Casavir's memory plays a strange trick on him: he will remember the war as a stream of overlapping images rather than a strict timeline. He will try to structure it later for so many times that the images will fall into a semblance of a story for him to tell himself. Whenever he is asked about the war in public, he will see it as a responsibility to convey the truth, so he will pick an image from this stream and delve into its detail. When asked in private, he will give a shrug, and grunt a non-committal noise, and say the true and trite things everybody expects. It was hard, cold, long, unpleasant. Many deaths. It is good it is over.
Their initial company includes seventy soldiers divided into seven squads of ten. Casavir was one of the last to be enlisted, so he is in Squad 6; they were supposed to take four weeks of training. Their lieutenant, an unpleasant bearded man in his mid-fifties, informs them after the roll call that their training term has been reduced to two weeks. Casavir looks at the faces of the recruits around him – farmhands, shipboys, all sort of float wood off Neverwinter streets, malnourished and mostly not much older than he is – and he silently questions this decision. By the end of the day, he realizes that there are maybe ten people in the company that have ever been taught swordsmanship. By the end of the two weeks the recruits know several basic moves and positions, can put on and take off their breastplates, tassets, vambraces and helmets, can wield their longswords more or less directedly and can block very obvious attacks if warned about them. This is not enough; their sergeant knows it, their lieutenant knows it, the whole army knows it.
It is no wonder that twenty-three of the seventy soldiers die in the very first battle before Casavir even had the chance to memorize their names. Their helmets are made of a single piece of steel, so his vision is limited by a T-shaped opening in the front of it, and as a result he remembers his first battle as a series of commands bellowed by their sergeant. Run. Halt. Shields. Run. Engage. Fall back, fall back, you bastards. Arrows spill from the drab sky, people scream and fall, Casavir steps on something warm and soft, and there is no time to think what it is. He is not afraid, but only because he is so disengaged from everything he is. He came off his last hospital shift less than a month ago, and the very idea of a temple and a city seems vague and unreal to him now.
After the battle he struggles to embrace the idea that he is Casavir, a paladin of Tyr, seventeen years old. An elderly priest – a short dark-skinned woman with a piece of parchment in her hands – asks his name and whether he is injured. He shakes his head and attempts to smile at her, but his lips somehow feel wrong on his face. All the blood on him is someone else's. They were not sent into hand to hand combat this time; they attacked a small hill, lost too many people, and retreated. His sword is pristinely clean.
He remembers that for some time after that they camp in the sad winter forest. Luskan forces do not advance, but stay their ground waiting for something, and their generals use that uneasy break to move more soldiers to this forest edge, to train them, to make more armour. They fall trees and fortify the camp, chop wood and cluster around campfires, take turns to sleep in old musty tents, stay on duty and guard the perimeter, send out patrols and learn the discipline and the subordination of this large military machine.
Casavir discovers that he does not like the company of so many men. They smoke and drink and swear and gamble while he prays and meditates and thinks. They often talk in the way that makes him burn with anger and shame. He does not take part in what they call fun, and he is not made fun of only because he is large, strong and actually good with his sword, so he also takes several softer boys under his yet unsteady wing and interrupts many confrontations before they get ugly. He learns to redirect conversations into safer topics – food and weather, mostly. It turns out that every soldier in the world will rise to the bait of complaining. It also helps to be a constant: calm, dependable, always ready to help, never taking offense, never bearing grudges, never arrogant, never riled up. There are so many sorts of people here pushed together by these unfortunate circumstances: tough lads, cocky brawlers, cowards and bullies, womanizers and mother's boys, and in the quiet of his mind Casavir contemplates the idea that he should endure them all as he endures rain or snow or heat or cold. They are here, a given in this trial, and he has no other companions but this diverse crowd to rely on.
Before long, Luscan receives reinforcements and starts the slow but steady advance into the south, and the quiet forest edge sees much more action than they hoped for. They bite back a strip of land to lose twice as much the next day, and every hill, every rivulet, every path is given up after a fierce fight. Years later Casavir will be listening to a beautiful speech in a magnificent manor: some benevolent lord will be speaking of people who died for Neverwinter, and Casavir will think of young Dany, a smith's son from a tiny village in the Dessarin Valley, who died for a tiny wooded dell that they surrendered to the enemy a week later; of the loud and honestly obnoxious Tarn whose head was split into two by an axe for a small nameless hillock; of the sunny beggar boy Mark who volunteered for regular meals rather than out of a noble sentiment and was gutted for a snowbound twenty-acre field in the middle of nowhere.
