The Oath

by A. M. Linden

  It was still dark when they slipped stealthily out of the inn, Caelym leading the way through back alleys, past shuttered stalls, and across the dark field where they stopped for Lliem to thank his tree and tell it goodbye.

  From there they made their way through steadily steeper pastures.

  By the time it was fully light, they were halfway up the next ridge.

  The boys’ spirits rose along with the sun, and they infected Caelym with their exuberance. As the three of them chased each other up the slope, darting and dashing from one thicket to the next in a high-spirited game of tag, Annwr talked softly to Aleswina, telling her about the king’s lodge and the Abbey of Saint Agned.

  Aleswina’s eyes filled with tears as she whispered, “Will you . . .” choking on the lump in her throat before she could finish—come to visit me?

  Answering the question she thought Aleswina was trying to ask, Annwr promised, “I won’t leave you unless I know it’s safe! You know you can trust me, don’t you?”

  Aleswina nodded, wiped her face with her sleeve, and even managed to smile when Lliem came galloping back on his stick horse, calling that they were almost to the top.

  They stopped in a rocky hollow just below the crest of the ridge. Continuing a game of being a wolf and his cubs on a hunt, Caelym told the boys in a growly voice that this would be their wolf’s den where they would wait, “while I, your pack leader, will venture cautiously on to see what lies ahead and decide what to do next.”

  Growling just as convincingly, Annwr corrected him, “We, your two pack leaders, will venture cautiously on to see what lies ahead and decide what to do next!” As she slipped off her pack, she added that Aleswina would stay with them and give them some wolf cub food.

  “You mean Ethelwen!” Lliem reminded her in his most wolfish-sounding voice.

  “I mean Ethelwen,” Annwr agreed.

  Leaving the boys to decide whether wolf cubs ate barley cake as well as cheese and sausage, Caelym and Annwr crept up to the ledge, where Annwr surveyed the landscape below while Caelym sat next to her with his legs crossed and his two maps spread out on his lap. Clearing his throat to get her attention, he spoke in his most dignified high-council voice.

  “To the unenlightened, it must certainly appear that these two maps—one drawn by the highest priest on our council, he who is greatest and wisest of our bards, and the other by an untutored innkeeper—have no similarities between them. Further, it goes without saying—”

  Annwr snorted. “If it goes without saying, why are you saying it?”

  Ignoring the interruption, Caelym continued, “Were we forced to make a choice between one or the other, we would, of course, follow the map drawn by Herrwn. I, however, have, after intense study and deliberation, reconciled their differences and can say that as the innkeeper’s map depicts the earthly route and Herrwn’s shows us the spiritual journey, it is not only possible but essential that we take both into account, following the one but guided by the other.”

  “And so?”

  “And so . . .” Resigned to Annwr’s terseness, Caelym used his forefinger to trace a curving line through a cluster of upside-down V’s on the map Gothreg had drawn for them, avoiding the wide central space labeled D’ld, and coming around to the X next to the letters KL. “We will bear north and west, keeping to the uplands, to reach Aleswina’s ancestral lodge, where she will remain in the safe keeping of her eternally devoted nurse until the nuns of Saint Agned, whose convent will be her sanctuary forever after, open their gates and welcome her in.”

  Annwr gave a grunt that was neither affirmative nor negative.

  Caelym went on, “And we, still keeping to the high ground, will continue to our own destination—the inn propitiously named ‘The Sleeping Dragon,’ where, by now, all of our beloved kin are gathered and waiting for our arrival.”

  Annwr nodded and said, “With the river on one side and the road on the other, even you can’t get lost.”

  The path that Caelym chose was actually a good one. It dropped down to run along the side of that ridge without losing too much altitude, leading them into the cover of a pine forest, and—as Annwr had pointed out—with cliffs on one side and the valley of Derthwald on other, their trek was up and down but was guaranteed not to go in circles.

  Still, those ups and downs were steep.

