The Unexpected Ally (12 page)

“Madness is right,” Rhys said. Some of the
onlookers had stepped closer to better hear the conversation, and
Rhys motioned with his hand as he’d done to the messenger to shoo
them away. Once his underlings obeyed, Rhys gestured Gareth closer
and pulled back the cloth, exposing Erik’s torso.

Gareth drew back with a gasp. He wasn’t
often shocked, but what had been done to Erik’s midsection was
unsettling to say the least. The men who’d stolen him had expanded
on the stab wound Gareth had seen, cut him down the middle, pulled
back the outer layers of skin and muscle, and sliced into his
stomach and intestines.

Conall cleared his throat. “I gather he
didn’t look like this the last time you saw him?”

“No,” Rhys said curtly.

Conall was still crouched beside the body.
After collecting himself, Gareth knelt to get a closer look, even
though that was the last thing he wanted to do. “It’s a
desecration, but at least he didn’t suffer.” The wounds were
ragged, but since Erik had already been dead, they hadn’t bled. It
was still raining too, and with the dampness all around—on the
trees, the ground, and the grass that grew against the stones of
the field—whatever smell Erik was putting out was minimal.

Gareth grimaced. “I confess in all my years
of service to my prince, I have never seen anything like this
before.” He rose to his feet, sickened by what had been done to
Erik. Murder was one thing, but being hacked apart was another. It
wasn’t as if Gareth didn’t have experience with the criminal mind,
but the man who did this was as cold and foreign to Gareth as any
villain he’d ever encountered.

Conall took in a careful breath. “I
have.”

“I have also.” Abbot Rhys turned away from
the body to stare east. “In the course of my duties in past days, I
came upon a courier from Empress Maud, who’d been captured by the
enemy. He’d swallowed the Empress’s ring rather than allow it to be
taken from him. They cut it out of him. Unlike Erik, they hadn’t
bothered with killing him first. He suffered.” Rhys cleared his
throat, disturbed by the memory.

“I have seen something similar, though in
Ireland.” Conall looked at Gareth. “I didn’t know Erik nor his
duties for Prince Hywel, but—”

Gareth cut Conall off. He wasn’t angry at
Conall but at the situation, which had the hairs on the back of his
neck standing straight up, and his stomach was churning worse than
Gwen’s in the morning. “Erik would have known to swallow evidence
that he worked for Prince Hywel if he was hard pressed. He was
expert at hiding his identity and allegiance, though I don’t know
if Prince Hywel gave him a token as proof that he was under his
command.”

“You might ask the prince, when next you see
him,” Conall said. “It would be unfortunate if his token has fallen
into the hands of evildoers. They could do great harm in the
prince’s name.”

Gareth himself had been impersonated at the
behest of Prince Cadwaladr last autumn, though the ruse had been
far more elaborate, in that the man had been made to look like
Gareth. Many men would pay a significant sum to acquire a ring or
signet of an enemy lord. It was why such tokens were guarded
closely. A man with the seal of the king spoke for the king.

Gareth frowned at the abbot, who was still
looking away. “I can tell there’s something else. What is it?”

Rhys turned back, his lips pressed together,
and then his eyes skated past Gareth and went straight to Conall.
“I know of two other reasons for a man to be so mutilated.”

Conall had risen to his feet by now, and the
way he was looking intently at Rhys had Gareth feeling like he was
missing something. Then, when Rhys didn’t continue speaking, Conall
bobbed his head. “I have encountered such blasphemy in Ireland, but
those monsters eviscerate animals not—”

Gareth found his head swiveling from Conall
to Rhys and back again. “What are you two talking about?”

“For one, pagans.” Conall spat on the
ground. “Those who worship the old gods split open an animal and
use his entrails to predict the future.” He pointed with his chin
to Rhys. “I’ve never seen it done to a man before, though.”

“Sacrilege is everywhere,” Rhys said,
“especially in times such as these when a man feels uncertain in
his own home and the four horsemen of the apocalypse ride
unchecked. The war in England has unleashed the devil in many men’s
hearts.”

Gareth had no patience for this kind of
talk, especially coming from two otherwise reasonable men. “Someone
murdered Erik, stole him from us, cut him open, and then dumped him
here. Why they did any of that remains a mystery, but it was a
human hand that held the knife—and that is the man I will
apprehend.”