The first time he takes a life he wants to die himself. For weeks, he shudders when he looks at his sword. In that very first moment of extinguishing a mortal he discovers that he is not that much of a believer, that despite all the evidence like spirits and ghosts and hells he doubts the very core of his religion, the all-empowering creed that this life is not everything that exists, that the soul travels beyond this short trip in the flesh. He discovers that the tiniest chance that the person he killed will not be a soul in the gods' realm makes him so uneasy that he is on the point of laying the sword down for good. He discovers as well that at the roots of his heart lies the firm truth that death cannot be justice, but a good half of what he has been taught rotates about metal that enforces justice. Fear that enforces justice. Violence that enforces justice.
In the eyes of the other soldiers, Casavir remains his usual reliable self, a steady rock in the eye of a storm, restrained and solemn, a wordless young man always ready to pick the heaviest burden without complaint. Yet his eyes bore into his own mind day and night, for many days and nights. He extracts another truth from his own depths: in his heart he does not believe even in the comforting formula 'May Tyr protect you'. Inwardly, he knows Tyr will protect no one unless it is some truly exceptional case. The gods have abandoned the land, and this romantic boy pledged himself to the symbol of justice while he mourns the kind of justice he may bring.
Casavir wonders if it is too late to pray to Ilmater, the symbol of mercy, and after many days spent on muddy roads, or in swamplike trenches, or in damp spring forest, he reaches a peace treaty with himself: Tyr will protect no one himself, but Casavir can be his tool. His lack of religious fervor can lie deep down, but the right and the wrong do differ, and he will try his best to distinguish between them. He will be humble, for there are things his mind struggles to comprehend, and maybe one day he will.
He takes another life, and another one; a few months later he counts these lives by dozens. He does not know their names, so he tries to remember their faces, but it is a vain effort: half of the attacks, he does not even see them under their helmets. He stops counting and prays for their souls and for forgiveness. He has no illusion he is fighting for the righteous side: the people in the enemy's army are no worse or better than the people in their own army, they are doubts and flesh the same way he is. A war has no justice or justification, it is unjust on either side of the barricades. Honor is a peculiar concept which only works if you shut your eyes and feel guilty all the time.
The year runs in loops of short intense skirmishes and periods of terrible weather that interrupt them. Every other skirmish starts with a shower of arrows; their sergeant has bad luck to receive one in his throat and die in the ditch where the squad carries him in their hasty retreat. When the company regroups and freshly enlisted recruits join them a day later, Lieutenant Martin Stiller appoints Casavir as sergeant. He registers the silent question in the young paladin's eyes and grumbles impatiently that judging by their deceased sergeant's notes Casavir is the only person in their squad who is literate.
Now he is the one who should bark commands and keep the mood up and enforce the discipline, and his squad is not known to be a well-behaved one. He builds his strategy on the implication that all these brash men do not dare to pronounce: they want to live. Casavir builds his authority on this underwater desire. They should train more to stay alive; they should keep their unity to stay alive; they should have discipline to stay alive.
During the first dozen attacks he experiences an acute shame that he is pretending to have any idea of which commands lead to victory and which ones result in heavy losses. This feeling slowly dissolves into a memory as he grows more experienced. He is lucky that they are not in the meat grinder of the front but defend a periphery, and during the first month since his promotion nobody dies in his squad. Other squads in the company are not that lucky, and soon there is a rumour that he is favoured by the gods. It is slightly disconcerting, but after a profound reflection Casavir decides that he cannot be sure he is not favoured by the gods indeed, and a little faith cannot hurt the generally faithless army.
When another winter puts a natural stopper on the war action for a while and early snowstorms bind the two armies in their positions, Casavir is relieved. They needed this respite from death trailing their footprints. He sits by the campfire and thinks of those glorious books he had been reading in that other life, of chronicles and annals and exaggerated historical accounts of poets, and he struggles to match what he read then with what he has seen now.
It is painful for him to admit that he is soft. He may look stoic, but in the truth of his nights he knows that he is soft and weak. A dead bird strikes him. A broken tool gives him pause. A wounded animal, or a fish beating its tail against the cook's table, or the haunted eyes of a beggar strike him deep. He has trained his face not to reflect these feelings, he has managed to hold his bile until he is alone when he first helped at the hospital, but he sees himself for what he is: a person who is not able to stay calm inside as well as outside. He would like to be a noble hero from his books, but he is a fraud and an impostor who shakes inwardly at the sight of life flowing out of someone's body with their blood. His courage is pretense, and he deems he must learn to live with this weakness so that it does not affect his duty.
