Chapter 68: Whatever Happened

“I wonder whatever happened to the little goat.”

It had been a year and four months since Caelym’s return from his spirit quest, and, with all that had gone on since then, Herrwn had forgotten about the missing animal, but he was reminded of its mysterious disappearance as he and Olyrrwd sat at the classroom table, watching their distraught disciple pacing around the chamber reciting snatches out of unrelated sagas—one of which Herrwn recognized as a stanza from Rhiawana and the Lost Prince, the story he’d been reciting to the girls on the day the goat vanished.

“I thought—” Olyrrwd’s answer was interrupted by a paroxysm of coughing that went on for an inordinate length of time, during which his face turned from beefy red to dusky blue. Knowing how much it irritated Olyrrwd when people “made a fuss over him” whether by asking anxiously, “Are you all right, Master?” as Benyon invariably did or by pounding him on the back, as Caelym tended to, Herrwn held his breath and waited until his cousin leaned over, spat a greenish-yellow glob into a crock by his feet, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and went on matter-of-factly, “you knew.”

“Was it found? Where? When?”

“At the pools. A week or so later.”

“The pools? You don’t mean—”

“I do. The Sacred Pools. Fortunately, not by Feywn but by a servant who’d gone ahead to make sure all was in readiness for her next visit.”

“What did she—I mean, the servant—do?”

“Hustled it off to the goatherd, who put it back into the flock, where it has taken on its responsibilities as the herd’s new stud with admirable vigor”—Olyrrwd waited for Caelym to pace past them and on to the far side of the room, then lowered his voice—“something I would say our Caelie has done as well,” with a chuckle that turned into another spasm of coughing.

While Herrwn would have phrased it differently, there was no denying the truth in what Olyrrwd was saying.