by A. M. Linden
Seeing Aleswina beam with pride at Caelym’s flattery, Annwr thought again how like Rhedwyn he was. She gave a snort, shook her head, and grumbled, “It may be days before we find a village with a market. What about tonight? Would you leave these poor babies shivering with no more than rags to wear and their little feet bare and bruised?”
But before she could finish saying—again—that they needed the supplies she had in her packs, Arddwn stamped one of his bare and bruised feet and yelled, “I’m not a baby! Lliem’s a baby!”
Speaking his first words since his rescue, Lliem shouted back, “I am not a baby!”
“You are too!” Arddwn retorted. “You’re always cold! I never am!”
“You are too cold!” Lliem sputtered. “You said so yesterday! And you were crying!”
From there the brothers’ exchange spiraled, Arddwn screeching, “I never cry! You’re the one who was crying!” and Lliem bawling, “I was not!”
“You were too! See, Ta?” Arddwn stamped his foot again for emphasis as he pointed to the tears that were beginning to spill down Lliem’s cheeks. “I told you he’s a stupid, crying baby!”
“I am not!”
“You are too!”
“Am not!”
“Are too!”
Having grown soft from fifteen years with the unnaturally well-behaved and always amenable Aleswina, Annwr was at a loss to stop the squabble she’d inadvertently set off. Caelym, however, had spent a good part of those same years taking care of his younger cousins and saw the row between Arddwn and Lliem as a mere bit of friendly banter compared with the epic five-way quarrels he’d had to referee on a regular basis. Taking advantage of a moment when Arddwn was drawing his breath and Lliem was wiping his eyes, he cut their spat short.
“Now hush, you both! I will not hear such discord between my two brave and grown-up sons who have stood together against a cruel foe and will always be each other’s staunchest ally!
“And,” he added, to Annwr’s surprise, “if Annwr, who is your mother’s beloved sister, says that you must have warm clothes to wear and shoes for your feet, then that is how it must be!”
While Arddwn and Lliem were trying to work out whether they’d just been praised or admonished, Caelym got to his feet, took off his tunic and slipped it over Arddwn’s head. Following suit, Aleswina put the tunic she’d been wearing on Lliem, and belted it so it wouldn’t trip him.
“There,” said Caelym, “now you both have a warm garment, and soon you will have new shoes for your feet. So, sit you down here.”
As he spoke, Caelym pointed to a nearby log. Arddwn vaulted into place. Lliem tugged on Aleswina’s hand, and she led him over to sit next to his brother. The two boys leaned forward to see what Caelym would pull out of his pack next. Their faces fell when he held up a single rolled-up piece of leather.
“This is not an ordinary piece of leather, my sons.” Caelym declared as if they’d spoken their disappointment out loud. “See,” he unrolled the sheet revealing a smooth surface embossed with cryptic figures, “it is inscribed with sacred symbols to defend the healing instruments that I lay upon them from the demons of fevers and festering. Now these same emblems will protect your feet from blisters on the long journey ahead.”
“But how?” Arddwn asked.
“I will show you.” Caelym reached back into his satchel, got his healer’s kit, and took out a knife, a needle, a spool of suturing thread and the pouch of sheep’s wool he kept for sopping up the ooze from draining lesions. He sliced off four thin strips from the edge of the sheet and cut the remaining piece into two larger and two smaller parts. Then, taking up each of the boys’ feet in turn, he fitted and folded the leather into booties, cushioned the bottoms with a layer of wool and sewed up the sides. Finally, he punched holes for the laces, threaded them through, and tied them in neat bows at the top.
Sewing was not a talent Annwr would have credited Caelym with, but she had to give a grudging nod as he finished and stood up, saying, “And there you have your shoes!”
Arddwn leaped off the log and shouted, “Now I can really run!” before dashing up the side of the bank and jumping down, landing with a resounding thud and a grin on his face. Lliem stayed where he was, holding his feet out straight in front of him and looking wide-eyed at them. The boots were the first thing he ever remembered having that was new and just for him, and he didn’t want to get them dirty, so he drew his knees up and raised his arms to Aleswina, silently pleading for her to pick him up.
