The next day, Lancecain was walking home having retrieved his blade left with a smith for maintenance, when a group caught his attention. A half dozen Moon jogged past him. Brows furrowed, he followed, walking slowly in case he was approaching a situation he had no business sticking his nose in.

He was beyond surprised when he heard the distinctive sound of the northern gate slamming shut, the sound carrying far with the lack of activity in the fort, and picked up his pace. There was only one reason for the north gate to open. An army had returned. The problem was that it was far, far too early.

Alana had been prompted to return because of her brother and the estrazi. He couldn’t imagine that another traitor had been found in the north. Or that an event of similar gravity had transpired. That left him confused and worried.

He came up short and stopped by the side of the road as he spotted the procession coming his way. His first thought was that the grim faces, dirty bodies, and plethora of injuries were what a returning army should look like. His second thought berated himself for the first. While it was the norm, he shouldn’t glorify the armies’ losses.

From the undecorated gray of their armor and their golden shields, they were from the Order of Paradise Seekers. That explained the early return to some degree. The knight orders of Victory were not equal. While they all fought for the north and served the James, they did so for very different reasons.

The Seekers were the new kids, so to speak. Normally, they should have a lot to prove but they weren’t interested in proving themselves to the people of the north. They worked for the favor of the saints.

Victory put far less credence in humanity’s heroes than the rest of the continent, preferring to put their faith in themselves and their ancestors. The Seekers were a group that had grown tired of the grim dedication to their forefathers. They wanted to give their lives to more benevolent beings. To know that something waited for them after the bloodshed.

They had a strange dogma that Lancecain didn’t quite understand. Foremost, they believed that the war against the hordes of the north was a sacred war. That by slaying the monsters before they could threaten the rest of humanity, they would earn the favor of humanity’s greatest heroes and be welcomed into the heavenly Paradise upon their deaths. The Seekers trained and fought the same as the other orders. They dragged back wagons of corpses every campaign. The problem was that they disagreed with nearly every other tradition of the north.

They served the James but they didn’t worship them the way the other orders did. In their minds, the saints were the only ones worth their veneration. The loyalty they gave the duke was the same as any other peasant beholden to a noble.

To the people of Victory, such shallow allegiance meant they couldn’t be trusted. Traditionalists hated them, considering them all traitors and their order a transparent excuse to build a private army for a coup. The only thing that kept them from being killed was that their numbers didn’t pose the vaguest threat, not even reaching a thousand.

The second problem was that they valued their lives too much, something that could only be considered a character flaw in Victory. They fought but they didn’t fight nearly as hard as the other orders. They were always the first to return, this year being the exception due to Alana, and their training was notoriously “soft”. They didn’t even make their trainees do their drills bare-chested.

All of that would be acceptable, if practices that would lead the other knight to mock them. The unacceptable section of the Seekers’ dogma was that they wanted more than the north could offer. They urged the untalented and poorly connected to flee the north for the south rather than throw their lives away pointlessly. Lancecain had heard rumors they were connected with fanatical religious factions in the south that would take the youths in.

They could perform below average, they could curse the James, but denying the north of soldiers was unforgivable. The Seekers had a terrible reputation. So bad that despite seeing their ragged appearance, the group of Bleak Moons that had come to check on the commotion didn’t make any effort to help them. No one did. Lancecain felt bad for them, but he knew who poured his cups and wouldn’t be the first to lend a sympathetic hand.

He buried his concern and focused on his curiosity, observing them as they passed. His eyes narrowed as he counted. He didn’t know the exact size of the army that had left Victory but it was obvious that they’d suffered heavy casualties. They also had too few wagons. The Seekers had undoubtedly met with tragedy but there was no sympathy to be found. Rather, the opposite.

“I guess your precious saints didn’t descend from on high to help you,” a man wearing an apron splattered with blood shouted with a sneer.

“Maybe they weren’t faithful enough,” a woman holding a young boy in her arms shouted next, the scorn in her voice almost severe enough to burn.

“Enough,” one of the Moons shouted but the knight said nothing in their defense.

One of the Seekers in the lead of the procession stepped aside and raised his voice. “You mock us without knowing anything. Our order has the right to believe what we want and to teach those who come to us seeking guidance what we believe. We fight just the same as everyone else.”

“You certainly have large ones to say that,” shouted another man. “There’s still several weeks of winter left and we haven’t seen the other commanders.”

“You’ll be seeing them soon. Monsters didn’t make us turn back. Storms did. Big, nasty storms. We ran back full pace for over a week. Over half of those days we had to march through powerful blizzards. Monsters attacked in the middle of the storms, taking both our men and our wagons. Something strange is happening beyond those walls.”

“Keep moving,” a Moon directed him, gently shoving him toward his compatriots. “Rest at a bunkhouse. See to your injured, take the names of the fallen, and get a good night’s rest. In the morning, you can tell the duke about what happened instead of shouting in the middle of the road. Go.”

After the second urging, the man rejoined the procession. With his head down, he didn’t notice Lancecain sidling up beside him until the young man tapped him on the shoulder. “Welcome home, sir. I’m sorry for your losses.”

“Polluck’s boy.” The knight was old enough that Lancecain considered him a senior and decided not to take offense at his dismissive tone. “I see he taught you some manners. Only one willing to give knights a proper welcome.” He spat to the side. “We’ve lost dozens this time and have nothing to show for it. The other orders wonder why we send the young ones away? Tell me honestly that you don’t think their lives are worth more than being lost in a storm. I guarantee over half of our fallen will be kids who haven’t seen their third decade. Saints.”

“It was the storm I wanted to talk about. You said you were caught in one?”

“Not one, boy. Several. The first one, we marched through, hoping to get past it. It lasted for three days. We spent one night without howling winds before a second one greeted us. When we were caught in a third storm, we had no choice but to turn around. Sprinting at top speed, we should have outrun them but we still spent over half the journey unable to see further than our outstretched hands because of the flurry of snow. I’m telling you, it’s unnatural. Winter isn’t over but it feels like late spring. Maybe summer, if someone was mad enough to go beyond the walls then.”

“I see. Why? What could cause it?”

“Do I look like a scholar? Saints’ blessed asses, I studied the sword not the sky. You’ve got what you want, now get somewhere. Unless you want to sully your pristine reputation helping out Victory’s traitors.” He snorted out a laugh. “Though I wonder how long you all can call us that. If the duke’s own son has turned against the rigid traditions of the north, it won’t be hard to sway the rest.”

Lancecain pursed his lips, holding back his thoughts as he stepped away. As he jogged toward his master’s house, he thought on the sudden storms and their cause. He was no scholar either, but he could assume with the best of them.

The biggest difference between the seasons was temperature. The north never got warm but it was less cold during the spring and summer. Following that line of thinking, he could assume that a change in the region’s temperature could cause the storms to come early, but he had no idea what could cause such a change.

Except…maybe a spell. A very powerful, very complicated spell. One that would take an enormous amount of power to initiate and even more power to keep active for weeks. It went far beyond the level of a master caster. More than ten. Maybe more than a hundred.

If his wild conjecture was right, what person, or being more likely, could use such powerful magic? And what would be its motivation?