One of these December nights Casavir returns from patrol and finds that his fellow soldiers have got ale and company. A nurse he does not know is sharing a meal with them, her cheeks are flushed from the ale and the warmth, and Thomas, the merry farmer boy who Casavir deemed to be harmless, is laughing and filling her mug again. It is Casavir's turn to sleep, but he weighs the circumstances and resolves to stay. The nurse is laughing louder and for no reason, the boys exchange excited looks, and Casavir tenses by the minute. As soon as she attempts to stand up and rocks forward, he jumps to his feet.
"I will walk you back to your tent." He offers just as Thomas rises as well and blocks their way. Casavir adds in a cold threatening voice. "Let us pass, soldier."
If it were not for the poison in his veins, the soldier would heed this warning, but they have no such luck. Casavir misses the first solid punch in his jaw but manages to block the worse-aimed second one. A sober man will always have advantage, so the scuffle is short, and thankfully the others stay away from it. Casavir cracks his neck ominously and leads the nurse into the night. She is delighted for some reason. Well, at least she is not scared and determined to leave the army for good and let these gross dunderheads die on their own.
Lieutenant Stiller eyes his bruise wearily when Casavir submits his report the next day, and the ever-present crease between his bushy eyebrows is deeper than usual.
"I've heard of your unnecessary conflict. I do try to keep women from my company for a reason, because you can't expect your soldiers to be monks, boy," He clears his throat and Casavir snatches the opportunity to interrupt.
"Sir, with all respect, you need to make up your mind if I am a boy or a sergeant."
They stare at each other for a moment. Casavir waits calmly, while the lieutenant's expression flickers between annoyance and amusement. He huffs at last and says nothing more, dismissing Casavir with a vague gesture.
When the new bunch of recruits arrive and there are three female soldiers in it – two mercenaries and a lady of uncertain age who happens to have served twenty years as a prison guard, all the three are assigned to his squad. Casavir is not sure if the lieutenant sees it as a punishment or a test and decides to take it as education.
To his relief, these three do not need the green sergeant's protection; to his headache, these three consider a brawl to be the most effective answer to any equivocal remark. Casavir is also surprised to discover that a lot of his remarks are in fact equivocal. Helena, the older mercenary, seems to have spent her life taunting people around her to bite her sword, and Casavir often fears he is going to have less soldiers when he wakes up. At least he now has more experienced fighters to rely on, and after a month of grinding against the edges of one another, the squad leaves their petty conflicts behind.
Teamwork is greatly improved by the fact that the season of snowstorms is over, and they are thrown into the fray again. The fighting is no longer aimed at standing their ground – they are battling in order to retreat slower and give Neverwinter a few more weeks to get ready for the siege. The reason for that has the paladin's blood running cold: Maugrim, the commander of the Luskan, has lived up to his reputation and enlisted help of forces beyond nature. They are now fighting living soldiers during the day and their once killed enemies at night. The dead they left in the north rise and march south.
If Casavir is very honest with himself, he prefers the undead to the living. Exterminating them gives him no sleepless nights. He loses a soldier to the zombies, and three more are gravely wounded over the month and taken back to the city with the wagons. Casavir sends a brief letter to the temple with one of them – alive, in the western part of the front, a sergeant now. He adds a note to Catherine Harkenhart with a small request and attaches the list of the deceased and wounded soldiers he has been keeping out of habit. He has more trust in the orderly temple archives than in the chaotic military records.
Hushed words weave into a steady confidence that Lady Aribeth de Tylmarande has lost her faith and now serves under Maugrim's command. Casavir listens to the conversations sadly and thinks of the innocent priest who was about to wed her. Injustice begets injustice. Some green soldier who learnt to hold his sword up a week ago will be killed because last summer the crowd demanded blood. He adds her name to his daily prayers. Mighty Tyr, let her die in battle or repent and lay down her weapon. Let this stop. Make this stop.
He often dreams of blood soaked up by the fields, of scarlet wheat sucking the blood out of the soil, of children who bite into loaves of rust-coloured bread and smear their mouths in the blood. He wakes up exhausted and panting, a drowned man resurrected from his nightmares. A taste of grave dust lingers in his mouth. At these moments he feels a fierce love for the warm and breathing people in his tent. This war is devouring the land, the longer it lasts the more it cripples them all.
