Gawain is the son of a blacksmith in the Midlands district. He grew up training as a soldier, hoping one day to join the Korvosan Guard. By the time he hit puberty, he was a promising lad, skilled in the use of basic weapons and heavy armor, strong, handsome and well spoken, and popular with the girls. But as his training progressed, he began to lose focus. He began to skip weapons drill more and more often to attend the theater, or beg a lesson from passing minstrels, or just sit and stare at the boats passing on the river. The gossips said he was giving up, that he was destined for a life of mediocrity and disappointment, but he discovered that when he surrounded himself with beauty and art, he felt an inner peace and fulfillment that he couldn't explain. When he inevitably was kicked out of the Guard's training program, it only made him happier, since now he could spend his days wandering and playing his mandolin and seeing the sights of Korvosa. He came to feel sure that his love of beauty was not merely natural, but represented the special
favor of Shelyn.
It was while he was playing in the street one day, hat out for the occasional stray copper, that he met Arwen. She was a fiery young thief with ash-smudged skin and flashing green eyes who carried more daggers than his father's smithy. She handed back to him the ring that she had just stolen from his finger, an odd piece of carved jade that was all he had from his mother, smiled, and told him to pay better attention. It was a whirlwind romance, full of rooftop scrambles, night-long revels paid for by money that he was careful never to ask the source of, and breathless trysts behind hastily picked locks. She kept stealing the ring off of his finger and giving it back to him, until one day he gave it back to her, and asked her to keep it safe for him. After a few months of bliss, Arwen began to come to see him later and later, and looked tired and pale more often. Gawain worried, but she became upset and refused to talk about it whenever he inquired, so he concentrated instead on making her happy when she could come.
And then one day she didn't come. And didn't come the next, and the day after. After a week, a riverboat captain who had let them use his boathouse a few times came to see him with the news. He had found her body fetched up against a shoal of the river, with several stab wounds in the back.
Gawain withdrew for a while and mourned, but eventually began to recover as the young do. He would likely have gone back to his father and become a smith, had he not happened to see in the marketplace one day the very ring that he had given to Arwen. Cornering the merchant, he managed to extract a name: Gaedren Lamm. Anger fueled Gawain with purpose, and he began to pray to Shelyn in earnest. He discovered that his connection the the goddess was real, that he could cast a limited number of divine spells. He began training with weapons again, and discovered that the glaive, favored weapon of Shelyn, came more easily to him than other weapons. He bought a suit of chainmail from his skeptical but supportive father, and set out to gain experience and wait for his moment to confront Lamm.
