The Lost Brother (13 page)

“About the man or men behind all this,” Gwen
said. “Who murdered the false Gareth—and possibly ordered him to
murder the false Gwen—and who was our false Gareth and Gwen
supposed to fool? I am concerned about where our victims were in
the days before their murders.”

“I care very much about the identity of the
former, but it’s the latter person who has my stomach in a knot,”
Gareth said. “It was foolish of me to hope that your mind wouldn’t
wander in the same direction as mine.”

“What do you think they might have been
doing?” Gwen said.

“I have no idea.” Gareth yawned. “Hopefully
not killing somebody else.”

“How about the first person then?” Gwen
said. “Who would come up with the mad idea of having two people
impersonate us?”

Gareth shook his head, trying to dispense
with the last of the fog in his brain. “If you were to think of a
man of our acquaintance who is capable of concocting an
unnecessarily complicated plot that ends in murder, what is the
first name that comes to mind?”

Gwen was silent for a moment. “You know the
answer as well as I: Prince Cadwaladr. I haven’t wanted to say his
name, because he hasn’t done anything truly hideous recently—”

“—that we know of,” Gareth said.

“That we know of,” Gwen amended, “and his
name is always the first to come to my mind when trouble strikes.
Although he ordered the death of King Anarawd, we’ve had to look
elsewhere these last three years for the person responsible for the
murders we’ve encountered—and we were right to.”

“I know.” Gareth adjusted his position so he
could see his wife’s face better in the flickering firelight. “And
we’re going to proceed along the same lines here.” He raised his
right hand. “A pact.”

Gwen raised her left hand to clasp his.

“We won’t mention Cadwaladr’s name again
unless all options narrow to him,” Gareth said.

Gwen’s expression cleared. “Agreed.”

The wind died sometime in the night, having
brought storm clouds and a few inches of snow to eastern Gwynedd, a
rare event for the end of November—or any month in Wales for that
matter. Some years, it snowed merely enough to whitewash the grass.
The only inhabitants of the fort who appeared pleased with the
change in the weather were those whose job it was to fill the ice
house against a hot summer, boys under twelve, and Father Alun. He
stood beside Gareth at the entrance to the hall, smiling as he
rubbed his hands together to warm them.

“Why are you so happy?” Gareth said.

A stray snowball from the flurry of missiles
the rambunctious youngsters were throwing about the courtyard hit
Gareth’s hip. He brushed the snow off his cloak and sent a glare in
the direction of the boy who’d thrown it.

The boy’s eyes went wide as he realized his
mistake. “Sorry, my lord!”

“Not as sorry as you’re going to be!” Gareth
bent to scoop a handful of snow from the stoop, formed a ball, and
sent it whizzing back across the courtyard at the boy. “Take that,
you rascal!”

The boy dodged it expertly, laughing. Gareth
wasn’t so old he couldn’t remember how much he’d loved playing in
the snow with his friends. He was sorry he wasn’t at Aber today
because he would have liked to have been the one to introduce his
daughter to her first real snow.

“Today will be a day men stay home if they
can or crouch around the campfire if they can’t,” Father Alun said,
as if the brief interruption hadn’t happened. “The war will be held
in abeyance for a day until the snow clears.”

“Only a day?” Gareth checked the sky. Snow
fell from it, though perhaps less thickly than even a half-hour
earlier.

“It is November,” Father Alun said. “The
snow will stop in the next hour and will have mostly melted by
mid-afternoon. Mark my words.”

“Then we’d better get going before the trail
becomes muck.” Gareth turned back to the door, thinking to return
to the hall to see what was keeping Gwen, but then she came through
it, wrapped to her eyes in wool.

“Oh.” She pulled down the scarf that
protected her cheeks and chin. “It isn’t as cold as I thought. I
think this might melt soon.”

Gareth shook his head, laughing and looking
from Gwen to Father Alun, who held out his elbow to her. “My
thoughts exactly, my dear.” They walked forward from the doorway so
they wouldn’t block the passage of other people who wanted to enter
or exit the hall.

“Where should we go first?” Gwen said.

