As though reading his mind, Arthur continued, "Do you swear that treason shall have no place in your heart and that you will honour and serve the will of Camelot above all others?"
"I do so swear," Alymere said, raising his head proudly. If he could not honour his father by reclaiming his home, he would find another way. There was always another way.
"Do you swear that you will offer mercy to all deserving of it?"
"I do so swear."
"Do you swear that you will offer succour to those in need if it is yours to offer?"
"I do so swear," the words came easily to him now.
"Do you swear never to take up arms in wrongful quarrels for love or worldly goods?"
"I do so swear."
"Do you swear never to stand by idly whilst such evils are perpetrated by others upon the weak and innocent?"
"I do so swear."
"And do you so swear to be noble, worshipful and just in all things?"
"I do so swear," Alymere concluded.
The king withdrew Excalibur and sheathed the great blade without the tip of the sword touching so much as a hair on his head. He bade Alymere rise. "I will hold you to this oath, Alymere, for now you are no longer the son of Roth, but a son of Albion. And as such you are my ward in your father's absence. Think on this oath when you retire tonight, boy. Think on what it means and how it will change your life. For when first light comes you will enter into the service of your uncle, Sir Lowick." Arthur raised a hand to forestall any argument. "I would have you serve him faithfully as squire and learn what it means to be a true man and worshipful knight. There is much yet you need to learn — you have shown us that — and accordingly, you shall be bound to his service for two years and a day; then, when you are released, you are to present yourself here for judgement. Should you be found worthy, you shall be asked to renew the oath you have just sworn and invited to take your father's seat at the table, as is your birthright. If not, you shall be given a hot meal and released from your oath to make your way in the world alone. Serve your uncle well, learn from him, and in that way you will serve both your king and your country. That is my judgement. Do you accept it?"
And with those few words Alymere's world was wrenched out from beneath him.
He reached out to steady himself.
Now he understood what Bors had meant by his first test.
He wanted to scream, Why? Why would you do this to me? Why would you give me to him? Is this to be my punishment? A death sentence?
If this was the path to righteousness and becoming a true man, he did not know if he had the strength to take the first step, let alone to walk the path to its end.
He didn't know what he'd expected; to imagine that Arthur might simply finish the oath with the words "Arise, Sir Alymere!" and congratulate him was naive, especially after the morning's events, but this was cruel. This felt like the greatest betrayal imaginable. After everything he had told him, how could the king make him swear his oath and then deliver him unto the usurper like this?
It was all he could do to nod, but Arthur pushed him to answer, "Yes, sire."
The great chamber, the castle beyond it, the bailey and the courtyards and practice fields, shed every illusion of homeliness in favour of its true cold stone face. No matter how desperately he had tried to convince himself otherwise, he didn't belong here.
"Thank you for this chance to honour my brother's memory, sire," his uncle said, his delight obvious as he offered his hand to the boy. Alymere shook it off, gripping instead one of the high wooden backs of the chairs beside him. All colour had drained from his face. The chamber reeled around him. He was breathing too quickly and too shallowly, and couldn't catch a proper breath. "The past shall remain where it belongs, I have no dispute with the boy. My blood flows through his veins, after all. We are kin. We stand together, we fall together. I shall see to his education as though he were my own son. When he comes before you next he will be worthy of the knighthood, this I swear." Lowick bowed low.
"That is my hope," the king said, gravely. "There is much for him to learn, and more to unlearn from what I have seen, but he has courage, some skill and no small heart. All of which he will need if he is to rise to claim his father's seat."
Squire
Five
"Everything matters. Everything is significant. Everything you say, everything you do, everything you think, everything you feel. Everything matters, all of it, every little thing, because when they are all brought together, they become you. But of equal importance, lad, are the things you don't do, the things you don't say. If you forget all but one thing that I teach you, let this be the one thing you remember. We are the sum of all these things." Sir Lowick said, tightening the buckle on his great destrier's saddle. It was a familiar lesson.
Alymere drew his wet cloak tight around his throat. The heat was leeching out of his body. Corkscrews of breath wreathed out of his nostrils as he wrestled with his own mount.
It was grim outside of the stable doors.
The blizzard had been blowing for days. The world was white. The snow was so thick, the world ceased to exist a few feet in front of his face. The skeletal limbs of the nearby trees were bowed under the burden of snow. The short walk from the house to the stable had been hellish; fat flakes of snow swirled about in his face, in his eyes, in his ears, and in his mouth as he tried to breathe. Head down, they floundered through the snowfall, the insidious cold soaking through to their skin in just a few paces. The thought of willingly riding out into the storm was insane, and yet that was precisely what his uncle intended they do.
Alymere was dressed in layer upon layer of tightly knit woolens beneath his mail shirt, as well as a heavy travelling cloak and hood lined with rabbit fur, and still the cold found its way through.
The wind cried out in a hundred different voices, each more plaintive and mournful than the last. Together the voices made the most haunting sounds as they rushed around the immovable stone of the stables. Alymere saw to his own horse, adjusting the blankets beneath the saddle. No one in their right mind would willingly set out into the heart of the storm. Even inside the stable the cold was ferocious.
