The Oath

by A. M. Linden

  Suppressing a wave of pity for whatever terrified creature was now running for its life, Annwr finished sweeping and tossed out a second breakfast for the geese, watching to be sure that their eager scuffling covered over any marks she might have missed before walking deliberately around the rows and beds to lay a trail of innocent footprints. The flock followed at her heels, tutting and chuckling, while their leader stretched up his neck to nudge at her half-empty basket. Looking back later, she’d be sorry she didn’t give them that final scoop of grain instead of telling Solomon he was getting too fat for his own good, shooing them off, and going inside.

  After closing the inner door behind her, she looked around and saw the room as Caelym must have seen it, crude and drab, a far cry from the resplendent halls of Llwddawanden. But it was spotless. There was not a crumb on the table or a wrinkle in the bedcovers to show that he’d ever been there.

  With nothing left to clean, Annwr began to pace around the hearth, clutching the silver cross Aleswina had given her to ward off evil—especially the evil of being accused of witchcraft.

  Meeting him on her way to the abbey, Annwr hadn’t recognized Caelym as anything except one more homeless Briton, taller than most but otherwise just another starving refugee looking for a handout. Even when he asked for her by name, she’d made no connection between the edgy, apprehensive vagabond speaking hesitant English and the willful, high-spirited boy she’d known in her other life, although the arrow in his back should have been a hint.

  His proclamation that he was a messenger from Feywn had shaken her more than she let on, but she hadn’t fully believed it until he plunged his face down into the washbasin and raised it up again, dripping but clean, and—for a heart-stopping moment— she’d thought Rhedwyn had surfaced instead.

  Like most people in her day and age, Annwr believed in ghosts, but she was also practical. When Rhedwyn was alive, he’d never paid her any attention beyond the habitual flirtation he’d bestowed on anyone who stood still long enough—why would he take time out of his next life to pursue her now?

  Still, the sight convinced her as no words could that her unexpected visitor was really Caelym, Son of Caelendra, that he’d really been sent by Feywn, and that maybe Ossiam wasn’t a useless old fraud after all.

  Reversing direction, she thought back over the message Caelym delivered. Stripped of its ornamentation—and there never had been a priest on the high council who could just say what he meant and get it over with—it came down to: “I need you—so come now!”

  Whatever else had changed in Annwr’s absence, her sister had not. Never a word from her for fifteen years and now imperiously calling her back, regardless of the risk and inconvenience, and making it sound as though Annwr’s abduction and captivity were her own doing and not Feywn’s fault in the first place.

  What had they been thinking, Feywn and her swaggering consort? That Rhedwyn and his handful of play soldiers were going to win back lands lost two times over? Prove the Goddess still held sway outside the gates of Llwddawanden? Decorate the sacred grove with real severed heads as easily as counting up clay trophies from their mock battles in the pastures above the shrine? Well, Rhedwyn’s decision to move up from raiding cattle and plundering trading caravans to taking on a Saxon force that outnumbered his foolhardy little war band three to one certainly settled those questions for good and all!

  “Rhedwyn,” even though Annwr only thought the name in her head, it came out as a snort. Too bad he didn’t have the sense of a goose instead of the looks of a god! Any goose would have known better than to believe Ossiam’s gibberish about some glorious destiny divined from a pile of soggy goat guts. And Feywn! Feywn should have stopped him, should have ordered him off his horse and back to her bedroom!

  Instead, she’d just believed his boasting and let him go riding off—banners waving, drums beating, soon-to-be widows and orphans cheering—while she called on Ossiam to invoke spirit armies from the otherworld to rise and join the battle. Either those shadow forces had refused the oracle’s entreaties or else they had no power against the Saxons who mowed down a generation of the shrine’s young men like the year’s last standing stalks of wheat.

  Dozens of men and boys died alongside Rhedwyn, but none of them mattered to Feywn. Blind and deaf to the grief of others, she’d sent the dazed survivors out under the cover of darkness to bring Rhedwyn’s body back to the shrine.

