Character History
Galvin Dubois
Galvin Dubois was born and raised on a farm and vineyard in the southwest of France, near Bordeaux. The Bordeaux region has actually been under English control since 1154, so Galvin is equally fluent in French and English--a necessity when half of your neighbors are English. (Historical note: English rule of Bordeaux dwindled into near-nothingness in the mid-1400s, and fell back under French rule in 1462.) Galvin has three siblings--an older brother named Jacques and an older sister named Milette, and a sister who's five years younger than he is named Lisel.
Bordeaux in the mid-1300s is a reasonably peaceful place, but rivalries between vineyards are intense and neighbors sometimes resort to dirty tricks in order to get ahead. Galvin's mother was accused of being a witch when Galvin was about nine years old by one of these neighbors-they said she had turned an entire year's worth of wine to vinegar. Though his father did what he could to calm things down, a mob of people fired the vineyards and the outbuildings of the farm one night. Galvin's mother was taken away by the mob, and he never saw her again.
Wracked by grief, Galvin's father fled Bordeaux, ending up eventually in Paris. It was a long, strange time for the family, as they wandered the countryside, fending for themselves. With winter coming on, Galvin's brother managed to talk himself into a position as an apprentice printmaker, and the printmaker he hired on with took pity on the family and hired Milette as a cook and maid and Galvin himself as a stablehand. Though he was young for the often heavy work in the stables, he found that he was good at it and had a knack with the horses. He also took care of Lisel when his older sister was too busy in the kitchen to look after an almost-five-year-old.
Galvin's father began to spend a lot of time rambling in the city, going out at all hours of the day and night, seeming to be looking for something. Eventually, he went out one night and didn't come home. They went out to look for him, but since it was the dead of winter, they assumed he'd fallen prey to the cold and frozen to death in an alley somewhere. There were many tears shed, but in truth it was as if he had died on the night his wife had been killed by the mob, and he had just now actually laid down and stopped moving. Galvin mostly hoped that he'd finally found some measure of peace and that he'd managed to find their mother somewhere on the other side of death.
That spring, a few months after Galvin turned ten, he began to feel a call towards the south. There was something that needed him, he thought, but he resisted it because he knew he was needed in Paris. Milette, now fifteen, eloped with the printmaker's son that April. Once the couple had come back and were forgiven, they set up a household near the printmaker's shop and took Lisel into their home, so Galvin was relieved of his major responsibility. He started thinking more and more longingly of going south, wherever this call would lead him.
Finally, that June, the call became so insistent that he left a note on the kitchen table in the printmaker's house, saying "Gone south. Will write when I get there. Galvin." and started walking south, using the skills he'd learned on his family's trip northward to survive off the land. He went close to Bordeaux on his way down but didn't stop at his family's old farm, preferring to remember it the way it was.
He finally reached Marseille, Provence, and the urge to wander south disappeared. He thought he might hire on as a stablehand somewhere while he figured out why he'd been called into Provence, so he went to the temple of Epona, which he'd been told occasionally had openings for stablehands.
A cleric named Endraya happened to be interviewing that day, and after seeing him work with the horses, she refused to hire him as a stablehand and instead told him to join cleric training with the new class that had started only a week before. Galvin was startled, but realized the opportunity he'd been given, and agreed.
A few days later, after he'd gotten settled in, he made the mistake of calling an incredibly gawky girl in the same class who was all knees and elbows and long black hair "that stringbean over there" in English. Said stringbean happened to speak English, and promptly dunked him in the nearest horse trough and then stomped off. Galvin, not one to let a dunking go unanswered, tackled her in the stableyard into a mud puddle. The girl screeched and bit Galvin.
Endraya, who happened to be nearby, sighed and grabbed both their collars, separating the two children. "Callas, Galvin, *stop that*. Both of you, go get cleaned up, and report to the stablemaster--you'll spend the afternoon mucking. Together. And I do *not* want to hear about any more fighting." She looked sternly at Callas. "Control your temper, girl. Galvin just got here, but you've been here long enough to know that you are expected not to start fights. EVEN when you're provoked." This had the sound of a lecture that had been repeated a number of times recently.
Callas glared, but mumbled, "Yes, ma'am."
"And you--" Endraya looked sharply at Galvin, "--have to learn that there is such a thing as not escalating a fight. You've got a temper, too, lad, though I wager you keep it under wraps. One of the things you'll have to learn is when it's better to let things go. Now, both of you, go wash and report to the stablemaster. I'll tell him to expect you."
At the end of an afternoon of mucking out stalls, Galvin and Callas were, if not actually friends yet, at least grudgingly admitting that maybe the other child wasn't so bad after all. After a few more fights and a number of punishment duties together, they were fast friends, in part because they were both picked on by the snotty rich girls in their class. They and a pair of girls named Contessa and Fredericka banded together and always seemed to run in a pack.
When cleric training was over, Galvin was assigned, instead of to a training or veterinarian rotation, to learn how to captain a ship in the fleet of Epona. When he asked why he'd been given this particular assignment, Ulan looked down her nose at him. "You and those two girls are bad news. You've done well enough that we have to graduate you, but we're not putting you on rotation anywhere near each other. On the ship, you'll learn useful things and you won't be around Callas, Contessa, and Fredericka. Maybe it'll straighten you out." Galvin thought about protesting but decided that it wasn't worth it.
Galvin reported for his new duties with a heavy heart. He already missed Callas and the others immensely, especially Callas. Though he knew she was well capable of taking care of herself, he wished he could be around to keep her safe--her temper still had a way of getting the best of her on occasion. He'd also, in the past year or so, come to realize that he was in love with Callas, but she seemed to be entirely oblivious to this, and he figured he'd let her figure it out on her own. He was patient.
He turned out to have a knack for ships, and learned a lot in his first several months on rotation. He was mostly doing scouting missions, and eventually became interested in a rash of piracy that had broken out along the Spanish coast. One ship seemed to be the center of it, and he was pursuing that ship, which seemed to have a habit of disappearing into a particular cliff face.
He was immensely surprised when, upon drawing close to the ship he'd been following, the signs of a bloody battle on-deck were seen--and Callas was in the thick of it, laying about her with a long staff. He joined the battle, and after discovering that the pirate he'd been following was Xora (one of the snotty girls from cleric training) lent his entire force to defeating her.
And everything after that is more or less history.
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