cousin Isuet to flow past. She lowers her eyes demurely, and lets the turn of her head and the line of her shoulders speak her helplessness. “I won’t dare argue, Grandfather. I merely happened to see your fief making preparations for war when I looked off the veranda at the close of my afternoon tea.”

The adamant of his chair groans as he settles back into it, taking a deep draught from his goblet. The fumes of his exhalation sting her eyes, no matter that she’s stood ten paces distant. She is no callow girl to break under mere scrutiny, but even lounging at rest, her Grandfather’s presence outmatches what she’s felt from lesser Knights driving themselves to exhaustion in sparring.

A true emotion, cruelly misused, can breathe life into a lie – but it can’t make it impenetrable.

“Enough, petal.”

Grandfather has always been larger than life. It isn’t just the size of him. He gestures broadly; scowls and grins and laughs, flashing the tombstone teeth under the great hedge adorning his upper lip; projects his speech like he’s stood before his men on the eve of battle. She’s never heard him so deadly quiet.

“Watching you grow your thorns – fagh, you’ve always had thorns. But playing court with you, helping you sharpen them, has been well pleasing. Of all my achievements, I count my House the greatest, and you the finest amongst them. Do not think me blind to how you’ve taken less than a decade to position yourself as all but matriarch, despite the chaos my craven great-granddaughter has let spill from her Moontouched slack fingers.”

Few men of Grandfather’s generation yet live, and none so hale. Amongst the many tales of the Mithral Lion, there are those which claim time has no hold on him. It isn’t true; the brilliant silver of his hair is only the most visible sign. He still holds to his faith in the sun, though piety has not been fashionable in decades. Most of all, there’s a fathomless depth behind his placid, pale eyes that Rohese has never been able to plumb.

“The time for games and sparring is past. A dragon has made lair in the Stonespines, above the valley of Gareth’s Ascent.”

Only moments ago, she had felt small and clumsy and stupid again, as she hadn’t since her first, fumbling girlhood steps into the courtly arts. Now it is as nothing; what has ever struck such fear into her as this?

“Do we know which..?” She trails off as he shakes his head. Every noble learns the title, distinguishing features, and particular habits of every dragon ever put to record; that they know nothing of this one is a fell omen. Young dragons oft lack the reserve and self-control of their elders, foreign ones are yet stranger and more inscrutable than their known kin, and those so ancient as to have faded from history…

Peasants, she has heard, tell fear-tales of Scarstorms that ravage fields and livestock; of plague and destitution and Scarbeasts too strong for mere Militiamen to battle. The fear-tales a noble child is raised on are of the fall of Houses, the ruination of a demesne entire, the toppling of kingdoms and empires. No few such tales come at the wrath of an elder dragon.

“It is Enaid that holds the Oath of Baron Medraut, and so we must answer this Bronze Judge’s demand he surrender the demesne he holds in our name. Yet it is well storied how a dragon responds when gainsaid; though I must go ahead, the War King readies even now to sally out with all his banners. Your great-grandfather will hold Enaid in his right as Heir, but he is a poor Knight, and ailing.” Nothing passes across Grandfather’s face at that pronouncement. He speaks of it as simply as he does the training of his Squires, the logistics of his Knights and Armsmen. But his eyes are solemn. “Your Granduncle must needs stand regent to his father. And so I charge you – do as you can, as you must, that Enaid stands strong in my absence.”

Her Lady Grandaunt is a dutiful wife but a terribly poor administrator, whose devoted husband will not gainsay her. A child scarce out of the creche could see this opportunity; Cousin Isuelt has more than once posed genuine threat to Rohese’s position. If she lives to see their Ducal Grandfather’s return, it can only be in such disgrace as she would never tolerate.

A house divided against itself is a perilous thing. Open internecine conflict is more perilous yet: the shattered remnants of the Ambrus stand testament to the ease with which a mighty House’s enemies may take advantage of such tumult.

But Rohese has never before had her Ducal Grandfather’s blessing to do the necessary.