  By midafternoon, Arddwn was asking, “When are we going to get to our camp?” and Lliem had switched from galloping along on Brave Horse to using him as a staff. They were all ready to stop, except for Caelym, but he was outvoted when they came into a glade that was sheltered from the wind and had a clear, babbling brook running through it.

  After the supper that Annwr cooked in her new pots, and just as Caelym was starting to tune his harp in preparation for the evening’s poems and songs, Aleswina shyly whispered, “I have presents for you.”

  She opened her pack and took out the things she’d bought at the fair while the boys weren’t looking and had kept hidden from Annwr when they were packing up. She’d gotten marbles and tops for the boys and a soft woolen shawl for Annwr. Since Caelym seemed to like reciting the psalms, she’d picked a parchment prayer sheet from the ones on sale in the stall in front of the church. Written in Latin, the prayer itself had looked like all the others to her, but this sheet had the most beautiful border—one with brightly gilded flowers and butterflies so real-looking they seemed about to flutter off the page.

  Touched by Aleswina’s generosity, Annwr pulled gifts from her pack—a little sack of seeds she’d gathered from her cottage garden for Aleswina, a sheaf of medicinal herbs for Caelym, and the pairs of extra socks she’d gotten for the boys.

  Not to be outdone, Caelym formally presented the boys with their bows and arrows.

  The boys’ faces beamed with delight, while Annwr’s darkened with disapproval.

  Seeing her lowered eyebrows and pursed lips, Caelym quickly added, “Of course, these are not toys! They are implements that you must learn to wield with skill and caution, and I will give you careful instruction about how to use them, and you will never think of pointing these arrows at anything except targets that I set for you! Is that agreed?

  “Yes, Ta!” Arddwn and Lliem spoke together in the sincerest possible voices.

  “Good! For if any boy were, ever so unfortunately, to forget and point his arrow at his brother or any other forbidden object, then by the power vested in me as your father and as a priest on the highest councils of our people, I should be forced to judge this a proof that this boy was too young to have them and would give him a baby’s rattle to play with instead.” After pausing to give this warning time to sink in, he finished, “But I know I have no reason to fear such rash or careless behavior from either of my sons!”

  Both boys clutched the bows and arrows to their chests and nodded vigorously as they promised to be careful and not shoot each other or any other forbidden object.

  Glancing towards Annwr and relieved that her scowl had softened to an almost smile, Caelym took up his harp and ran a finger across its strings, both to check its tuning and to give himself a moment to decide on a different story from the one he had planned. With the boys and Aleswina scrambling to their places around the campfire, he began, “So now I will tell you the story of how a carelessly fired arrow from the bow of an ill-trained archer nearly started a war between the spirit queen of the deer clan and our own ancestors.”

  Chapter 63

  Caelym’s Answer

  The next day set the pattern for the weeks ahead. They woke at dawn, shared their cold breakfast with the local spirits, and hiked on until late afternoon, when they started looking for some grove or glen to make their camp for the night. When they found a good place to stop, and got the sprites’ permission to spend the night, Caelym would set up an archery target for Arddwn and Lliem and spend some time teaching them to shoot while Annwr made a mix of what they gathered along the way and her carefully garnered provisions into dinner. After they’d eaten, Cae
lym would sing and tell stories, and they’d all curl up and go to sleep under Annwr’s new blankets.

  Mostly Aleswina stayed close to Annwr, but one afternoon Caelym invited her, rather formally, to come to the boys’ archery lesson. Assuming he wanted her help in finding the arrows that missed the target, Aleswina was startled when it became clear that Caelym expected her to take her turn shooting along with the boys, and she was badly flustered when he stood pressed close behind her and reached his arms around her to show her how to grip the bow and aim the arrow.

  If she’d been less innocent, Aleswina might have suspected Caelym of having ulterior motives—which, in fact, he did.

  From what Caelym could tell from the innkeeper’s map, they had only one more ridge to cross before they would reach Aleswina’s ancestral lodge—where, for her sake as well as their own, they would leave her in the care of loyal and trustworthy servants waiting for the gates of her soon-to-be sanctuary to open and let her in.

