The Unlikely Spy (2 page)

“Thank you,” Rhys said and then continued
under his breath as he spurred his horse out onto the road, “We’re
going to need it.”

Once on the road, he skirted another group
of travelers, some walking, one driving a cart, and two on
horseback. This party was bypassing the monastery in favor of
continuing south to the castle and the festival grounds.

Instead of following them, at the crossroads
Gwen and Prior Rhys headed east towards the mountains. A half-mile
farther on, they turned into a clearing in front of the mill, a
stone building built on the edge of its pond. Several empty carts
were parked by the entrance, and the giant water wheel spun as the
water flowed past. A small group of people had gathered near the
edge of the millpond.

At Rhys’s and Gwen’s appearance, the man in
the center, who’d been crouching low over something on the ground,
looked over his shoulder. It was Prince Rhun, Hywel’s brother and
the eldest prince of Gwynedd. His bright blond hair was lit by the
afternoon sunlight that filtered through the green leaves
overhanging the pond. Even with a dead body at his feet, Rhun’s
blue eyes remained bright. Gwen had seen this prince somber, but
not often. Prince Rhun had been in Aberystwyth longer than Gwen,
escaping (he said) his stepmother’s matchmaking.

Prince Rhun had confessed to Gwen upon her
arrival that circumstances had reached such a dire point in Gwynedd
that his father had decided to become involved. He’d warned Rhun
before he left that if he didn’t find a wife for himself by the
Christmas feast, King Owain was going to allow Cristina to choose
one for him.

Recognizing Gwen, Rhun stood. “Thank the
Lord the prior found you.”

Two monks, instantly recognizable in their
undyed cloaks, and two men, wearing the breeches and sweat-stained
shirts of laborers, surrounded the body. The monks had kilted their
robes and were soaked to the waist, implying that they’d waded in
to retrieve it. Although some monasteries employed day laborers or
lay brothers—peasant members of the order who were restricted to
agricultural work—this monastery required everyone to work and made
no distinctions among types of labor.

Rhys and Gwen dismounted, and Gwen studied
the dead man from a few feet away before approaching Prince Rhun
and the others. The body lay in the dirt and grass beside the pond
out of which it had been dragged, far enough away from the water
that it didn’t lap at its feet. At other murder scenes, how and
when the body was moved could make a difference between solving a
murder and allowing the murderer to walk free. Today it didn’t,
since this wasn’t the spot where he’d died. Nobody had yet said the
word
murder,
but Prior Rhys had to suspect that the man’s
death wasn’t an accident, or else he wouldn’t have come to fetch
her.

Gwen hadn’t been involved in an unexplained
death since before Tangwen’s birth. Men had died in Gwynedd since
then, but none mysteriously as far as she knew. And she would have
known: while Prince Hywel was absent and living in Ceredigion,
she’d served as a liaison between Hywel’s spies and King Owain.
Gareth had sworn more than once that he would protect her from
these investigations. But since he wasn’t here, Gwen was fully
capable of stepping into his place, even if she couldn’t be pleased
that a dead man had been found in the millpond.

“What happened?” she said.

One of the men, larger than most, with thick
muscled arms characteristic of heavy labor, scoffed. “He
drowned.”

Prince Rhun pinned the man with a gaze that
would have shot right through him had it been an arrow. “Start at
the beginning. Tell Lady Gwen what you know.”

Gwen wasn’t surprised at the man’s dismissal
of her question. Until they learned more of her, most men treated
her that way. Rhun, however, was a prince, and the man’s face
flushed red to be chastised by him. He didn’t defend himself but
merely ducked his head in apology. “Yes, my lord.”

“What is your name?” Gwen said.

“My name is Bran. I work the mill,” the man
said. “I’m the journeyman, though I know more about milling than
the miller.” He made a motion as if to spit on the ground but
stopped himself at the last moment.

“So you’ve been here all day?” Gwen
said.

“Since early morning,” Bran said. “I had a
short break at noon, but I’ve been grinding since just after
dawn.”

“That means you’ve been inside all day?”
Gwen said.

