Caelym stared into the depths of the pool. Ripples from the upper stream traveled across its surface, breaking up the shape of the half-moon’s reflection, stretching it out so it took on the appearance of a ghostly female figure floating under the water. Annwr’s questions seemed to come at him from far off in the distance. At first, he didn’t see how he could respond, but once she made it clear that they would speak no unspeakable names and say nothing that was forbidden, he heard himself answering her as conscientiously as he had answered Arddwn.
It was the night of the last winter solstice. That night, like every winter solstice night since the founding of their cult, the celebration of the reconciliation between the earth and the sun began with the opening of the main hall of the shrine to the common people—replacing its usual solemnity with revelry as villagers wearing brightly painted masks danced to the music of drums and flutes. The sound of the ram’s horn halfway between sundown and midnight signaled that it was time for the priests and priestess to withdraw from the public festivities and prepare to conduct the most important ceremony of the year—the enactment of the time when the first Druids gathered together on the highest mountain in the world, pleaded with the Sun and the Earth to put aside their differences, and convinced the Earth to call the Sun back to Her.
They filed up the stairs to the uppermost chamber of the shrine’s highest tower without so much as a candle to light their way. Entering the dark room, they began the ritual by milling around the unlit hearth in what appeared to be random circles but were actually rigidly choreographed dance steps and reciting overlapping lamentations in a portrayal of the despair of humankind, who feared they would be left to freeze in eternal night.
Gradually, the priests and priestesses took their assigned spots in preparation for the next and most critical phase of the ritual—the recitation of the chants that must be said in precise order and without the slightest deviation to ensure the sun would indeed return this year.
The moon was full that night, making the winter solstice all the more auspicious, but in spite of that, there would have been a growing tension in the chamber as they became aware that the place in the woman’s line to the right of Feywn was vacant. There were, as Annwr would recall, seven stanzas that must be chanted by the chief priestess’s closest female kin—and this, it went very much without saying, would have been Feywn’s daughter, fathered by Rhedwyn, if such a daughter had ever been.
Caelym would have seen Feywn’s lips tighten from where he stood but wouldn’t have been worried himself because if Feywn had ever had a daughter fathered by Rhedwyn, then that daughter would have been forever coming late to meals and rituals, almost certainly with the express purpose of annoying her mother.
And true to form, at the last possible moment, she would have arrived. Only instead of taking her place in line, she would have stepped into the center of their circle, pulled a silver cross— the disdained symbol of the uninvited and unwelcome Christian god—out from under her robe and thrust it up like a war banner. She would have boasted that she was going to marry a powerful Saxon prince and reign with him over the vast lands around them. Then she would have openly defied her mother—saying that there were no goddesses but only a god, and that god was Jesus! Then, as they all stood frozen in their places, she would have told them that they all must convert as she had done, and never again listen to the sham of a mother goddess.
Feywn would have moved forward, lifting her staff higher than the cross.
Everyone in the chamber would have drawn back—except for Cyri, who would have stepped between the two of them in a vain attempt to make peace.
Not deigning to respond to the vile attack against herself, Feywn would have proclaimed that what they saw before them was a demon in the shape of a woman, sent by their enemies’ god. Then she, Feywn, would have begun chanting the chant casting out demons and condemning their mortal manifestations to death.
At that, the demon—as she was revealed to be—would have dropped the cross and drawn her knife, would have grabbed hold of Cyri and used her as a shield as she backed out of the chamber.
He himself would have stood still, stunned and disbelieving, until he heard Feywn’s voice ordering him to take up his bow and arrows and go after them.
Knowing she had no chance to escape hampered by a struggling hostage, the demon in woman’s form would have hidden behind a pillar at the bottom of the tower stairs and shoved Cyri into Caelym’s path as he came out. Cyri would have lurched into him, clinging to his robes as if she were trying to hold him back. He would have broken loose and taken up the chase. Cyri would not have understood. She would have run after them, calling out and pleading with him not to shoot, while his quarry dodged from one hall to the next, out of the shrine through the lower gate, and down the winding path that led to the tunnel through the underground caverns. All along the way, the demon would have been laughing—taunting and teasing him, as though this were nothing more than a game they would have played as children.
He would have reached the end of the tunnel, coming to the mouth of the cave, at the same time that she reached the edge of the pool outside. There, she would have had the choice of taking the path around the edge—making her an easy target against the cliff wall—or diving into the pool that was too wide to swim across without coming up for air.
