The Renegade Merchant (27 page)

Meilyr and Gwalchmai seemed satisfied with
that response, so Gareth and Gwen collected their horses from the
stable and led them out the back of the abbey. The path they took
paralleled the main road that ran to the east and took them through
the abbey gardens and fields to the abandoned mill the abbey
laborer had mentioned when he’d told Gwen and Brother Julian about
seeing Conall.

Settlements of varying sizes lay to the east
of Shrewsbury. First was the Abbey Foregate, really another village
in and of itself, which even had its own priest. A hundred yards
on, these homes gave way to fields on both sides of the road. If it
had been daylight, Gwen could have made out crofts and barns
belonging to people who might worship in the Foregate, but who
didn’t live in Shrewsbury proper. After another half-mile, they
passed the back entrance to St. Giles, which was closed up for the
evening, or they might have returned to the road and the front
entrance in order to ask about the dead girl’s dress.

As it was, their current mission was more
urgent. “The mill is just up ahead,” Gareth said, “and then the
brothel is a matter of a few hundred yards to the east, to the
right of the main road.

“I thought you said you hadn’t been here
before?” Gwen’s eyes narrowed suspiciously.

“I haven’t! Before we left, I asked the
layman working in the stable where it was.” Gareth’s expression
turned sheepish. “It didn’t feel right speaking to one of the monks
about the location of a brothel.”

“I can see why it wouldn’t.” Amusement
bubbled up in Gwen, surprising her. It was raining and cold, but
she was out with Gareth. Yes, they were investigating a murder, but
in this moment, she had to admit that there was no place she’d
rather be.

She took in a deep breath,
probing in her mind around the edges of what she was feeling. She
was starting to think that perhaps the problem wasn’t with
her
at all, and
her detachment from this investigation wasn’t
wrong. Maybe what was wrong was murder itself. To feel numb to it
after a while was a natural reaction to something so unnatural that
nobody could keep doing what they did—feeling what she’d always
felt—and stay whole.

That didn’t mean she and Gareth should keep
on as they had, however. They would have to make a pact, for
starters, that from now on Tangwen and this baby would always come
first, and that they would try harder to keep Gwalchmai and her
father out of their cases. And maybe not answer when John Fletcher
called.

Gareth directed his horse into the trees,
and Gwen followed, ducking her head as branches, heavy with rain,
dumped water on her head as she brushed past them. Within three
paces, she couldn’t see anything at all, and all of a sudden, the
illicit nature of this endeavor had her breath catching in her
throat. She wouldn’t have said she was afraid, necessarily, but she
didn’t like how dark it was, and not being able to see made her
heart beat a little faster.

As always seemed to be the case, Gareth was
unerring in his ability to find a track that would take them
through the woods, though at one point he dismounted and helped
Gwen down before grasping the bridle of his horse and leading it
forward. By then, they didn’t have far to go, and soon they came to
a halt on the edge of a clearing beneath the sheltering branch of
an overhanging oak.

The mill lay in front of them on the far
side of a large clearing. A torch on a long pole jammed into the
ground shone near the front door.

“I thought you said it was abandoned,”
Gareth said.

“Who told you that?”

Gwen turned at the voice a moment before a
hand clapped over her mouth and pulled her away from Gareth. Before
she could bite down on it, the hand was removed to be replaced by a
gag, and then her hands were wrenched behind her back to be tied at
the wrists, and a bag thrown over her head. All she had was the
impression that her captor was a large man with a fierce
expression.

She tried to scream, but she choked on the
gag instead. She heard shouting and the clash of swords, which she
assumed meant Gareth was trying to fight off the attackers, but
from inside the bag she couldn’t make out what was happening.

Then the fighting stopped, and the only
sound she heard was a thud and heavy breathing. “Put them with the
others,” the same voice said.

Gwen experienced a moment of weightlessness
before she was thrown over a man’s shoulder. She jounced along
upside down, hardly able to breathe through the gag and with all
the blood rushing to her head. She was thankful she was only a few
months pregnant and the baby so small, since she barely showed and
her womb hadn’t grown to the point that being upside down on a
man’s shoulder would have been utterly unbearable.

