His dreams are disturbing. He climbs countless crumbling stairs and they disintegrate under his feet, so he must pull himself out of the fall into a putrid-smelling abyss deep below. He is lost in a cavernous labyrinth, and he keeps hitting the same dead end for a thousand times. He looks down at his feet and sees that grass grows from them and through them, and the grass roots spread and bury him until his sight is blocked by the turf that grows over his face. I'm having a fever, he makes a guess when the three dreams are repeated in another succession, I need to wake up.
When the nightmares finally spit him out, he stares at the dimply lit figures of the Triad on the dome above his bed. A vague recognition glimmers through his stupour. It is the main hall of the city temple. His surroundings take flesh slowly – he absorbs the muffled sounds of the hospital, the sharp smells of willow bark and soaked lint. His gaze travels from the soft glow of tall candles in their glass cases to the darkened stained glass windows in the portal on his left. It seems to be late evening. He focuses on the sensations in his body: his head hurts, his ribs ache when he inhales, his limbs feel rusty and heavy. He is naked and covered with a thin white sheet. This fact honestly gives him the greatest discomfort as a passing nurse notices he is awake and a minute later the loud and elated Catherine Harkenhart plops down on his bed unceremoniously and snaps her fingers a few inches from his face.
"Awake at last! Glad to see you, Casavir of Tyr. The way you looked three days ago I thought I will never have the chance to tell you what I think of your stunt with the necromancer." Casavir stares into her cherry-coloured eyes and realizes he is very happy she is alive, too. "You took a blow to your head and a spear in your back, and I am justified to say that your stubbornness probably takes its root in that extremely thick skull of yours. Now that you must be the youngest lieutenant in all modern history and I am still a stupid old mentor, tell me, child: was it worth it to leave your education and service for the army? What did you learn there?"
Casavir starts to speak and chokes on his words. He tries to tell her that he has learnt how people bleed to death in the sludge of a battlefield for hours because they were cut off their troops. He has learned that he is a coward and he cries when a horse with a broken leg struggles to get up and they can hear more and more bones crack. He has learnt to live in the routine when every week there are new people on your team, and they inherit the seats and the tents of the dead men. He has learnt to see every meadow as a burial ground. He has learnt to be the evil and bring death upon people who did not deserve it. He has learnt to strike a killing blow by accident and to strike a killing blow as a mercy and to strike a killing blow to kill. He takes a gasping breath, tries to wipe his sweat off and can feel his fingers shake. Catherine watches him silently and strokes his head.
"Easy. I know, I know. Learnt a lot, none of it good. It's over." Her voice takes a tranquil ring as if she is telling him a fairy tale. "We are safe. Luskan is defeated. Lord Nasher had been keeping the more experienced regiments in reserve. When the central line of defence was breached and their infantry approached the walls, we tore into their flanks while the Many-Starred Cloaks showered spells on them from the ramparts. The Hero of Neverwinter used the initial distraction to get to their commanders. He killed Maugrim and convinced Aribeth to surrender. With the infantry erased and the generals absent, their lower officer ranks decided to make peace. It is over."
Casavir digests the story slowly. There are too many things he does not like at all. He averts his gaze to conceal his treasonous thoughts, and Catherine follows his eyes to the blackened windows. She huffs.
"The Luskan dogs did manage to set several buildings in the docks on fire. It caught well and spread fast. I am afraid half the city has been burned, but all the stone buildings are standing. The temple dormitories are gone. When you recover, you can stay here at the temple. Tyr knows we have a lot to do, but it is over, Casavir. It is finally over."
Another spring spreads its wings wide, and Casavir pauses now and then and takes a deep breath of the fresh wind with a mixed feeling of relief and shame. Like ants, people rearrange their district into a more habitable one by the day. There is a steady smell of wood and sawdust in the air, construction sites are at every corner, and though one can see gaping spaces and charred ruins everywhere, the city heals. There is work for all hands. There is life in the markets. The plague is water under the bridge, the war is a bridge that has been washed away: it causes a lot of inconvenience, but reconstruction is on the way, and there is hope.
