Berethar was born in 2890 of the Second Era, two months before Mordred Kenhelm, in a small village in the mountains of Erahar called Edu Ghul, to an Eraharian mother and an Enydhwyn father.

His parentage was unusual in several ways. First (and this will be delved into a little further in part three of Sorrow and Song), his father Cirnac was one of an almost extinct house of Enydhwyn which had been wandering Legea for uncounted generations. Despite their nomadic lifestyle, they always returned to their fatherland to take a wife. Because they kept to their own cultural customs, wandered constantly, and only wedded from the stock of Enydhwyn, they were generally counted by any who observed them as strange folk, outcasts.

As if Berethar's heritage were not strange enough, however, Cirnac broke tradition. He married Iloen of Edu Ghul, against his parents' better judgment and even against his own. This should have lessened his outcast stripe in the eyes of Edu Ghul, of course, but it did not, because Cirnac picked the wrong girl.

Iloen, as alluded to briefly in the last chapter of Sorrow and Song, was a seer. This ability of the "second sight" is passed on through the female line, and acquired by having a legaeësse in one's ancestry. The village looked on her as nothing less than a witch, and feared and shunned her. She, for her part, was aware of her strangeness, and perhaps because of it she closed up. She was cold, not in a sense of aloofness, but simply a lack of warmth, of affection, of response. When she smiled or laughed, which was rare, it was not in a way that put people at ease, but one that alienated them even more. Even her parents said that she never loved anyone, and she never did love anyone, except Cirnac son of Culchayn. Cirnac, like she, was an outcast.

It was at her insistence that she and Cirnac were married. She invoked even her seer powers, which she rarely spoke of, to persuade Cirnac's parents to give their consent. And Cirnac did not take her from her home village, but stayed with her for a little. The compulsion was still on him to wander like his father had, and so he would wander, but he always returned to Edu Ghul.

Into this strange, outcast environment Berethar was born. And he was a little of a strange child himself: fierce, quiet, always wanting to know every matter to the very bottom, seeking solitude often. He could not tolerate leaving a task half-finished or attended to with any kind of incompleteness, and if he left something undone it was because he saw no need to have done it. With an absent father and a reserved, silent mother, he was lonely and did not know it; he avoided his brother's company because they were so different, and neither one cared to play with the other, and his sisters Mehyvyd and Maha had one another.

Then Lyathí was born. Lyathí had the farseeing look in her eyes, the Second Sight of her mother. Iloen saw it, marked it, and said nothing of it to Cirnac, who thought no more of his wife as a seer but simply as his wife. But a bond grew between Berethar and his youngest sister, an unstated, almost unacknowledged bond, for they were both minds of few words and raised by a mother of few words. And Berethar loved her deeply.

Lyathí was five, and Berethar ten, when Cirnac died at forty years of age. He had traveled the Fell Pass once, before Berethar was born, and he went to it again but was waylaid by Wild Men and slain there. The word came to the family in Erahar months later, by a man who had found his body and brought Cirnac's knife. Iloen kept the knife until Berethar was fifteen.

If anyone had asked Berethar why he loved his father, Berethar would have answered, "He is my father," and if that were doubted as being valid grounds, he would have replied, "Is that not enough?" He loved his father with a fierce filial love which was tied into the pride that he bore of his Enydhwyn heritage, for it was Cirnac who had built into him a love of that heritage, who had spoken to him the language of Enydhwyn and taught him their lineage. The memories that he carried of his father were more of a dim hero-figure than a guiding father, but they were enough to impel him to track down the murderers of that father and visit them with vengeance.

He found the Fell Pass, and went through it in peril of his life, and searched for a time, but it was not long before he realized the impossibility of his quest. Five years flown and an unnamed Wild Man must baffle the most seasoned of trackers and the most obstinate fool, and Berethar was neither. So when a man called Gehather took notice of him in Rodron, and offered him a place as trainee in the Legean Association, Berethar laid his futile errand by and accepted the place.

Berethar expresses very, very little emotion outwardly. The only place he feels himself free to let go is anger, which is logical, because anger is where we are least vulnerable. He was never taught how to open up, and unlike Mordred, who can only repress things for so long before they fly out, Berethar can repress them indefinitely -- and does. Dangers and issues of all kinds arise from this, because Berethar is not a basically phlegmatic character. He feels things. He feels them incredibly deeply. And when Gehather, at that time the most senior member of the Legean Association, died through Berethar's impatience and rash decision, it tore him radically apart.

Again, there is a difference between Mordred and Berethar. Mordred sometimes feels guilt for semi-logical or even illogical reasons. If Fenris is hurt, he will make himself at fault, even when there was nothing he could have done to prevent it. On the other hand, sometimes he knows that he has been at fault in some regard or another, but he may, even if he is perfectly conscious of his wrongdoing, shrug it aside and feel no remorse. Case in point: his hate of Inspector Dickson.

