The Fourth Horseman (21 page)

Amaury lowered his lantern and stopped.
Ahead, a faint light cut through the darkness. “We’re almost
there.”

“
I haven’t seen any sign so
far of Mari and Prior Rhys,” Gareth said. “I apologize, my lord, if
this was a fool’s errand.”

“
We had to know,” Hywel
said. “We haven’t come out in one piece yet, either.”

Gareth took Gwen’s hand and now paced with
her just behind Hywel. “What are the chances this turns bad?”

Amaury’s brows came together. “Why would you
even say that?”

Gareth gave a mocking laugh. “Stick with
Gwen and me. You’ll see.”

Hywel smirked, and they exited the tunnel.
Like the entrance back at the castle, this one was located in a
damp basement. Then his smile faded as he saw the two guards who
were supposed to be protecting the tunnel. They sat on benches at a
table, heads down on their arms, unmoving.

Gareth shot Amaury a grim smile. “See what I
mean? It’s inevitable.” He released Gwen and put a finger to the
neck of the first man. “He’s alive.”

“
This one is too,” Gwen
said from the opposite side of the table. “His pulse is faint, but
present.”

“
My impulse is to send you
back to the castle for help, Gwen, but I don’t want you going off
on your own,” Hywel said.

“
We should just go on,”
Gwen said.

Amaury gestured towards the inclined
corridor leading out of the guardroom. “Earl Robert took this over
when he claimed Newcastle. We are underneath an old country chapel,
long abandoned in favor of St. Giles.”

Hywel looked up. The foundations of the
church had been grafted onto the natural stones. Thick wooden beams
grew from floor to ceiling to support what was above them.

Amaury had already started walking and Hywel
followed, but then he stopped when Gwen hesitated, her hand on her
stomach. “Are you all right?”

“
I’m fine,” Gwen
said.

“
Then let’s move. We need
to find Mari.” Hywel continued on without waiting for her. He’d
learned over the years that there were few situations he couldn’t
handle merely by declaring that he could. Even at fourteen, when
his father sent him to roust one of his knights who’d betrayed him,
Hywel had sat on his horse, watching the man’s steading burn, while
a feeling of cold certainty settled onto his shoulders and wrapped
itself around him like a cloak. He’d worn that mantle ever since.
Hywel could always do what had to be done.

But the anxious feeling he’d felt in his
chest ever since he’d learned of Mari’s disappearance had him
concerned that his surety had abandoned him.

The passage opened into the crypt of the
church. Stone sarcophagi had been placed on ledges on either side
of the passage. Twenty feet long at most, it ended at a door. “This
opens onto a stairway which rises behind the altar in the
choir.”

“
Do you hear voices?” Gwen
said, her ear to the wooden panel.

Hywel didn’t stop. It was time to move this
along. He didn’t want to be reckless, but he heard the voices too,
and one of them sounded like Mari’s. He pulled on the door, which
was closed but not locked, and stepped through it, his sword
extended. As Amaury had indicated would happen, he stood on a stone
slab at the bottom of a set of stairs that rose above him to his
own height, approximately six feet.

Gareth had come through the door just behind
him, and together they took the stairs up two at a time. They came
out behind the altar and turned toward the voices, which were
coming from an alcove to their right. Hywel hadn’t been able to see
the alcove at first due to the pillars that ran from floor to
ceiling—or had once done when the chapel had a ceiling.

Amaury hadn’t been misleading them when he’d
said the chapel was abandoned. Most of the roof was gone, along
with three-quarters of the walls. All that was left of the nave
were the pillars, the stone altar, and the wall at the back of the
church. The chapel had become hardly more than a grassy clearing,
though flagstones still poked through the grass near the altar.

Three people stared at them
from the former alcove: Mari, Prior Rhys, and a third man Hywel
didn’t recognize. “
Cariad
, are you all right?” Hywel
strode towards Mari and caught her up in his arms before she could
answer.

Mari hugged him back, and then he
reluctantly released her.

“
I’m-I’m fine.” Mari’s eyes
were wide as she clutched his arms.

