The Oath

by A. M. Linden

  Caelym was dozing off on the far side of the campfire. A week’s growth of beard hid his uncanny resemblance to Rhedwyn, so he now seemed to be nothing more than a stray vagabond worn out from his wandering. There was something shadowy about him, something elusive about how he changed the subject anytime she mentioned Llwddawanden.

  In their rush to escape, she hadn’t questioned his insistence on taking the river, but shouldn’t they have left it to start the journey back up into the mountains once they were safely past the village? Even as enamored as Caelym was with riding the rapids, it didn’t make sense that he would just keep rowing on in the wrong direction without thought to how far out of the way the river was taking them.

  There was something he wasn’t telling her.

  Keeping her voice low so she didn’t wake Aleswina, she called to him, only to have him grunt and mumble, turn over, and pull his cloak up around his ears.

  “Caelym,” she hissed louder. “Caelym! Wake up and answer me! I want to know where we’re going—and don’t tell me Llwddawanden, because we both know this river isn’t running uphill!”

  Oddly, the idea of the river running uphill seemed perfectly reasonable for a moment, and Caelym was on the verge of arguing that it might if Annwr would just stop saying it couldn’t. Fortunately, he woke up completely before he’d managed to organize that befuddled thought into a sentence.

  He pushed himself up to sitting and returned her glare with one of his own. “We are going to find her”—he shifted his eyes to Aleswina just long enough to emphasize which “her” he was talking about—“another convent! Then we will speak of where to go next.”

  “Don’t shout! She’s sleeping!”

  He hadn’t shouted, just spoken in a firm, resolute voice—and more distinctly than most would be able to manage after three cups of Annwr’s potent ale—so there was no need for her to chastise him when he was only answering the question she’d asked. After drawing in a breath and exhaling pointedly, Caelym repeated himself in a chirpy little voice that was, he thought, quite a clever imitation of Annwr talking to Aleswina.

  “We are going to find her another nice convent where she can stay all nice and warm with all the other nice little Christian priestesses!”

  Annwr, of course, failed to appreciate his humor.

  “Then we don’t need to go any farther, because we not leaving her in any convent, we’re taking her with us back to Llwddawanden!”

  “We’re not going—”

  One of the many irritating things about Annwr was how she kept harping on Llwddawanden. Without the long years he’d spent sitting at the feet of three great Druids, Caelym might have blurted out that they weren’t going back to Llwddawanden then or ever, but with their masterful training in the art of telling the truth without telling the whole truth he didn’t hesitate for more than the time it took to clear his throat to shift to saying, “to take her to Llwddawanden! We’re going to take her to a convent to be with others of her kind!”

  “Her kind? If by that you mean others who are sweet and gentle and loving, then I hope there will be some of her kind in Llwddawanden!”

  “I mean her Saxon, Christian kind!”

  “She does not care about being Christian or Saxon. She only cares that she is with me, and I will not leave her!”

  “She may not care about being Christian or Saxon, but that is what she is! And someday she will care, and she will look at you and see you are her enemy, and she will forget all you have done for her, and she will betray you and all those you hold dear.”

  “I have raised this girl as my own daughter! She loves me and would never betray us.”

  Annwr was glowering at Caelym as she spoke, and she would have paid no attention to his rebuttal if it had not been for the sudden look of misery and grief—too raw to be feigned—that passed over his face in the moment before he answered her.

  “I do not know what you have experienced in your years away from us, Annwr, but if you still believe that the love and care you give to another can protect against betrayal, then you have not yet learned all there is to know in this life.”

  Annwr, quite unfairly, evaded what Caelym considered to be an irrefutable assertion by listing off in entirely unnecessary detail the string of good deeds Aleswina had done for him— risking torture and death to save him from her fellow Saxons, hiding him, feeding him, nursing him back to health, and helping him escape his pursuers a second time.