Berethar, in contrast, would feel no guilt if a family member of his, even a close one, should die -- not unless it were by a clearly preventable action on his part. But where Mordred may know he is wrong and yet not make amends, Berethar's conscience compels him to make amends. Mordred's "heart" conviction that he was wrong will not always follow his "head" admission that he was wrong, but IF you can get Berethar to make the "head" admission, his "heart" conviction will inevitably follow. He will go to immense lengths to repair the smallest damage that a careless word or deed on his part caused. If he cannot repair it -- as in the case of Gehather's death -- it will torment him forever.

In a desperate effort to hide from what he had done, Berethar fled into the depths of Edivernel and the wilderness for eight months, as he tells Mordred in Path of the Tempest. He came home at last for good after three years of intermittent absence, hiding from his past, the Legean Association, and anything that might remind him of the pain that he had locked down upon and buried.

During Berethar's time in the Legean Association, Edu Ghul had experienced a series of droughts, possibly repercussions of the dry weather that was also visiting Harotha and Menevace further north at that time. The villagers blamed it upon Iloen and her "witchcraft", and, using that as an excuse more than anything else now that Cirnac was dead and Berethar was generally absent, drove the family out. They removed to Gontland, and were living there still when Berethar returned home after his disastrous mission.

Berethar's siblings, who had never known him well, found him more of a lone wolf than he had ever been. He consistently avoided speech, and when he was not working he avoided them as well. Lryn, who bore internal resentment towards Berethar for having (as he saw it) deserted them all those years ago and left Lryn to support the family alone through growing hardships, watched his brother with unwelcoming eyes, and so the gap widened. For whatever reasons Berethar had (most likely because of the sheer level of non-communicacy in the family), he had kept his Legean Association work a secret from all of them, and he certainly had no intention of telling it now.

Iloen had little reason left to live. Cirnac had been her world, the only thing that drew her out of her cold winter's shell. She was forced to dwell among the Gontish, a people whose customs were foreign and often disgusting to her; despite the lack of acceptance among her own people, it had at least been at home. Lyathí, her youngest, was nearly a grown woman, and her sons able and hardworking men. In the year that Berethar was twenty, she died.

And Lryn, despite his sorrow, thought that a way had opened up for them. He wanted to return to Erahar, for surely now that Iloen was dead the villagers would accept them back. The Gontish people were not friendly to them, and Lryn, like his mother, missed the familiarity of Erahar's mountains. He saw nothing standing in their way to go back -- and there was nothing standing in their way.

Except Berethar.

One of the more surprising facets of Berethar's character is his need for stability. More surprising, because in joining the Legean Association he certainly opted for a lifestyle that had very little stability, if any at all. But that sprang naturally from his opposite, almost contrary need for activity, as well as a youthful lust for adventure. Berethar can stand neither a cage upon his freedom nor being adrift; he must have employment with purpose. As a matter of fact, the Legean Association gave him all the stability and purpose he needed at the time: the purpose was to help the world, and he had older men all around him, mentors who trained him and gave him assignments, and provided parameters for his world.

(Forgive me my constant digressions... it's all in the name of painting the clearest picture possible)

At this point in his life, Berethar was craving stability more than ever. His entire world had been ripped out from under him, and he was in the process of piecing it together under his feet; he was just beginning to successfully push the anguish and guilt under the surface of his mind; he wanted to put down roots and be able to live again. Lryn's proposal jolted him to his core with horror. The idea of leaving and uprooting himself again was akin in his mind to going back to the Legean Association, and he was sure, though he scarcely let himself think it in so many words, that if he agreed to this move, if he let go of the shred of stability that was left to his life, the memories of pain would boil right back up from where he had covered them. He might never get rid of the ghosts of his past again. He point-blank refused.

Lryn, who had no idea of any of this, and knew only that Berethar had scarcely involved himself with their life for the past five years and suddenly seemed to be behaving with a high hand, perhaps suddenly hungering for his eldest-brother rights, was at first irked. But he was of a quiet temper, and wished to think well of his brother though he did not understand him. He thought that maybe Berethar was only worried about how the village would receive them, so he tried to reason with his brother for a while.

But the reasoning only stoked Berethar's anger. He would not yield. Harsh words went between them, and Lryn's long-hidden resentment came out in sharp accusations, which cut deeper than he knew, and made Berethar still more angry.

"Go without me," said Berethar at last, for the cutting of a familial tie seemed even to him less in that moment than breaking with the land on which he stood. "I do not wish to count you my brother any longer."

This seemed to Lryn the peak of indignity and dishonor that Berethar had wrought, and he was furious. So he took all his sisters, even Lyathí, who voiced a desire to stay with Berethar. Lryn would permit nothing of the kind. His outrage knew no bounds.

But in departing as quickly and angrily as he did, he showed how little he knew his brother. Berethar's anger blazed quick and fierce, like a torrent of white-hot sparks, but when it was over, it was over. Had Lryn waited, Berethar would have taken back his words, and maybe even have come with them, as amends for his explosion of temper.

Instead Berethar's anger passed only to give way to despair. He bitterly regretted all he had said. The home in Gontland was nothing to him now, with his family, even Lyathí, taken away. He struck out east, and did not know or care where he was going.

Berethar's backstory will conclude in the following installment, which details how the Mycrai family came to Ceristen.