Chapter 4: Cididden

The next morning, while his parents were busy with the preparations for Eldrenedd’s funeral, Herrwn rushed to find Olyrrwd and Ossiam. He met them hurrying down the hallways toward him—Olyrrwd out in front for a change, carrying something wrapped up in a small woolen bundle.

Before Herrwn could tell them what had happened at the Sacred Pools, Olyrrwd launched into an enthusiastic account of his day in the shrine’s kitchen—interrupted now and again by Ossiam, who seemed determined to continue some earlier quarrel.

Olyrrwd was more than ready to oblige, declaring, “Ossie was a big baby! He was rude to the cook, and she made him sit in the corner.”

“She didn’t make me do anything! I wanted to sit there! I was having a vision!”

“Were not!”

“Was too!”

“Were not!”

As Olyrrwd and Ossiam shouted at each other, the bundle Olyrrwd was holding against his chest began to move and give off faint mewing sounds. Olyrrwd dropped his voice to a whisper and, ignoring Ossiam’s final “was too,” abruptly changed the subject to say that he had watched the cook’s cat have kittens.

“Seven of them! All black kittens, with no white on them anywhere!”

Too caught up in his story to keep up his quarrel with Ossiam, Olyrrwd retold every detail of the birth that he could remember.

“The mother cat yowled and heaved and looked like she was pooping, but instead of poop, kittens came out! They were all wet and gooey and covered with something like snot, only stickier! And the mother cat licked the sticky stuff off of the kittens, and the kittens crawled all by themselves to start nursing, even though they were just born!” Pausing to take a gulping breath, he went on, “But when the last and littlest kitten was born, her mother pushed her away and wouldn’t let her have anything to eat, and the cook said that she was too weak to live, and that she was going to drown her!”

Here Ossiam broke in, paying Olyrrwd back for his earlier insult. “Oly cried like a little baby, and the cook gave him the stupid kitten to make him shut up! And it’s just going to die anyway!”

“She will not!” Olyrrwd hugged the bundle closer and glared at Ossiam. “I’m going to heal her! I’ll feed her sheep’s milk and keep her warm so she will live!”

Olyrrwd named the kitten “Cididden.” For the next three days and nights, he cradled her in his arms, not willing to put her down for fear that she’d die if he wasn’t holding her. He dripped milk into her mouth from a doll’s spoon and stroked her tiny, frail body, all the time making soft purring noises in imitation of a mother cat.

Defying Ossiam’s spiteful prediction, the kitten grew stronger until she could suck the milk off a rag wick and then lap it out of a bowl. The first of the many sickly or injured animals that Olyrrwd nursed back to health, she remained his boon companion for twenty-four years, the exact length of Caelendra’s time as their chief priestess.

Once, somewhere in the middle of those years, when Herrwn, Ossiam, and Olyrrwd were resting in their chambers after their midday meal and Cididden was stretched out, sleek and content, on a sunny window ledge, Olyrrwd smugly reminded Ossiam of his “first prophecy,” to which Ossiam retorted, “I said she was going to die, I didn’t say when!”

But Ossiam was never able to pronounce his prediction fulfilled because, in the turmoil that followed Caelendra’s death, Cididden disappeared. No trace of her was ever found, and all Olyrrwd would say was, “She must have gone to be Caelendra’s guide into the next world.”

While there was no question that Olyrrwd mourned the loss of his beloved pet almost as much as he mourned for Caelendra herself, Herrwn always harbored a suspicion that his cousin had eased Cididden’s exit from this world with a dose of poppy juice in her milk and then hidden her body among the grave goods surrounding the remains of their dead priestess. With Olyrrwd, anything was possible when it came to chafing Ossiam.