Trapped but too proud to admit it, she would have turned and looked straight at him, her head held high, her red hair glowing golden in the moonlight, her white ceremonial robes billowing in the cool night breeze—daring him to shoot. Then, almost lazily, she would have lifted her arms and leapt headlong into the pool while he dropped to one knee, fitted his arrow to his bow, and waited.
The night sky was cloudless and there was—had he said it already?—a full moon. The water was so clear that he would have been able to see her lithe, silvery form skimming below the surface.
The echoes of Cyri’s cries—pleading with him to hold his fire— would have bounced off the walls of the cavern behind him, growing louder as the shimmering white form rose up to break the surface. He would have drawn back his bowstring and launched his arrow. And then he would have doubled over in agony at what he had done. Cyri, herself racked with grief beyond tears, would have helped him to his feet, and they would have gone the long way back to the uppermost chamber of the shrine’s highest tower together. He would have taken his place in the men’s line, while Cyri would have stepped into the vacant place at Feywn’s right side. When the time came, she would have recited each of the seven vital stanzas as though they’d been her lines from the beginning.
And when the night’s ceremonies were complete, the priests and priestesses would have done what they could to fortify the shrine—setting guards at the valley’s upper and lower entrances and warning their servants and the villagers to be prepared for the coming attack—before retiring to their chambers to get what rest they could before dawn.
Relieved to be done with the part of his account that required wary circumlocution, Caelym stopped rocking. He wiped an errant tear from his eye and sighed. “When we woke in the morning, it was to find that our servants and laborers had vanished overnight, taking most of the shrine’s stores and all of the sheep, leaving only the herd of goats kept for milk and sacrifices—maybe out of fear of stealing animals intended to be tribute to the Goddess, or maybe they just couldn’t catch the wily old ram that led the flock and trusted no one except Cyri, who’d made a pet of him years before.”
“Even if,” he went on, “we could have barricaded our gates against the coming invasion, we could not have withstood a siege. But then, when all seemed lost, Feywn spoke—reminding us of the prophesies of a time when we would leave Llwddawanden and return to Cwmmarwn, our ancestral home. Our hopes restored, we followed her commands. Herrwn drew the maps to guide us. What provisions we had left were gathered and packed. I, as you know, was tasked with finding you and the boys. It was thought safest for the others to travel in four groups, each to be led by a ranking priest or priestess. What hardy men we had left—the last three of the shrine’s guards and our metalsmith—were parceled out between the groups like the smoked meat from the slaughter of our remaining livestock.”
“Darfwyn lived, then?”
Briefly confused over what time he was in, Caelym looked around. He saw Annwr, now kneeling next to him, and recalled that she’d been carried off before any of the bodies but Rhedwyn’s had been brought back to the shrine.
“Not Darfwyn. His son, Darbin, who inherited his father’s place at the forge and who, alone of all the shrine’s artisans, remained loyal to the Goddess.” (Or, at least, to one of her priestesses—there was a story in that, but Caelym needed to finish what he’d started out to say.)
It was just as well Caelym didn’t interject another topic while Annwr was grappling first with the realization that they weren’t going back to Llwddawanden and then that they were heading off to who knew where, following Caelym’s wildly inaccurate understanding of geography and Herrwn’s useless map in hopes of somehow stumbling into those groups that had left Llwddawanden when he did. Suppressing a groan, she asked, “And how will we find the others?”
This time, Caelym anticipated her question. “There is an inn, marked by the sign of a sleeping dragon, located at the last valley below the mountains that hide our next sanctuary. It is known to be a safe haven where no one questions other visitors, and there is reason to think that the innkeeper is a secret adherent to our ways. We are to meet there. When all have arrived, we will go on together.”
A cloud passed over the moon, and the pool went dark.
Caelym seemed, for the first time since Annwr had known him, to have no words left to say. He sat in the shadows, so motionless that he might have been a shadow himself.
Annwr knew the feeling—and she also knew that sometimes you just go on, whether you see any reason for it or not, so she got up and said firmly, “We are going back to camp now.” When he didn’t respond, she took hold of his arm, dragged him to his feet, and pointed him in the direction of their makeshift shelter. After he stumbled his way into the tent, she added another log to the fire. Instead of going back to lie with Aleswina, she settled herself next to Caelym, thinking that he was the one who most needed a mother just then.