  The unspoken accusation of ingratitude hovered in the air between them and for a moment he almost wavered—but only for a moment. Then, in his mind’s eye, he saw himself standing before Feywn and the high council, trying to explain how, along with Annwr, Arddwn, and Lliem, he’d also brought with him a Saxon Christian princess—and not just any Saxon Christian princess but the daughter of the king against whom, for good and valid reasons, he had sworn eternal vengeance. It was an image that strengthened his resolve and put iron into his response.

  “I will compose a song commemorating her noble deeds— ending it with how she fled the lustful grasp of her evil cousin to find safety and happiness in the finest convent in Atheldom!”

  Chapter 27

  Who Said It Was Safe?

  The name of their next destination slipped out without Caelym meaning it to, but as Annwr repeated “Atheldom!” after him, he realized that this was the answer to the problem of what to do with Aleswina and nodded vigorously.

  “So you have heard of it, then, and must know that it is the one place below the mountains where Christians live alongside our folk, each conducting their own rites and leaving the other in peace.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “One in whom we can trust absolutely and completely.”

  “Well, he in whom you trust absolutely is wrong! There have been Christian priests hard at work in that kingdom and those left unburned all swear that they are Christians and are ready to turn over their neighbors or their parents in exchange for themselves.”

  Looking at Caelym as if it were he and not Aleswina who was the simple-minded fool, Annwr brushed aside his protests, saying, “If you’d told me where we were going in the first place, I could have saved us all this trip. And now we may as well get some rest, because we’ll have a long climb back the way we came.”

  Caelym, however, stayed sitting up, gaping at her. “You must be mistaken! He said it was safe . . .”

  “Who said it was safe?”

  “Benyon.”

  “Benyon? The priest’s servant?” Annwr frowned. The only memory she could dredge up on hearing the name was the vague recollection of a huffing, middle-aged man carrying an armload of the priest’s robes for the women servants to wash.

  “The chief of the men’s servants,” Caelym thrust out his chin, “trusted not only with cleaning the quarters of the priests but also with overseeing the care of the sacred vessels and the distribution of goods from the storage chambers, an excellent and loyal servant who has spent his life in our shrine and whose devotion to us is beyond question!”

  “And how would a servant who spent his life in the shrine know about the world outside of Llwddawanden?”

  “He has kin in the outside world, kin who live in Atheldom and who know more about it than—”

  “A priestess of the shrine of the Great Mother Goddess, sister to the chief priestess who is the living embodiment of the spirit of the eternal goddess herself?”

  Annwr’s eyes glinted dangerously, and Caelym chose his next words with care.

  “I do not say that any kinsmen of a common servant, even one so esteemed as Benyon, are as wise and all-knowing as you, only that they assured him it would be safe there for him to carry out the important mission we gave him.”

  “And what mission was that?”

  “I will tell you that after we have found her a convent!”

  “You will tell me now,” Annwr snapped, “or I’ll not take one more step on this mad quest of yours!”

  Caelym hesitated, then
decided that there was no way other than telling Annwr the truth.

  “His mission was to go to Atheldom disguised as a sheep-herder, taking Feywn’s sons with him to foster them there so that they would learn to speak English well enough to pass among our enemies undetected. It has been two years since they left and we had expected them to return by now, as both boys are quick at learning, and it is past time for the older one to begin his training in recitation, and . . .”

  Once he started talking about them, memories of Arddwn and Lliem flooded Caelym’s mind. He would have gone on pouring out his longing to have them back in his arms again, only Annwr broke in.

  “Now I know you are mad! Feywn has no sons. She had only the one daughter! I was at her side when Rhedwyn’s body was carried in and laid at her feet, holding her back from slaying herself in her grief! She swore to me and to all the world that she would never love any other but would be true to his memory until the end of time itself. If I had been gone from Llwddawanden a hundred years, still I would know my sister and know she meant it.”

