The Oath

by A. M. Linden

  She started to urge him to go back into Saint Wilfhilda’s shrine—but then realized that having him in the bushes meant that she could get on with the spring planting while she worked up her courage to ask him to go away.

  Painfully shy and socially awkward, Aleswina was not a skilled speaker by any stretch of the imagination. Now that she had to ask for the thing she wanted most in the world, she didn’t know what to say.

  The little she knew about Druid customs had mostly been gleaned from the particular snorting sound Anna made—gritting her teeth and blowing sharply through her lips and her nose at the same time—whenever Aleswina tried to explain what Christians were supposed to do. This meant that practically none of the things she knew about Christian priests would help her talk to a Druid one.

  At a loss to know how to begin, she picked up her trowel and started to set in her first row of bean sprouts.

  It was Caelym who opened the conversation, murmuring, “Tell me about this fine garden that looks so much like Annwr’s, has it been with her skill and labor that it grows so well?”

  Asked for the first time in her life about the only two things that mattered to her—her plants and Anna—Aleswina began to talk, faltering at first but then with increasing ease and animation, telling him all about what Anna had showed her and taught her and how they’d planted and weeded and gathered the harvest together. Taking Caelym’s nods and hums for reassurance that once he understood how much Anna meant to her everything would be all right, she went on, explaining that before she’d come to the Abbey, she and Anna had lived together in her nursery where Anna had taken care of her and told her stories and rocked her to sleep when she had bad dreams. Caught up in her happy memories, Aleswina didn’t notice that Caelym’s murmurs were changing tone or that his expression was growing dark.

  In the chaotic aftermath of Rhedwyn’s defeat, Caelym was sent back to the shrine’s nursery—his defiant protests that he wasn’t a baby overcome by Herrwn telling him that he was not being sent there because he was a baby but because he was grown-up enough to help take care of the little children. Once he understood how important that was, he threw himself into the task.

  Almost the first thing he did was to find Annwr’s orphaned daughter, Cyri, who’d wandered off from the others and gotten lost. Although seven years apart in age and only distantly related by blood, the two developed a close bond, and Caelym’s affection for Cyri remained, in its own way, as strong as his love for Feywn.

  Once, when they were both still children, Cyri asked Caelym to tell her what her mother looked like. Caelym didn’t remember, and he blamed himself that he could not meet this forlorn request. But, he now thought—glowering at Aleswina—it was not his fault that Cyri didn’t know what her mother looked like!

  As Aleswina prattled on, the logical train of Caelym’s planned argument was lost in his smoldering indignation over the injustice that, during all those years, this simpering Saxon girl had received the loving care that Annwr should have been giving her own child.

  Finally, pausing to take a breath after having revealed far more about herself to Caelym than she had to the Christian priest who’d been taking her confessions for the past seven years, Aleswina was about to make her plea—only Caelym spoke first, in a soft, hypnotic voice, repeating back the essence of what Aleswina had just said but turning it to his own purpose and launching his challenge.

  “But have you never wondered whether somewhere Annwr might have kin who were longing and weeping for her?”

  Lulled into a more honest reply than she might have given otherwise, Aleswina snapped back that those kin could not love or care for Anna as much as she did, or they would have defended her better and not let her be taken away from them in the first place.

  “So then you have no pity in your heart for Annwr’s own little girl, left alone and crying for her mother?”

  Instead of answering, Aleswina stared dumbly at Caelym, her mouth opening and closing like a fish caught and floundering on the riverbank. For all her fears of anything that might take Anna away, the possibility of Anna’s having another child had simply never occurred to her.

  She sank to the ground, covering her face with her hands, feeling that unknown child’s pain as if it were her own.

  Aleswina’s muffled sobs went on long enough for Caelym to realize the debate was over and that he had won it with no real effort at all. Oddly, this added to his irritation with her. Had she at least put up a fight, he could have felt it a greater triumph than just making a foolish, simple-minded girl cry. But glorious or not, it was still a victory, and he meant to have it declared.

  “So say now whether you will keep Annwr a slave to do your work for you or set her free to take her own child up in her arms again after keeping them apart these many years!”

  “Anna’s not a slave, she’s . . .” But even if Aleswina had been able to control her quivering voice, she would not have had any word for what Anna was to her.

  “Free!” Caelym filled in the word he wanted, adding, “I will go now and tell her and—”

  “No! You can’t! Not yet! It’s too dangerous! The soldiers are still out there! You must wait until they’re gone, or—or—at least until it’s dark.”

  Realizing that she was right about the risks of leaving in the daylight, Caelym assumed the gracious demeanor of a magnanimous victor and agreed to wait until nightfall. Had she responded in kind—bowed her head in dignified defeat and acknowledged that his was the more powerful claim—he would have reached out to take her hands and thank her for saving his life, but she turned her back on him and walked off without saying a word. After the gate closed behind her, he slipped back into the underground chamber where he gathered his bag and Annwr’s basket and set them just inside of the entryway. With things in readiness, he returned to the bushes and stretched out to nap in the sunlight that filtered through the leaves, getting what rest he could for the coming night’s travel.