Bran nodded. “It is necessary to pay
attention all the time in case something goes wrong. I didn’t
notice anything amiss out here until young Teilo came running in to
tell me about a body in the water. I don’t know how long it’d been
there. I didn’t notice anything this morning or after my noon meal,
but I didn’t look hard either.”

“Thank you.” Gwen looked at Teilo, the other
laborer not dressed as a monk. His brown hair was cropped close to
his head, and like everyone else, sweat beaded in his hairline. He
wore a filthy shirt that might have once been the color of cream,
brown breeches cut off at the knees, and bare feet. In regards to
the heat, he had to be the most comfortable of all of them. “What
did you see?”

Teilo looked as if answering the question
physically hurt his throat, but he cleared it and said in a low
whisper, “I was coming by like I always do—”

“From where?” Prior Rhys said.

Teilo swallowed, and his eye skated from
Gwen to Prior Rhys and back again. As with Prince Rhun, Prior
Rhys’s authority was unmistakable. “From swimming in the river with
my friends. We’ve all worked in the fields since dawn.” He said
these last words somewhat defensively.

Gwen didn’t care if he was avoiding work and
didn’t blame him for wanting to cool off in the river. “On our way
here we passed a water hole full of caterwauling local boys. You’d
been among them?”

Teilo nodded.

“My boys would have loved it.” Gwen gave a
rueful smile at the thought. Gareth had formally adopted their two
wayward charges, Llelo and Dai. The adoption meant they were now
sons of a knight and no longer destined to be herders like their
grandfather or a trader like their father. Consequently, their
training to be soldiers had begun.

Since neither Gareth nor Gwen had kin of
their own to provide guidance for the boys, Prince Hywel had
arranged for them to fall under the care of Cynan, his
twenty-three-year-old half-brother. Cynan had been fostered by King
Owain’s sister, who was married to the King of Powys. Recently,
King Owain had made Cynan custodian of Denbigh Castle, north of
Rhuddlan. From there, he and his two younger brothers, Cadell and
Madoc, protected eastern Gwynedd for their father. Dai and Llelo
had been welcomed into the garrison, and Gareth was confident they
would learn to be knights there.

It had been two months since she’d seen
them, and Gwen missed her sons. She planned to visit Denbigh upon
her return to Gwynedd in the autumn.

She motioned with her hand to encourage
Teilo to continue his story. “You were walking by and …?”

“And I saw him, bobbing about in the reeds,”
Teilo said.

“Face down or face up?” Gwen said.

Teilo’s face went blank for a moment, but
then he said, “Face down.”

She needed to ask these kinds of questions,
even if they appalled the men, so she tried to ignore their shock.
She looked at the two monks. “You two retrieved him?”

They nodded.

“Can you show me exactly where he was
floating?” she said.

Prince Rhun answered for them. “He was under
the trees, over there in an eddy.”

One of the monks then pointed east, to the
opposite side of the pond from the mill. The Rheidol River flowed
from east to west, emptying ultimately into the sea. Upstream, a
portion of the river had been diverted into a man-dug channel to
form a pond here, in order to provide a steady supply of water to
the water wheel that ran the mill.

Gwen turned back to Prior Rhys. “While I
examine the body, would you mind following the others around the
edge of the pond to see if you can discover the place where the
dead man went in? It would be good to know the exact spot.” Gwen
remembered from an earlier investigation how uncomfortable the
prior had been to witness her examination of a corpse. She would
avoid discomfiting him this time if she could.

A smile hovered around Prior Rhys’s
lips—perhaps in acknowledgement of what she was trying to spare
him—but he nodded and gestured to the two monks that they should
lead the way. The journeyman begged off, saying he had to get back
inside the mill. Gwen watched him go, telling herself not to
distrust the man just because he was resentful of his position.

Teilo went with the monks, but before Prior
Rhys himself moved away, Gwen caught the edge of his sleeve. “I
don’t want to tell you what you already know, but Gareth would want
me to say this: try to make sure they don’t trample whatever
evidence has been left.”

A smile twitched at the corner of Rhys’s
mouth.

“Sorry.” Gwen looked down, chastising
herself for even mentioning it. Prior Rhys had been a soldier and
spy before she’d been born. She had no business telling him what to
do.

