The Oath

by A. M. Linden

  “I can, Anna!” Aleswina said and, to prove it, she grunted and spat into the grass.

  “Excellent! No one will ever take you for a princess or a nun!” Annwr licked her thumb, rubbed it in the dirt and blotted out a bare spot on Aleswina’s forehead. Leaning back to inspect her handiwork, she found herself almost able to believe they might survive Caelym’s hopeless, foolhardy quest after all.

  As if her thinking his name conjured him out of the woods, Caelym swept into the camp looking more like a Christian monk than any real one Annwr had ever seen. It was as startling a transformation as Aleswina’s change from a girl to a boy and sent an involuntary shiver up Annwr’s spine.

  Taking Annwr’s look of alarm as a compliment, Caelym announced that he would lead the way to the tavern, adding, “You, Annwr, will be a Christian priestess, and I will be your consort, and Aleswina will be our son, and we will say that we are on our way to visit a sheepherder who is kin to kin of ours . . . only we do not know his name or the name of his village.”

  He would’ve gone on with the elaborate tale he made up, explaining why they were making to visit their kinsman and how it was they happened to know nothing about him except that he was traveling with his two sons and had one eye, the other having been lost in an unfortunate accident, but Annwr rolled her eyes and interrupted him.

  “You will be a monk who has taken a vow of silence and will say nothing to anyone. I will be a nun traveling with you for what little protection that might gain me. Aleswina will be your serving boy, and she will speak for you.” Annwr crossed her arms and finished, “You may begin practicing your vow of silence now!” before she turned to Aleswina. “What do you think, Dear Heart? Will we pass for Christians on a mission?”

  “We will!” Aleswina answered, sounding like herself only more confident. Then, remembering she was now a boy, she lowered her voice to ask, “What are our names?”

  Cutting off Caelym before he could warn them that choosing names for so important a quest was a grave matter and something over which he would need time to deliberate, Annwr smiled at Aleswina. “You choose!”

  Aleswina bit her lip, thinking hard, and then pointed at Caelym. “He will be ‘Brother Cuthbert’—that’s a common name for monks.” She squinted at Annwr. “You will be ‘Sister Columbina’—there are a lot of those too. And I will be ‘Codric,’ like Sister Idwolda’s youngest brother.”

  Those were nothing like the names Caelym would have chosen, but seeing that Annwr wasn’t going to listen to anything he said even if she did let him speak, he picked up his healer’s satchel and put it back into his pack. Annwr’s pack was already closed and he carried them both, without audible grumbling, down the path to the boat while Annwr and Aleswina doused the fire and refilled the pit with dirt and debris.

  Chapter 35

  Leaving Camp

  Aleswina looked over her shoulder as she left the campsite and followed Annwr down the pathway to the river.

  She had left the palace nursery where she’d spent the first thirteen years of her life caring only that Anna was with her. She had run from the convent that had been her home since then without a backward glance. Now she regretted every step back to the boat, convinced that she would never again be as happy as she had been nestled against Anna and listening to Caelym singing the story about Gwendolwn and the baby bear.

  Back in the boat, she watched the trees along the banks change from oaks to birches and from birches to alders, her confidence waning as her dread of being discovered returned.

  “Pull out there!”

  Turning around, Aleswina saw Annwr pointing to a gap in the left bank where a creek came in to join the river. In the same moment, she was pitched to the side as Caelym jerked back on his left oar and leaned forward on his right, spinning the boat so the prow pointed straight up the side channel. She managed to catch hold of the sides in time to keep from falling over backwards when he heaved hard on both oars, sending the boat shooting up the mouth of the stream.

  Caelym tucked the oars in as the boat surged forward and leaped out, calling, “The rope!”

  “Toss him the rope!”

  Aleswina did as Annwr said and got the line close enough to Caelym’s feet that he was able to pick it up and drag them the last of the way out of sight from the river.