  “You may know your sister, Annwr, but you must also know that beyond love and beyond grief, there is need. If we are to go on, there must be children, and those children must be fathered. Nine years ago, Feywn took a second consort, and she now has two sons—Arddwn, who is eight, and Lliem, who is five.”

  Taken back by this unexpected news, Annwr spoke without thinking, “Only sons then? No other daughters?”

  “There was a baby girl,” Caelym answered, “born as beautiful as a fairy’s child, but she lived only long enough to break the hearts of those who beheld her, opening her eyes but once before returning to the Otherworld.”

  Two dead daughters and too old to chance another pregnancy, it was no wonder Feywn wanted Cyri for her own, but Annwr did not say this out loud; instead, she changed the subject, saying as much to herself as to Caelym, “And who was it that climbed into the bed Rhedwyn left empty?”

  There were three flat stones near where Annwr was sitting. She reached over and set them up in a row as she thought about the priests in the highest ranks of their order—all of them had seemed ancient to her fifteen years before, and not one of them came close to having Rhedwyn’s charisma, charm, and otherworldly good looks. Tapping her finger from the first stone to second to the third and back again, she muttered, “I pity the man who dared, for the task he’d have trying to take Rhedwyn’s place.”

  “A most difficult task indeed, but not without some small reward.”

  There was no mistaking the smugness in Caelym’s tone, or the effort it took him to keep from smirking.

  “No, Caelym, not you! You are too young! You would have been nothing more than a boy then!”

  Suddenly serious, almost regal, he answered as if he were speaking out before the high council. “I was seventeen when Feywn chose me for her consort, eighteen when my first son was born, and nineteen when I buried my daughter. Maybe I started this as a boy, yet I became a man when it was required.”

  There was nothing to say to that except, “I’m sorry to have spoken as I did—and suppose I can see how it could be.” Annwr spoke the last part of this quietly, intending the words for herself alone.

  Caelym gave her a coy smile. “You would not be the first to think that, having lost the greater father, Feywn might have settled for the lesser son.”

  “Hush, Caelym. You were conceived at the Sacred Summer Solstice Ceremony and know full well that the mortal man who danced with your mother that night was but a vessel for the spirit of the Sun God!”

  “Ah, but from what I have heard, that vessel had an uncanny resemblance to Feywn’s beloved Rhedwyn, even as I do myself.” Here, to Annwr’s annoyance, he winked at her, and—as if reading her thoughts—added, “A resemblance that might explain why Feywn chose me as soon as I was grown enough to take my place at her side.”

  “Being born to Caelendra, forever mourned chief priestess and past embodiment of the Great Mother Goddess, would be reason enough for that.”

  Annwr’s voice did not hold much conviction when she said this and Caelym did not answer. Instead, he returned to his demand that they leave Aleswina in the first convent they could find.

  Caught up in their argument, neither Annwr nor Caelym noticed the flickering movement behind Aleswina’s closed eyelids, or how the rate of her breathing changed depending on which of them was speaking and what was said.

  Chapter 28

  The Seed Of Mortal Sin

  The surge of desperate courage that carried Aleswina out of the convent had ebbed away as she stumbled along the stream clinging to Anna’s hand. With her feet going numb in the water and the impenetrable blackness of the forest all around her, she’d felt she was walking into the worst of her childhood nightmares.

  Still, with Anna holding her up and urging her on, she’d managed to make it to the boathouse—so cold she couldn’t stop shivering and so exhausted she could barely stay upright even with Anna’s arms around her.

  The soft splash of Caelym climbing out of the water, the creaking of planks under his feet, and the scraping of the boat against the dock as he pulled it back with him had all seemed faint and far away, not sounds that had anything to do with her. But when, with no warning, he’d pulled her away from Anna and into the boat, she’d panicked, and her panic had turned to hysteria as her struggles to break loose and get back to Anna sent the boat rocking and reeling. Caelym was bigger than she was, and stronger, but it was his angry voice ordering her to be quiet that had overcome her spasm of resistance.