  The phrase “loyal and trustworthy servants” was an unfortunate one. When he’d used it in discussing their plan with Annwr, she’d pursed her lips so grimly that he let another six days go by before bringing up the subject again. Even so, she seemed resolved on, or at least resigned to, leaving Aleswina behind and hadn’t reopened the argument about it.

  Having the highly trained memory of a Druid bard, Caelym could recall every line of their original dispute, particularly the part where Annwr had contended that it wasn’t safe to leave the girl behind, “alone and defenseless and knowing full well that Gilberth’s guards would raid convents in their search for her,” and how he’d countered that he would teach her to defend herself.

  Though spoken in the heat of their argument, it was an oath as binding as any other, and he’d been brooding ever since over what weapon she could wield or what ploy he would teach her in order to fulfill that vow.

  He dismissed hand-to-hand combat immediately, certain that she had neither the strength nor the boldness to use a sword, even if he’d had one with which to teach her. But he had hope for archery. It was a skill at which he not only excelled but had also taught to Cyri so successfully that her aim and distance had come to rival his own. Now, with only days left, he was dismayed when his best attempts to show Aleswina how to aim and shoot—holding her body precisely in position, gently but firmly whispering his instructions in her ear, keeping her hands in place as he guided her to pull back and release the arrow—resulted in no more than a pitiful, wobbling shot that hit the ground far short of the target.

  He returned to camp discouraged, and was on the verge of pleading with Annwr to release him from this pledge when he remembered a long-ago lesson that had taken place in the shrine’s healing chambers.

  It was not just any lesson but the one where Olyrrwd had asked him if he knew the difference between a surgeon’s incision and a murderer’s stab. Assuming this was a joke, Caelym had pretended to ponder for a moment before saying, “No, Master. What is the difference between a surgeon’s incision and a murderer’s stab?” He’d expected his teacher to laugh his deep, gravelly laugh and give some droll answer. Instead, Olyrrwd, with an intensely serious expression, had held up his hand with his thumb separated from his forefinger by the width of an acorn and said, “That much!”

  The rest of that day’s healing lesson had been taken up with Caelym’s learning to maintain absolute control over the direction and depth of his lancing and excising. Now he recalled how, when his life was at stake, Aleswina had overcome her timidity and lanced his wound as perfectly as if Olyrrwd himself had been guiding her hand. So why could she not learn to plunge “that much” deeper if it were her own life that hung in the balance?

  That could be the answer. It had to be the answer.

  Chapter 64

  Speaking of Wolves

  The next afternoon, they made camp by the edge of a reed-rimmed pool where choruses of frogs were calling out, challenging Arddwn and Lliem to try to catch them. Assuming Caelym would take care of placating any necessary local spirits before going off to shoot something for their supper, Annwr gave the boys a basket and reminded them to take off their shoes and roll up their pants legs. She gave the other basket to Aleswina, saying, “You go gather the greens, Dear Heart, and I’ll pull us some rush roots and keep an eye on the boys,” thinking it would be better that the too-soft-hearted girl was somewhere else when it came time to show the boys how to kill their frogs quickly and painlessly before stirring them into the evening’s stew.

  Proud that Anna trusted her to go off gathering by herself, Aleswina wandered down the path plucking fern tips and wild celery stalks. As she went from one patch to the next, the boys’ gleeful cries were overtaken by the sounds of birds singing and bees buzzing. It was almost as if she was Gwendolen going to meet a bear cub. Looking up from picking a bunch of sorrel at the edge of a flowery meadow, she saw Caelym coming toward her carrying his harp instead of his bow.

  “Your basket is full to overflowing, so perhaps you will leave off your gathering and listen to the tale I’ve come to tell you.” Making one of his sweeping bows, Caelym pointed to a circle of flat stones at the other side of the meadow.

  Aleswina, who hadn’t been alone with Caelym since they’d run off from the convent garden, suddenly felt shy.

  “Shall I call Arddwn and Lliem?”

