Chapter 24: But They Should Be Here Already

Jonathan was still sitting in the kitchen, staring down into the mug he held clenched in his hands, when Manfred bounced through the door and gleefully announced, “I got her water and soap and a pan and soup and bread and she’s going to wash while the water is hot and eat the soup and all the bread too and she thanked me very much!” before shifting into a volley of questions that started with “Can I get her sausages and eggs and sweets for supper?” and ended with a breathless “Can I ever get married?”

That was a question Jonathan was not prepared to answer—at least not with the dinner hour fast approaching and the preparations not close to finished—so he forced himself to stand up, sent Manfred out to chop wood, and started pulling down platters and filling the ale jugs.

He was laying out the evening’s meat pies when the kitchen door opened again, quietly this time.

As anxious as Cyri was to look for her kinfolk, she had paused at the foot of the stairs, realizing it was incumbent on her to proceed with caution. Drawing a calming breath, she eased the door open and peered in before she entered. She wasn’t surprised to see the innkeeper standing in his own kitchen, busy with the preparations for the evening meal. His being there, however, meant she must ask his permission to enter and formally thank him for his hospitality.

“May I come in?” she murmured.

Seeing the girl he assumed to be his niece—now with her hood down and no longer hidden by Feywn’s shadow—Jonathan was taken aback. That she should look so much like he imagined his daughter would look was only to be expected, as the two girls had been almost the same age and both had taken after his and Rhedwyn’s mother in their build and coloring. What startled him was the intense and serious expression on her face—the “Cyri look,” he and Annwr had called it when they’d watched their toddling daughter squat down to stare at a snail oozing along the ground or a caterpillar inching up a stalk of grass.

Putting down his flicker of hope—first because miracles don’t happen, and then because of his guilt-ridden realization that to wish his daughter alive was to wish his brother’s daughter dead—he wiped his hands on his apron and managed a genuine smile.

“Please, please, do come in, and please, sit down. Let me get you something to eat.”

After months of living on limited rations and longing to have enough to eat, Cyri now just wished people would stop feeding her and let her find her friends and family. The innkeeper, however, was her host, so she sat down on the chair he pulled out for her, hoping to get the formalities over with quickly.

That hope vanished when he set a thick slab of mutton pie and a steaming cup of mulled wine in front of her, poured another cup for himself, and sat down across the table in obvious expectation of an extended conversation.

An extended conversation with the innkeeper was the last thing Cyri wanted. Besides her barely controlled impatience to learn who else had arrived, she had no idea how much of the truth Jonathan already knew or would want to admit that he knew, and was uncertain whether she was to keep to the story Feywn had told the Saxon sheriff and the false names she’d given.

After taking a polite taste of the pie and sip of the wine—both of which were the equal of anything served at the shrine’s high table—Cyri started out to say exactly that, only to falter. “The repast you offer is as excellent as . . . as . . . as . . . any I have ever eaten,” she finished awkwardly—which, if they were keeping up the fiction that she and Feywn were humble villagers, was meager praise, to say the least.

She tried to do better expressing her appreciation for his taking them in at what was certainly great risk, but got no further than to say, “I speak for myself and . . .” before losing any semblance of the dignity and decorum she was striving for as she fumbled, “Fe—Fai—my mo—that is, both of us . . . in giving you thanks for . . . for all you have done . . . and . . . and . . . we, that is . . . I thank you also for this very delicious pie.”

Meaning to show how much she liked it, she took a large bite, only to be overwhelmed by embarrassment, supposing that, besides having spoken such a faltering, poorly worded tribute, she must look to the innkeeper like a cow chewing its cud.

That was not what Jonathan was thinking. Hearing her stutter and seeing her embarrassment evoked vivid memories of how he’d struggled with a stammer when he was young, and for a second time the possibility that she was his own daughter, not Rhedwyn’s, flared in his heart.

Whether the girl across the table was his daughter or his niece, what Jonathan knew for certain was how it felt to have your throat close up so you could barely breathe, let alone speak. Nodding as though he’d understood her completely, he looked at the cup of wine in his hands—partly to allow her time to recover control over her voice and partly to gather his thoughts.

The wine was elderberry mulled with honey and wild ginger, Herrwn’s favorite drink.

Besides being the shrine’s master bard, Herrwn had been their chief priest and presided over their council meetings, and Jonathan, as his disciple, had sat at his side through myriad sensitive debates where the most important point of contention could not be spoken of openly. Time and again he’d been impressed with how, at the climax of what seemed an irreconcilable dispute, Herrwn had taken the speaker’s chalice in his hands and invoked some ancient tale, the moral of which had pointed to the resolution of the quarrel at hand without any allusion to whatever unspoken conflict lay beneath.