  “No matter what happens, you must not speak a single word, not a peep, not a whisper, until I say so.”

  All the way down the river, those words raced in circles inside her head, changing into three voices—one hard and commanding, one high and shrill, one soft and urgent—until Anna lifted her up out of the boat and began to croon to her in the soothing voice that had woken her up from her nightmares when she was little.

  Safe inside their new shelter, finally warm again, she was on the verge of being lulled to sleep by the soft back and forth of Celtic speech between Anna and Caelym when the sounds that she remembered from earliest childhood, before Anna learned English, separated into words and phrases, and Aleswina realized that they were talking about her.

  Maintaining peaceful cohabitation within the close confines of the convent had, in Hildegarth’s view, required keeping gossip to a minimum. The abbess’s conviction about this had led to frequent, vehement admonitions against the relatively minor sin of eavesdropping. After seven years of hearing the abbess’s dire warnings that listening slyly to what others are saying was “the seed of mortal sin and must be rigorously confessed before it weakens your soul and invites the devil in,” Aleswina knew that she should sit up and tell Anna she understood what they were saying.

  But Caelym had ordered her not to speak—and not to move, either! So it was his fault, really, that she kept lying there as still as if she were dead even when he told Annwr, “If what you say about Atheldom is true, there is certain to be a convent there where she, at least, will be safe, while Benyon and the boys are in the gravest danger and must be rescued without further delay.”

  She held her breath and didn’t let it out until Annwr answered, “And have you forgotten that the king’s guards are pursuing her? What if word of her arrival in that convent is sent back to Derthwald?” Her breathing, along with the beat of her heart, sped up when Caelym said, meanly, “There is little need to worry about that, for by the time any message from Atheldom reaches the king’s ears, his passion for her will have cooled and been forgotten in the arms of some woman more ready to welcome his affection.” Both raced faster when Annwr said, “He will pursue her to her grave! And no Saxon convent is safe from him. We must at least take her to some abbey in Celtic lands where she will safe,” and faster yet when Caelym said, “There is no time for that! I need to save my sons, and you need to return to your daughter—your real daughter!”

 
Spoken openly for the first time, Caelym’s accusation that she favored Aleswina over Cyri was a bitter blow, and it took Annwr several outraged moments to sort through the many answers she might make to it.

  Before she was able to pick the most scathing, Caelym said in a soft, sad voice, accompanied by a dark, reproachful gaze, “You have not asked for any news of Cyri. Is that because you’ve no wish to hear about her?”

  Knowing Caelym was doing what Druid priests always did—turning the debate from one he was losing to one he could win—Annwr snapped, “No more wish than I have to be taking another breath!” before she gave in.

  “Well then, tell me! What training did she choose? Does she have a consort? Is she happy?”

  “No consort yet, as there are no priests of her age and rank that are fully trained and ready for that honor. And as for her training, she is, like you, a skilled midwife, but even as she was training in the birthing chambers, she determined that she would be a physician and a bard as well.”

  While Annwr was sputtering that this was priest’s work and how dare they allow her daughter to clutter her mind with it and was this some stupid idea of Olyrrwd’s and Herrwn’s, Caelym swept on.

  “I had just finished my own training as a physician, with the final test of Olyrrwd’s last illness, one that I correctly named but could not cure, so Cyri’s training in this was given to me, while Herrwn agreed to teach her to recite our nine great sagas. From then on, he and I have been two teachers in competition for a single student. It was to become an unending rivalry between us, with me coaxing Cyri away from Herrwn’s feet to learn the proper treatment of childhood fevers and him luring her back with his wondrous tales from ancient times. All the while, she would take each lesson she was given and learn it, asking no more reward than that she be given another. She is now a skilled healer in both women and men’s lore and a stirring bard in her own right. As to whether she is happy or not, it is not for me to say but for you to ask her if you decide that your real daughter matters to you as much as a Saxon’s spawn!”