  “When I passed them just now, they were too busy at their hunt for frogs to join us. And besides, this tale is one I mean for your ears alone.”

  Still a little nervous but also flattered, Aleswina took the hand Caelym held out to her and trotted along as he led her across the meadow. She took a seat on the low, flat rock he offered her with another bow. She drew up her knees and wrapped her arms around them as he sat down facing her on a taller stone. He settled his harp on his knee and gave the strings an opening strum—but instead of starting to sing about some ancient hero in the long-ago past, he let his harp strings go silent and began speaking in the formal and learned manner he used when he lectured the boys about rites and rituals.

  “I do not know what is needed to become a Christian priest, but to become a Druid one requires more than simply being born to a mother who is a priestess—although that, of course, is necessary.”

  Supposing Caelym, like Anna, used “priestess” and “nun” interchangeably, Aleswina tried to explain that Christian priests weren’t supposed to be born that way because nuns weren’t supposed to have babies unless it was by immaculate conception (something she didn’t actually understand any better than the other kind but knew it had only happened for the Blessed Virgin Mary).

  As a priest in a cult based largely on reverence for fertility, Caelym could only shake his head at the idea that virginity was something to be blessed. Dismissing the core concept of Christianity with a wave of his hand, he went on with the point he was making.

  “Having been so born and being a boy rather than a girl”— here he digressed to say that he had no regrets about being a boy, even knowing that only by being a girl was there the hope of someday becoming the living embodiment of the Great Mother Goddess, before continuing— “I left my nursery on the morning of my sixth birthday to live in the priests’ quarters and devote myself to the studies necessary to take my place in the highest ranks of our order.”

  Again digressing, he added, “In former times, when all of our people worshiped the Great Mother Goddess above any of Her divine offspring, there would have been dozens of disciples filling our classroom. As it was, I sat alone at the feet of the three greatest of Druid masters—Herrwn, head of the High Council and our shrine’s foremost bard; Olyrrwd, our shrine’s beloved physician; and Ossiam, our chief oracle and master of divination.”

  “Then you are an oracle as well as a bard and a healer?”

  Despite what Anna was always saying about Caelym’s being boastful, Aleswina thought it was very modest of him not to have mentioned this before. She would have said so, only Caelym’s expression clouded over, and for a moment sh
e thought she saw tears welling up in his eyes.

  He drew in a deep breath and let it out as a long, sad sigh. “It is as much honor as I, or any man, might hope for to sit on the highest councils of our shrine as a bard and a healer and as”— here his expression brightened again—“the consort to our chief priestess. But as I was about to explain, I studied with diligence, and by the age of fifteen I could recite from memory all of the stories, songs, and odes of our nine great sagas and chant the proper evocations for the twelve ranks of divinities!”

  “Is that why you have learned to speak in English so quickly?” Aleswina broke in.

  Caelym’s justified pride in his accomplishments tipped over into boasting as he agreed, “After learning to speak the language of wolves, English is no great challenge.”

  “Wolves?” Aleswina gasped.

  “Wolves!” repeated Caelym.

  “But how—”

  “That is what I am now about to tell you.”

  Hearing the astonishment in Aleswina’s voice reawakened the awe—or, more accurately, the dread—Caelym had felt when he’d stood before the shrine’s high altar at sunrise on his sixteenth birthday.

  He’d risen that morning not just confident but exhilarated to think that—despite Ossiam’s refusal to take him on as his apprentice—he must still retain the oracle’s esteem, since it was Ossiam rather than Herrwn or Olyrrwd who had pronounced Caelym ready to embark on his spirit quest . . . two full years earlier than ordained by tradition.

  As he’d been telling Aleswina, becoming a Druid priest demanded rigorous training under the scrutiny of the elder priests—and not even Caelym’s being the only son of the shrine’s previous chief priestess and goddess-incarnate exempted him from any of the grueling tests along the way, or from undertaking the ultimate test to prove himself worthy to enter the final stage of his induction into the priesthood.