She did, and, with the sun setting and Annwr resigned to abandoning their packs, the small group was ready to go.
Chapter 45
Follow Me
It was the first part of their path that worried Caelym the most. Once they got back to the forest, they just needed to follow the river as far as the start of canyons and, from there, cross over a few mountain ridges to find the place marked on Herrwn’s map by the sleeping dragon where Feywn and the rest were waiting—hopefully having found a convent for Aleswina along the way.
But to get to the forest they had to skirt around Welsferth, making their way along patrolled roads and through the farmed lands, and for that they needed the cover of darkness. It was only when the sun was fully set that he picked up the repacked bag and said, with more confidence than he actually felt, “Well, then, it is time to go. Follow me and keep absolutely silent until I say it is safe to speak again!”
Lliem nodded and bit down on his lower lip. Arddwn looked like he was on the verge of saying something, but he caught his father’s stern glance and clamped his teeth together.
With his satchel over his left shoulder and his staff in his right hand, Caelym pushed through the underbrush and started down the road. Arddwn followed after him, and Aleswina, hugging Lliem to her chest, followed Arddwn. Annwr clutched her staff and brought up the rear as they crept along the side of the road in single file, making no more noise than a snake slithering through dry grass.
Counting to himself, Caelym took the third turnoff on the right past the three oak trees. From there they followed a narrow lane that veered northward and away from the village proper, and only once had to duck into the bushes and wait as a trio of men heading home from the Spotted Hound staggered past singing a bawdy song suggesting that the Virgin Mary had been no better than she ought to be. After the raucous (and to Caelym’s highly trained ears, painfully off-key) lyrics faded around a bend, he started on again, leading the group across a footbridge that creaked under their feet and tiptoeing past hedges and gates until they came out through a stand of muttering aspens where the track disappeared into a dark expanse of fields and pastures.
“We must wait here for moonrise.” Annwr’s voice came from behind Caelym, sounding so much like Feywn it took him a moment to gather the courage to stand his ground.
“We will go now, with the darkness blinding our enemy and shielding us from them!”
“So then we will stumble around, blind ourselves, getting lost and going in circles?”
“I have traveled on darker nights than this without getting lost or going in circles!” Before Annwr could make any unkind rejoinder about the night she’d found him wandering wounded and directionless not so long before, Caelym added, “I promised that I would see you safely returned to our people, and I will. You need do no more than follow where I lead!”
With that, Caelym drew in a breath of the brisk night air. Willing himself to become a creature of the wild, untroubled by human qualms and misgivings, he plunged forward, exchanging thought for impulse and deliberation for instinct.
As he picked his path along the crisscrossing trails, Caelym’s senses grew sharper. Peering ahead with narrowed eyes, sniffing the air at each branch in the road, he might have been a wolf stalking its prey, if a wolf could walk upright on two legs. The wind coming from the northwest carried the scent of the forest and drew him unerringly through the web of intertwined cattle tracks to the road that separated the planted fields and grazed pastures
from the edge of the forest, which loomed up on the far side of a flat expanse of low-growing brush.
Out of breath from dashing after him, Annwr gasped, “Wait— we should wait for more light. The moon will be up soon!”
“It will, and that is why we must go now,” Caelym answered in a low growl. “We have just this one meadow to cross to reach the forest, and the path is straight before us, but the grass will give us no cover and it is here above all we must go in the dark.”
Coming back to himself, he was relieved to realize they’d reached the entrance to the trail he’d seen from his vantage point on the ridge top—a narrow track running more or less directly to the forest across what had appeared from that distance to be a broad green field—but was actually a bog known locally as Fernley’s Fen.