Rhys’s expression cleared. “If any of the
good people of St. Asaph were involved in something so sinister, I
would know of it.”

“Of course you would,” Gareth said. “Erik
wasn’t a druid. He didn’t care for rituals, satanic or otherwise.
He was a spy for Prince Hywel and was killed because of it. Our
task is to find out who—and then why. The souls of the men
responsible I leave to you.”

Rhys nodded jerkily at Gareth. “Of course.
You are right.”

Conall gave a low laugh. “Perhaps some of
the Devil’s Weed our captors gave me has addled my mind.”

“You see clearly enough most times.” Gareth
was disturbed by the condition of Erik’s body, but even more so at
how much the sight of it had shaken his friends. He narrowed his
eyes at Rhys. “You said
two reasons
. What is the
second?”

“Certain men are fascinated by the human
form. Men have been known to dig up the newly dead in order to cut
into their bodies. They say the purpose is to better understand
what goes on inside, leading to an improved ability to heal the
sick.” Rhys pursed his lips, just marginally less disapproving than
he’d been when they’d discussed pagans.

For Gareth’s part, he could understand the
quest for knowledge, and he knew something of the innards of men
because he’d fought in wars and tried to save the lives of
companions on the field of battle. He himself wouldn’t be opposed
to knowing more about how the body worked and could see its use in
healing and in his investigations. Given the gruesome state of
Erik’s body, however, he wasn’t going to say as much to Rhys, who,
for all his worldly ways, was still a churchman and would not want
to see anyone’s body so defiled.

They’d fallen down the trapdoor of
speculation again, and it was time to get on with the real business
of investigating murder. He pulled the coins from his purse and
showed them to Rhys. “We found these in your paddock. I think they
give us a far better and more mundane motivation for Erik’s death:
greed.”

Rhys accepted the coins, eyebrows raised.
“Five silver pennies? The monastery keeps a bag of coins in our
treasury—” He broke off, his face paling and his mind going to a
place Gareth’s hadn’t yet traveled. “If these came from our—” He
spun on one heel and pointed to one of the other brothers who’d
been lurking twenty feet away. “Brother Fidelus, I need you!”

The monk hastened forward, and Rhys spoke to
him in succinct sentences, asking him to take another brother and
the horse and return to the monastery posthaste. If the coins had
come from the treasury, it was already robbed, but if the treasury
was unlocked, someone needed to stand in front of it. Anything else
would be a gross neglect of duty. At the same time, Gareth’s
thoughts went again to Conall’s supposition that Erik could have
been killed for Hywel’s ring. The coins could have been offered in
payment, and when Erik spurned them, he was killed instead.

Rhys held out the coins to Gareth.

“What if they’re yours?” Gareth asked.

“Keep them until I’m sure,” Rhys said.

Conall tipped his head towards the body.
“Shall we escort Erik together?”

“Likely he’s safe from predation now,”
Gareth said, “but it’s the least he deserves.”

Gwen

“G
wen! My goodness,
I can’t believe it’s you!”

At the sight of Saran, her long ago friend
and mentor, coming towards her out of the gloomy late afternoon,
Gwen stopped dead in the middle of the monastery courtyard. She’d
known Saran at Carreg Cennan, in the years after Gwen had lost
Gareth while her family had been wandering the roads of Wales,
singing for their supper.

“What are you doing here?” Gwen hastened
forward and wrapped her arms around Saran, finding tears of
happiness pricking at the corners of her eyes. She had often
thought about Saran over the years, wondering how she was faring,
but Carreg Cennan was on the other end of Wales, and Gwen had never
gone back. “You’re walking into the middle of a war, you know.”

“I understood that this one might be
averted, but war is why I’m here, of course,” Saran said.

Gwen took a step back. “What do you
mean?”

“Deheubarth has descended into turmoil, with
King Cadell and the Normans at each other’s throats. Carreg Cennan
has been caught in the middle of the fighting, and because of it, I
thought this would be a fine time to visit my sister in Corwen. But
the farther north I came, the worse the news was. I’m sorry to hear
that Powys and Gwynedd are at each other’s throats as well.”

