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."