They went a hundred steps, though they felt
like a thousand. Then a door creaked, and her captor walked across
a wooden floor with clunking steps, made louder and heavier by the
weight of her on his shoulder. Then another door creaked, and it
actually hit the top of her head as it closed behind them. More
footfalls, this time descending wooden steps, and then the
footfalls became more muffled. The man dropped her to the ground
and pulled the bag from her head.

Gwen blinked her eyes, adjusting them to the
light, though it wasn’t a difficult transition since the room was
hardly more illumined than the absolute blackness of the bag. What
light there was came from the glow of a lantern in the hand of a
second man. She took in a breath, and now that she felt a tiny bit
more in control, she realized that she recognized him as Flann’s
partner, Will.

They’d come down a narrow set of stairs,
with only six steps, to a damp dirt floor to end up in a room
approximately fifteen feet long and twenty wide. An L-shaped bend
hid the far corner. Wooden beams supported the ceiling above her
head, and the walls themselves were made of wood, plastered to keep
out the wind, though as she leaned back against the wall, she could
feel the force of the weather, rattling something loose. A
strangely narrow door—closed, of course—was centered in the wall
opposite the stairs.

It was an exit, though Gwen didn’t know to
where until she noted the rhythmic creaking and sound of splashing
water coming from beyond the narrow door. She’d briefly been in a
room just like this in Aberystwyth. It made up the lower level of
the mill, necessary to give access to the water of the mill race
and to maintain the waterwheel, but where nothing could be stored
because of the dampness.

These men, however, were storing women here.
Crowded together against the rear wall were a dozen women of
varying ages, though none looked older than thirty. They were dirty
and obviously cold, since they huddled against one another, some
sleeping, others merely staring vacantly at the newcomers.

Her initial captor, a man with a scruffy
brown beard, stuck his face into Gwen’s. “We have one rule here: if
you scream, you die. Do you understand? There’s nobody out there to
hear you anyway.”

Gwen nodded, not because she planned to
obey, but because she needed him to remove the gag, and she would
have promised him anything if only he would do so.

He did.

“What do we do with him?” A third man with a
neatly trimmed black beard, who was younger than either Will or the
man who carried her, appeared at the bottom of the steps with
Gareth on his shoulder. Blood dripped down Gareth’s left arm, and
he had blood on his face from a wound at his hairline. If Gwen’s
hands had been free, she would have put them to her mouth.

“Is he dead?” Will said.

Blackbeard laid Gareth on the ground ten
feet from Gwen. “No. Just knocked out. It seemed a waste to kill
him when someone will pay a pretty penny for a warrior like
him.”

“If he can control him,” Will said.

Blackbeard jerked his chin to point at Gwen.
“Isn’t that his wife?”

Will nodded.

The man smirked. “It won’t be hard then,
will it?”

“We’ll leave it to fate. If he lives, we’ll
sell him.” Will stood with his hands on his hips, looking down at
Gwen, though he didn’t speak to her but to Blackbeard. “How long
until we’re ready to move?”

“Flann hasn’t returned from town,”
Blackbeard said.

Will pressed his lips together. “We can wait
another hour. Then we have to leave in case someone comes looking
for these two.”

Scruffy beard scoffed. “Who is going to care
about a couple of Welsh dogs?”

“I saw Gareth with the Deputy Sheriff,” Will
said. “Fletcher might care. The girl did see the wheel we
fixed.”

“They don’t know anything,” Blackbeard
said.

Will shot Blackbeard an unreadable glance.
“They know everything now.”

“Fat lot of good it will do them.” That was
scruffy beard again.

Gareth’s head lolled to one side, but now
that Gwen had managed to blink back her tears, she could see his
chest rising and falling. It might even be that the blood on his
arm was from a surface wound and not grievous—though if it
suppurated, any wound could be mortal.

