How far we have come in eight-odd months, he thought, surveying with pride the scene in the courtyard below. When Tate's party of thirty or more had arrived to reestablish the abandoned stronghold south of Kern for the forces of Good, the castle had been in ruins, looted and laid to waste by cen shy;turies of roving monsters and mercenaries.
Tate had stumbled upon the architect's original renderings of the castle, stuffed behind a loose stone in a wall of the great room. He was using the faded and torn plans to restore as much of Lamesh as possible to its original condition, though he was forced to use more wood and less stone, due to availability. The entire western cliff face had been in advanced decay and needed immediate shoring. The only significant alteration to the design was the conversion of a portion of the original lord knighf s personal apartments into a temple to Kiri-Jolith.
Within the castle walls, work was moving according to schedule. Tate's master architect, a man named Raymond of Winterholm, who had accompanied Tate from Solamnia, was an excellent planner. Normally, temporary structures would have been erected to house workers and key personnel while construction occurred. In laying out the castle, Winterholm wisely positioned the main wooden buildings near the walls that needed the least work, so they were permanent struc shy;tures from the beginning. Most of the key workmen currently lived inside the castle. Once it was finished, they would either return to Solamnia or build houses of their own in the adjoining village. Ultimately, only those folk crucial to the castle's defense would live within.
Turning, Tate looked down upon the town, which was quickly growing beyond the walls on the eastern side of Lamesh Castle. Crumbling sections of the old town wall cast a wide circle, suggesting that Lamesh had been a sizable vil shy;lage in its heyday before the Cataclysm. People were return shy;ing to the village more quickly than even Tate had expected. The simple presence of the knights in this wild territory promised order and authority. Since ogres and other crea shy;tures inhabited the mountains in greater numbers these days, many people chose to relocate within the protective shadow of the castle.
As the village awakened that morning, boys carted water with buckets on yokes, girls hunted eggs in corners where range hens had laid them, mothers issued orders to all. The support beams of new houses were a common sight these days. The first tavern had already sprung up to meet the needs of the many craftsmen who'd come from all corners to find work. Behind old, rebuilt homes, women gathered honey and tended herb gardens, drying their produce for winter use. Goats bleated; roosters crowed; dogs barked; cows lowed to be milked. The plaintive wail of bagpipes floated up from unseen lips. Tate felt something akin to a father's pride for this village.
Beyond the ruined walls of the town, a man led a horse and plow through a field where corn had just been har shy;vested. More than half of the crops were already in, filling the granary and storehouses. Hayricks and corn shocks dotted the rolling landscape. Sheep grazed on a nearby hillside, their dirty white coats grown out since spring shearing. Lina the weaver had already turned it to fabric, enough so that they wouldn't have to buy more during the cold months. Tate's plan for a self-sufficient community was becoming a reality even more quickly than he'd hoped. Still, there was much to be done before the first snowfall.
The Knight of the Crown dreaded the approaching winter, and not only from the standpoint of preparations; Sir Tate Sekforde hated the cold. It seemed to bury itself in his bones on the first frigid day and stay until buds returned to the trees. Winter would undoubtedly seem even colder without the centuries-old conveniences of the family castle back in Solamnia. Tate could just see his stuffy younger brother Rupport, feet propped on a hassock before a roaring fire in the family's private apartments, thick tapestries covering the cold stone walls of Castle DeHodge.
You have no business envying Rupport, Tate scolded him shy;self. You gave up your claim as eldest son of your own accord. Truly, envy was not what Tate felt for the brother who'd been so ashamed of their father's common heritage that he'd taken their mother's maiden surname, DeHodge. Sir Rupport DeHodge. Even his name sounded pompous.
It was Tate's opinion that knights like Rupport had caused the decline of the order. Rupport had inherited his super shy;cilious nature from their mother, whose noble family's his shy;tory with the knighthood could be traced all the way back to Vinas Solamnus. Thirty years ago, the DeHodge family's for shy;tunes had declined beyond their ability to deny it. The Cata shy;clysm had caused less physical damage to their castle near the High Clerist's Tower than the social aftershocks to their finances. An only child, Cilia DeHodge had reluctantly agreed to an arranged marriage to a wealthy merchant from downriver at Jansburg, for whom she felt nothing but contempt.
Gedeon Sekforde was a kindly, street-smart man who loved his wife despite her many faults, not the least of which was the disdain for him she never bothered to hide. In exchange for restoring her family's lands with his merchant money, Cilia bore him two sons. While Cilia DeHodge Sek shy;forde pushed her sons toward the knighthood, Gedeon Sek shy;forde gave them the freedom to choose whatever occupation they wished. Though both embraced the knighthood, their reasons were very, very different. Rupport read his own intolerance and bigotry into the writings of the Measure and espoused them as his knightly goals.
Tate read the voluminous set of laws that defined the term honor and saw obedience to the spirit of the laws as the chief goal of the knighthood. It was Gedeon Sekforde who encour shy;aged Tate to read between the lines of the Measure when his elder son would question the accuracy of the younger7 s inter shy;pretations. When Gedeon died, Cilia and Rupport's unfeeling snobbishness, not an uncommon trait among mem shy;bers of the knighthood, became unbearable to Tate. To escape the prevailing attitudes in Solamnia and in hopes that the frontier would allow for freethinking, Tate formally renounced his claim to the family estates and signed on with Stippling's expedition.
Not a month out of Solamnia, however, the venerable Knight of the Rose's party had been ambushed by ogres and mercenaries in a pass through the northern Khalkists. Tate alone had survived. Burned, his leg injured, he had stumbled and crawled his way to the village of Styx. Giving himself just one day to rest, he bought a horse and headed straight shy;away for the High Clerist's Tower back in Solamnia to report the deaths. And to apply for entry into the next level of knighthood, the Order of the Sword. He knew just what quest he would be assigned: to complete Stippling's mission of establishing a Solamnic outpost at Lamesh.
On the return trip, the Knight of the Crown had had a lot of time to think. The clerical spells that only Knights of the Sword received through prayer would certainly be useful, especially if ever Tate were in a situation like the ambush again. What was more, his reasons for joining Stippling's troop had not changed; he had no wish to settle in Solamnia. The High Clerist and the Knightly Council had not been keen at first to agree to such a monumental quest by so young a knight. A number of particularly arrogant knights, mentors of Rupport's no doubt, had even questioned Tate's bravery, since he'd had the audacity to survive. Tate had wondered more than once if the staid old Council of Knights hadn't ulti shy;mately agreed to his request simply to brush him off, pre shy;suming that he would fail. In a land so remote that it didn't even bear a regional name, news of a Crown Knight's defeat would not tarnish the knighthood in Solamnia. Tate shook away the aggravating reflection. Unkind thoughts were not allowed on holy days either.