  Annwr, along with her cousins, Gwennefor and Caldora, had done everything they could to appease Feywn’s spiraling demands— bathing Rhedwyn’s ravaged corpse with water carried down in buckets from the sacred pools, swathing him with silk and decking him with gold and precious gems, gathering armloads of flowers and herbs to be his shroud. Then she’d called for King’s Heal, as if Rhedwyn was a king or there was any hope of healing him!

  But there’d been no reasoning with Feywn, so they put on their fine white ceremonial robes. Leaving the safety of their hidden valley, they’d carried their little reed baskets and their little golden scissors to snip the leaves of those precious little plants growing on the banks of the sacred river just downstream from where it flowed through the blood-drenched battlefield—a place where anyone as all-seeing and all-knowing as the living embodiment of the Great Mother Goddess should have realized the Saxons would still be prowling.

  They’d been caught unawares, preoccupied with their separate sorrows. Annwr had fallen behind the others, so she was the first to hear the sound of horses’ hooves pounding towards them. She’d called out a warning, changed direction and started to run, hoping to give Caldora and Gwennefor a chance to escape and get help. Her next scream was cut short as a filthy, sweat-soaked cloak came down over her head and she was grappled to the ground— trapped, suffocating, feeling the earth shudder as more horses thundered past.

  Carried off, bound and blindfolded, losing count of the days and the number of times she’d been raped, she’d clung to life and sanity by silently reciting the chant for the worst phase of labor, moving her mind so far away from her body that nothing they did mattered to her—so far away she never knew that she changed hands twice, once in a game of dice and once in exchange for a fresh horse, before finally being sold at the main slave market in Derthwald.

  Chapter 6

  Sold

  Eldhelm, the slave dealer, realized almost at once that he’d made a bad bargain. Staring vacantly ahead of her, unable or unwilling to respond to the loudest and simplest of commands, Annwr drew little interest and no bids until late in the afternoon when Erbert, who’d just been appointed the under-steward of the king’s chambermaids and kitchen sculleries, came looking for a nurse for the newly orphaned princess. Erbert had an intuition he should get one that was stupid and did not speak English, so he picked Annwr—answering Eldhelm’s half-hearted claim that she was a trained nursemaid worth twice her asking price with, “Six sceatta, take it or leave it.”

  Eldhelm took it. Erbert grabbed Annwr by the wrist and dragged her out of the slave yard, shoving their way through milling, muttering crowds and clusters of guards—out of the village and up the steep road that switchbacked its way to the top of the granite outcrop that gave the name Gothroc to the central fortress and stronghold of the Kingdom of Derthwald. A portly, middle-aged man, not accustomed to strenuous activity, Erbert was sweating and out of breath by the time they’d reached the top, where a massive oak and iron gate creaked open just enough to let them in, but he forged on, hauling Annwr through the narrow passages between guardhouses, armories, stables, and storage sheds.

  Stumbling along behind him, Annwr kept her eyes fixed on the knife Erbert had carelessly stuck in his belt, and if he had not been too nervous to stop off in some alley and take advantage of his temporary authority, things would have ended very differently for both of them that day. As it was, he kept hurrying on until he came to the back gate of a high-walled compound. The gate cracked open at his knock, revealing half the face of an old woman who thrust her hand out, grabbed Annwr by
the sleeve, and yanked her inside.

  In contrast to Erbert, who hadn’t spoken a single word to Annwr, her new captor began talking as soon as the gate was latched behind them, gesturing wildly with her free hand. It would be months before Annwr would have even a rudimentary grasp of English, so the woman’s guttural exhortations were totally incomprehensible to her, but there was no mistaking the urgency of their tone as she pulled Annwr through an overgrown courtyard garden and into a dark, tightly shuttered room.

  It took time for Annwr’s eyes to adjust to the dim light and for silhouettes and shadows around her to take recognizable shapes—a box filled with toys on the floor, a child-size table and chair next to the unlit hearth, and a small bed in the corner with a child-sized figure sitting on it. At first, Annwr thought she was seeing an amazingly lifelike doll dressed in layers of green and gold brocade, its face and hands carved of alabaster, with disks of obsidian for eyes and a smooth veil of silvery-white silk threads for hair. Then the little girl blinked, looked straight at Annwr, and reached up to her with both arms, the fingers of one hand wide open, the other clenched in a fist.