Yet Casavir imagines that he sees some invisible lines in the air that tie innocent daily things to their macabre backgrounds. He walks by a skeleton of a new house and sees four women pulling support beams up and sawing planks into two, and he thinks of their fathers, husbands and sons who stayed nameless in mass graves in the north. He sees a junkman selling old frames and thinks of the portraits ripped out of them because the plague and the war left no one in some poor family.
He buys several yellow tulips at the corner and has no idea why he suddenly craved them so terribly. Their sunshine petals with specks of pearly white are so fragile. They are going to last for a couple of days at best. Casavir carries them carefully into the temple and has no heart to leave them in the gloomy candle-lit nave, so he puts them in a jug in his room and watches them welcome the morning sun when he wakes up. He tries not to think what they might symbolize when they fade and the water acquires that slightly putrid smell of rotten stems.
He has been written off as missing in action, so he shows up at the temporary command point and submits his report and records. He has spent a good week trying to list everyone he could remember and pay at least a paragraph to their fate, and then a week more to copy it for the archives. At the command point they give him a parchment with names and he recognizes the last roll call he sent with a messenger that morning. The seventy-two names and his own signature stare at him from the wrinkled page. He is told to cross out the names of those he has seen die with his own eyes and tick off the names of those whom he knows to be in the hospital. His hand trembles as if he is killing them. He receives his final allowance, shakes his head when he is asked if he has any weapons or armour from the armoury, nods at the question if his armour was paid for. The clerk's eyes travel to the holy symbol on his neck and soften. They exchange hollow blessings and Casavir leaves. He rakes his hands through his hair and tries to shake off the stupour that strangles him.
He starts to train with Catherine and the others again. He takes up his studies diligently, reads and learns what is required. He is slightly older than the other apprentices from the chapterhouse, and he is disconcerted when the priests and the monks fall back into the habit of treating him like a boy. He feels nothing like a boy. If anything, he feels old and out of place in this beautiful temple school where most concerns are examinations and rites of passage.
Catherine tells him that he should embrace the years that the plague had robbed him of. She also insists that he needs to complete a full apprenticeship step by step without haste, and he agrees with her, but again for vastly different reasons. She believes that as a young, promising, and talented paladin he needs to be better equipped with knowledge. He is sure that he does not deserve to be a beacon of virtue to others because he has failed so many people and they all rest in cold graves now.
He has run through that last battle in his mind for hundreds of times, and he is convinced that there was nothing he could do save deserting and leading his company away from the battle – they were positioned that way to bear the brunt of the attack, the superior forces of the enemy swallowed the bait and mowed through them and his survival was a mere coincidence. He should have died in that field like every single one of those seventy-two people he oversaw. That is why Catherine's kind words fall dead on his ears. Casavir needs to study more not because he does not know enough history or because he applies his feeble divine magic intuitively and with little use, but because he needs to figure out an impossible thing: how to lead an army and not treat soldiers like numbers on paper.
He trains in the mornings, studies before noon, works on the reconstruction of the monastery in the afternoon and walks back to the temple after sunset. For some reason he needs little sleep now, so at night he reads and reads at length and realizes he needs to get back to the texts he had mastered before. The old chronicles shifted their meanings; the familiar stories cracked like mountains in an earthquake and laid bare everything that they omitted. Casavir walks through their plots like an archaeologist in a necropolis: his attention stumbles upon the nameless losses, the forgotten people, the lives extinguished without a trace. He looks at his favourite story and sees that the hero he was so enchanted with in his adolescence had murdered hundreds and was celebrated for it. He sees the gaping space where individual fates were woven into a tapestry and were neglected to be mentioned collectively.
It hurts him to see that the recent war is already a story of one plot against the dim background, and the plot is painted all wrong. Lady Aribeth is in prison, in the very same cell where Fenthick Moss was contained, and nobody quite knows what to do with her – she has repented, and the Hero of Neverwinter vouches for her and insists on her exile, but the trial extends for over a year. After his work and errands Casavir goes to taverns to stare into an untouched tankard and learn what his city is. People speak of her betrayal as if they have always hated the fierce half-elf. They take tiny pieces of the past and reassemble them into a story of a haughty elven woman (they use a different word, of course) who was in league with her traitor lover (they use a different word here as well) to destroy the city and pretended to repent in order to live. Bards sing songs of her promiscuity and cruelty and drag her name through all the mud of traditional couplets. When somebody leaks parts of her diary from the court materials, they take root in this mud and bloom into the public opinion that she deserves a shameful death. Neither words nor fists can convince anyone, and as soon as they see he is a paladin his argument is lost. In their eyes, he becomes an accomplice and object of hatred by proxy.
