The Fallen Princess (2 page)

“Just now, Ma,” Llelo said. “That’s why we
all came down here this morning. After the rain we’ve had, we were
looking forward to a good haul of clams.”

Gwen focused on the damp sand around the
body. The high tide mark was another ten feet further up the beach,
beyond where the woman lay, which meant that she’d been laid down
on this beach sometime after midnight. Otherwise, she would have
been washed away with the tide. That led Gwen to conclude—though
Hywel would say it was far too soon to conclude anything—that
whoever had laid her here had wanted her to be found. Otherwise, he
should have left her where he found her, wherever that was, or put
her closer to the water’s edge so the tide could have taken her out
to sea.

“Can we move her now?”

Gwen looked up and struggled not to let
dismay show on her face. Adda, the commander of one of King Owain’s
companies, had arrived at Gwen’s side with Dewi in tow. Adda bent
over the body, his hands on his knees. Dewi wore a look of
revulsion on his face.

“I’m sorry, sir, but we really can’t,” Gwen
said.

“Why not?” Adda said.

“Because she didn’t drown.”

“What do you mean?” Adda said. “Sailors and
fisherman often wash up on our shore when they don’t end up on the
Great Orme.”

Adda was right. The villagers knew to come
to the beach after a storm to look for valuable items they could
salvage from boats lost at sea, even if they had come for the clams
today.

“The body is barely damp, Adda,” Gwen said
as gently as she could.

Adda pressed his lips together.

Gwen didn’t know either man well. But while
Dewi seemed something of a simpleton, Adda was far from stupid,
even if he annoyed her by being pompous and overbearing.

It should have been clear to an experienced
man such as he that the woman had been dead long before today, but
he was also a stubborn man with fixed opinions. Gwen encountered
men like him all the time. They were older, set in their ways, and
did not welcome the notion that a young woman might have anything
to contribute to a murder investigation.

“Perhaps while we wait for Gareth to arrive,
Dewi and Rhodri could survey the beach?” Gwen gestured to the area
around the body. “I know that we’ve disturbed the sand with our
footprints, but they could look for tracks from a cart or from a
man walking as if he was carrying something—her—on his shoulder?
Given how dried out the body is, she wouldn’t have been very heavy
for a grown man, but his boots should have sunk deeper into the
sand than if he carried nothing.”

Adda raised his eyebrows. “Sir Gareth would
want the body removed from the beach first.”

Gwen just managed not to grind her teeth.
She’d given him a long speech and was trying to be as polite as she
could. “My husband, and Prince Hywel, of course, will be very
grateful to you when they return for moving the investigation
forward in their absence. I’m sure they will personally want to
hear from you whatever you discover.” She gave him her sweetest
smile and tried to keep her expression as sincere as possible.

Adda’s chin still stuck out stubbornly, but
as Gwen had hoped, he grunted his consent. It was unlikely that
Adda would tell her anything of what he found now that she’d
wounded his pride, but Gareth would tell her what Adda had to say
as soon as he heard it. There was only so much she could do here
all by herself, and she did need Adda’s help.

Adda motioned for Rhodri to join him and
Dewi, and Gwen went back to studying the body, finding it hard to
reconcile its condition to its presence on the beach. She fingered
the cloth of the woman’s dress. Blue like the cloak, with a close
weave that was still fine to Gwen’s touch, it was embroidered at
the bodice and had a full skirt, the hem of which would have
trailed behind the woman as she walked. Her linen shift and
underdress were also embroidered. Even without the garnet ring
strung on a gold chain around the woman’s neck, Gwen would have
known by her clothing alone that this was no serving girl. She’d
been noble or at the very least had dressed like it.

Whoever had left her on the beach hadn’t
just dumped her here, either. He’d arranged the woman’s long braid
of reddish-brown hair so that it trailed down her right shoulder
past her hip. In Wales, girls trimmed their hair until they reached
womanhood, keeping it shoulder length and easier to care for, after
which they never cut it again. Comparing this woman’s braid to
Gwen’s own, and taking into account that not every woman’s hair
grew at the same rate, the dead woman had been at least five years
past womanhood when she died.

