The village of Fenwick was awake. Drifting past with their noses just above water, Caelym and Annwr could see men carrying torches rushing around with packs of hounds. The light from the flames, however, darkened the night around them, and neither men nor dogs took any notice of the brush-filled boat as they floated past on the far side of the river.
Still, they kept their heads down and stayed even with the current around another three bends before they risked landing the boat and climbing out. After shaking off like a wet dog, Caelym pulled off the tangle of twigs and branches and hoisted the packs onto the shore, leaving Aleswina to Annwr.
It was, as he’d advised them both, better to have dry clothes to get into after spending a cool night in the water. Dressed again, and with the coarse monk’s robe a welcome shield against the breeze, he climbed back into the boat, set the oars into their braces, and settled himself on the seat and took some experimental strokes through the air.
“Have you taken a boat down a river before?” Annwr asked, skeptical as ever.
Of course, I have, a thousand times or more! is what he would have answered if only it were the truth. Instead, he barked back, “I have not, but how hard can it be if a drunken Saxon can do it?”
“It may have helped that he learned how when he was sober.”
Unable to think of a suitably scathing rebuttal, Caelym took himself off into the bushes, both for personal reasons and to escape having to respond.
Glad to have him out from underfoot, Annwr coaxed Aleswina out of the boat and into dry clothes. While she did as she was told, it worried Annwr that Aleswina kept shivering after she should have been warm, and that she didn’t answer when Annwr spoke to her.
Coming out of the thicket to see that Annwr still hovered over the dim-witted girl, Caelym weighed Annwr’s indulgence of the stupid little Saxon princess against the harsh abuse and neglect he felt himself to be suffering. His sense of being wronged increased as he got close enough to hear Annwr telling Aleswina that she should “pay no attention to Caelym’s antics, because he was always one to put on a show for the pleasure of being noticed and no doubt will be making up poetry about his own silly escapades before they’re half over.”
That there was some truth to this only added to Caelym’s mounting resentment as he pushed the boat back into the water.
It took him a while to get the feel for rowing in the strong current and keeping the boat in a relatively straight path. Once he felt in control, he snapped “It might be better if you spent less time telling the girl that I’m a fool. As we journey together, fleeing from one danger to face another, there may be a time that I will need to tell her what she must do, and instead of doing it maybe she’ll be looking at you to see if she should, and maybe by the time you tell her, it will be too late.”
To Caelym’s surprise, Annwr said that he was right and that she was sorry.
Another several bends of the river slipped past in oddly companionable silence, with no more than the slap and surge of the oars and the rustle of water against the sides of the boat.
It was almost dawn when a change in the sound of the river caught their attention. Looking downstream, in the faint beginning of daylight, they couldn’t see anything except a few rocks and some V-shaped ripples, but the sound increased to a thundering roar as the current picked up, carrying the boat faster than Caelym was rowing.
Aleswina sat up to look just as the boat came to the verge of the rapids. It teetered there for half a dozen heartbeats, held in place by Caelym’s desperate backstrokes. Then it dropped its prow and plunged downwards. The two women clutched whatever there was to hold on to while Caelym heaved one oar then the other to fend off rocks or bring the boat around straight before the waves swamped it.
They were all soaked, and their packs were washing back and forth in a small lake of water in the bottom of the boat when they came out, just as suddenly, into a swift, smooth current that gave no hint of what they had just been through.
Caelym brought the boat around to look back at the cascade of water crashing behind them, his face glowing in exaltation. Even Annwr’s sharp warning to look ahead or he’d be drowning them all could not dampen the triumph of that moment or keep his heart from filling with a deep and lasting love for boats and rivers.