  Annwr could not help herself—she shook loose from the old woman’s grasp and picked the child up, expecting the crone to scream and attack her as savagely as she would have attacked any stranger who dared lay a hand on Cyri. Instead, the woman broke into a toothy smile and nodded eagerly. Annwr nodded back without any real idea of what they were agreeing about and watched in numbed bewilderment as the woman darted around the room, still babbling, and opened the doors of its several cabinets, pointing to the rows of child sized gowns as she went. When she’d opened the last cupboard, the old woman pointed to the little girl and said, “Infant Princess Aleswina.” Then she pointed to Annwr. When Annwr said her own name, the woman nodded so vigorously it seemed her head might fly off her shoulders. Then, abruptly, she stopped bobbing her head, pointed to herself and said, “Millicent,” then pointed to the door, ran out, and slammed it behind her.

  Left standing in the dark with Aleswina clinging to her, the understanding dawned on Annwr that she was to be the child’s nursemaid. She knew about nursemaids. She’d had one herself. She recalled how much liberty Nonna had had—and taken—so long as she and Feywn were quiet and happy, and so, as she rocked the little girl, humming the lullabies that Nonna used to sing, she began to plan her escape.

  Within a month, she had a knife. Within a year, she had a blanket, a rope, and containers for food and water. By the end of three years, she could speak enough English to be sent out to the town market and had convinced her keepers that she could be trusted to come back again. The one thing she did not plan on was that she’d come to care so deeply for the little Saxon princess who clung to her like a limpet to a rock.

  If she’d known which way to go, Annwr would have taken Aleswina and gone. If she’d had only herself to think about, she would have run off in any direction at all.

  While she never actually gave up her plans to escape, she’d postponed them so often that they no longer seemed real. Meanwhile, she’d had a child to raise, babies to deliver and, in these past seven years, her own small cottage, her garden, and her animals.

  It was not much, but it was what she had to show for fifteen years of hardship, and it was not as easy as some people might think to leave it all behind on a moment’s notice. So now she wavered, worrying about Aleswina and also about Betrys, the pig whose regular litters gave Annwr an income of her own, and the geese, whose eggs and offspring added to her economic security as much as their militant defense of the yard added to her safety. These animals were more than livestock to Annwr; they were her friends and her family. If she left, what would happen to them?

  Chapter 7

  Cyri

  As Annwr paced in circles, trying to decide what to do, the soft chatter of the geese outside her window seemed to change into the sounds of children at play, laughing and calling out to each other in sweet, lilting voices.

  Between them, Annwr, Feywn, and their two cousins, Gwennefor and Caldora, had five girls, all born with within the space of five years. Cyri came last because Annwr was in training with the shrine’s chief midwife, Rhonnon, who’d refused to give her permission to take a consort, saying, “You can learn with your mind and with your heart, but not at the same time!”

  Unwilling to give up her position as Rhonnon’s understudy, she’d watched with growing envy as the others chose consorts and got pregnant—assisting at each birth while wanting to have a baby so much that she pleaded, unsuccessfully, with Caldora to give over one of her twins.

  Then, the spring that she was nineteen, when every living creature around the shrine had seemed to be hatching an egg or suckling a pup, she got an idea. Guessing correctly that her teacher’s objection was not to having babies but to having consorts, she went to Rhonnon asking her consent to take the lead role in the Summer Solstice rites celebrating the courtship of the Earth Goddess by the Sun God and the conception of their first child together.

  She returned to the women’s quarter skipping and dancing to tell her cousins the news, and the three of them had barely been able to keep their composure as they sat through the speeches of the next high council, waiting for Feywn to make the official proclamation.

  It had been the beginning of a wonderful, waking dream and she’d loved every part of it—the giggling sessions with Gwennefor and Caldora over which priest she should pick to stand in for the Sun, the delirious ecstasy of playing a goddess coupling with a god, the self-conscious pride in her steadily swelling belly that changed into mystic bliss as the life within her began to move and kick under her fingertips. Of course, the actual pain of giving birth had not been fun, but all memories of that vanished when Rhonnon handed the warm, squirming bundle to her and asked what she was going to name her daughter.