  Chapter 18

  The Vision

  Even by her own exacting standards, the abbess had had a busy and productive morning. Up before the sunrise service, she’d finished her report to the bishop. By the second prayers of the day, she’d reviewed the contract committing Aleswina to the convent, written a letter to the abbey’s visiting priest, letting him know he was needed as soon as possible to conduct the mass celebrating Aleswina’s marriage to Christ, and composed the noontime sermon.

  She was more than halfway through revising the Bible readings and commentaries for the coming week when a messenger arrived from the captain of the king’s guard announcing that the sorcerer was driven off, and they were on their way back to Gothroc to report the mission’s success to the king. She’d given him her thanks and blessing and was back at work before the man finished bowing, crossing himself, and backing out the door.

  With the roads safe to travel, she sent Sister Oslynne, the one skilled rider among the younger nuns, to deliver Father Wulfric’s summons by the fastest horse in the convent’s stable. That done, Hildegarth returned to her plans for Aleswina’s ordination, selecting the passages she liked best from Psalms of Solomon and the Book of Ecclesiastes and drafting both her own and Father Wulfric’s sermons. When the bells rang for the noon prayers, she was checking the inventory of white linen.

  Although Hildegarth made the decisions about the specific readings, prayers, and hymns in each of the chapel services, she followed Saint Edeth’s ordering of the themes, focusing on Christ’s birth at sunrise, His miracles at midmorning, His trials in the wilderness at noon, His betrayal and crucifixion in the midafternoon, and His resurrection at sunset. That day, she’d drawn heavily from Luke and Matthew, thinking that the accordance and consistency of their accounts would have a steadying effect after the worries of the past week.

  Kneeling in the dark chapel, only half-listening to the Lord arguing with Satan, Aleswina fought back the tears that threatened to flow at the thought of Anna leaving with Caelym that night—never to be see
n again in this life.

  Or the next.

  Aleswina always repeated everything she learned in her religious lessons to Anna. When she told her that you had to be Christian to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, Anna had made her snorting noise and muttered, “There’ll be nobody inviting any dead Christians into the Other World either, and they can just go to their heaven and see if anyone misses them.” At the time, Aleswina pleaded that she didn’t want to be Christian and begged Anna to promise that she could come into the Other World too, but Annwr only said that she was too young to be worried about dying and that heaven was probably a very nice place—adding “for Christians” under her breath.

  So once Anna left with Caelym, Aleswina would never see her again. She knew that. Now she only wished—desperately—to see Anna just once more before losing her forever.

  “Just once more . . . Just once more . . .” turned into a throbbing drone in her mind as the service ended, and she walked in line out of the chapel and around the edge of the courtyard to the dining hall.

  The midday meal at the Abbey of Saint Edeth the Enduring was both the largest and the longest meal of the day. This one seemed as if it was never going to end. After the abbess announced that the king’s guards had driven the sorcerer off (knowing just how wrong the abbess was about that, Aleswina had to stop herself from snorting the way Anna did), the prioress said a grace thanking the Lord for everything He’d ever done. Later, Aleswina wouldn’t remember what was in her bowl that day—only that it tasted like sawdust mixed with mud. She choked down her last mouthful, folded her hands, and turned her head with the others to listen as the abbess began her sermon, while “Just once more . . . Just once more . . .” kept humming in her ears.

  Hildegarth ended her sermon with the twenty-eighth verse of the eighth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans. A tall, solidly built woman, she stood erect at the head of the long, rough-cut dining table. Forty-six nuns and novices, twenty-three on each side of the table, looked reverently up at her. She looked straight at Aleswina, halfway down on the right-hand side, and might have been speaking only to her as she declared, “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to His purpose.”

  There was rumor, widespread among the younger nuns and novices, that the abbess could see people’s thoughts just by looking into their eyes. Caught in the Abbess’s direct gaze, Aleswina immediately stopped thinking about Anna and filled her mind with Christian thoughts, moving her lips to silently repeat what the abbess was saying—and was relieved beyond words to see the abbess smile and nod before beginning the day’s benedictions.

  By the time the Abbess began the list of afternoon duties, Aleswina’s heart had slowed down from a frenzied racing gallop to a brisk, steady trot. She expected to hear that she was supposed to go to work in the garden, just like every day except in the dead of winter or when it was pouring rain, only the abbess skipped over her and went on with all the other assignments.

  Aleswina stayed, sitting in her place, as, one after the other, nuns and novices rose and went to their assignments. When she was the only one left, the abbess beckoned to her without speaking and walked out of the dining hall without looking back. Aleswina followed, her fears rising as she followed the abbess from the dining hall to the abbess’s private chambers.

  The abbess’s chambers were, like the abbess herself, large and well-organized. What in Saint Edeth’s time had been an oversized hut that served as chapel, dining hall, and common living quarters for the saint and her handful of followers had long since been changed as the convent grew up around it. Once a single room with a rough stone hearth in front of a drafty alcove where wood was piled, it had become the “abbess’s chambers” before Hildegarth had ever arrived.

