We never really knew where he was or when he’d be returning. There were the wives meetings, where the senior crone married to some military relic long overdue for retirement would disseminate the latest news through scroll and lecture. Mother hated those. In one of her more humorous moments, she reenacted how catty they all were and how without delay the meetings would degrade to drunk clucking hens gossiping over which watchmen was the most endowed and notes on his availability.

So, it’s no surprise to me now that one fateful winter, when Father was supposed to be on the forefront of some vague campaign, he was attending to the wife of a field grade commander in his SS.

We found out weeks after. Father had returned home a wretch, reluctantly telling Mother that he was done deploying due to “some arbitrary insubordination.” For all the stolen gold in the Thunder Bustle, I couldn’t fathom why Mother didn’t tear the house apart and leave him emasculated after he had fallen asleep. She took it on the chin and seemed to recover back to her dismal role as housewife to the once-great warrior. You would have barely noticed anything at all, save the additional silence at the table and the lines in her face that had deepened. But hindsight is an unchained dragon, cruel but liberated. I know now why Mother remained in that house in Templeton.

Despite a heated debate among his superiors, Father was allowed to retain a paying position. As a man it occurred to me maybe it was his greatest detractors who gleefully fought for this altered retention. Demoted to a stable master for one of the SS garrisons, our once healthy stock of horses were sold off, their mountain of feed abandoned to mottle with the fungi that I examined and the vermin that I caught.

Most of the time, Father would bring his work home with him—we certainly had the room in the stables. Mother once whispered he was too embarrassed to be seen in his billet by his former brethren.

One of the few reasons he wasn’t pulled apart by a departing pair of Saber warhorses was he’d saved the life of an esteemed officer. At the time Father’s infidelities were being exposed, this officer had climbed to the seat of Vice Chief Horseman and had enough clout to muffle the baying of the scorned husband. Although the Vice Chief’s influence spared my father, the same could not be said for his loose-ring-bearing mistress, whose corpse dangled on the Tower of the Waning Moon for a season of crows and maggots.