  “Cyri.”

  Feywn didn’t like the name and tried to get her to change it to something that sounded more elevated and fitting for a priestess destined to be her own daughter’s chief assistant. But in those first wonder-filled moments when Annwr held her baby cradled in her arms, Cyri had looked up at her and said “Cu-Ree.” Even though no one else heard, or believed her when she told them, Annwr was convinced that Cyri had picked her own name, and she refused to give it up for all of Feywn’s badgering.

  Keeping the promise she’d made to Rhonnon, Annwr returned to her training after giving birth, but she spent every spare moment with Cyri and the other four girls—Gwennefor’s pretty, dark-haired daughter, Caldora’s lively twins, so much like each other that even their mother couldn’t tell them apart, and Feywn’s daughter, Arianna, who was red-haired like Cyri and just six months older, so the two of them might have been taken from a distance for a second set of twins.

  Not that Annwr would ever mistake her own daughter for any other child!

  Even covered in mud and, as often as not, with her finger stuck up her nose, Cyri had always seemed to have a special radiance about her, and it had puzzled Annwr that no one else saw it as clearly as she did. But then none of the other girls got the same attention as Feywn’s daughter. Not an hour went by that some servant or priest wasn’t saying how wonderful Arianna was, praising her emerald-green eyes (and Cyri’s were what? Blue? Brown?), her spiraling crown of vibrant red hair (and Cyri’s wasn’t just as red and just as curly?), or her flawless skin (as if there was something wrong with a few freckles!).

  The sociable chortling of the geese outside shifted briefly into a squabble over some left-over wad of bread crusts and just as quickly fell back to friendly chatter.

  Although she was not a woman given to fanciful imaginings, Annwr began to feel like the room was growing misty, its walls sprouting branches and leaves to become a ring of living trees and the bare floorboards turning into a carpet of grass sprinkled with summer flowers. It was as if, in her impatient pacing, her feet had carried her back to Llwddawanden and back in time to the day she’d taken Cyri and the other little girls to play in th
e meadow above the shrine. There, holding Cyri’s hand on one side and Arianna’s on the other, she’d led them dancing around in a circle, the five girls calling out “Faster! Faster!” until they all fell laughing to the ground. Once they’d caught their breath, the children had gotten up and run off to a new game, while she’d sat there, a fresh breeze rustling her hair, the sun warm on her cheeks. As she watched her daughter playing the games she’d played as a child—singing made-up songs at make-believe stone altars and picking flowers to weave into solstice crowns—she’d thought that nothing could add to her happiness. And then Cyri had broken away from the others and come running back, her face glowing with love and her arms outstretched, holding a battered cluster of flowers in each of her chubby little hands.

  The bliss of that moment was shattered when Arianna came tearing after Cyri, screaming, “She picked my flower! Mine! I want it!”—and their nursemaid had actually tried to pluck that exact blossom out of Cyri’s hands, scattering the rest in a vain attempt to mollify Arianna, who’d just screeched louder, “No, not that one! Not that one! Not that one—”

  In the pervasive web of gossip that ran from the lowest servant’s closet to the highest chambers of the elite council of Druid elders, nothing that Arianna did went unremarked, and that very night at supper, Ossiam, groveling toady that he was, had gushed on and on how Arianna’s “vibrant moods moved from joyous happiness to magnificent rage and back again as the sky filled with storm clouds and parted to let the radiance of the sun shine through”—making it sound as though there were something miraculous about a spoiled child having a tantrum.

  Chapter 8

  Annwr Makes Up Her Mind

  Coming to an abrupt halt, Annwr stood staring at the chair where Caelym had sat, spouting off about mystic visions and golden harps. She’d been so impatient with his posturing, innuendoes, and meaningful looks that she’d hardly paid attention when he said that Cyri “stands at Feywn’s right side.” Her right side! Where her presumptive heir would stand!