“I value your counsel, Gwen,” he said. “I
will do my best.”

“Thank you.”

Prior Rhys turned away to follow the other
men around the millpond, and Gwen eyed Prince Rhun, who was
hovering over her. “Are you ready for this?”

“I’ve seen dead bodies before, Gwen.” He
looked at her carefully. “You must know that I have killed
men.”

“Yes, but—” Gwen broke off as she thought of
how best to say what she meant. Rhun had killed men in war. Gareth
had too, of course. But murdering a man—and the sight of a murdered
man—was different in both thought and deed, and a man who could
kill another man in the heat of battle might find himself squeamish
at the sight of the same man dead beside a millpond on an August
afternoon. “I know you’ve seen murdered men before, but it’s a
beautiful day and maybe you have other tasks that need your
attention.”

“One—” Prince Rhun held up his right
forefinger, “I’m not leaving you alone here with a dead body and
men you don’t know, and two—” up went the second finger, “I’m
interested. I have witnessed the beginning of investigations
before—Newcastle comes to mind—but I had other duties there that
prevented me from seeing the whole of it.”

Gwen took in a breath and let it out,
accepting that Rhun meant to stay and deciding not to worry about
it. “If you mean it, we might as well get started.”

“What do we do first?” Prince Rhun said.

“First of all, we should acknowledge that
this man didn’t drown.”

Gwen

“H
e wasn’t murdered
for his money either,” Gwen said, though it was too soon to declare
the
why
of his death, which had to come after the
way
of it.

“What? How do you know any of that?” Rhun
looked from the body to Gwen and back again.

“My lord, look at the whole of him. He wears
a threadbare coat, his soles are thin, despite the three boot
makers who have taken stalls at the fair, and his purse is flat and
still tied to his belt.” Gwen crouched beside the body and
carefully removed the purse in order to peer inside it. It
contained nothing much: a bit of string, a few small coins, and a
fire starter. Nothing to kill a man over, nor anything to indicate
the man’s identity. Rather than encumber herself with it, she tied
the purse loosely back onto his belt.

“If I take a step back, I can see what you
mean about his wealth,” Rhun said, “especially about the purse. But
why do you say he didn’t drown? How can you tell that just by
looking at him?”

“A drowned man would have spent days in the
pond, much of it on the bottom. This man hasn’t done that.” Gwen
gestured up and down the length of the body. “If he’d spent any
time in contact with rocks or debris, his nose, forehead, and chin,
along with his knees and the back of the hands, would show evidence
of it.”

“So you’re saying the man was dead before he
went into the water?” The prince was looking at her intently.

“Dead men float; drowned men sink,” Gwen
said. “A drowning man dies because he pulls water into his lungs—he
breaths it in—and once he dies from it, the weight of the water
inside him causes his body to sink. He ends up on the bottom of
whatever body of water he fell into. It is only after some days
have passed that fumes inside the body cause it to bloat, and
float, and eventually rise to the surface again. It’s like blowing
up a pig’s bladder into a ball for children to play with.”

Gwen glanced up at Prince Rhun, whose mouth
had formed an ‘oh’, though no sound came out. She plowed on. “In
this instance, this man’s body is stiff with rigor, which happens
within half a day of death. That’s not enough time for any real
decay or bloating to occur. As you said, he died
before
he
went into the pond.”

Rhun finally managed to speak, and when he
did, his voice was normal in tone. “I’m guessing the murderer
didn’t know this, or he might have found a different means of
disposing of the body.”

“I would say you’re right,” Gwen said.

Rhun’s brow furrowed. “What if he’d died
naturally and just happened to fall into the water on his own?”

“You mean, perhaps his heart failed or
illness overtook him as he was standing on the edge of the water?”
Gwen said.

Rhun’s lip curled. “When you say it that
way, it sounds foolish. Nobody dies that quickly.”

Gwen put out a hand to the prince, not quite
touching his arm. Rhun thought she was mocking him, but she hadn’t
meant to. “As I said, the issue is whether he was breathing when he
went into the millpond. If he was still alive, even if he was
dying, his lungs would have taken in water. He would have sunk to
the bottom, and after a few days there, he would not look like this
man does.”