PART VI
Fernley’s Fen
If Caelym had been better informed about the annual cycle of pasturing sheep, he would have been more suspicious of any ground that green that early in the year that wasn’t being grazed. As it was, he mistook the marsh for a meadow and assumed the path leading across it was a safe shortcut to the forest.
In the drier months of late summer and early fall, the track through Fernley’s Fen was passable—at least in the daylight—and was a popular route for local men going to the river to fish. Even then, however, they traveled in twos or threes and carried ropes in case any of them made a misstep off the path and into the mire, which had been known to suck a struggling ox down in a matter of minutes. This early in the year, they took the longer path that circled around the west end of the boggy expanse. None of them would have attempted crossing it, as Caelym planned to, in the wettest part of the year and the darkest part of the night.
Caelym, however, was only glad to have just this last bit of what looked like easy terrain between him and the safety of the forest. And as none of the others had any sense of where they were or what might lie ahead of them, they fell back into a line and followed him down the track into the marsh.
Chapter 46
Frogs
Counting on his ears as much as his eyes to guide him through the dark, Caelym started forward. As they made their way along the narrow track, the sounds of domestic life—the lowing of cattle and barking of dogs—dwindled and were replaced by the sounds of owls hooting, nighthawks screeching, and frogs croaking.
A lot of frogs.
Their chorus grew louder and was almost deafening, swelling up on both sides of the path and directly in front of them.
Caelym stopped mid-stride. His staff made a splash as it came down ahead of him and a sucking sound as he stepped back and pulled it out of the mire.
Arddwn, who’d been following on Caelym’s heels, bumped into him.
Aleswina, still carrying Lliem, bumped into Arddwn. Annwr, who’d been hurrying to keep up, bumped into Aleswina.
“What is it?” she hissed and was about to step around to see what the problem was when Caelym hissed back, “Do not move!”
Crushed together, Annwr, Aleswina, and Arddwn stood wobbling in place.
Keeping his weight on his left foot, Caelym slid his right out to the side and felt it hit water almost at once. He eased his foot back, shifted his weight, and slipped his left foot out to the side—water lapped there as close, or closer.
He could already feel himself sinking as the ground beneath him was turning to mush, and water was beginning to creep over the top of his weight-bearing foot.
“What’s wrong, Ta? Why aren’t we going?” His tone wavering between crankiness and apprehension, Arddwn added, “My boots are getting wet!”
Caelym had made it a rule never to lie to his children, but at the moment the only truth that mattered was that they must not panic and flounder in the dark, so he affected a merry tone of voice as he answered, “Nothing is wrong, Arddwn, only now we are going to play a game, and the first part of the game is that we will turn around.”
There was some shuffling and, more worrisome, some squishing sounds, as they did.
Still speaking cheerfully—and quite calmly, given that his right foot was sinking steadily lower, but he didn’t dare shift his weight to his left before he was actually ready to start forward— Caelym said, “Now, then, Aleswina will put Lliem down just in front of her.”
“Who is Aleswina?” Arddwn asked.
“Aleswina is the name we are calling Codric in our game.”
“My boots will get wet!” Lliem whimpered
“My boots are already wet, and they’re getting wetter, Ta!” Arddwn was tired of his little brother getting all the attention.
“I will dry your boots for you after we have played our game, but remember the rule that we all do exactly what I say, and what I say is that Annwr will take Lliem’s hand, and Lliem will take Aleswina’s hand, and Aleswina will take Arddwn’s hand, and Arddwn will take my hand, and we will all hold on and not let go. Have we all taken hands now?”
Four “yeses” came in a single voice.
“That is excellent! Now the last part of our game is that Annwr will pull us back the way we came . . . exactly the way we came, not going off the path even a little bit.”
By then Annwr understood their predicament. She reached back to take hold of Lliem’s wrist and started steadily pacing exactly the way she’d come. Once she started, she didn’t stop. Moving as much by the feel of the brush on either side of her skirt as by the dim sight of the gap they’d come through, she pulled Lliem who pulled Aleswina who pulled Arddwn who pulled Caelym.