  “Hurry along, Dear Heart!” Annwr urged, and Aleswina forced herself to climb out of the boat, trying desperately to think of some reason to stay in hiding.

  “We need to put the packs in the bushes!” Annwr’s next words were directed to Caelym, who grumbled that he hadn’t been planning to leave them out for thieving Saxons as he picked up the larger one and shoved his way through the undergrowth.

  “What if someone finds our things and steals the jewels?” Hoping what she knew was a feeble excuse would work, Aleswina took hold of Annwr’s hand and stammered, “M-maybe you and I should stay here and guard packs while Caelym goes and finds out where his little boys are.”

  “That is a most excellent suggestion!” Caelym emerged from the bushes, nodding vigorously. “You both stay here and guard the jewels, and I will go and find where Benyon’s kin live and bring him and my sons back and we will go on then to our own destinies!”

  “I understand, Dear Heart,” Annwr murmured, as if Caelym hadn’t spoken. “Those jewels belonged to your mother, and even though they would be safe here, we will bring them along—only remember you must let no one see that you have them.

  “And”—she shot a dark look in Caelym’s direction—“we’ll all go together so none of us get lost.”

  It took no more than moments for Annwr to crawl into the bushes, recover the jewelry, and make her way out again. She tucked the packet into Caelym’s satchel, swatting his hand away when he reached for it.

  “I am a healer,” he attempted to protest, “I go nowhere without my—”

  “You are a monk!” she retorted sharply. “You carry your bowl and staff! Codric is your serving boy! He carries the bag!” She gave Aleswina an encouraging smile and a loving pat on the cheek, then handed her the satchel. “Come along, Dear Heart, it’s time to go.”

  Biting down on her lower lip, Aleswina took the bag, hung it over her shoulder, and followed Annwr and Caelym as they scrambled up the side of the ravine and onto a bluff.

  “That’s it! That’s the road!” Caelym pointed down the hill to a wagon track just as Annwr hissed, “Get back! There’s someone coming.”

  Instead of backing into the cover of the trees, Caelym dropped down and crawled forward on his belly to part the grass and watch the horse cart pass below. Annwr stayed behind a tree, and Aleswina stayed behind Annwr until the clopping of the horse’s hooves and rattle of wagon wheels died away.

  “Now!” Caelym sprang up. Holding his staff in one hand and the wooden bowl in the other, he forged his way down the slope through waist-high brush.

  “Wait for us!” Annwr called after him as she grabbed Aleswina’s hand and pulled her along. When they reached the road, Caelym brushed the leaves and twigs from his robe while Annwr straightened her veil and shook her skirt.

  With a final, “Remember you’re a monk and keep quiet!”— which Caelym answered by opening and then closing his mouth with a snap—Annwr started off.

  Aleswina tucked Caelym’s satchel under her arm and fell in step with the other two as they trudged first down a dip in the road and then up to the top of a rise. From there the road sloped down again, and they could see the horse cart that had passed them cross over a bridge and draw to a halt as two guards armed with pikes came out of the guard station. They were too far off the hear what the driver or the guards were saying, but close enough to see the guards pull the cover off the cart and thrust their spears into the straw before they let the wagon move on.

  “We’re on a quest for the bishop!” Caelym muttered between clenched teeth without slowing down.

  “A mission! You’re a monk! You’re on a mission! And you’ve taken a vow of silence!” Annwr his
sed as she rushed after him.

  Left with no choice but to go along, Aleswina made her feet move forward. From somewhere in her frightened mind she heard the voice of the abbess reciting, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”

  Repeating, “I will fear no evil,” to herself, she followed Annwr across the bridge and past the guards, and even managed to say, “God bless you,” in a low voice that only quivered a little when, instead of charging a toll, the guards each tossed a penning into Caelym’s wooden bowl, and the more ferocious-looking one said, “Welcome to Welsferth.”

