Raerin Corvain

Raerin Corvain was an officer of the Amultan house of Corvain, lesser nobility, and one of four Amultan soldiers who walked away from a war that is still running. Harveen once called him their commander and corrected himself to officer inside the same sentence, and officer is the word that has stood.

The two letters cut into the slate at the cairn east of the western mountains are RC, in the formal Golden hand, and nobody has opened the grave. Jaden read them herself and knew them before anyone else had spoken; Harveen then named the man under them, that’s the one you were looking for; and from the workmanship Jaden judged that Aldred had raised it alone, which is an inference. Aldo and Mikhail agreed quietly between themselves that they doubted it, and that they were not going to disturb a grave to find out. The surname is spoken exactly once on that whole road, by Harveen, saying somebody would have to go home and inform the Corvain family.

Background

The Corvain blood carries magic and the house is known for it, which in Amulta settles a child’s road early. Families known for magic have their children tested at about three, where everybody else waits until six or seven, and how well a child tests decides what they will be when their service comes: some to the gish, some to the proper mages. He tested well enough for the gish. He was still in that training when he left, and he never finished it.

What put him on the road, by Harveen’s account, was complications with the family, and the plain fact that in Amulta everybody is expected to fight. What he wanted out of it, by Jaden’s, was not escape at all. He meant to carry Amulta’s case west and find someone with the power to help and the inclination to sympathize. He was not really breaking away, not at first and perhaps not ever, and it was Harveen who put the idea of leaving in his ear and kept it there. Nobody else has confirmed a word of that, and Harveen was never made to answer it.

He was the only one of the four with any preparation for the country they were crossing. The other three were soldiers. His education and his childhood gave him the region in outline, enough that he knew the name Haudh-Gwenn before he ever came near it, and he had diplomatic training and a degree of influence to use it with. They were taken in their sleep, all four together. Two came back out of the mountains and he was not one of them.

Appearance

On the road west Jaden wrote out a physical description of each of the missing men, in Peren so that the others could read it, and handed the paper to Mikhail; what was written on it was never read out. Riding east afterwards she meant to ask in Forven whether someone of his description had come through. The description was made, carried and used, and not one word of it has ever been spoken aloud.

Relationships

His brother is called Tristan. The brother tested far more potent for magic and went off to train elsewhere, and the men who served alongside Raerin saw very little of him. What that did between them is told two ways, and the two have never been squared. Jaden thought Raerin was always jealous of him. Harveen, standing at the graveside, said the rumor was always that the brother had been their mother’s favorite anyway, so no harm, no foul.

The fourth of them was Aldred, the other of the two who never came out, and it is Aldred who is thought to have buried him. He has not been found since. Of how Raerin fought, one line survives, and it was offered in praise of Aldred rather than of him: Aldred could wrestle him down, unless he was being tricky.

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