The army dissolves in the peaceful towns and villages gradually, but there are too many people who know how to use a weapon now, and not all of them are law-abiding servants of Tyr. It hurts Casavir to see gang members in the gallows and notice that they were soldiers recently. It is dangerous to walk alone after dark now; he is attacked every single week and the fact that he is a tall and broad-shouldered man with a sword does not help at all.
Casavir likes his night walks. The city quiets down and smells different, the dirt and gloom of the streets looks almost magical. If he crosses the way of some rascals, he does not mind: better him than any other citizen. If he chooses shadier and more secluded routes to the temple, he fails to acknowledge it even to himself. There is a night when he is jumped by three bandits, and yet he is the only person to leave that alley that night. The priests at the temple gape at his bandaged shoulder the next day but say nothing.
Catherine is awarded a medal for the Battle of Neverwinter. She brings it to the temple and does not know where to put it. They are paladins, they do not own things like houses, chests, and shelves. Sending it to the smithy seems wrong, a sign that she is somehow ashamed of it, she tells him after their joint evening prayers and sighs. Casavir reads her body language and realizes she is indeed ashamed of it. It puzzles him for a while until he finally gets it from the way she tries to downplay its importance in his presence: Catherine believes he deserved a medal as well, and he does not know how he can start this conversation and tell her she is wrong about him. She returned from the battle with her small crew unscathed, her leadership protected them. He lost all his company, so a medal is the last thing he deserves.
They never have this conversation.
Aribeth's trial – she is stripped of her title before it, so it is the ordinary court and not Lord Nasher Alagondar judging her – draws closer, and Casavir notices that the songs and drunken stories change their course. First, they tell of her evil charms and that the innocent young Hero of Neverwinter has been tempted by her and stayed true, and then 'what ifs' appear and lead the rumours into saucy, seedy waters of speculations. Casavir hoped that by the final round of the trial the green-eyed mage's influence and reputation would save her life and the vicious circle of evil would be broken, but his reputation weighs less and less as gossip bites off chunks of it and paints the hero weak, his courage into madness, his mercy into trivial lust.
By the time Aribeth is hanged and the Hero of Neverwinter exiled, Casavir is in such black despair that he does not expect anything good to come out of his life or work. The houses they build will be dwelt by terrible men who will beat their wives and children, the streets they clean will be red with blood and filthy with crime before long, every little good thing will wane and vanish, and every evil ever done will spread and spawn. He tells himself this feeling must be inside him and it shall pass, but he sees no end of it.
He throws himself into training with abandon so that he has no time to stay alone with his murky thoughts. Even Catherine notices something is wrong with him, but her sunshine personality is quick to be satisfied with dozed truths like 'I am tired' and 'the wound hurts a little'. Catherine pauses to think, her creative mind takes another somersault, and she advises him to fall in love. He is embarrassed, so she says with an impatient shrug that their vows never included celibacy. As long as his trysts are consensual, he will not fall from Tyr's grace. Casavir is speechless and Catherine rolls her eyes patronizingly and reminds him he can also marry if he wishes to. Of course, a favoured union would be with a person of faith, but it has never been an iron-cast condition.
Casavir flees from her and takes some time to consider her advice. She believes he is concerned with violating norms or falling from the gods' grace, but she is wrong again. It is not her fault, Casavir judges – he is determined to conceal whatever is brewing in his heart, and no seer can look at him and extract all his truths from their shell. Catherine means well, and he is obliged to keep counsel with himself and accept or discard her advice for a reason.
