The chapterhouse gets its name from the ancient function of the main building: clergy of the Triad gathered here to advise rulers of these lands. Now that the chapter does not meet anymore, the magnificent stone walls host a refectory and the castellan's office, and numerous smaller buildings have sprung up around it: dormitories, teaching halls, small libraries, stables, a balneary, an infirmary, all connected with an arcade cloister – monks constructed the school, and whatever monks construct will look like a monastery and smell like a monastery. There is also an orchard and a cemetery, and several training grounds. The boisterous city is seen in the distance; the chapterhouse is separated from it by a wall, a wood, a hillside, but most effectively – by the secluded and busy routine inside.
During his first year at the chapterhouse Casavir finds the courage to ask about his family once; there is that stern monk that goes out into the city from time to time to deliver letters and run errands, and he might ask around if he wanted. At his timid request, the stern monk holds him waiting with an unimpressed stare for a long nervous moment and then gives him a quiet rebuke. His true family is all around him; any life he used to have is fallen leaves and last year's snow now; cherishing what was not his will only cause suffering. The boy schools his features into guilt and hides his treasured memories deeper.
In other aspects, Casavir takes to monastic life seamlessly, and his calm focus translates well into the daily order of studies, training, chores, and prayers. There are about fifty children in their teens here, and two dozen of younger ones, so it is easy to blend in the mass of them. He does not make friends seeing that he is the youngest one in the dormitory and the things he thinks about are implicitly forbidden topics, but he does not make any enemies either, so he considers it an achievement and stays friendly, mostly silent and unchallengingly distant.
Days follow days, months grow into a year, and then another one. He may be a borrowed soul, but he has eyes and ears, so he studies and learns. He does not think he is particularly clever – but he is rather lucky to have sharp memory, and while many of his fellow novices struggle, he needs little effort to memorize the countless codes, odes, chants, regulations, ceremony protocols, doctrines and readings by noble clerics of the past. He likes reading most of all activities in the chapterhouse, and maybe sword practice comes second, because these are the two tasks that clear all thought from his mind. In reading, he can be anyone else; in sword practice, time is lost to extreme concentration where minutes last like hours and hours fly like minutes.
"He spends too much time reading history books, Sister Martha", Casavir hears Father Andrew say about him at the midday meal and turns this thought over in his mind like a smooth pebble for several days. Is it a sin? It is undesirable? Will it spoil him for the service? He looks into himself and admits that he appreciates annals and chronicles because they have a plot that does not necessarily lead right into the moral; because historic figures linger with him and he spends nights thinking of how their lives might go down differently if they had a little more luck or made a different decision; because he tries on their mantles and something in him changes. He sits a little straighter in class because a knight he likes was described with "his back as upright as his words", and he intercepts his vague intention to live the metaphor only when he is on his guard against it. All these discoveries do not keep Casavir from reading, for he concludes that reading does him more good than harm, but they do bring an echo of guilt every time the book in his hands is not a spiritual one.
"Are you that eager to die young, child?", he receives as a sad admonition from their Sister-in-Charge when she invites him into her office to talk about his path one sunlit morning. There are three paths any novice can choose to trail. He can become a monk and stay in the quiet of their collective research and duties; he can pledge his life to a certain god as a cleric and go out into the world to guide the flock; he can take vows of a paladin and serve as a knight-errant of his church, defending faith with his sword and his habit. Casavir lowers his head and tries not to show he is wounded at such reaction to his uncovered aspiration. The tall and robust Sister-in-Charge sighs and pushes aside her maternal feelings that demand her to hug this taciturn boy and ruffle his hair. She makes him promise to think more about it.
Casavir does his best and weighs the three paths again. Can he be a monk? Life of solitude and scholarship is so appealing, and he is sure he would enjoy the enlightened peace it promises to his days. Yet this is what revolts him: in the serenity of sheltered faith, he will forget that people suffer outside their walls. Does he have the right to be safe and full when they are in trouble and hungry? Will it be enough for him to give the gods their due?