  PART V

  Welsferth

  The village of Welsferth started out as a Saxon fort that was King Athelrod’s northwestern most outpost before Theobold’s successful conquest of Derthwald. Since then, its military importance had faded, and all that remained of the once heavily fortified garrison were a handful of guards who doubled as toll collectors.

  Although predominantly Saxon, Welsferthers (as they called themselves) included a substantial number of native Britons who’d stayed on after their armies retreated northward. Over time, shared religion and intermarriage had blurred the distinctions between them, and although Saxons, for the most part, had the better holdings, the two groups got along surprisingly well, all things considered.

  Taking advantage of their strategic location between the bridge and the crossroads where wagon traffic from the four corners of Atheldom converged, the villagers had turned to commerce so that Welsferth was now a thriving and growing community with a weekly market, two churches, and a tavern that was open from midmorning until whatever time in the evening Merna, the innkeeper’s wife, got tired of cooking.

  The Spotted Hound, named for the first innkeeper’s boyhood pet, owed its success to being the first place travelers coming into Atheldom from Derthwald could stop before the road split in three— the main branch turning northeast toward the capital city, and other two splitting further into the maze of side roads that connected the area’s outlying farms and villages.

  Wilbreth, the innkeeper, ran a thriving business on three basic principles—don’t water the ale so much you wouldn’t drink it yourself, don’t ask your customers where they got the money they’re spending, and count the cost of what you serve monks and pilgrims as part of the tithe you owe to God and the church.

  All in all, the Spotted Hound was as a good place as Annwr could have hoped for when she came up with her plan of tracking Benyon and the boys by word of mouth.

  Chapter 36

  The Spotted Hound

  It was a busy day at the Spotted Hound. The first of the traders from the western coast arrived that morning, and by noon the newcomers were joined by the regular midday diners and the front room was packed and buzzing with the news from Derthwald that a Druid sorcerer had carried off a virgin princess—the king’s daughter by some accounts, his betrothed bride by others.

  Rushing between the kitchen, where Merna was warning him the stew was running low, and the dining room, where Frinwulf, the village smith, and Aelfgar, the potter, had come in at the same time and were each ready to take offense if the other got served first, Wilbreth was carrying two pitchers of ale in one hand and balancing Frinwulf’s bowl of fried eels along with Aelfgar’s platter of bread and sausage in the other when three more guests appeared at the door.

  Wilbreth paused, staring at them, as he did a quick mental calculation. There was a table in the corner big enough to squeeze them in, enough of yesterday’s stew left over to feed them, and he’d already compromised his first principle (regarding watering down the ale) so he’d have enough to get through the day. None of that was a problem. The nun was. Wilbreth had nothing personal against nuns—in fact, his sister was one—but having a nun in his tavern’s dining room put people off and shut down the pleasantries of the tavern conversations—and while his paying customers didn’t mind a monk or two (or a priest, come to that), they’d been known to clear the room entirely at the sight of a nun.

  As he’d expected, his regulars looked up, saw the nun, shifted in their seats, and stopped talking.

  As the room went silent, Aleswina froze with the fear that they were recognized. On her right side, she felt Caelym stiffen and sensed his hand was slipping under his cloak for his knife. Annwr’s voice seemed to come from a long way off as it said, “God be with you, Sir. I am Sister Columbina, of the order of Saint Wilfhilda, and am on my way to join my sisters in Christ in a convent in the capital of Atheldom—and I am, for now, traveling with Brother Cuthbert, who is on a mission for the Bishop of Lindisfarne. As Brother Cuthbert has taken a vow of silence, his servant boy, Codric, speaks for him.”

  Surveying the room with an unmistakable look of disdain, Annwr went on, “My vows as a nun do not allow me to eat in the presence of men, and so I will take my meal in your kitchen.”

  Relieved, Wilbreth waved the way to the kitchen’s curtained entrance and stepped aside to let her pass. Then, calling “Just a moment, Brother,” he hurried to deliver Frinwulf’s eels and Aelfgar’s sausages. That done, he ushered Caelym and Aleswina to his last vacant table.