Gareth gestured to the boy who was leading
their horses from the stable. “We need to visit the site where the
false Gareth was buried. When I talked to him last night, the man
who found his body wasn’t terribly coherent, but he did say that
he’d meet us where the road forks. This journey will serve the dual
purpose of letting us see where the man died and was buried and
allowing us to question our guide.

Father Alun nodded. “Bran knows that if he
sets foot in the hall before nightfall, the drink will call
him.”

“He was quite drunk last night,” Gwen said.
“It’ll be a wonder if he’s able to walk this morning.”

“It is a matter of pride with him.” Father
Alun picked at his lower lip with one finger. “I must do better
about finding him a wife.”

And with that, Father Alun set off across
the courtyard to the stable where he’d left his mule. He’d spent
the night at the fort too, rolled in a blanket on the opposite end
of the hall from Gareth and Gwen. Gareth couldn’t blame him for
staying. His house was cold and lonely in comparison to the
fellowship found in Lord Morgan’s fort.

“Are we ready?”

Gareth and Gwen turned at the voice. Morgan
himself appeared beside them, still shrugging into his cloak. He
settled it around his shoulders and then pinned the broach at his
throat.

“My lord, I didn’t realize you intended to
ride with us,” Gareth said. “Your duties—”

“Can wait,” Morgan said. “This is
important.”

“Yes, my lord,” Gareth said, somewhat
puzzled still at Morgan’s continued presence.

And yet he’d heard in the hall last night
that, like Bran, Morgan had lost his wife to childbirth. The child
had lived, but Gareth could see how the days grew painfully long
without his wife. Gareth had kept busy fighting this war during the
three months he’d been parted from Gwen. Many nights he was so
tired he fell asleep instantly, but on those occasions he couldn’t,
and he allowed himself to think about Gwen and Tangwen, the hours
until dawn were endless.

Lord Morgan’s inclusion in the company
required an additional three men as guards. King Owain never went
anywhere without at least twenty, so three were hardly any trouble
at all. Leaving Einion watching stolidly from the entrance to the
fort, they rode out from the gatehouse and down the hill towards
the ford.

Even with the snow, which had all but
stopped by now, daylight afforded a fine view of the surrounding
countryside, down to the river and across it to Cilcain. Eastern
Wales beyond the Clwyd range sloped gently down to the Dee Estuary
and to Chester. In winter, with the trees mostly bare, the air
crisp and clear, and everything coated in a layer of white, a man
could see for miles. Gareth liked it because it meant he could see
the enemy coming before he was upon him.

When it wasn’t covered with snow, the
English liked the landscape too because they could march their huge
armies across the fields and meadows without obstruction—and
without having to worry about where the Welsh were hiding. The
Welsh, in turn, had a long history of responding to English
military action by retreating into their mountains, and woe betide
the foreign soldiers who followed them there. By Norman standards,
Welshmen had no honor. They thought nothing about ambushing their
enemy from behind any tree, boulder, or hillock, shooting their
arrows from afar and at no danger to themselves.

The Normans hated the ambushes but hadn’t
yet adopted the bow with any regularity, though certainly some
lords had men who could use it, particularly in the north of
England. It was terribly short-sighted of them, but Gareth feared
the day Englishmen trained to use it on the scale the Welsh did
because the Welsh would have lost one of the few advantages they
had.

Where the road down to the river divided—one
path heading to the ford of the river and the other northwest
upstream—they found Bran waiting for them. He gave no greeting, but
turned his back at the sight of them and started walking. He didn’t
have a horse, but that didn’t stop him from setting off at a
quicker pace than Gareth was riding.

Gareth spurred Braith to catch up, and when
he got close, he dismounted so he could walk beside the herdsman.
“Tell me what you saw.”

He intentionally spoke bluntly, having
learned last night from Lord Morgan—and confirmed by Bran’s
behavior if he hadn’t been sure of it already—that the man didn’t
like to waste words and took offense when anyone else did. Short
and abrupt answers were normal for him whether drunk or sober.

