Free Abomination by Gary Whitta Page B

open behind him and spun around to see King Alfred enter with a man he did not recognize. He looked to the young priest like a commoner, but the steeled look in the man’s eyes suggested he was more likely a soldier of some kind. The priest swallowed deep and corrected his posture as they approached.
    “Your Majesty,” he said, bowing low before the King.
    “Cuthbert, this is Sir Wulfric,” Alfred said. The priest’s eyes widened a little; he might not have recognized the scruffy-looking man standing beside the King, but he most certainly knew the name. He was standing in the presence of not one living legend but two. He looked to Wulfric and tried to conjure something to say, but could not think of anything that would not make him sound like a complete idiot.
    Alfred sensed the priest’s awkwardness; he had grown used to it by now and knew it would be merciful to move swiftly to the business at hand.
    “Cuthbert was a junior cleric under Aethelred at Canterbury,” the King explained to Wulfric. “He has a keen aptitude for languages, so the archbishop put him to work studying the scrolls. He was the first to successfully decipher what had baffled many other more learned scholars.”
    “If I had known what lay within them, I would never have consented to it,” Cuthbert was quick to offer. He had seen what the archbishop had wrought in Winchester’s courtyard, from the words he had helped to decode, and the guilt lay heavy on him. He felt responsible for every twisted, malformed monstrosity the archbishop had brought forth and wanted now only the opportunity to help set it right again.
    “I say it not to assign blame,” Alfred said, placing a reassuring hand on the cleric’s shoulder. “That is set squarely on Aethelred’s shoulders alone. I mean to say that you are among the brightest of Canterbury. And perhaps now our brightest hope.”
    Cuthbert felt briefly uplifted by the compliment, only to grow even more nervous as the King’s words reminded him of the responsibility that now weighed upon him. He placed a hand to the back of his neck and rubbed nervously.
    Wulfric did not know what to make of the callow, fidgety little man who stood before him. Little more than a boy, really. There had been many like him during the war, pressed into service despite their protests and their tears. Most of them had notsurvived long. But behind all the awkwardness and jitters, Wulfric recognized a spark of something in the boy’s eyes—a keen intellectual curiosity that he remembered once burning within himself as a young man, before war had made it a luxury to be swept aside. In a way he envied Cuthbert. Before the Norse came, he had often dreamed of joining the clergy himself and devoting himself to a life of quiet scholarship.
In the next life
, he told himself.
    “You came with Aethelred to Winchester?” he asked Cuthbert.
    Cuthbert nodded. “I was one of many he brought from Canterbury to assist him with his . . .” He hesitated, looking for the right word. “His . . . experiments. I dared not refuse, but I feigned a sickness contracted on the journey so that I might have as little hand in it as possible. Many of us were not comfortable with what the archbishop was doing. Few of us had the courage to refuse or question him.”
    “What became of the other clerics when he escaped?”
    “One tried to stop him. He was turned, God help him. The others fled shortly after for fear of being punished for complicity in his crimes.”
    “But not you.”
    “I have no family, no means, nowhere else to go. I cannot return to Canterbury. And even if I could, I would not. I have vowed to help somehow undo what I helped to bring about, and I told His Majesty so.”
    Wulfric smiled; he was beginning to like this man. Oftentimes a fretful demeanor like Cuthbert’s could be mistaken for spinelessness, but the more Wulfric took the measure of him, the more he was convinced that Cuthbert was no coward. From his own