Elorri is, toward the end of the convention, offered a vacant castle and its lands beside Ravounel Forest, and to go with it a charge to keep the border Lawfully and tolerating no Evil, and that's the kind of thing he's good at.  It makes it more urgent that he find a wife, though, and so far he has not managed to meet any young women who are definitely not awful; heartening though it was to meet the "discount paladins" they are an all-male "order".

He puts it about that he's interested in meeting candidate women.  Most of the nobility at the convention have rank on him sufficient to dismiss him as a prospect, he's not in line to inherit what his family has in Molthune since his brother took the post and had four kids - and even said brother isn't a baron - but he'd also be willing to consider commoners, if they were the right sort.  He meets people's cousins and nieces, daughters and friends, schoolmates and acquaintances-owed-favors.  He likes meeting all these people, he almost always likes meeting people; but he can't really see himself married to any of them.  A few he gives a second or even third meeting just in case, and -

Maybe the problem is with him.  Maybe it's the thing he's always had where he likes meeting a new person and is less interested in them once he's already got the first twenty most important facts about them and has placed them in their context.  He doesn't have this problem with his horse but she's his horse.  Maybe he should go ahead and marry someone who he finds kind of dull but who looks good on paper and doesn't have any major skeletons in her closet, and accept that this is one of the things about mortal existence that just isn't that fun.  He doesn't have to find someone exciting to be kind to them and cooperate with them.

He considers the merits of all the women he's seen twice (anyone who didn't get a second meeting showed herself horrible in some way).  He sees a few of them a couple more times.  Eventually he is frank with one of them, an imported count's Galtan adventuring companion called Osanne, that he just doesn't seem to be a romantic sort of person and can't guarantee that being married to him will be any fun, or be much like any model marriages she might have seen around her, practiced by people who have mastered the art of companionate (let alone passionate) love.  She attempts with too much delicacy to make herself understood to find out if this means that he has a boyfriend, or would like to have one; once she realizes he hasn't caught her meaning and comes out with it he's rather taken aback by the idea.

"That isn't it," he says.  "I can see in retrospect where you'd have gotten the idea, but no, that hadn't even occurred to me, I find women appealing like most men do."

"And me in particular?" Osanne asks.

"You're more than pretty enough."  The bar is not high.  He would marry a very plain woman if that seemed like the thing to do.  But Osanne's got a stark handsomeness to her, like she would look best rendered in marble.  He likes to look at her, just not in a way where he wishes he were a poet.

"It doesn't sound so bad, having an unromantic husband.  You're still a paladin.  If you say you haven't got a boyfriend you haven't, and you aren't going to have a girlfriend either, and you won't terrorize me or be dreadful to the children.  And I think I'd like it, being a lady and all.  And you're right by where Etienne's got the county, so if ever he wanted to rally the party again I wouldn't have gone far."

Elorri must knit his eyebrows together or something, because she goes on: "Only in an emergency, especially if I were pregnant at the time.  Etienne's retiring just like me, he plateaued at fourth circle ages ago and can't squeak out so much as one more second on a Fly than he could last Arodus, he wants to root out some less acid-spitting evils and dote on Simone.  But, you know, if a dragon were marauding, they don't often spare the pregnant whether the pregnant throw a spear at them or not."

Elorri nods, and he can feel himself deciding that he's willing to be bored of this woman for the rest of his life.  It could be relaxing, the boredom.  He wouldn't actually be inclined to call his receipt of a landholding to run, in recently Infernal Cheliax, on the edge of a forest, "retiring".  It will be a job.  And a half.  But maybe it will be a sedate one.  And that's not the worst thing.

Iomedaean churches are not known for their weddings, and the ones in Westcrown struggle to operate.  He's partial to Erastil over Shelyn, not so much for the Law per se as the - unromanticism.  Farming, too, is a sedate job and a half, which farmers the world over undertake while yoked to partners chosen out of a half-handful of nearby eligibles.  Besides, Elorri's an archer, and so is Erastil.  Osanne's into obscure empyreal lords who don't make any attempt to field enough clerics for marriage to be among their duties, so Erastil it is.  They invite Osanne's erstwhile party - her family are all too far away to make the trip - and a few of Elorri's Reclamation comrades, and of course Katixa is there, and they say custom vows quilted together out of a half-dozen traditions, before the Sower.