Bran was a few inches shorter than Gareth,
but he was just as muscular, with heavily calloused hands from
laboring daily among his herds and on his farm. He pushed back his
hood, revealing dark brown hair that had been cropped close to his
head like Gareth’s. He was fifteen years older than Gareth,
however, so his hair was also receding from his forehead and
balding at the back of his head, with more gray in it than Gareth
had. In fact, his mustache was almost entirely white and stood out
clearly against the man’s tanned face. Gareth’s face was tanned too
despite the long, rainy autumn, simply from spending so much time
outdoors.

“The body lay in the dirt,” Bran said,
startling Gareth by stringing six words together at the same
time.

“It was partly buried, I hear,” Gareth
said.

Bran gave him a curt nod. “The dog found
him.” He gestured to his sheepdog, which trotted at his master’s
heels, his tongue hanging out. The dog was enjoying the snow as
much as the children.

“He’s beautiful,” Gareth said, and meant
it.

All Welshmen appreciated a good sheepdog,
and this one appeared particularly intelligent and alert, either
observing his surroundings while trotting along the trail or
bounding ahead, his nose to the ground and sniffing everything in
sight.

“Why were you on the trail?” Gareth
said.

“Lost lamb.”

“A lamb had become lost in a thicket?”

Bran nodded.

“Did you find it?”

Bran grunted, which Gareth took to be a
yes.

“So am I to gather that you were returning
home when you found the body?”

Again the grunt, and then Bran whistled to
his dog, who’d run farther ahead than Bran wanted. The dog
responded instantly and returned to Bran’s side.

Gareth waited until he had Bran’s attention
again. The trail was rising steadily towards the mountains, and
Gareth was starting to huff with the effort of keeping pace with
Bran. “Did you see anything unusual around the body, something you
noticed either before you discovered it or after? I’m particularly
thinking of boot or hoof prints and the like.”

Bran started to shake his head, but then he
arrested the movement and tipped his head to one side, thinking.
“Yes.” It was a real assent, and Bran’s eyes flashed with something
that looked like interest for the first time too. Up until now, his
participation had been the result of duty—his allegiance to Lord
Morgan—rather than because he cared about his role in finding
either the body or the killer.

“Will you show me?”

Nod.

After another half-mile of walking upstream,
by which point Gareth was sweating heavily in his mail shirt and
thick padding, Bran came to a halt in the shelter of a wood which
lined the trail on both sides. The river rushed by thirty yards to
the northeast of their position.

Bran stepped off the path a few yards, his
eyes on the ground, and then pointed to the base of a tree. Snow
had filled in the whole area, but indentations remained beneath it,
which the snow couldn’t entirely mask. Gareth put out a hand to
keep the others from coming any closer. Leaving his reins with
Gwen, who’d dismounted too, he crouched low to the ground and
gently swept aside the snow with his gloved hand.

“What do you see, Gareth?” Gwen said from
behind him.

“Tracks.” Gareth swiveled on his heel to
look at his wife. “At least three horses, I’d say, same as the
graveyard, plus a number of boot prints. They seem to extend over a
broad area.”

“Can you tell if they’re the same as those
near the chapel?” Morgan said from his seat on his horse. “You said
you were looking for a man with large feet.”

Gareth gave Gwen a wry look before directing
his response to Cilcain’s lord. “Because the earth here was wet
from all the rain we’ve had, the men who walked here left
particularly distinct prints. And then we were very lucky that the
colder weather came when it did because they’re better-preserved
than they could have been.”

While he’d explained the situation to Lord
Morgan, Gwen had started to move away from him, somewhat bent over
with her eyes fixed on the ground. “Gareth, I think I see two sets
of footprints going this way. The trail is too hard-packed and
snow-covered to read where they went once they reached it.”

“Can you hand me the rope?” Gareth said.

Gwen loosened the ties on Gareth’s saddlebag
and took out the length of rope he kept there for measuring. Taking
it from Gwen, he set it in the boot print and marked the fibers
with a piece of charcoal to indicate how long and wide the print
was.

“Lucky that Bran noticed these were here.”
Gareth nodded towards the herdsman, who stood impassively by the
tree near where Gareth was crouched, his dog to heel at his left
ankle. “We might have missed these in the snow.”