She then glanced at the third man, a worried
expression on her face. Given his greying hair and the lines on his
forehead and around his eyes, the stranger was at least twenty
years older than Mari and Hywel, similar in age to Prior Rhys, who
stood next to him.

“
How did you find us?”
While Rhys’s face was very pale and he clutched his cloak around
his shoulders, he didn’t waver on his feet. “Did Gareth get my
message?”

Hywel gestured to Amaury, who had entered
the chapel with Gwen and joined them in the alcove. “Eventually,”
Hywel said.

“
We didn’t know where you’d
gone, of course, but I thought this was a place worth looking,”
Amaury said.

Mari released Hywel’s hand to hug Gwen and
give her a peck on the cheek. “We were very worried,” Gwen
said.

“
I’m sorry to have
frightened you,” Mari said.

“
Mari wanted to tell you
where she was going, my lord,” Rhys said to Hywel, “but neither she
nor Tomos could find you. I did the best I could by sending a
message to Gareth.”

Hywel made a gesture of dismissal, accepting
the apology even though his instinct was the opposite. “All is
forgiven if you tell me why.”

Mari took in a deep breath. “My lord Hywel,
may I introduce you to my father, Ralph de Lacy.”

Chapter
Seventeen

Gwen

T
he older man beside Prior Rhys bowed low. “My
lord.”

Gwen’s hand went to her mouth. Mari gave her
a tremulous smile, and Gwen noticed the dried tear tracks on her
cheeks that looked to be renewed at any moment.

Hywel was looking daggers at Ralph. “We
thought you were dead. You let Mari believe you were dead.”

Gwen blinked at the
fierceness in Hywel’s voice. He was
angry
.

Ralph bowed his head. “I have been serving
my empress.”

“
You left your daughter to
fend for herself,” Hywel said, “while you’ve been alive this whole
time?”

“
I made sure she was cared
for—”

“
You let her think she no
longer had a father!” Hywel’s hands clenched into fists.

Ralph didn’t flinch or raise his voice. “It
was necessary.”

Mari put a hand on Hywel’s arm and spoke in
rapid Welsh. “Thank you, my lord. But it’s all right.”

“
It isn’t all right.” Hywel
was still glaring at Ralph. “Why did you do it? How could you do
it? And why reveal yourself now?”

“
What I did then, I did out
of loyalty to my sovereign, just as I serve her now by coming
forward,” Ralph said. “As I was just saying to Peter—I mean, Rhys—I
have learned of a plot that threatens Prince Henry’s life. Saving
him is more important than continuing my deception.”

“
We know of the plot,”
Amaury said. Gwen glanced at him, curious that like Hywel, his
hands were clenching and unclenching as if he were struggling to
control his emotions.

“
Where have you been all
this time?” Gareth said.

“
Like Rhys, I changed my
name, though instead of retreating to a monastery, I made my way to
the court of King Stephen.”

“
But not because you
switched sides?” Gwen said. “You’ve continued to work for the
empress?”

“
Yes.”

Hywel made an impatient gesture with his
hand. “Tell us about this plot and how you discovered it.”

“
It was a matter of
following the emeralds,” Ralph said. “I understand you know of them
too.”

Hywel’s arm came around Mari’s waist, and he
looked down at her. It looked like he’d managed to rein in his
temper, because his words were soft, “I wouldn’t have had you
mention the emerald to your father.”

“
He knew about the gems
already but not for whom they were destined,” Mari said. “It seemed
important that we pool our information before it was too
late.”

Hywel nodded and then looked back to Ralph.
“Tell us what you do know.”

“
William de Ypres, King
Stephen’s spymaster, has been paying off men in the empress’s
retinue since Stephen was crowned king,” Ralph said. “It was to
discover who these traitors were that I joined King Stephen’s
service in the first place.”

“
How did that come about?”
Gareth said. “How did you convince King Stephen of your
loyalty?”

“
Earl Robert arranged for
me to be attached to Ranulf when he was still a member of the
King’s company. When Ranulf defected to the empress a few years
later, I stayed, having established myself as a loyal
retainer.”

