The Black Chalice

Eleven

Sir Lowick found Alymere naked and shivering in the snow, his clothing scattered around the clearing. His eyes had rolled up inside his head and he appeared to be in the grip of some manner of fit or seizure. He knelt beside the young man, cradling his head in his arms and holding him firm until the convulsions had passed.

He fetched his cloak and wrapped it around him.

"Come on, lad. Come on," he repeated over and over, turning the demand into a mantra, willing Alymere to come back to his senses. He was sweating despite the cold. Some sort of fever sweats. He smoothed the matted hair away from the lad's brow. There was a scrap of linen tied around his forearm. Lowick couldn't tend to Alymere here. He put all thoughts of reivers⁵ and missing guards from his mind. One thing at a time; he needed to get Alymere to a fire, and get some warmth back into his blood. Anything else could wait.

He started to gather the discarded clothes and dressed his nephew, pulling his undershirt and shirt on over his head and his hose on one leg at a time. His mail shirt lay in the soft mud where the melt had soaked into ground, softening it up. Lowick thought long and hard about leaving it there, but knew that out of the cover of the trees where the blizzard was still raging any extra layers could be the difference between life and death. The mail would serve to lock in what little heat his body generated, so the added burden of it couldn't be measured in pounds and ounces.

Besides, the boy would be wretched if he woke to find it had been left behind in the forest.

The knight man-handled his nephew into the mail shirt and gathered him into his arms. Following their muddy tracks back to the road, Lowick carried him the mile and more back through the trees.

The horses were tethered where he had left them.

When his nephew hadn't caught up with him down the road he had turned his horse around and come looking for him. He hadn't known what he expected to find, but certainly not this. Alymere's mount was loose, but well-trained. It hadn't strayed too far from where Alymere had left the road, and the knight had been able to find his tracks and follow them. "Thank the Lord for small mercies," Lowick grunted as he hoisted Alymere up into the saddle. He draped his nephew's limp body over the animal's back, checked he was indeed still breathing, so grey and pallid was his complexion, and then draped his own cloak over his nephew's back before climbing into the saddle himself.

With the reins of both horses in his hands, the knight spurred his mount into motion, and led them back out of the trees into the cutting wind and swirling snows.

He knew this land well — he had ridden it every day for the forty-seven years he had been on this earth — but even so, with the snow storm raging, it would have been all too easy to get turned about and lose his way. The cost of that, though, was beyond anything he was prepared to pay. Shivering against the freezing cold, and with his head down against the icy sting of the snow as it abraded his cheeks, the knight guided the horses back through the blizzard to the abandoned mile house.

He threw the door open and staggered into the room, laying Alymere down on one of the unmade bedrolls closest to the fire, and then threw off his gloves and knelt at the hearth. He set about banking up the coals quickly and fed two new logs into the grate. He fumbled with the tinder, trying to get a spark. His frozen fingers refused to obey him as he struggled to light the fire and get some blessed warmth into the place. It wouldn't light. Again and again he sparked the tinder but couldn't get a flame to catch.

The answer, of course, was in the brazier outside; the knight braved the storm one last time to gather two logs from beneath the brazier's cover. They had been soaked in oil to withstand the elements, and to light no matter how harsh or hostile the conditions. They had to. Lives depended upon it. He tossed them into the grate and knelt, fumbling with the tinder. It sparked the third time of asking and the fire caught on the fourth spark. In a matter of minutes the fire was cracking and sap snapping and popping in the logs as it burned, filling the small room with warmth.

Lowick stripped out of his own armour, and then did the same for Alymere. What had kept the heat in outside only served to keep the heat out inside. Alymere's shivers lessened as the warmth filled the room, but he didn't stir.

Lowick had set his sword down upon the small table, within easy reach.

The knight paced around the cramped room, frustration eating away at him. What had possessed the lad to leave the road? Snow madness? He had heard of such things, when the cold was so great it froze the blood in the brain, but surely the onset of any such madness demanded more time in the cold for it to worm away inside a man? He cracked his knuckles and stretched out the bones in his back.

He needed to think.

There was much about the day that the knight had no liking for, not least the fact that his guards were still missing. Had they too succumbed to snow madness? Was it some sort of sickness that his ward had contracted in this very room? Was bringing him back here a mistake? Would he succumb to it himself? A thousand thoughts and more raced through his mind, clamouring to be heard, each of them more strained and panicked than the last. He needed to focus. To think. He had not been able to find any trace of the guards out on the road, which, he was beginning to suspect, boded ill for them. For two miles up and down the road he hadn't been able to find sight nor sound of an overturned cart or a wagon with a broken axle or any other travellers in trouble. That didn't discount the idea that the missing men had been lured out exactly the way Alymere had surmised.

Mercifully, he hadn't found any sign of reivers either.

He pulled up the small stool and sat, leaning back against the wall of the chimney breast, savouring the warm stones on his back.

Once, during the darkest part of the night, when the lad had tossed and turned most violently during his fever-dreams, the knight knelt and said a prayer, offering his own life in return for Alymere's if that was what was demanded. A life for a life. It was the old way. He didn't know how he would live with himself if the boy didn't make it. It would be like losing his brother all over again. And it didn't matter how strong he was, how great his skill at arms, he could vanquish every foe he faced on the battlefield and it wouldn't matter, because he couldn't fight disease or sickness. He couldn't save his brother and now he was helpless to save his brother's son.

All he could do was pray, and hope that the God that looked after foolish young men with hearts the size of lions was listening.

The knight didn't move from his bedside vigil until Alymere woke with the coming of the dawn.