While Jonathan was not a master bard and never would be, he had kept an inn for over a decade, and there’d been more than one occasion when, as the sheriff had so succinctly put it, men had been “made braver, or more careless, with drink,” and some chance remark had reignited a feud that had smoldered for years—or, in some cases, generations. Forced to intercede if he wanted his chairs and tables to remain intact, he’d become adept at using Herrwn’s strategy of turning an old tale to a new purpose.

Clearing his throat in an unconscious imitation of his former teacher, Jonathan began, “Mistress Faith, as I believe she wishes to be called, has spoken of us as close kin, and I ask no higher privilege than to honor her wishes.”

It was the mannerism—so reminiscent of Herrwn—as much as the kindness in the innkeeper’s voice that made Cyri stop chewing and look up.

Rolling his cup in his hands in a thoughtful sort of way, the innkeeper went on without pausing for her to reply. “And it was, of course, also an honor to join with her in the recitation of the tale she told to our good Saxon sheriff, convincing him of that which she wanted him to believe, just as how, in the saga of Queen Llenddren’s Golden Harp, the queen was able to delude the ogres who had entrapped her and her daughter as they were fleeing from the enemy army that had besieged and destroyed her castle.” He gave her a sideways glance before finishing, “I recall that in the eastern versions of the story, only the queen and her daughter escaped, while in the western version, all of her counselors and her subjects did as well, and I find myself wondering which account Mistress Faith had in mind.”

Relieved to be offered this face-saving opening, Cyri nodded vigorously, swallowed the wad of meat and pastry, and answered, “I am sure she meant the one in which those others loyal to her escaped as well and joined her in what was to be their mountain refuge, as perhaps you are already aware?”

She had hoped this would be the point at which the innkeeper would tell her that the others were there and take her to them, but he just replied in a slightly higher tone of voice, “There are others, then, who will be coming?” adding, “I do not ask their names, only some description to know what accommodations they may require and how many there are and when I may expect them.”

“But they should be here already!” Even knowing that she was grasping at straws, Cyri spoke urgently, almost pleading. “They would be in disguise, so perhaps you simply do not know them. Some would be wearing the dress of”—here she hesitated, but only for a fraction of a moment—“nuns and monks, and others would seem to be ordinary travelers, one a smith and his family and another a father with two young sons and a servant.”

The innkeeper shook his head and said, so softly it seemed he was talking to himself, “I would know them even in disguise.”

“Are you sure?” Cyri asked, although she already knew the answer. He had known Feywn through her disguise. He would know the others.

Even as caught up as she was in her own distress, Cyri could see the innkeeper was worried as well, even as he said reassuringly, “You and Fe—Mistress Faith have only just arrived, so surely the others will be here soon.”

“But we got lost and almost didn’t get here at all . . .” The tears Cyri had been holding back since the night of the winter solstice broke through, spilling over, and she could do nothing more than bury her face in her hands and try to stifle her sobs while the innkeeper left his chair to kneel beside her, put his arms around her, and rock her as if she were a baby.

She didn’t know how long she cried, only that the innkeeper’s tunic and shirt were soaked when a Saxon voice called from the other side of the curtain, “Hello! Jonathan! A little service here!”

Until then they’d been speaking in Celt, and that was what the innkeeper used when he handed her a towel and whispered, “Don’t give up hope. They may still come—and now I know, I will be watching for them. Go back upstairs and tend to your aunt. I will send your supper up to you.” Then he released his hold on her, stepped over to the doorway between the kitchen and the dining hall, and, reverting to English, called, “Just a moment, Eagberth, the pies are coming out of the oven. There’s a pitcher of ale on the side table. Help yourself. I’ll be out to take your order in a moment.”

Determined to be composed when she faced Feywn, Cyri drew a shaky breath, dried her eyes, and started for the stairs. She stopped at the door and turned back to thank the innkeeper for his kindness, only to see him heft a tray loaded with flasks and platters and push his way through the curtain.

“What’s the celebration?”

Eagberth’s question brought Jonathan out of the blissful daze he had been in since he’d slipped the phrase “your aunt” into his parting words to “Cristiana.” She hadn’t noticed . . . because she was Feywn’s niece, not her daughter. She was his daughter.

Not that she would ever know it.

She might be living in his inn, but she was still a part of the Goddess’s world, a world in which it was the Sun God who had fathered her, while he, cast out, was a nameless nothing—and no priest or priestess knowing that would deign to touch, look at, or speak to him.

All this swirled in his mind as he poured free drinks and handed out double portions of pie without any conscious thought beyond making up for serving dinner late—but, yes, when Eagberth said it, he realized it was true. He was celebrating.

“The fair is coming, and it’s time to get into the mood, don’t you think?”

Jonathan’s answer, along with another cup of ale, satisfied Eagberth, and he went on pouring drinks freely that night knowing that upstairs, in the room next to his own, his daughter was safe and well—which, in a world filled mostly with suffering and misery, was more than enough reason for celebration.