The sounds of the baying hounds grew louder as Annwr sealed the gate and began to sweep away the telltale tracks. A single shrill bark rang out above the rest—then there was silence.
The broom handle grew moist in her hands as she waited, straining her ears. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Betrys, heavy with her unborn piglets, heave herself up to look out from the door of her shed as the geese drew together into a defensive circle.
When the yowling started up again, it was jumbled and discordant, as if the dogs were arguing amongst themselves.
A loud yelp seemed to settle the pack’s dispute. It was joined almost at once by a chorus of blood-curdling howls that rose up, swerved away and faded into the distance.
Suppressing a wave of pity for whatever terrified creature was now running for its life, Annwr finished sweeping and tossed out a second breakfast for the geese, watching to be sure that their eager scuffling covered over any marks she might have missed before walking deliberately around the rows and beds to lay a trail of innocent footprints. The flock followed at her heels, tutting and chuckling, while their leader stretched up his neck to nudge at her half-empty basket. Looking back later, she’d be sorry she didn’t give them that final scoop of grain instead of telling Solomon he was getting too fat for his own good, shooing them off, and going inside.
After closing the inner door behind her, she looked around and saw the room as Caelym must have seen it, crude and drab, a far cry from the resplendent halls of Llwddawanden. But it was spotless. There was not a crumb on the table or a wrinkle in the bedcovers to show that he’d ever been there.
With nothing left to clean, Annwr began to pace around the hearth, clutching the silver cross Aleswina had given her to ward off evil—especially the evil of being accused of witchcraft.
Meeting him on her way to the abbey, Annwr hadn’t recognized Caelym as anything except one more homeless Briton, taller than most but otherwise just another starving refugee looking for a handout. Even when he asked for her by name, she’d made no connection between the edgy, apprehensive vagabond speaking hesitant English and the willful, high-spirited boy she’d known in her other life, although the arrow in his back should have been a hint.
His proclamation that he was a messenger from Feywn had shaken her more than she let on, but she hadn’t fully believed it until he plunged his face down into the washbasin and raised it up again, dripping but clean, and—for a heart-stopping moment— she’d thought Rhedwyn had surfaced instead.
Like most people in her day and age, Annwr believed in ghosts, but she was also practical. When Rhedwyn was alive, he’d never paid her any attention beyond the habitual flirtation he’d bestowed on anyone who stood still long enough—why would he take time out of his next life to pursue her now?
Still, the sight convinced her as no words could that her unexpected visitor was really Caelym, Son of Caelendra, that he’d really been sent by Feywn, and that maybe Ossiam wasn’t a useless old fraud after all.
Reversing direction, she thought back over the message Caelym delivered. Stripped of its ornamentation—and there never had been a priest on the high council who could just say what he meant and get it over with—it came down to: “I need you—so come now!”
Whatever else had changed in Annwr’s absence, her sister had not. Never a word from her for fifteen years and now imperiously calling her back, regardless of the risk and inconvenience, and making it sound as though Annwr’s abduction and captivity were her own doing and not Feywn’s fault in the first place.
What had they been thinking, Feywn and her swaggering consort? That Rhedwyn and his handful of play soldiers were going to win back lands lost two times over? Prove the Goddess still held sway outside the gates of Llwddawanden? Decorate the sacred grove with real severed heads as easily as counting up clay trophies from their mock battles in the pastures above the shrine? Well, Rhedwyn’s decision to move up from raiding cattle and plundering trading caravans to taking on a Saxon force that outnumbered his foolhardy little war band three to one certainly settled those questions for good and all!
“Rhedwyn,” even though Annwr only thought the name in her head, it came out as a snort. Too bad he didn’t have the sense of a goose instead of the looks of a god! Any goose would have known better than to believe Ossiam’s gibberish about some glorious destiny divined from a pile of soggy goat guts. And Feywn! Feywn should have stopped him, should have ordered him off his horse and back to her bedroom!
Instead, she’d just believed his boasting and let him go riding off—banners waving, drums beating, soon-to-be widows and orphans cheering—while she called on Ossiam to invoke spirit armies from the otherworld to rise and join the battle. Either those shadow forces had refused the oracle’s entreaties or else they had no power against the Saxons who mowed down a generation of the shrine’s young men like the year’s last standing stalks of wheat.
Dozens of men and boys died alongside Rhedwyn, but none of them mattered to Feywn. Blind and deaf to the grief of others, she’d sent the dazed survivors out under the cover of darkness to bring Rhedwyn’s body back to the shrine.
Annwr, along with her cousins, Gwennefor and Caldora, had done everything they could to appease Feywn’s spiraling demands— bathing Rhedwyn’s ravaged corpse with water carried down in buckets from the sacred pools, swathing him with silk and decking him with gold and precious gems, gathering armloads of flowers and herbs to be his shroud. Then she’d called for King’s Heal, as if Rhedwyn was a king or there was any hope of healing him!
But there’d been no reasoning with Feywn, so they put on their fine white ceremonial robes. Leaving the safety of their hidden valley, they’d carried their little reed baskets and their little golden scissors to snip the leaves of those precious little plants growing on the banks of the sacred river just downstream from where it flowed through the blood-drenched battlefield—a place where anyone as all-seeing and all-knowing as the living embodiment of the Great Mother Goddess should have realized the Saxons would still be prowling.
They’d been caught unawares, preoccupied with their separate sorrows. Annwr had fallen behind the others, so she was the first to hear the sound of horses’ hooves pounding towards them. She’d called out a warning, changed direction and started to run, hoping to give Caldora and Gwennefor a chance to escape and get help. Her next scream was cut short as a filthy, sweat-soaked cloak came down over her head and she was grappled to the ground— trapped, suffocating, feeling the earth shudder as more horses thundered past.
Carried off, bound and blindfolded, losing count of the days and the number of times she’d been raped, she’d clung to life and sanity by silently reciting the chant for the worst phase of labor, moving her mind so far away from her body that nothing they did mattered to her—so far away she never knew that she changed hands twice, once in a game of dice and once in exchange for a fresh horse, before finally being sold at the main slave market in Derthwald.