The Black Chalice

People rushed to help him.

He felt their hands steadying him and heard their voices, but couldn't make sense of anything they said. Alymere could barely stay on his feet. He saw his uncle striding toward him, face grim. He was carrying another body in his arms. Alymere laid the woman down in the snow and sank to his knees beside her.

One of the women came forward, reaching out for the baby.

Tears and soot stung his eyes as the woman took the tiny infant in her arms and cradled it to her breast, soothing it and stroking the fine wisps of hair back from its scalp. She slipped a small finger between the baby's lips, hoping it would suckle. It didn't. Next, she pinched the baby's cheeks, hoping the nip would succeed where the suckling instinct had failed. It didn't. The woman's expression didn't falter. She swung the baby around in her arms and delivered a sharp smack to its bottom, once, twice, and on the third the baby's cry filled the silence.

Alymere turned his attention to the mother, but there was nothing he could do to save her.

Sixteen

Other than the child Alymere had saved, seven people survived the reivers' raid on the village, all of them women.

In a few harrowing minutes an entire community had died.

The men's bodies were lined up in the snow, some of them barely recognisable from their injuries. Only three of them had died in the fire. The others had been butchered by the Scots' swords. Beside them lay the smaller bodies of six children and the woman Alymere had dragged from the flames.

So few survivors out of all of those families. Seven women who had lost everything.

Alymere couldn't begin to comprehend their grief. Generations cut down, grandparents, fathers, mothers and children. It was senseless. All he felt was rage at the men who had done this. It was like a vile black canker in his heart that threatened to overwhelm all else. He wanted to lash out, strike something, someone. He wanted vengeance for these helpless women and their fallen families. Surely that was what it meant to be a knight, wasn't it? To protect those who could not protect themselves, and when that failed, to give their ghosts justice? What had they done to deserve this? The answer was, of course, nothing. There was nothing anyone could do to deserve a fate like this.

And yet not one of them had wept as they gathered the dead and cleaned them. The tears would come, of course, when the horror subsided and the reality of their situation set in. Only Alymere had cried. He did not feel any less of a man for it. The dead deserved no less from him.

Sir Lowick took no part in the funeral rites. He rode out in search of the reivers before they could cover their tracks.

Alymere had wanted to ride with him, but knew that his duty was to stay with the women while they built funeral pyres, although consigning the dead to more flames seemed almost repugnant to him. He saw the need for the ritual, though — it was more about the living than the dead — and he knew the choice of pyre over plot came down to the fact that none of these women intended to stay in the ruins of their village. And why would they, when all they had for company were the ghosts and constant reminders of what they had lost today?

No-one talked while such grim work needed to be done. Each looked after their own.

Alymere busied himself with physical work, hacking down branches for the women to build the pyres. And he kept on hacking away at the barren branches long after his muscles began to burn. His face contorted with pain as he pulled the tangled wood free and dragged it over to the growing bonfires. Over and over again, the mindless repetition of it freeing his mind to think of nothing.

But, of course, all he could think of was the body of the burned child and all of those other bodies lined up in the snow. There was no respite.

The wood piles grew higher and higher until, with the sun lowering in the sky, he helped each of the women in turn bear their loved ones over to a pyre so that their spirits could be laid to rest.

One by one the women applied burning torches to the wood piles until the ring of bonfires blazed all around them.

At last, when all of the fires were lit, the oldest of the women sought him out. 'Would you say a few words, my lord?' she asked. He couldn't look her in the eye. He knew she was right; they deserved no less from him, but he didn't know what he could say about these people beyond platitudes. He had never met them before in his life. He inhaled a deep breath and held it, letting it fuel his blood. 'Something to send them on their way to their maker so that He might know they are coming?'

But when it came down to it, he had no deep wisdom, no kind words, only a profound and infinite sadness for what had happened to these people. So that was what he said.

He took the time to stand beside each pyre, to learn the names of the dead and to hear a story or two about each of them so that they might live on, for another night at least.

And he cried silent tears for the widows and the orphans.

Before he left each funeral fire he made a promise to the ones left behind. There would be justice for the ones they had lost.

Even as he swore that promise he recalled the last few words of the Crow Maiden as she begged him to save her, and knew, on some instinctive level, that this was part of what she needed him to save her from. If his time bonded to his uncle had taught him anything, it had taught him to think. There was no such thing as happenstance. Coincidence was nothing more than a hidden chain of cause and effect waiting to be unravelled. The reivers hadn't simply come marauding south, intent on death and burning for the hell of it; they moved with a purpose. He thought it through: first they breached the wall, taking out the wardens without raising the alarm, which was no mean feat, and then they had struck deep into Sir Lowick's protectorate, leaving devastation in their wake. They seek to horrify, Alymere reasoned, thinking about the human cost of their raid, but something, some ill-formed doubt niggled away at the back of his mind, and he found himself thinking it was more akin to smoke and mirrors — tricks — there was grim purpose to their advance, and there was nothing random about those they had chosen to spare. They were looking for something; not food, and they hadn't taken any of the women, so, something else…

The Devil's Bible, he thought, staring into the dancing flames. Why else had Blodyweth drawn him into the Summervale? Why else had she made him swear his promise to save her and then bid him follow the smoke? They were linked, like chains that weighed on his soul. The Scots sought the book. Their purpose didn't matter. The Crow Maiden had asked him three questions: what was he prepared to do for his king, for his land and for her, and he had offered the same answer to all of them, anything and everything. Failure meant the land would fall, the king die, and whatever magic sustained Blodyweth in her kingdom of summer would fail. And somehow all of these fates were bound to this book, this bible.

All of this was for a book? He remembered something Baptiste had been fond of saying: a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Now, in this dead village, he thought he saw what his friend had meant by those words.

He remembered something else Baptiste had said, his lesson on the quality of mercy. Watching the fires burn themselves out, he was far more interested in the quality of retribution than anything even vaguely merciful. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. A life for a life. There would be a reckoning, he would see to that.

When the pyres had burned out he shepherded the women back to the manor house, where at least they would be dry and warm. They had precious few belongings to gather, and offered no objections. They followed him, trudging wearily through the deep snow, as they left their lives in the ashes behind them. Gwen, the woman who had taken the baby from his arms, hugged him hard. She was the last of them to enter the great house. She looked at him, down to his feet and back up to his eyes, and said, 'God help them if you find them, my lord.'

'Indeed,' he said, coldly. The way he said it frightened him. It was absolutely detached from the young man he had been when he woke up that morning. 'But even with his help they are damned.'

'I do not doubt it for a moment,' she said, sadly.

He couldn't understand her sadness; he would, but only when it was too late.

Once the women were quartered in the Manor, Alymere rode out to join his uncle. The storm had abated, but, with midday fast approaching, it was still bitterly cold. But the cold was inside him, in his soul, so that was