Chapter 36: Bringing Rhedwyn Home

Instead of going to the sunrise ritual the next morning, Herrwn left the shrine in the predawn darkness along with Caelym, Olyrrwd, and three manservants, one of them carrying a shovel, blankets, and two long poles, the other two armed with kitchen knives.

He’d expected Olyrrwd to object and was relieved that—understanding a direct order from the chief priestess could not be disobeyed—his cousin had just muttered, “Let’s get it over with.” After Olyrrwd cajoled Caelym out from under the covers, he helped the dazed and nearly mute boy get dressed, gave him a cup of hot broth, and asked, “Which way did you come back, over the ridge or through the tunnel?”

“The tunnel,” Caelym answered, staring blankly at the wall.

“Let’s go then,” Olyrrwd said in much the same tone of voice he used when he and Caelym were going for a jaunt to look for wild herbs. With that, he took the boy’s hand, nodded to the waiting servants, and started off.

When they came to the far end of the underground passage and made their way around the edge of the pool just below it, Olyrrwd murmured, “Which way from here?”

Caelym pointed into the start of a narrow opening into the undergrowth of the forest that lay beyond the pool. Crossing the pool’s outflow on wobbling flat stones, they followed after Caelym, who seemed to be sleepwalking a step ahead of Olyrrwd, now and again coming to a stop at what to Herrwn was an imperceptible turn in the nearly invisible trail. Each time he stopped, Olyrrwd would ask, “Which way from here?” and Caelym would point to the right or the left, taking them along a route that ran mostly southeast, crisscrossing back and forth across a wooded slope and then over another before finally climbing up and coming out onto a hilltop covered with dense clumps of brush and blackberry brambles.

Before them, a trampled track made by hooves and boots ran across the bluff and over the far side. Thick plumes of brown smoke rising up from the valley below carried the smell of burnt meat.

The servants drew back and were making ready to flee when Olyrrwd said, in a matter-of-fact voice, “So, Caelie, you say you buried Rhedwyn. Where was that?”

“There.” Caelym pointed to an apparently impenetrable mass of blackberry vines.

“You lead the way.”

For a moment, Caelym stayed where he was, shifting from one foot to the other. Then he crouched down on his hands and knees and crawled into a gap in the tangled brambles. Olyrrwd followed him, the servants followed Olyrrwd, and Herrwn followed the servants, coming out, scraped and scratched, into a tiny clearing with a long, narrow mound of rocks at its center.

“Keep him with you,” Olyrrwd muttered. Then he turned and told the servants to “start digging,” and Herrwn, not ordinarily a man to be physically demonstrative with his pupils, hugged Caelym against his chest.

The grave was shallow, so digging it up didn’t take long—in fact, they hardly had to do more than move aside the rocks and scrape away a smattering of dirt and wilted plants. With Olyrrwd giving directions, the servants eased Rhedwyn’s body out of the ground, wrapped it in blankets, and tied it to their makeshift stretcher. Then, bent over and fighting off the thorny vines, they made their way back through the brambles.

Slowed by the servants struggling along with the heavy stretcher, it was late in the day before they crossed back over the creek and trudged through the tunnel and up the path through the shrine’s lower gate, where they were met by Rhonnon and another set of servants who took Rhedwyn and carried him the rest of the way back to the shrine.

Leaving Rhedwyn’s final care to the priestesses, Herrwn and Olyrrwd took Caelym back to their quarters, where Olyrrwd used some last reserve of energy to drag the boy’s cot to their sleeping chamber and shove it into the space between their beds before giving him a hefty dose of poppy juice–laced potion “to ward off nightmares.”

After they’d gotten Caelym tucked in and were certain that he was asleep, Olyrrwd told Herrwn that Rhedwyn was laid out on a bed of pine branches, wrapped in his cloak with a broadsword and a ceremonial blade laid crosswise on his chest, and covered with Labhruinn’s cloak and a layer of flowers.

Mulling over this—along with the fact that Olyrrwd had referred to Labhruinn by his name and not by the accepted circumlocutions of the “Banished One” or the “One Who Never Was”—Herrwn finally said, “So he didn’t just run away,” to which Olyrrwd replied, “No, he didn’t.”