Gareth nodded. “And yet you chose this
moment to jeopardize everything for which you’ve worked so
hard?”

Ralph sniffed. “William of Ypres found
someone close to the empress who agreed to murder Prince Henry for
the payment of four emeralds. I had no choice but to come in the
hope that I’d be in time to stop him. I hadn’t realized that Prince
Henry was due to arrive at Newcastle so soon until my daughter told
me of it.”

“
Why not send a message?”
Hywel said.

“
I did not dare in case it
was intercepted. It has been many years since I lived among Earl
Robert’s men, and I didn’t know whom I could trust. My instincts
told me that other than my friend, Alard, I might be able to tell
only the empress herself of what I’d learned. When I got word that
she would be arriving at Newcastle tomorrow, I resolved to come
myself.”

Gwen pursed her lips. That was a chain of
events she could actually understand.

Ralph continued, “But in the hours since I
arrived, David and John have died, Alard is accused of murdering
them, my own daughter and former friend are involved somehow—and
nobody is at all concerned about the welfare of the prince.”

“
That would be because we
had no idea who might be behind such a plot if that man is not
Alard,” Gareth said, “and he has strongly asserted his innocence in
this matter.”

“
Was it you on the wall
walk with him when we first arrived?” Gwen said. “Was it you who
met Alard by the river … and killed John?”

Ralph’s mouth twitched, hinting at a smile,
though Gwen couldn’t see how taking a man’s life could ever be
amusing. “I hoped nobody had seen me, either at the castle or
beside the river. I was very careful to leave no signs of
myself.”

“
You left boot prints,”
Gareth said.

“
You understand that my
first act, after I left King Stephen’s court, would have been to
contact Alard? He was the only one, besides Rhys and the empress
herself, who knew of my mission all these years. Alard and I met in
secret every few months—though I hadn’t seen him since he was sent
to Scotland.”

“
And the real traitor?”
Hywel said.

“
I don’t know who’s behind
the plot. The man is surely high up in the empress’s ranks,” Ralph
said.

Amaury stepped into the ring around Ralph.
“We need to know everything you do.” The Norman’s face was both
intent and anxious. “Begin with the emeralds, if you will.” Then
his brow furrowed, and he turned to Hywel. “Tell me, my lord, how
is it that you know of them?”

Hywel said: “Could it be Ranulf who is
betraying the Empress?”

“
I don’t know,” Ralph
said.

“
I would know if the
traitor was Ranulf,” Amaury said, irritation rising in his voice.
Hywel had ignored his questions in favor of interrogating Ralph. “I
am the castellan at Chester, after all—”

Thwtt!

An arrow whipped by Gwen’s cheek and lodged
in a pillar to the right of Ralph. It had come so close to her
she’d felt the feathers on her skin. Then Amaury staggered and fell
to one knee, an arrow high in his chest, near his left collarbone.
Gwen gasped, without even the presence of mind to dive to the
ground. Fortunately, Gareth, Hywel, and Prior Rhys moved instead:
Gareth to throw himself on top of Gwen and bring her to the ground,
Hywel to do the same for Mari, and Prior Rhys to clutch at Amaury
and cover his body with his own.

“
Stay down, all of you!”
Gareth said, though he himself lifted his head and gazed around the
chapel.

Gwen turned her head to one side. Mari lay
in the grass with Hywel crouched over her. She looked at Gwen with
wide eyes. “Are you hurt?” Gwen said.

Mari shook her head.

“
Where is Ralph?” Hywel
said, looking right and left, much like Gareth.

“
I don’t know!” Gareth
moved off of Gwen, cursing under his breath, though he still kept a
hand on her shoulder to keep her down. He swiveled on the toe of
his boot, scanning their surroundings.

“
We need to get the women
to safety,” Hywel said.

“
I know. Come this way.”
Gareth grabbed Gwen’s arm to help her up and urged her towards the
back of the altar and the stairs that led down to the crypt. “Stay
here.”

A moment later, Mari crouched beside her.
“What about Amaury?” Gwen said.