He knows he can follow it. Many women give him long looks and hopeful smiles, and the shortage of men after… the war pushes many kind hearts into a desperate search of a partner. He is not… averse to the concept, he has blood; it does run fast at times. He is averse to the idea of using a woman as a medicine. If he has this emptiness in his soul and heart, of course it may be beneficial for him to fill it with someone's care and tender words and small signs of affection he sometimes imagines a taste of. But it will not be fair to that person. It will not be fair to receive without an adamant sureness he can give as well. If he can be whole again, he must recover on his own. If he fails, he must not drag another soul down with him. He is lost, but he is alive.
All people around are human, they forget and believe they have always been themselves, and he seems to be the only one who carries every version of his past self and lives three people's lives at once – a borrowed child, a novice full of silly illusions and a soldier who never returned from the war. He just needs to cultivate another Casavir around these three – a loyal, steady, reliable, boring, straightforward man. The kind of man who makes a place safe by his presence. The kind of man who makes decisions without questioning everything he knows. The kind of man who does what he can and is satisfied with small victories.
When he turns twenty-two and sets off for his first temple quest, this kind of man is constructed. He travels from town to town and lets people's needs guide his course – a letter to be delivered, a pack of wolves to be hunted down, a group of bandits to be confronted on the high road, a cemetery to be cleansed of the restless dead, a missing boy to be found, an old nun to be escorted, a donation to be guarded on the way. He roams the land, walks the paths, sails down rivers, crosses mountain ranges. He sleeps in the open, in a tent, in the back of a wagon, in a rundown tavern, on the floor of a small forest chapel, in the house of a fellow priest.
Here and there he meets people whose destination is Neverwinter, and when he has a chance, he sends letters to his mentor – alive, in this place, saw these things, learnt this lesson. He does not only fight but also prevents bloodsheds. He speaks just words and believes them. He encounters hundreds of people and kindles back the warm appreciation of their daily lives. If they ask him whether he has fought in the war, he answers honestly.
For many years he will dread these conversations most of all. A crone, or a teenager, or a grey-haired man will approach him and ask if he knew their child, or friend, or father. Most of the time he will have no knowledge of that person, but sometimes they will say a name he knows, and then they will ask something worse. Something straight which he must answer straight. If he is lucky, they will ask a question along the lines of "Did he die a hero?", and he will be able to confirm that. All people who died there were heroes, if not in the way of courage than in the way of martyrdom.
However, at times they will ask him "Was his death quick?" or "Did he die with dignity?", and he will have to say no, because there were very few quick deaths and there was no dignity at all in this long war of lost battles. All the time he will notice this fleeting thought in the eyes of the strangers, this accusing look that usually will turn into a slightly ashamed echo in his own mind – why did you survive? How are they dead and you are not?
The tide of the great sea of human troubles carries him for a winter, a spring, a summer, an autumn and a winter again. His turmoil grows placid and his conviction strong. His faith takes shape and lends him an air of confidence. He grows appreciative of the nature's beauty and the small trails of unseen human history fascinate him once again. In this second spring of his trip, he even feels some bud burst in his chest and starts humming a rhythm which later takes words and accompanies him as a poem on his way.
When his peace is forged and a passing errand sends him to Neverwinter, he decides it is time to renew his vows and tell his mentor he has found his own path. He travels north and enters the city with a serene heart. With a sad tenderness he passes by a monastery on the hill, walks up the paved streets, drinks spring water from a fountain in a small square. His attention is caught by a large apple tree in full blossom, and he contemplates it as a thing of ultimate beauty until ghosts of his memory fill the square and he knows he has seen the fountain and the apple tree before. He turns to look at a small side street that leads to a house with a little garden and two windows over the shop.
Casavir closes his eyes and accepts his fate. He does not want to know if they survived or the plague had taken them, or the war had driven them away. He is not one of them anymore. He is a paladin of Tyr. The priests are his fathers and mothers, all servants of Tyr are his brothers and sisters, and Catherine is more of a family than most people ever have.
He walks to the temple and is welcomed with warmth, but his mentor is nowhere to be found. He is given his own letters tied by a brown string – unopened. Catherine Harkenhart set off for a mission in Neverwinter Wood eight months ago, and never returned.