Being a cleric means offering guidance and administering rites. He will be sent to some village as a priest and run the church, serve the residents, heal them, bless them. Casavir knows he could be content with this kind of life, that every mended knee and every cured fever would give him fulfillment, and that he might even find some sense of belonging there. It is an honourable course. He is tempted to follow it, but who is he to guide and supervise? And will a long life of religious leadership be enough to pay his debt?
Not many novices choose paladinhood. Paladins exercise a strict code of conduct, a merest breaching of which can make one fall and lose all benevolence of the gods; paladins lead a lonely and perilous life on the road when a roof over your head for the night is a luxury; paladins bear the brunt of every war, every invasion, any attack of evil with their own body – no arrows or fireballs, only direct combat and may the gods choose whose cause is fair. Paladins also die young, which may signify the sad truth that the gods sometimes forget to interfere. Casavir thinks that this is the path that scares him most and therefore he ought to choose it. He is anxious to find a way to serve with his mind, his body, his soul ultimately, without a modicum of reservation. Risking his life and being in danger seems to be it.
Years later Casavir will look back at this logic and smile at how faulted it was; he will realize he has chosen the right path for all the wrong reasons, and his well-structured guilt was a phantom constructed by that lost and pensive child he had been. That year the child returns to the kind Sister-in-Charge and insists that he has chosen the path of a paladin. He is ascribed a mentor and more hours of athletic practice.
Catherine Harkenhart of Tyr greets him at the practice course at the sunrise of the following morning. She is a head taller than he is, she hits with the force of a healthy bull and finds him inadequate at every step. Within an hour his body is disintegrated into competing pools of pain; within two hours he arrives at the revelation that every small tendon can be twisted differently and strained more; by the end of the third hour Catherine Harkenhart lowers her unsharpened practice sword and inquires curiously if he is going to acknowledge the limits of his body or faint first. Casavir gets told off for his unnecessary and vain conviction that he should neglect the shortcomings of his physique and is dismissed after the chiding lecture that his enemies will just need to wait until his own stubbornness kills him.
Casavir sleeps with the other novices in the cold stone building, bathes in icy morning water, wears his rough robe and moves from one daily chore to another without complaint. In fact, he welcomes the restrictions he obviously deserves and tries to catch and kill any pitiful thought as it is born. They train with blunt swords every morning. The ache in his muscles tells him he will be able to fight better for those who cannot. When his back is sore after a day of hard work or diligent studies, he thinks of metal plates of heavy armour and stubbornly endures the pain. Even if he is punished and the punishment is unjust, he takes it with clenched teeth and says to himself that he needs this injustice for him to remember that the world is unjust.
The long classes held in the teaching halls and libraries take a good part of his day. He is sure that names of angels have nothing to do with what his life will be, yet he learns them by heart as required and recites the long list in the quiet of the study hall – out of respect for the teachers and a deeper and better kind of respect to those who mined this knowledge from countless accounts of witnesses, prophets and blessed priests. He whispers the required lessons under his breath while he learns to ride in full armour, or exercises in the practice field, or scrubs the greasy pots clean in the kitchen. Day after day he is so tired that he falls asleep as soon as his head touches the hard bed, and in this permanent exhaustion he does not notice that he grows taller, and his shoulders spread wider, and his frame acquires muscle.
One day he catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror that adorns the back wall of the small washroom in the balneary and realizes he must have turned sixteen this autumn. He is tall and lean like a three-year-old horse, but his skin is tight over muscle and tendons, nothing soft or idle. He stares at his reflection for some more time and tries to measure if he took after his mother or his father more. She was tall for a woman and he was tall for a man, so there is no saying here. He rotates his wrists and cracks his neck, and reckons that his bones are definitely his father's, thick and steady bones of farmers or infantry. His parents both had dark hair, so they are even here. His eyes are nobody's, that he had been told enough times to remember. He touches his cheekbones, contours his skull underneath his skin as if he is drawing it on his face – the single features all match those of his father, but they are somehow differently mixed into a new combination, a softer one, a chiseled one, a… more handsome one. Casavir shudders as if he had a misstep and turns away from the mirror. Vanity must be portrayed with a mirror in hand for a reason.