In the underskirts of Neverwinter they set up a hasty camp and start building fortifications. Other regiments march to join them from the east, and soon all the theatre will spread in the wooded plain and freeze in the wait of the final confrontation. He cannot see the city walls from here, but he can feel them behind his back, they press down on his conscience. Lieutenant Stiller now sends out whole squads to patrol, because the undead have no concept of appropriate time and meander in their general direction ahead of Maugrim's army.
Casavir's squad is preparing to set out for a patrol when what is left of the previous group rushes into the camp and hell breaks loose a split minute later.
The undead rush into the camp as if they are driven. They slash at the living with unusual purpose, but the fires were already burning bright, and the first wave is pushed back without much loss. The second wave is larger, but everybody is alert now, and it is fended off as well. They are waiting for the third wave, but it does not come; some sergeant swears impatiently when Casavir freezes and registers that something is very wrong. There is no breath of air, no blade of grass moves, and every night bird has fallen silent. He peers into the dark intently and a thought flashes across his mind that he is seeing green ghosts of sparks from their torches. He looks around, and nobody seems to notice them, but some deadly weight presses down on his shoulders, and a spell of panic grips his heart. He knows these sparks, he had read about them ages ago, before the war and the plague and the chapterhouse.
"Fall back! Fall back! This is death magic!" He did not even know his voice can roll and rumble like that, and his squad steps back immediately, trained to trust and then question. His command is chorused by other voices, but the green sparks are swirling too close. Several soldiers are engulfed by them. As they fall to their knees and start choking, Casavir makes a sign against evil and utters a quick prayer. He is supposed to be immune. Thy hand will strike true, for I name you the paladin of Tyr, a distant voice echoes in his soul, and though a sticky fear makes his knees weak he grips his sword harder, raises his shield and takes a determined step forward. He can sense eyes drilling a hole in his back, but he concentrates on moving forward and forgets where he is.
The green sparks have a pattern and a source, they flare out from a point beyond his vision, but he can trace them. Death magic reeks of everything he hates. Blood, rust, pus, mud, mold, rotting leaves and decaying flesh. The hostile sensation intensifies as he moves. It leads him to its source; it is a mortal man. A necromancer in a deep black robe covered in embroidered symbols, some two dozen undead behind him.
The necromancer raises his simple wooden staff and green sparks swarm so thickly that the air grows solid. The tension coils and Casavir can feel his limbs grow heavy. He is moving through the spell slowly as green sparks try to eat through his resolve. I am not yours, he thinks suddenly, and imagines that his faith is a cloak hanging off his shoulders. Another step, and one more. The necromancer rocks back slightly and opts for a safer choice of running before it is too late. As soon as his focus wavers, the spell loses its grip and traction, and Casavir advances into action. He is at the necromancer's heels before the man turned back, and his sword cuts deep in between the ribs under the black attire.
The spell bursts and dies out, and Casavir looks back to assess the distance. He has no chance against two dozen skeletons, but he can see the camp behind him – the distance he covered was hardly seventy yards, it only felt longer. He raises his fist in a signal for help, and jerks back from under the sable of a skeleton. He parries another blow, sinks to evade the next one and suddenly his fellows are around him, and his death is again delayed for an undetermined term.
He had never been at the centre of so much attention before. Everyone, literally everyone tries to have a word with him, pat his shoulder, praise him, celebrate his luck that they call courage. Casavir is at a loss why they do not think he is a freak and do not shy away from him. He has seen before how people distrust the divine and the arcane equally. Over the following days he arrives at the conclusion that it is because they rescued him from the skeletons and therefore had a part to take in their joined success. The soldiers brag to the other companies that they have a paladin of Tyr with them. Lieutenant Stiller smiles at him. Two priests of Tyr from the medical train show up at their campfire to get acquainted with him, and the mood in their camp is so light it makes Casavir ache. He would prefer them all to be focused and watching every shadow, for they all were a hair's width away from death and there may be more necromancers out there, but he listens to the conversations and relents. They did need a little hope beyond all these defeats and disasters.
They do not have a single day to celebrate though. Dark tents of their enemy can be seen in the distance. The very next evening there are more undead roaming through the plain, and Lieutenant Stiller with two other soldiers come under attack while they return from the Commander's post. He is carried back to the camp, and one look at his torn side and shoulder tells Casavir the lieutenant is a dead man. They try to stop the wound as he keeps gasping news and curses at them; by the time a healer arrives the old man has already bled to death. The sergeants exchange a grim look and reach an understanding. They walk away to their squads and set tasks to keep them busy. Idleness is key to low spirits, and the message the late lieutenant was carrying demands all their attention.
The great battle is approaching.