When the convention is over they go see their castle.  Elorri and Katixa patrol the edge of the forest.  He meets everyone in the holding, one at a time, and they're pretty horrible but they're his now and he'll have to help them out with that.  And at least he has time to do it in, not a few days before the schedule pushes him on to the next assizes stop.  They don't have a cleric or a lay priest, in the Asmodean church they've converted into a shared temple for half a dozen gods (Iomedae is for some reason in between Erastil and Pharasma, across from Abadar, cattycorner to Shelyn and Milani; the shrine to Gozreh is in the courtyard and there's one for Cayden in the pub down the lane, and he's not sure where people go to speak to Calistria, or if she's just not popular here).  Still, even without a dedicated professional for the preaching, Elorri can make himself sometimes available to answer basic catechism questions and read sermons from a book of good ones, and write letters for anything weird if anything weird should come up.  He does decide after a while that he doesn't think being both lord and spiritual counselor is good, and gets himself on some kind of waiting list for a priest, but he assumes it's a very long waiting list.  Of the things one must tolerate in life, needing to be scrupulous about not conflating those responsibilities inappropriately isn't the worst.

He manages, unromantically but not without enjoyment, to get Osanne pregnant within their first few months of marriage, whereupon she has to leave off the strenuous exercise she normally takes to instead mope around, grouchy with nausea and floppy tendons.  She thinks it'll be a girl.  She wants to give it a Galtan name, and Elorri says perhaps one that's common in both Galt and Cheliax, like Flora, and she says, fine, Flora, as though that wasn't just an example.  Elorri doesn't really know how to feel about an impending Flora, but Katixa's very excited; whenever not on patrol or exercises with her paladin, and whenever Osanne's not shut up indoors, the horse hovers curiously.

Osanne is wrong; it's a boy.  It's a stillborn.

Elorri lays on hands for his wife, and tries it for the baby but it doesn't work, and he buries the baby, and names him so he'll have something to pray for him by that the baby's grandfather can find him in the Boneyard and bring him to the archons, and - still doesn't know how to feel about it.

He had a Reclamation comrade who came into his fearlessness while they were assigned together, and it seemed to be a big adjustment for him.  Elorri took it in stride.  He remembers what it's like to be afraid, if in the vague way that one remembers a dream.  He's fine without it but it was there, to suppress when he achieved the requisite power.  Maybe he's just naturally immune to some other standard-issue feeling, and that's what's wrong with him.  It isn't stopping him from doing right by his people and doing good in the world or even having a decent time on many of the days of his life, so it can't be that important, but it's itching, now, as he buries his baby and Katixa is clearly more affected about it than he is, and Osanne's sure to be in a dreadful funk for the whole rest of the week if not longer.

Osanne has the grace to not need, from him, that he be demonstratively sadder about this baby than about all the other babies in the world who find themselves in the Boneyard without the parents they were meant to have.  He learns a prayer Osanne knows, to Atropos (Pharasma Herself being too mainstream for her religious sensibilities), who is said to abhor harm to children and is on the scene for their child at least in theory.  They say it together and he holds her and there isn't a lot else that passes between them about it.

Flora is born when they've been in the castle for two years, and she's healthy and Katixa insists on taking her for (Elorri-enabled, at first) rides every day so that she'll know how a horse moves and how to move with one, so that one day she will have the potential to be a mounted archer like her father should her talents lie in that direction.  Flora seems fine with getting her emotional support from Osanne and experiencing her father mostly as a source of advice, activities, lessons, and horseback rides.  So do Flora's brothers and sisters, when those come along.  Maybe this is a fine way to be a father.

Elorri is bored, but he is busy.  Elorri is defective, but he is arranging Flora carefully curated meetings with the count's son because Etienne simply loves the idea of his children marrying his party member's children, and that'll get them all a leg up in the world.  Elorri is missing some thing that everyone else has, but he is minding the forest border and seeing to it that the next generation of Chelish nobility isn't horrible.  And maybe in Heaven all wounds will be healed.