The susurrus rush of snow sliding from the roof above them spooked the horses. It took Alymere several minutes of soothing and whispering to calm his mount, whereas his uncle's destrier settled almost immediately. The snow blustered in through the stable's barred windows. It was still cold enough inside the building that it settled, leaving a shallow mound of white banked up against the wall.
Alymere was long since past the point of challenging his uncle's will; if he wanted to ride out, they were going to ride out and no amount of protesting from him would make a blind bit of difference. They were well into their second year together. The first time he had questioned Sir Lowick, he had earned a swift slap with the back of the knight's hand across his face, and the second, and the third, and the forth, fifth, sixth, seventh, until he was broken of the habit and merely acquiesced. But, like the most stubborn stallion, he was a long time breaking. Alymere let his dislike for the man fester, but resisted allowing his anger to show through his mask of servility. He was the willing apprentice. He did not understand why the knight was delivering those back-handers until much later in their relationship, and not once did Sir Lowick take the time to explain why he had raised his hand to his nephew every time he voiced dissent or disagreement. His word was law. It was that simple, as far as the knight was concerned.
Hence, when Sir Lowick insisted they ride out, ride out they did. Duties could not and should not be shirked. Both the Stanegate Road and Deere Street traversed their lands, the crossroads deep in the heart of the old forest, and several mile houses on the great wall fell under their protection. These had to be patrolled; bandits and robbers preyed upon travellers. Although surely the inclement weather ought to be more of a deterrent than two men on horseback riding the road could ever be? Alymere did not argue, though. He finished getting his horse ready, then
mounted and rode out into the storm.
Try though he might, Alymere found it more and more difficult to nurture his dislike of the man, though little things still prickled away at him. It had been so much easier during their first weeks together, with his uncle's fist doling out lesson after lesson, but once he'd learned to bite his tongue, they'd begun to learn about each other. There was a lot about the knight that felt weirdly disconnected from the stories Baptiste had told him, making Alymere all the more unsure about their provenance. What could Baptiste stand to gain through lies? In the meantime, Sir Lowick had been good to his word, taking his young nephew under his wing and picking up his education where Baptiste had left off. More surprisingly, he had allowed the boy to have his mother's body moved to join his father's in the estate's chapel. Little gestures like that made him seem almost human. And those moments were exacerbated whenever he caught sight of his uncle from a certain angle, or the sun lit his face just so, and Alymere would imagine he could see his father looking back at him. It was hard to believe — or to continue to believe — that Sir Lowick could be the monster he had grown up thinking him to be. But that didn't mean he was kind, only that he was fair. There was a difference. That was another lesson the knight imparted, with something akin to delight at times.
The cold hit him with stunning force the moment he rode out into the open. He ducked his face out of the wind, drawing the thick fur of his cloak up over his mouth. His eyes watered, and the tears froze on his cheeks. Alymere turned his horse, the great beast churning up snow as it side-stepped away from the stables. The white seemed to roll out endlessly in front of him, two feet deep and more in places. The horse couldn't stand still for a moment. It walked on the spot, as though it didn't trust the ground beneath its feet. Great curls of steam billowed out of the horse's flared nostrils.
Alymere leaned forward, soothing the animal's neck, stroking its mane and calming it. The horse whickered at the air and churned its hooves through the snow, digging out its own grave. Alymere was all too aware of the raw strength beneath him. If the horse panicked and bolted there would be nothing he could do about it.
Sir Lowick rode out behind him.
"Come on, lad. Think of it this way; the sooner we're about this damned business the sooner we're home wrapped up beside the fire." He spurred his horse forward and set off at a canter through the snow.
Alymere spurred his own horse on, and set off after him.
Their tracks from the manor house to the stable were already blurred and indistinct as they filled with fresh snowfall. Snow pelted his face and wormed its way down his neck and back. But it wasn't so much the snow as the wind that was the worst of it. Without the freezing cut of the north wind he might have been able to weather the storm. He willed himself smaller in the saddle and kept his head down, concentrating rigidly on the horse's mane. It didn't help.
They rode for the north wall and the mile houses along it. Each one would offer brief respite from the elements, a fire to warm their extremities at, and a few minutes' shelter from the wind. But the nearest one was nearly twenty minutes' hard riding across inhospitable countryside.
He looked up. The snow blew under his hood, soaking his hair. In seconds the fat swirling flakes had filled his eyes. He tried to blink them away but it was a losing battle. He had no real idea where he was, beyond the very general idea that, providing the horse hadn't strayed from the path, he had to be somewhere between the manor house and the wall, but it was all too easy to imagine that they might have been turned around in the blizzard and be riding off into the white oblivion where, in a few hours, his blood would freeze in his veins and his heart would stop. The world was that disorientating. What should have been a twenty-minute ride had turned into a snowbound odyssey. With the cold clawing into his nose, his ears, his throat, down into his gut and burning into his lungs, Alymere felt like a lost spirit — a ghost that never made it home.