  The original doors were still in place: one opened off the hall that led to the dormitories and one, on the opposite wall, opened into the central courtyard. A quarter of the space was walled off to be the abbess’s bedroom and another section adjacent to the hall door had been made into a small antechamber, leaving the remainder of the room open and yet so clearly divided by function that there was no mistaking where the abbess worked and where she prayed. The work space, dominated by a heavy oak writing table and edged with shelves of manuscripts and ledgers, was on the side of the room closest to the bedroom, while the alcove in the far corner that had once been a woodshed was the room’s centerpiece—the abbess’s private shrine and the repository for the relics too fragile to keep in the chapel. The stone hearth had long since been replaced by a wrought-iron brazier and the walls that weren’t draped with tapestries of the Last Supper, the Ascension, or Christ on the Cross were hung with paintings of the saints and apostles.

  Closing the door behind them, the abbess motioned for Aleswina to go ahead of her into the room, then brushed past her and turned around so that Aleswina was trapped between the abbess’s desk and the abbess herself.

  “I think you know why I have called you here!”

  Now certain she was caught but determined not to betray Anna even if she was tortured, Aleswina began, “I, I—” but could go no further.

  “I know what you are thinking!”

  A shiver of pure terror raced up and down Aleswina’s spine.

  “You think you are ready to take your final vows!”

  Nothing could have been further from Aleswina’s mind. She stammered, “M-my final vows?” Then, realizing that taking her final vows would be far better than being burned at the stake, she said, “Yes, my final vows!” and added, in what for her was a resolute voice, “I think I’m ready to take my final vows!”

  Here an abbess with less strength of character might have left the question of what Durthena may or may not have seen in the garden the night before unasked. Hildegarth, however, stiffened her back and said, “But before we go on, I must ask you something and you must tell me the truth!”

  The truth was, for Aleswina, whatever she had to say to keep from giving herself and Anna away, and she answered in a louder, firmer tone of voice than she’d ever used before, “I will tell the truth!”

  “I have been told that you were in the garden last night without permission. If this is so, you must tell me what you were doing there.”

  Unable to meet Hildegarth’s piercing stare, Aleswina shifted her eyes to a painting on the wall behind the abbess that showed Saint Edeth standing beside the garden well—a golden halo around her head and her hands lifted up with a fountain of water rising from each of her palms. The saint’s eyes were gentle and loving and kind, like Anna’s, and Aleswina found herself speaking without any effort at all.

  “I had a dream that Saint Edeth came to me, called my name, and told me to come with her, and even though I woke up I could still see her and hear her so I followed her out into the garden, where she rose into the air above the well and”—thinking quickly about what anyone might have seen her doing, Aleswina gripped her cross with her—her hands!—and she went on as if she’d only paused to take a breath—“she said that I must wash my hands in the water from the well . . .” She faltered again, trying to think of some reason to wash her hands other than having to clean off the blood and pus from Caelym’s wound; then, in a flash of inspiration, she continued in an almost steady voice, “to be ready to take my final vows.”

  “And I’ve heard that your hair was uncovered. Where was your wimple?”

  This time, Aleswina didn’t even hesitate. “Saint Edeth told me that I must take it off and wash it with holy water from the well too, and that this anointed veil was the one I must wear forever after.”

  Aleswina inadvertently raised her hand to touch the cloth, hoping against hope that the abbess wouldn’t ask why it wasn’t even damp.

  It was this simple, unaffected gesture, along with the softly awed and quivering tone of Aleswina’s voice in narrating what was surely an authentic moment of conversion—and maybe even a minor miracle—that relieved the last of Hildegarth’s concerns
. Breathing an almost audible sigh of relief, she was ready to declare the matter settled and move on to the practical things that needed to be done.

  “That is wonderful. Now, then, there is only the matter of your serving woman. Once you have taken your vows, you can have no ties at all outside of this house. I will make the arrangements to send her back to the palace today to take up other duties there.”

  “No!” Aleswina swallowed hard. “Saint Edeth has already spoken to me about that, saying that I must set her free”—now came another flash of inspiration— “and she told me I must do this myself. So, with your permission and your blessing, I will go and tell her.”

  “I will send for Prioress Udella, and she will go with you—”

  “No! Saint Edeth said I must go alone!”

  The last thing that Hildegarth wanted was to let Aleswina go out of the convent alone—especially not to see her sour-faced Celt servant. While she stopped short of calling the village midwife a witch, the abbess suspected the woman had a dark, unhealthy hold over Aleswina and that this was the real reason the novice had found one excuse after another to put off her final vows.

  The abbess wavered, weighing the risks. She could, of course, insist that the ever-reliable Udella go along to make sure that Aleswina returned safely. But might she be doing more harm than good? Planting the seeds of her own doubt in the girl’s soul and undermining her newfound faith? Beyond that, Hildegarth was astute enough to know that if Aleswina was to truly break free of her servant’s grasp, she must do it on her own—so she set her qualms aside and gave her consent.