On the drizzly morning before it Casavir is summoned to the Commander. A messenger arrived with a second horse in tow, and Casavir strokes the noble animal's neck. He has had enough time to forget the earthy smell of horse sweat, and it grounds him in the way he could not expect. They trot across the messed field to the centre of the camp. There is chaos of thousands of people around them and lines of Graycloaks can be seen marching down the road from the city. They approach the Commander's tent. Inside, there is an exotic-looking man in leathers, a knight with regal bearing who must be Lord Nasher Alagondar and that young mage with green eyes Casavir remembers from the Beggar's Nest. The young mage looks… tired, for the lack of a better word. Battered, worn out, washed out, as if a heavy burden is bending his shoulders with its weight. Casavir has a fleeting desire to talk to him, but the mage turns away and the knight starts speaking.
"Casavir, right. Here are your papers, your company will be part of the vanguard, so report to Callum immediately." He talks as he looks through his notes in a checked, heavy voice. "Questions?"
Casavir takes a look at the papers and decides against asking why he is appointed a lieutenant when he has next to no experience in commanding anyone other than himself. He shakes his head, and the Commander dismisses him with a nod.
Callum turns out to be General Callum, an extremely broad-shouldered dwarf in what must be three stones of a full metal plate. The general has little patience, but Casavir still asks him a good dozen quick questions about tomorrow's battle, and the dwarf orders Casavir to join him on his round of the troops for an hour so that the freshly baked officer meets the other lieutenants ('and sees what they do' is implied). Casavir has eyes and ears. He sees that the lieutenants in the vanguard host are mature and long-serving. He hears that they talk to their sergeants like nobility talks to common folk. He knows he has neither the experience nor the demeanor for it. He knows Callum steals glances at him. His insides tighten into a heavy knot. He is going to fail them all. Callum obviously sees him go pale at the thought and slaps him on the shoulder.
"Easy, lad. Your task is to tell your sergeants what to do before the action, keep track of the horns and fight. It is not much strategy tomorrow, and you will have time to master the art of management and provision later. Tomorrow is the good old getting them before they get you."
"Why?" Casavir utters the word before he knows it, and Callum waits for him to continue. "I am not… I do not… I am a soldier, not an officer. The necromancer was a gut choice, nothing more."
"The necromancer? Huh. Stiller had you listed as his successor for a good month, if not more. The old barrel could have given you a hint." Callum shrugs and sends Casavir on his way. There is a lot to be done before the next morning.
Casavir remembers that day in a blur: announcements, news, preparations, a few hours of shaky sleep. He most certainly appointed someone a sergeant for his squad, but he does not remember the name. They definitely sealed the camp in the morning and marched into order, but these hours seem to be fogged. He remembers conducting the roll call and assigning front, rear and sideline positions to the squads – with the full clarity that the vanguard will be hit by the enemy's cavalry, and they must hold the lines or everyone in the company dies. He has a vague image of his squad chanting something and the company picking up the chant while they were waiting for the sun to rise.
Everything else is mercifully wiped off his memory. He had been wrong thinking that everyone in the company dies; next to everyone in the vanguard dies that day. There is smoke, horses neigh and die, people scream and die, arrows pin people to the ground, a mercenary army cuts through their lines and melts under their swords, taking so many down with them. One regiment around him falls and another arrives from behind his back, and Casavir does not see any familiar faces around anymore – only death and blood and enemies running at him. Everyone dies and he must be either blessed or cursed, but he is standing to meet the new wave over and over again.
His body hurts under the weight of armour – he is tired and bruised all over. He hurls his sword up and throws all the force he can muster into one cleaving blow after another. The battle lasts and lasts and gradually the field clears. There are less voices around and more death under his feet. The ground soaked up enough rain yesterday, and it is not thirsty for blood now – it flows over and pools in the mud. Casavir has lost his helmet, and his shield was so threadbare from all the metal it engaged that he threw it away and uses his left vambrace for an illusion of protection. It has deep dents. He did not move forward for what feels like hours – and they keep coming at him.
He hears a warning call on his right, evades one blade nearly, and then misses his step, and hears a painful crack, and suddenly the ground jumps at him and then away, and he is on his back, the stormy sky spreading wide above. It is heavy with rain, so grey and close that Casavir tries to touch it, but his hand misses it, shakes in the air, leans strangely beyond his will. I fell, the thought flashes across his mind and he drops his hand helplessly. Something flows down his right temple, and he has seen enough carnage to know it must be blood.
The sky blurs and comes into focus again, vomit rises in his throat, and panic shots through him a split second before everything goes dark.
