Chapter 49
Alistar spent most of the month of June getting used to his new schedule. After tidying up his room each morning, he would use a washcloth and a bucket of warm water to clean himself. Following this, he would put on in one of the ten sets of clothing that filled the upper drawers of his dresser. His inflated wardrobe was a little much, but his uncle had insisted.
Once he was decent, he usually ventured over to the dining hall for a solitary breakfast, though sometimes he bought a snack in town so that he didn’t have to bother any of the house servants to make him a meal. Afterward, he would meditate at the collegia under the supervision of Sword Master Tramon, until the irritable old man allowed him to leave. Once given permission, he would hurry to the Hanging Hill in the hopes of catching the tail end of the daily public lessons, and would stick around until early in the evening to talk to Mr. Herst, who answered any questions that popped into Alistar’s head with eager words, and told him many stories, folktales and lesser-known myths that he would be hard-pressed to find in the local libraries.
He usually made it back to the manor house just in time to share a warm dinner with his family, though Caedmon was a busy man so oftentimes it was just him and Anice. These meals weren’t long though, since he was always in a rush to read one of the many books he’d hoarded in his room, or to meditate in the central gardens for an hour or two. He ended each night with a long stint of physical training, swinging around the polished wooden sword that his master had gifted to him out of frustration after his constant inquiries into when his practical training would begin.
"I told you, we’ll start whenever I say so."
"But all I do is sit around all day. Are you just making this up as you go?"
When Alistar jumped out of the cane’s range, Tramon had growled like an animal and gone off to his closet to retrieve a long bundle of cloth. The fabric fell to reveal a sleek, varnished length of carved wood, a beautiful piece that had been crafted with care.
"Swing it around on your own time," he’d snapped, tossing it at him hard enough to knock him down, "and stop being a thorn in my backside."
Alistar didn’t know much about what he was doing, since Tramon refused to have him do anything aside from meditation, but he’d read in several manuals that the most important thing when it came to learning swordsmanship was to build a strong base. He took this to mean that he needed to become accustomed to swinging a sword, and so for three hours each evening, he did just that.
After a week of solitary breakfasts, Anice began to wake up earlier so that they could share their morning meals. They would part soon after, he to the collegia and her to study under their private home tutor, a wispy old woman named Mrs. Dawn with a prim and proper bearing.