Chapter 55: Herrwn’s Judgment

Following a subdued and awkward midday meal during which neither Olyrrwd nor Ossiam made eye contact with each other, Olyrrwd herded Caelym off to the healing chamber without any of the usual departing salutations.

Taking advantage of the scraping of chairs and murmuring of priests and priestesses leaving the table, Herrwn turned to Ossiam and said softly, “I must speak to you in private,” at the precise moment Ossiam said the exact same words to him, adding, “Will you come to my chambers, or shall I come to the classroom?”

The conversation Herrwn anticipated was not one he wanted to have where anyone else could hear—so, realizing Benyon was likely to be in and out of the classroom, he answered, “Your chambers will do.”

Herrwn hadn’t been inside the room at the top of the oracle’s tower since his long-ago lessons in the basics of augury. Looking around through the haze of the steaming cauldron, it seemed to him that nothing had changed. Dismissing the feeling that his uncle, Ossaerwn, by whom he’d always been somewhat intimidated, was standing in the shadows, he cleared his throat and began, “You must explain what happened yesterday!”

“I? You might ask Olyrrwd!” Ossiam’s opening words were irate and became more so as he went on, “Only I see you already have—and I can well guess what groundless accusations he has made in private to you that he does not dare make openly before the High Council!”

Unwilling to be put off, Herrwn crossed his arms and looked Ossiam straight in the eye. “I have spoken with Olyrrwd, and now I am speaking to you—and I will decide whether this is a matter for the High Council.”

“And what is it that I must answer for?”

“That, whether intentionally or unintentionally, you put the apprentice entrusted to your care in mortal danger—and before you say anything more, I must tell you I know that to be true, and I know that if Olyrrwd had not rescued him, Caelym would have thrown himself over the edge of the cliff above the Bottomless Falls! And now I want to know why you have done this!”

“I—I never—”

There was something in how Ossiam clasped his hands to his chest in a gesture of offended innocence that was so much like the scene in Herrwn’s recent dream that he half-expected to hear his cousin protest, “I never did—or, if I did, it was only a jest to tease Olyrrwd …”

But Ossiam only said, “I never imagined,” as he staggered backward to collapse on a chair. He slumped forward and buried his face in his hands, and for several moments his shoulders shook and heaved before he looked up and repeated, “I never imagined … How could he have thought I meant …” He managed to steady his voice. “You must believe me—I never thought—”

Though touched by Ossiam’s abject distress, Herrwn persisted.

“What did you think? That you could put the words of the Dy Na Ma into the mouth of a fifteen-year-old boy, whatever his parentage, and have its spell succeed? That the blame for its failure rested with your pupil and not with you? That telling that pupil to whom your word is law that he was unfit to join our order and sending him away with a vial of poison in one hand and a knife in the other would have no untoward result?”

“But that’s not how it was!” Ossiam put his hands up and grabbed fistfuls of his hair as he shook his head. “True, I set the boy a test to see whether he had the gift to be an oracle, but I left the choice of the incantation to him, never imagining that he would use that one. I regret now that I spoke so harshly to him, but I did so out of my fear and dismay at the risk he took in using it. It was out of my last hope that I gave him a second chance with a simpler task, which he failed as well, leaving me no choice but to accept the truth—that even though he is the son of our forever mourned chief priestess, Caelendra, he has no aptitude as an oracle, and so I could do nothing else but dismiss him and could not—for his sake as well as our shrine’s—give in to his pleading to continue in studies for which he was ill-suited. I assumed that he would recover from his disappointment in time and would keep up his lessons with you and Olyrrwd. Whatever Olyrrwd may have claimed, I swear to you on my sacred staff and necklace, I didn’t put either the vial of sacred elixir or the ceremonial dagger in his hands; I but cast both down on the floor in my deep disappointment. How could I have imagined that when he picked them up, it was for such a purpose?”

Rallying enough to straighten his shoulders, Ossiam regained something of his earlier injured dignity as he added, “If I had any thought that a pupil in my care had left my chamber bent on self-destruction, do you think I would have calmly come to you and started a game of Stones?”

Herrwn hadn’t planned to bring up the painful revelation of Ossiam cheating at Stones, but it slipped out. “I would not have believed that—but then I would not have believed that you, my cousin and our shrine’s chief oracle, could have taken advantage of my indisposition to toss the dice out of turn and change their score to suit yourself!”

“Is that what Olyrrwd told you?”

“It is!”

“Well, I am telling you that he charged into the room shouting incoherent accusations—so crazed that he, our shrine’s chief healer, never even looked to see how badly you were hurt when he knocked your chair over! I, of course, was more concerned with your welfare than any attack on myself and demanded he do his duty as a physician. If, in my shock at his behavior and out of my concern for you, I dropped the dice or accidentally shifted any of the stones, I cannot recall it now—nor does it matter, since he tossed the board off the table and continued to shriek until I finally came to realize that he was saying some servant claimed Caelym had left the shrine intent on self-destruction. It was not out of any thought that this was true but only to send Olyrrwd away so I could see to your needs that I said the one thing I could think of—that when Caelym first pleaded with me to become my disciple, we’d been standing together on the overlook above the Bottomless Falls, and since he’d just been dismissed from his studies, he might have returned there. But now … but now … if what you say is true …”

In his vigorous denials of intentional wrongdoing, Ossiam had risen from his chair, waving his arms and stamping his foot. With this last, faltering line, he sank down again, and again covered his face with his hands. “But if what you say is true … If Caelym took my dismissal so wrongly and might actually have …” Looking at Herrwn, his eyes brimming with tears, Ossiam said in a hollow voice, “And if you, the head of our order, truly believe that I did this out of malice, then you must take my staff and my necklace.”

Herrwn looked back at Ossiam as he pondered what to say. Considered side by side, both of his cousins’ accounts fit the facts before him. There was no question in his mind about Olyrrwd’s version of the actual events, but knowing the readiness of both men to infer the worst motives in each other, it was not impossible that Ossiam was equally sincere. And to take the symbols of a high priest’s office from him was an act as irrevocable as the chief priestess casting him out.

“I will not take your staff and necklace, for I do not believe that you did this intentionally. But hear me, my cousin, if I should ever find out that I am mistaken—dear as you are to me, I will take those things from you, and I will expel you from our order. Now, it is my greatest wish that we will never need to speak of this again.”