The snow came high up around the horse's fetlocks, exaggerating its canter into a seasick gait.
His nose started running, only to freeze in the scruff of his scraggy beard.
By the time they arrived at the first mile house he had lost the feeling in his face and fingers. He spent ten minutes huddled over the brazier, rubbing his hands briskly together and trying to massage feeling back into his cheeks while Sir Lowick took the warden's report. It was a waste of time; ten minutes later he was back out in the snow.
It was the same at the second and third mile house, and although both were considerably closer than the manor house, the ride between them took longer, twenty minutes becoming thirty as nature turned more and more hostile. Alymere couldn't imagine bandits out on the road, but more to the point he couldn't conceive of any innocent traveller making a journey north or south in this savage weather.
The territory around them began to change subtly as they rode deeper into the wild. The forest brushed up against the wall. The hills became higher, the valleys wider.
The fourth mile house gave the all clear.
And the fifth.
The time they spent huddled over the braziers increased with each mile house, finding it more and more difficult to drive the ice out of their bones. Alymere could no longer feel his hands or feet, and his face felt as though it belonged to someone else, a mask crusted over his own. He was looking forward to a few minutes thawing in front of the brazier.
The sixth mile house was different.
It was dark as they approached. It took him a moment to realise the implications of that.
There was no welcome fire burning in the brazier.
Sir Lowick stamped the snow off his boots as he entered the room. It was cold; an old cold, deep-rooted in the stones. The fire had been dead for some considerable time; days, maybe. It was also empty. There should have been two wardens. There were plenty of signs of habitation: bed rolls, blankets, cooking pots hard-crusted with food, tallow candles burned down to the nub, and more. So the wardens had been here, but they were long gone. That made no sense. They wouldn't abandon their posts. Not willingly. The thought sent a shiver down Alymere's back, independent of any chill.
He rushed over to the fire grate. The wooden logs had burned down to curls of grey-white charcoal, and ash had gathered beneath them. By the looks of things, the fire had been left untended to burn out. Alymere reached into the grate hesitantly to confirm what he already knew: there was no lingering warmth.
Behind him, Lowick grunted. "This isn't like Markem. He wouldn't just wander off. What are you thinking, lad? Talk to me. What does the room say to you?"
Alymere straightened and stood. He rubbed the last residual traces of charcoal between his fingertips, dusting them white. He looked around the room, at the unwashed pots and at the unmade bedding, and then back at his fingers, trying to think it through. The evidence was all there, waiting for him to interpret it. "They left in a hurry, this morning or yesterday morning."
"Good. Talk me through your reasoning?"
"The bedrolls have been slept in. It could just be slovenly housekeeping, but the mile house is small, so it's likely that the wardens would tidy their rolls away for the day when they were done with them."
Lowick nodded. "But why have you discounted them being drawn away in the middle of the night?"
"Two reasons. One: the fire. They would have banked it to preserve the wood. There are only a dozen logs left in the woodpile and they wouldn't want to have to go foraging, plus anything they did find would have to be dried out if it was going to burn. And two: the pots."
"Go on?"
He picked up one of the pots to demonstrate his reasoning, and ran his fingers around the inside of the rim. "There's a crust of food dried into the pans, meaning they ate but didn't have time to clean them. It's like the bedrolls. They'd clean them after they used them, simply because they'd need them again the next time they were hungry. Not cleaning them is more than just slovenly habits. It's an indication that they were disturbed."
"Good."
"There's no food left in their bowls though," Alymere followed his reasoning through to its logical conclusion, "so they had time to finish their meal. By the looks of what's left," he flaked it off with his fingers, "it's oats, or porridge, so definitely morning."
"Well done, lad. That kind of keen eye will serve you well, as will your analytical mind. The world talks to us all of the time — all we have to do is listen. What else can you tell me?"
Alymere scanned the small room, looking for some tell-tale sign that he'd missed, some small irrelevancy that was anything but. "There's no sign of a struggle," he said eventually, "so they went willingly."
"That's the one. Two men, veterans who've been guarding the wall between them for the best part of fifty years willingly abandoned their post in the middle of the storm of the century. What does that tell you?"
He thought about it for a moment. There was only one logical conclusion he could make. "They knew whoever it was."
"More than that, they trusted them," Sir Lowick finished. "That's the only thing that makes any sense. Last night or the night before someone came here begging for their help. They knew them, and more, they trusted them, because obviously they didn't think twice about helping them."
"And they didn't return," Alymere said.
"And they didn't return," the knight echoed.
Six
"Where did they go?" Alymere wondered aloud as he stepped back out into the snow storm. The wind swept away his words.
He studied the ground.
Any footprints that might have been there even a few hours ago had been masked by the latest fall of snow. He knelt, hoping to see any slight difference in the lie of the snow as though it might still give away the ghost of footprints long since buried. It was hopeless. There was nothing to indicate anyone other than he and his uncle had come or gone from the mile house. He rose again. The chill he felt this time had very little to do with the elements. It was as though the two wardens had simply ceased to be, spirited away by demons under the cover of the snow without a trace.
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