A dirty band of fabric that might once have
been white was tied around her head. A dark patch on it—dried, of
course—had Gwen carefully unwinding the cloth, tugging on it to
unstick it from the right side of the woman’s head and knowing
before she saw the mat of blood in the woman’s hair that someone
had to have hit her very hard to cause the wound. The same dark
stains that Gwen guessed were blood instead of mud or the decay of
time marred her dress at the right shoulder too.

Gwen gently worked her fingers underneath
the matted hair and found the wound. As Gwen traced the edges of
shattered bone, she came upon an abrupt indentation in the center
of the wound as if a sharp point had been driven into the bone.

Gwen sat back. Trying to gain control of her
thoughts, she blocked out the image of the woman as she was now in
order to take stock of what the girl had once been: she was more
than eighteen years old, possibly noble, and had been dead for
years. Gwen ran her thumb along the woman’s slender wrist. The
flesh still adhered to the bones and, like the rest of her arm,
wasn’t a uniform medium brown. The skin was mottled all along the
arm—darker in some places than others—but a thin band of darker
skin went around each wrist. Given the unusual state of
decomposition, Gwen didn’t want to speculate if these were bruises
or a natural result of the desiccation of the body. Gwen had never
seen a body like this one, so she honestly didn’t know what was
normal in such a case.

Other than the head wound, of course, which
clearly wasn’t.

For the first time in months, Gwen felt her
stomach rebelling. She swallowed down the bile at the back of her
throat, grateful now that Rhodri had woken her from a deep sleep,
and she hadn’t had the opportunity to eat anything before she rode
to the beach.

“Gwen!”

She looked up at the sound of her husband’s
voice. Gareth had appeared in the gap between two dunes,
accompanied by Prince Hywel and ten other men. Gwen had drowsily
kissed Gareth goodbye before he’d ridden out of Aber Castle with
Hywel. At the sight of him now, her spirits lifted, alleviating
some of the sickness in her stomach. Gareth and the other men
reined in and dismounted near where Gwen had left her horse and the
cart had been parked.

Gwen’s pleasure faded, however, as Adda
stepped in front of Hywel, talking quickly. They were too far away
for Gwen to make out Adda’s words, and apparently Gareth wasn’t
interested in hearing what Adda had to say because he strode past
him, crossing the last few yards of sand to where Gwen waited. He
was careful—as Gwen had been—to take a circuitous route so as not
to disturb the already churned up sand more than he had to.

Gwen rose awkwardly to her feet and gestured
to the body in the sand. “As you can see, we have had some trouble
here.”

Gareth slipped an arm around her waist,
holding Gwen close for a moment while she pressed her cheek to his
chest. To Gwen’s dismay, tears pricked at the back of her eyes, and
she shook her head to stop them from falling, determined not to
lose her composure just because Gareth had arrived and she no
longer needed to keep it.

“Are you all right?” He kissed her
temple.

“I have lost count of the number of people
who have asked me that this morning,” Gwen said. That wasn’t
entirely true; in fact, she’d kept a careful count. Gareth was the
third.

“You didn’t answer my question,” Gareth
said, but he must have decided that if she could talk back to him,
she really was fine, because he released her and crouched in Gwen’s
place beside the dead woman.

While Gwen related what she’d discovered so
far, Gareth went over the body as she had. Hywel, on the other
hand, once he dismissed Adda, stood chewing on his lower lip, his
arms folded across his chest and every line of his body revealing
his tension and unhappiness. Gwen had assumed that the strange
state of the body and the length of time since her death would make
it difficult to identify the woman quickly, but the prince’s
expression said otherwise.

“Do you know her?” Gwen said.

Hywel breathed deeply. “I don’t want to; I
shouldn’t be able to.”

Gareth looked up from his examination. “My
lord?”

Hywel didn’t answer. He seemed to be
struggling with himself somehow.

Gwen stepped closer, looking at him with
some concern. “Whoever she is, we’re here to help, like we always
are.”

“After all these years, I can’t believe
she’s dead.” Hywel scrubbed at his hair with one hand, his gaze
never leaving the body.

“Who’s dead, my lord?” Gareth said.

“My cousin, Tegwen,” Hywel said.

Gareth

G
areth looked from
Hywel to the body and back again. “This is your cousin? How can
that be?”