Until that moment, Caelym wasn’t sure whether the extra tug would be enough—or if he’d have to let go and order them on without him.
But it was, and with his right foot freed from the swamp’s grasp, he lurched forward and followed the others back to dry ground.
“Is the game over? Do we get a prize?” Arddwn had distant memories of playing games with his father and his cousins, and as he recalled, there were always prizes when they finished.
Annwr—to Caelym’s surprise and gratitude—said nothing about how close he’d come to drowning them all, leaving him to answer Arddwn’s question as he wished.
“This part of the game is over, Arddwn, and the prize is that I will pretend I am a horse and will carry you on my back from here to the forest.”
Forgetting he’d refused to be carried before, Arddwn practically leaped into place and waved triumphantly as Caelym pranced in a circle and neighed.
Lliem looked wide-eyed at their display, then turned his face up to Aleswina. Aleswina turned to Annwr, who helped with lifting him up. Once he was secure, she managed a few awkward hops and even tried to imitate Caelym’s horse noises, making what Caelym would joke later was a “whiney whinny.” Lliem joined in with a gaspy, giggly sound—his first laughter in two years.
Caelym might have made a longer romp of it, only Annwr pointed to the silvery glow that was spreading upward above the eastern horizon. Seeing that, Caelym gave a horse-like shake of his head, declared, “We must ride swiftly now in search of our stable for the night!” and set off down the road.
Chapter 47
Real Horses
The moon was midway up the horizon when they reached the next branch in the trail. The left-hand track—the one that Caelym guessed and hoped would take them around the edge of the marsh and into the forest—dropped abruptly down an incline and into a morass of grass and brush. Again, Annwr had her doubts, wanting to keep to the road they were on, which was admittedly more exposed but was high and dry—and empty, as far as they could see ahead.
The debate between them took place in complete silence. Caelym edged to the left and looking meaningfully toward the silhouette of treetops just visible across the expanse of ferns and gorse, while Annwr lowered her eyebrows and looked down at Caelym’s soggy sandals.
Their stalemate was broken when Lliem whispered, “I hear horses! Real horses!”
Before Arddwn could say that he heard them first, his father had swung him down to the ground, and Ann
wr had grasped hold of his hand and was pulling him after her down the track toward the woods.
Caelym tried to take Lliem off Aleswina’s back but couldn’t break the stranglehold he had around her neck, so the three of them descended the first steep section of the path together, with Caelym gripping his arms around Aleswina to steady her and keep her upright. Once they reached level ground, he let her go, and she raced after Annwr.
On the verge of dashing after them, Caelym stopped. He didn’t have his healer’s bag or his staff and, except for holding onto Arddwn, Annwr had been empty-handed too. He dropped to his belly and wormed his way back up to the road, intent on retrieving the satchel and the staves before the oncoming riders saw them. The sound of the galloping horses grew louder as he got to the top. Pressed flat against the ground, he could feel the pounding of their hooves and knew that any moment they’d come over the rise. The satchel and one of the staves were close enough that he was able to grab them without leaving the cover of the brush. The other pole lay farther off and was practically pointing to the trail’s entrance. He lunged forward, seized the end of it, and scrambled back into the underbrush—pulling the tip out of sight just as the horsemen thundered past.
Still keeping his head down, he tucked his bag under one arm and the staves under the other before scuttling, crab-like, down the slope and across the meadow, not straightening up until he reached the cover of the trees.
“You could have been—” Annwr gasped as she brought Aleswina and the boys out of hiding.
“But I wasn’t!” he handed over her staff and added, “now if you will follow me.” Buoyed with the satisfaction of having successfully dodged disaster, he started jauntily off, leading the way into the forest.
If he’d been alone, Caelym would have walked on through the night, breathing in the scent of pine and reveling in the bright dots of the moonlight that danced along the trail ahead of him. But with the women and children to think of, he had to find a safe place to stop and rest—preferably, a place where he could set a fish trap to catch their breakfast.