Rumour of a plague in the Beggar's Nest enters the chapterhouse in the middle of that winter. First the monks and the priests talk in hushed voices about fever that cannot be brought down and blackened limbs that no healing takes, then all the priests are leaving for the city temples and the gates are locked to keep the unsworn novices from contracting the unknown disease. Then the refectory cuts down the rations and the monks who stayed in with the novices start a timeless vigil at the temple. Father Andrew returns to the chapterhouse sick and locks himself in a small wooden outhouse where hens used to be kept. He dies there a week later, and the two hermits from the monastery who showed up to bury him follow the head teacher to the grave shortly.
Casavir hears accounts of churches packed with the sick and streets where the dead lie in the open because there are not enough hands to bury them. He lies in his bed sleepless and counts the things he is lacking. His training is incomplete and should require three to four more years. His age is inadequate and believed to be the age of rash decisions that a good mentor should keep him from. Every adult he asked tells him that his time has not come yet and there will be plenty of disasters to land on his shoulders when he is older. He repeats these wise, rational arguments and they come out empty.
The following evening sees the gates open, and three riders enter the chapterhouse grounds. One of them is Lady Aribeth de Tylmarande, one of Lord Nasher Alagondar's most trusted advisors. The riders dismount and disappear in the office of the castellan. Casavir sees the horses when he returns from evening practice in the twilight, and a younger novice tells him what everybody is discussing: the paladins who teach at the chapterhouse are summoned to help in the city, all the four of them. Casavir spends an hour wandering around the refectory and making that very kind of rash decision he was warned against. He stares at the dying embers of the sunset in the west and knows that his disobedience is going to cost him something, but he will not, cannot stay behind in the safety of this place.
The massive wooden door is not locked, is not even fully closed. As he approaches, he can hear muffled voices over his own heartbeat. A ray of light from the inside cuts the gloom of the anteroom. He pulls the door; all conversation in the office dies out.
"What do you need here at this hour, novice?" the legendary paladin demands in a commanding voice, and Casavir glances at his mentor before answering. Catherine Harkenhart closes her eyes and rubs her temple tiredly. This is not quite a blessing, but this is not an outright refusal, so he lets the confident words drop off his tongue, and by their heaviness he knows this is the right decision that changes something in the fabric of the universe.
"I want to make my vows and serve out there, in the city," he hears himself say and waits.
Aribeth de Tylmarande measures him with a look and shrugs. This is all the approval they need to set up the ceremony on the closest appropriate day.
He pronounces his vows in the frozen sunlit chapel with three monks and his mentor bearing witness to the moment. He pledges his life and service to Tyr with as little pomp as possible, for these are dark times and all decorum has been shed off the rites as an unnecessary mantle. If it were not for the plague the ceremony would be taking place in Castle Never, there would be a crowd, and Lord Nasher Alagondar, a servant of Tyr himself, would give him his blessings. Casavir appreciates the quiet ceremony so much more than the clamour of publicity: he remembers that his pride would have liked it, and he is glad that tradition is not going to feed his vanity. His chosen god accepts him in the humble ritual none the worse, and this is enough. He can feel an unfamiliar energy course through his flesh, it is peaceful and soothing, but it also rings and calls for action at times. There is also joy he does not have anyone to share with: he turned out a true follower, not an impostor, and Tyr accepted his promise as soon as it was offered.
The novices, his former fellow students, surround him before his departure and tell him they are going to pray for him. Casavir is touched by their sincere concern and thinks about them on his way to the city walls.
Not even twenty of them are going to survive the year of the Wailing Death.