Gwen was staring open-mouthed at Hywel.
“But—but—Tegwen ran away. We all know that she ran away!”

Hywel shook his head, sadness and regret in
his face. “It seems we might have been wrong about that, Gwen.”
Then he looked at Gareth and said, “My uncle, Cadwallon, was her
father. He never had any sons, and Tegwen was his only child.”

Gareth straightened from his crouch and
stepped close to his lord to ensure that none of the onlookers
could overhear him. “I know who Tegwen was, my lord, but she’s been
missing these five years. Are you suggesting that she didn’t run
away with a Dane as we all thought but has been dead this whole
time?”

“I can only tell you what I see.” Hywel
gestured helplessly to the body. “That’s Tegwen. I’d swear to
it.”

“How could she have ended up here?” Gwen
stood with her hand to her mouth. She seemed unable to look away
from the dead woman, so Gareth stepped past Hywel to stand beside
her, his hand resting gently at the small of her back.

Gareth couldn’t blame the two of them for
being shocked. This was the last thing he wanted to see today too.
From the head wound, this was murder, and even if it happened a
long time ago, it couldn’t be ignored. Neither King Owain nor Hywel
would allow it. For Gareth’s part, he was loath to spend the short
time he had with Gwen working on a murder investigation,
particularly one involving a beloved member of the royal house of
Gwynedd.

Tegwen’s disappearance five years ago had
been dramatic enough to have become legend. Gareth had heard the
stories and couldn’t blame the people for reveling in its
retelling. Who wouldn’t enjoy a tale of a young princess who defied
her family and ran away with a handsome Dane? The fact that Tegwen
had left her husband and daughters behind was usually (and
conveniently) forgotten.

Gareth had heard a version of the story in
the great hall at Aber just last night, set to music and much
embellished, with the names changed and an added mythological
element that included a dragon. The singer hadn’t been Meilyr or
Gwalchmai, Gwen’s father and brother, and as Gareth had heard this
version before, he hadn’t paid much attention. He’d been with Gwen
at the time, and they’d had eyes and ears only for each other.

Neither King Owain nor his guests were going
to enjoy what appeared to be the real story: Tegwen hadn’t run away
with a Dane. She’d been murdered instead.

Gwen slipped her hand into Gareth’s. “We
have more to observe, but it might be better not to do it in front
of all these people. Can you get them to leave? Rhodri and Dewi
tried, but nobody seems to have listened.”

Gareth surveyed the beach. Although most of
the dozen onlookers had the decency to move at least ten feet from
the body, and no one else was hovering over it like they were, Gwen
was right. “I’ll see what I can do. Ignore them and do what you
have to do to help Prince Hywel.”

With a worried look at Hywel, who seemed to
be frozen where he stood, Gareth headed up the beach towards his
men in what wasn’t his usual stride. His boots dug into the soft
sand, and he knew he’d be dumping the fine grains out of them for
weeks to come. As he crossed onto drier sand, Gareth called for the
men to gather around him.

“This has turned into a more delicate
situation than Prince Hywel first thought it would be, and we need
to contain this scene,” he said. “Many of you have had the
misfortune to participate in incidents like this before. I must
stay beside the prince for now, but I need to know everything that
happened on this beach between yesterday evening and this moment.”
Gareth pointed with his chin at his friend. “Evan, if you could see
to interviewing the people here? You know what to do. At a minimum,
I need them to stay further away from the body. A crowd of
onlookers watching his every move is the last thing Prince Hywel
needs right now.”

“Of course, my lord.”

Gareth turned away, taking a breath and
letting it out to settle himself as he looked down the beach to
where Hywel and Gwen were talking quietly over Tegwen’s body. Hywel
seemed to be recovering from his initial shock, which had been
uncharacteristic of him to begin with. None of them had encountered
a murder since last spring when a Norman spy had dropped a body at
their feet in the bailey of Earl Robert’s castle at
Newcastle-under-Lyme. While Gareth had been a key player in that
investigation, his task had been hampered by his unfamiliarity with
the area and a general prejudice against the Welsh displayed by
most every Norman he encountered. At least here at Aber that
wouldn’t be a problem.