She helped him to rise, taking much of his weight on her outstretched arm. Alymere wasn't ashamed to lean on her. Together they walked slowly to the door. The pain of it was evident on his face, and even before they reached the threshold she questioned again the wisdom of over-exerting himself. Alymere shook off her concern with a brusque shake of the head, which he immediately regretted but refused to admit. "I would feel the spring air on my face and remember how it feels to be alive and well, not sick."
That day they made it as far as the hundred-year-old apple tree in the centre of the lawn. They sat in the shade of it while Alymere gathered his strength for the short walk back. The main treeline of the forest was still hundreds of yards distant. It seemed like forever away. Every muscle burned.
"What of my uncle?" he asked, plucking a yellow buttercup from the grass and stripping its petals one by one.
"He carried you all the way from the sea in his arms. It was truly a miracle. He carried you for three days before he collapsed, finally, in sight of the house. Even then he would not rest. He summoned healers and watched over you day and night when first you returned, my lord, worrying as a man would for his own son. But when it became clear that there would be no quick healing and there was little these men could do for you, he had no choice but to ride south to Camelot and report the attack on Medcaut and the slaughter of our villages to the king. Not that he has confided in me, but I believe he plans to urge the king to raise arms against the North. His only instruction was that we tend the fields as usual, for no matter what, we would all need to eat."
"Ever practical," Alymere agreed, especially if there were to be more mouths to feed. His blood ran cold at the thought of what such an act of war would mean. Blodyweth had promised so ominously that if the Devil's book were to fall into the wrong hands it would mean the end of Albion as they knew it, but how could civil war against the northmen be any less devastating? "When did he ride out?"
"When the weather broke, my lord. He has been gone near two weeks."
Two weeks. More than long enough to ride to the Seat of Albion and back alone, if you flogged the horse, but not with a war party. Supply lines would slow them down greatly. He had to assume this meant war was coming to his home. It was impossible to believe, looking up at the endless blue sky and hearing the music of the grasshoppers' wings and the birdsong.
They walked together back to the house, and within minutes Alymere succumbed to exhausted sleep.
The walk became a ritual, with Alymere gaining strength every day. The exercise was cautious at first, no more challenging than climbing the staircase unaided, though even that had him reliant upon the wall more than once for support. Before the week was out they made it as far as the treeline and back without rest.
Still his uncle had not returned.
Seven more days and Gwen was sitting in the shade of the old apple tree watching him run, first no more than a gentle loping stride, the distance more important than the speed with which it was covered, and then pumping his arms and legs furiously as he gave every ounce of strength he possessed to the sprint. Frequently his body buckled beneath the exertion and his legs betrayed him, but sheer determination always had Alymere back on his feet before she could come to his aid.
Afternoons, he stripped off to the waist and gave himself to physical labour. His body tanned with the sun, or part of it did. The scar tissue left by the burns whitened where the old skin browned, making him appear even more like a man of two aspects, two souls.
Gwen never left him. She urged him on as he split logs, working his upper body until some semblance of power returned to his frame. His muscles slowly returned as he hefted the axe over and over, slamming it down into the logs.
When the heat became too much, he would descend to the cellar and spend an hour or more moving casks of wine and mead, and hulking sacks of grain over his shoulder to carry them from one side of the cellar to the other, back and forth, back and forth until his legs refused to carry him.
He forced his body through more and more gruelling exercises, bringing the casks up from below to load up a broken cart — which leant precariously on its splintered axel — so that he might press greater and greater weights, building the muscle in his shoulders and lower back, and before long he surpassed his previous physique.
He was born again, body and soul.
And still his uncle had not returned.
A curious relationship formed between Gwen and Alymere during his rehabilitation. There was a tenderness there, and pride, friendship even, but it was completely maternal. He welcomed it. Of all the servants in his father's house, she was the only one who could bear to look him in the eye. Not once did they speak of their fevered coupling, so he became more and more certain that it had never happened, although that only left disquiet in his bones.
It was a month before he realised what it was that so disturbed him: during all of their time together he never once saw her with the child, Alma.
Thirty
Alymere read the words again, his index finger running over each of them slowly as he sounded the syllables inside his head: being an account of the entire wisdom of Man as transcribed by Harmon Reclusus.
Those fifteen words promised so much; the entire wisdom of Man. That he couldn't read more than those fifteen words was a torment beyond reason. He had stared at them for hours, lost in their shapes, imagining he could hear them come alive inside his head without ever knowing what they meant. Why had the monk chosen to record such precious words in a language few could read?
For protection, of course, to safeguard that wisdom from those unworthy of it, or unready for it, from those who would corrupt it or use it to do harm. Like the sword, wisdom was itself merely a tool, it was how it was wielded that made all the difference.
He turned the page, breathing in the musty smell of those old sheets as he thumbed through them. The fragrance he thought of as the smell of knowledge filled his senses.
Alymere studied the shape of what he assumed to be a prayer as it was laid out on the page, tapering to a point. His finger traced the ragged shape of the stanza, resting upon the two words, alone at the bottom of the page, and he realised he could read them: Black Chalice.
He read them over and over again, but there could be no mistaking what they said. "Black Chalice," he said aloud, barely breathing the words. It was enough to send a thrill through his entire being. He felt it in that intangible place men call the soul. And it was electrifying.
How could he have missed them?
The entire body of text pointed towards those two words as though they were the focal point of the stanza itself.
How could he have been so blind as to not see them?
Did that mean there were other words in the book he had somehow failed to recognise? Heart racing, he turned page after page, quickly, eyes hungrily scanning the rows of indecipherable text for anything, even a single word, that made sense.
He found the same two words repeated several times within the book: Black Chalice.
He could only wonder how, in all of his poring over the book, he had missed them.
He set the book aside.
This time when he dreamed it was of a hanged man and a cup. As the man twisted and turned against the bite of the rope a shadowy figure — a woman, he thought — used a silver dagger to open the artery at his ankle and bleed him, catching the slow drip, drip, drip of his death in a black cup. She raised it to her lips and drank the blood of Iscariot, the traitor, and Alymere sat bolt upright in bed, sweating and screaming, the taste of blood on his lips where he had bitten through his cheek.