  Once she got over the oddness of being in a room full of men, Aleswina found talking easier than she expected, although the topics and vocabulary here were so different from the convent that had it not been for Sister Idwolda’s persistence in telling her life story, Aleswina would not have understood much of what was being said.

  Remembering to keep her voice down, she took the bowl of stew the innkeeper handed her and caught his sleeve before he could rush away.

  “God be with you, kind Sir. Brother Cuthbert is on a mission for the bishop to find a one-eyed sheepherder, a Briton, who may have passed this way two years ago in a horse cart with his two young sons. Pray have you any memory of such a man stopping here and saying which road he was taking or what village he was going to?”

  She held her breath and sensed that Caelym wasn’t breathing, either. When the innkeeper cocked his head and looked oddly at her, she added, “It’s a secret mission and I can say no more, only . . . only, it is very important . . . to Brother Cuthbert . . . and to the bishop . . . and . . . and to God . . . so if you remember anything at all . . .”

  She was clinging to the hope that he’d say something, anything—

  “Barnard? You mean Master Barnard?”

  Before she could think what to answer, a big, burly man at the next table boomed, “Nah! Couldn’t be old Barnard! He’s no sheepherder and never was!” Another man, who was sitting on the other side of the burly one and hidden from Aleswina’s view, chimed in, “He’d milk a ram as soon as a ewe.” But a third man, one sitting at the table to the left of the other two, made his voice heard over the general laughter with, “And just how many other one-eyed Britons drove into town two years ago on a horse cart with two little boys?”

  Her heart beating hard against her chest, Aleswina put in, “Maybe Brother Cuthbert mistook the sheepherder part, but he’s sure about the horse and cart and this man having two young sons, and”—she recalled the other thing—“he, the one-eyed man, was coming to live with his kinsman, and maybe it was they, the kinsmen, that herd sheep!”

  “There’d be no one I know of claiming kin to Barnard!” This was the burly man talking again.

  “Not for all his gold and silver!” That was the voice behind him.

  “And least of all those two miserable little sods,” added a bearded man at the table directly across from her.

  A thin man with mud-splattered clothes piped up, “My wife heard it from her sister who cooks and cleans for him that they’re the orphaned sons of a serving woman he had where he lived before, and that he kept them on out of Christian charity.”

  This was met with an outburst of raucous laughter.

  The thin man held his ground. “Well, he might be . . . neither of them’s old enough to be of any use to him!”

  The burly man fired back, “Depends on what he’d be using them for
!”

  The innkeeper, who hadn’t said anything until this, finally stepped in to settle the dispute.

  Shifting his considerable bulk so he blocked Frinwulf and Aelfgar’s view of each other, he banged his pitcher of ale down in front of Caelym with the authority of the councilman bringing a town meeting to order.

  “Most likely Barnard’s the man your monk is looking for,” he said. “Like Albarth over there said, there’s been no other one-eyed Britons coming here from Derthwald two years ago on a horse cart with two little boys.”

  “Where . . .” Aleswina realized that in her excitement, she’d started to speak in her own girl’s voice. Catching herself, she coughed as if to clear her throat and began again in what was practically a growl, “Where do we go to find him?”

  “Straight on through town to the first fork in the road, go left there, then right at the lane after the three big oaks . . .” The innkeeper’s rights and lefts and landmarks went on for another several turns.

  Although the talk swirling around him was in rapid and idiomatic English, Caelym had followed it well enough to understand that he had again been betrayed—this time by the man he’d trusted with his sons’ lives. As the pack of boorish peasants bantered back and forth about just what sort of ill treatment Arddwn and Lliem were suffering, he sat motionless, his face hidden in the shadow of his hood, waiting for the innkeeper to finish giving his directions.

  “. . . just past a stand of pines, before the ridge, there’ll be a fenced-off field to your left, you’ll see his manor from there.”