In her early fifties, Saran was one of those
women who, after she reached a certain age, never seemed to grow
older. Admittedly, her hair had more gray in it than when Gwen had
known her in the south, and perhaps her face and body were somewhat
rounder, but her smile was the same, and her brown eyes gazed at
Gwen with the same knowledge and wisdom that had prompted Gwen to
make changes in her own life eight years ago.

Gwen pulled her friend into another hug.
“St. Asaph is not Corwen, Saran.”

“I know, but when I arrived at Corwen, my
sister and her son were not there. The villagers told me that
Rhodri had come north to fight for Gwynedd, and Derwena had gone
after him. Rhodri intended to join King Owain’s forces, and she
thought to cook and clean for him and those from Corwen who went
with him.”

Gwen frowned. “Truly, I have encountered no
women here at all other than me. The guesthouse was emptied
yesterday in preparation for the arrival of King Owain’s retinue.
Have you checked for her at the encampment?”

“Not yet.”

Gwen relaxed a little. “That’s a much more
likely place to find them, but I’ll keep a lookout for them for
you. What do they look like?” Not for the first time, Gwen wished
she had Gareth’s skill with a piece of charcoal.

“Derwena looks like me, so for you she might
be hard to miss! Rhodri is tall and gangly—taller than any man I
know, with brown hair and eyes.”

“And you’re sure they came all the way to
St. Asaph? Perhaps they stopped at Denbigh.”

“I passed through there on the way here.
While one man remembered Rhodri, nobody remembers seeing Derwena at
all.”

To Gwen, Saran was completely memorable, but
Gwen could see why—to someone who didn’t know her—she would be
appear to be just another middle-aged woman. They wouldn’t know to
look for the sharp mind beneath her rounded shoulders and pleasant
demeanor, and if Derwena looked just like Saran, perhaps the same
could be said of her.

While Gwen had been talking to Saran,
Tangwen had been tucked in Gwen’s skirts, half-hiding from the
stranger, and now she patted Gwen’s belly, asking to be picked up.
The personality of a two-year-old was ever changing, and this
shyness was a new thing for the little girl, developing in the
aftermath of Shrewsbury. Gwen had tried very hard to keep Tangwen
out of what had gone on there, but children were perceptive in ways
that adults didn’t always credit, and Gwen felt that Tangwen must
have picked up on the fact that her mother and father had been in
danger.

Regardless of the reason, since then,
Tangwen balked whenever Gwen suggested that someone else look after
her. Gwen had gotten away with a lengthy absence today, first
because Tangwen was asleep and then because Tangwen adored
Gwalchmai and had been willing to play with him for most of the
afternoon. Gwen had also allowed them out into the monastery
gardens to stomp in puddles and thoroughly soak themselves. But
Gwalchmai shouldn’t have to be burdened with his niece all day when
he had tasks of his own to perform. He and Gwen’s father would be
singing at the onset of the peace conference tomorrow, and they
needed to prepare.

Rather than fight Tangwen’s need, Gwen had
resolved to bring her everywhere, in the hope that the constant
reassurance would eventually convince Tangwen that she could be
left. It hadn’t happened yet, however, so Gwen bent to her daughter
and swung her onto her left hip.

“And who is this?” Saran reached out a hand
and caught the little girl’s finger.

A month ago, Tangwen would have loudly
proclaimed her identity, but today she turned away and pressed her
face into Gwen’s upper arm, so Gwen answered for her. “Tangwen.”
Gwen couldn’t stop the grin that blossomed on her face. “I have
another on the way too. Saran, I married Gareth.”

For a moment Saran looked at Gwen
open-mouthed, and then she laughed with Gwen. “Does he serve King
Owain?”

“He is the captain of Prince Hywel’s
teulu
,” Gwen said.

Saran pressed her lips together,
unsuccessfully suppressing a satisfied smile, as if she’d had
something to do with the match and with Gareth’s success. “He
landed on his feet, then.”

“That’s exactly what my father said to him
when they met again a few years ago,” Gwen said.

Saran raised her eyebrows. “Meilyr is
here?”

“Yes, and Gwalchmai too, now a man in his
own right. Meilyr is King Owain’s court bard.”

“So he really did go back to the king.”
Saran made a
heh
sound. “We’d heard that he’d finally
swallowed his pride and apologized, but I didn’t necessarily
believe it.”