Nox by Cym Aros

Jesse, Ava, Rivka, and Marshal Smith ride into the Sierra Nevada foothills, hoping to reunite their rescued horse with her owners, a young couple gone missing in the mountains after an ambush by horse thieves. En route, the four become embroiled in a standoff with an army colonel bent on Indian extermination – a man with whom Jesse has a tangled and traumatic past. Their quest to find the missing couple becomes a broader mission, to defend an an entire Miwok village against the lethal threats of disease, starvation, massacre, and despair. Back at war, and confronted by an old nemesis, Jesse is overwhelmed by previously buried memories, and his mental health deteriorates. The braided histories of Jesse and the nearly-extinguished Miwok Indian village come to light. Jesse discovers himself to be a figure of Miwok legend, while the Miwok people offer him a path to the recovery of his spirit and a true homecoming.

Thanksgiving by Cym Aros

Jesse has returned from from a brutal stretch in a Nevada prison, but struggles to rejoin “normal” family life in California, burdened by unresolved bereavement and post-traumatic stress. His sister reaches out to him by way of a rescued horse in need of similar healing. Jesse travels to the impoverished mining town of his childhood to discover something of the horse’s past, and to seek out Ruth, left alone after the deaths of Thea and Deborah. His siblings travel with him, and each, in their own way, comes to a deeper understanding of their new brother.

Trail Markers by Cym Aros

Indie Recs Indie

This tale - the first in a series of three - opens in the summer of 1874, in a prison camp south of Carson City. Falsely accused and incarcerated, two half-brothers find themselves in a losing battle to survive corrupt and brutal conditions. Cole Franklin, twenty-nine, is the privileged scion of the late, much-lionized patriarch of a wealthy California family. Jesse, twenty-four, is that patriarch's bastard son, a fact unknown to Jesse or the surviving Franklins until a scant year and a half before. Jesse had come to the Franklins as an itinerant cowboy. He is the younger of the two men, but he had ridden a long, hard trail of poverty, prejudice, and violence in his few years. Jesse had grown up a dirt-poor, hard-working, fatherless boy in a dying Sierra mining town; by age sixteen, he had seen three years of combat as a scout and sharpshooter for the Union Army, and spent the last eight months of the war interred in a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp. Cole is a strong man, and brave, but their current predicament is unlike any battlefield he has ever faced. Jesse understands too well where they are, and what might lie ahead. He takes desperate action to ensure Cole's freedom. The consequences of that action, for Jesse and the Franklin family, are severe and far-reaching. Trail Markers begins with the brothers' struggle against raw criminality - first, for simple survival; ultimately, for justice. Jesse faces bigotry, mob violence, and the shattering of his own mental health as he battles to regain his freedom and find an honorable path home to family and to the woman he loves.