Gwen supposed it wasn’t surprising that her
captors hadn’t questioned her, since she was a woman, and her value
was only in what they could sell her for. She certainly wasn’t
going to volunteer the information that her father knew where she
was. Even if the whole lot of them were leaving this place within
the hour, they could hardly travel far undetected, not with this
many people to transport. A cart could only move so fast, and she
doubted that these women were going to be in any condition to ride
horses. Besides, they would have had to be tied onto them, which
would be even more noticeable, whether or not it was dark.

All that passed through Gwen’s head as a way
to reassure herself. Rhun’s death had shaken her confidence that
everything would always turn out all right in the end, because that
time it hadn’t. Despair threatened to overwhelm her, but she hadn’t
spent nearly ten years as Hywel’s spy for nothing. For Tangwen’s
sake, and the sake of her unborn child, she was going to get them
out of here—or die trying.

Her hands itched to touch
her husband, and she prayed that these men wouldn’t hurt either of
them anymore, and that they might even leave.
Leave us alone leave us alone
cycled
through her mind in a litany, as if somehow her thoughts could be
conveyed to them and influence their behavior. She presumed that
the exterior door, which she made sure not even to look at in case
one of them noticed, was locked or even nailed shut, or else they
wouldn’t have left the women here without a guard in the first
place. If someone watched the door, there would be no reason for
any of them to remain inside the room.

As the men obeyed her unvoiced command and
moved towards the steps, Gwen gave a huge sigh of relief and turned
her attention to her fellow captives. A few of the women gazed back
at her, blinking sleepily, but none seemed very awake, and none had
said a word throughout the entire exchange among the men. One of
the women curled up into a ball on the floor, and it was then that
Gwen realized that not only were the woman’s hands free, but none
of her companions were constrained at all.

Sadly, Will took the lantern with them, but
after the door closed behind him, it looked as if he then set the
lantern on a table near the door because it continued to shine
faintly into the room through the many gaps between the slats of
the walls and around the doorframe. Thus, even in its absence, Gwen
was able to see how rickety her prison really was. Maybe they
assumed, because they were leaving within the hour, that she didn’t
have time to escape. With Gareth unconscious, she had to admit she
was at a disadvantage.

But she wasn’t helpless.

Gwen propped her shoulder against the wall
of the cellar, using it to brace herself until she could get her
feet under her. Even though her hands were tied behind her back,
she was able to feel for the knife in her boot that Gareth always
insisted she carry. He would be missing all his weapons, of course,
but the men hadn’t bothered to search her.

Gwen edged towards the woman closest to her.
She was about Gwen’s age, with lighter color hair, dark eyes, and a
ragged dress. “Can you untie me?” Gwen said in English, holding out
the knife. She was willing to do it herself if she had to, but
slicing through the ropes with the knife at such an awkward angle
might well end up with blood everywhere.

The woman looked at her blankly, so Gwen
tried again in Welsh.

The woman’s eyes widened. “I can’t,” she
replied in the same language. “He’ll beat me.”

Hell
.

Gwen didn’t often resort to profanity, but
the situation seemed to call for it. She gazed around at the faces
turned towards her, and even as she looked at them, she saw many
lose interest, or perhaps even forget that she was there. Gwen
puzzled over their odd behavior for a moment before concluding that
they must have been given some kind of potion that muddled their
minds. She had to get out of here before it was given to her
too.

Gritting her teeth, acknowledging that she
was on her own and her and Gareth’s best hope for survival was
herself, she gripped the hilt of the blade, turning it on end in
her palm, and sawed through her bonds.

It was only as the bonds fell away, having
nicked the fat part of one thumb but freed herself nonetheless,
that Gwen noticed the man lying in the far corner of the room. His
arms were tied behind his back at the wrists and his legs at the
ankles. Thinking that he could be an ally, once she cut his bonds
and provided she could wake him, Gwen hastened through the women,
who didn’t even move aside to let her pass. It was as if they
didn’t even see her.