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
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.
