The Unexpected Ally

by Sarah Woodbury

  Meilyr and Gwen nodded, because how could they not? It was a common condition.

  “Perhaps he inherited that from his mother.” Saran looked down for a moment. “Derwena has always been calculating. You saw that when she was here. She tries to fall back on innocence and her beauty, but it’s gone now and all that’s left is the cleverness.”

  “What is it that you think she is being clever about?” Gwen said. “Do you think she knows what Rhodri is up to?”

  “She knows,” Saran said. “I have no doubt that she knows, and she doesn’t want to tell us because we won’t approve or because it will implicate him in some genuine wrongdoing.”

  Meilyr pushed to his feet. “Let me escort you to the healer’s house, Saran. Perhaps if we two go over it again, we can figure out what she’s hiding.”

  Saran smiled. “Thank you, Meilyr. I would like that.” She nodded to Gwen. “Tomorrow, my dear.”

  Gwen stood to hug Saran, and stayed behind as they departed as her father had clearly wanted. This was again one of those moments when an investigation intersected with her and Gareth’s personal lives, and Gwen didn’t see how she could stop it from happening. At the moment, given how pleased with life her father seemed to be all of a sudden, Gwen wasn’t going to interfere with his developing relationship with Saran.

  It was odd to be completely alone for once, and for a moment Gwen didn’t know what to do with herself. But the monks who attended the guesthouse had gone to Compline before cleaning up from dinner, so she began collecting cups and stacking empty dishes on a tray to return to the kitchen. When the first load was ready, she carried it through a narrow doorway, along a covered but open-air walkway for a few steps, and then into the kitchen. It was empty but for one man, who was just pushing open the back door.

  Both he and she hesitated in their respective doorways, each equally surprised to see the other, and then Gwen took a few steps forward to set the heavy tray on a nearby table. “Father Alun!”

  The old man beamed. “My dear Gwen.” He walked towards her and put his hands on her shoulders in a partial hug. “You look absolutely radiant!”

  Gwen didn’t know about that, but she smiled anyway. Father Alun was the priest of the church in Cilcain, a town ten miles as the crow flies east of St. Asaph. Alun had been unlucky enough to find the body of a woman who looked like Gwen half-buried in his graveyard last autumn. That finding had ultimately set Gareth and Gwen on a course for Shrewsbury. While she couldn’t regret knowing that the girl who’d died had been her cousin, she was sorry that Father Alun had been caught up in murder.

  “I am well.” She leaned forward to speak to him conspiratorially. “Gareth and I are expecting another child later this year.”

  He squeezed her shoulders. “I’m so happy for you, especially after all that has happened.” He shook his head and looked down for a moment. He was thinking of the loss of Prince Rhun, as they all still did, many times a day.

  “But why are you here?” Gwen said.

  He looked up. “The peace conference, of course. I was invited as a witness.”

  Though Gwen would never say it, she thought it was kind of Abbot Rhys to invite the older man. She didn’t think Alun was exactly lonely in Cilcain, given the busy life of a parish priest, but it must be nice to be among other churchmen every once in a while, men he could truly relate to as friends, rather than as confessor and parishioner. Rhys had implied as much earlier when they were discussing why Rhys already knew about the events of the previous year without Gwen or Gareth having to tell him.

  “Come. Sit.” Gwen moved a stool from beside the fire to the table. “You must be hungry after such a long journey.”

  “I am. I am.”

  For a moment Gwen frowned. “Why did you come to the guesthouse instead of the monastery kitchen? Surely they have a spot for you there.”

  “They do; they do.” Alun spoke heartily, but then he leaned forward and said in a loud whisper, “The food over here is better.”

  Gwen smiled. “I’ll fix you something.”

  “I hope you serve it with news from Gwynedd. We know of the taking of Mold, of course, but recent events often pass us by in Cilcain.”

  “I do have much to tell you.” While she talked, Gwen bustled about, getting the old priest dinner. The pot over the fire had a few cups of mutton stew left in it, and half a loaf of bread remained on the sideboard. She set the meal in front of him, poured them each a glass of mead, and then pulled up a stool to sit beside him.

  “Where is your husband? I hope he is not so unwell that he is abed?” Alun said.

  Gwen smiled ruefully. “I’m waiting for him to return. I’m afraid that we have another death to investigate.”

  “You don’t say! My dear, that’s terrible.”

  Gwen pursed her lips, reminded of her encounter with Deiniol, and pulled the sketch of Erik from her purse. “Do you recognize him?”

  Alun squinted at the page. “Is he the murderer or the victim?”

  “The victim.” And she described his overall size and shape beyond simply what his faced looked like.

  Alun stood and took the paper closer to the fire, which was blazing brightly. “My eyes aren’t what they used to be, but I saw this man earlier this week.”

  Gwen spun around on her seat. “In Cilcain?”

  Alun nodded. “Passing through. He stopped at the church to ask if I knew where Prince Hywel was now, as he wasn’t at Mold Castle where he was supposed to be.”

  Gwen’s eyes lit. “So he was looking for the prince. I don’t suppose he said what for?”

  Alun shook his head sadly. “No.”

  “Did he have anyone with him?”

  “Not that I saw.” Then Alun frowned. “He asked if my church was missing any relics. I told him that we had so little here, there was nothing to miss, and if a thief was so desperate that he needed to rob us, he was welcome to what he took.”

  Gwen studied the priest. It was just like Alun to say that. More importantly, his testimony was the first link between Erik and the thefts. Then her stomach dropped into her boots as fear surged through her. It could even be that Erik had been looking into what had happened in Wrexham, as she and Gareth now were, and someone had killed him for it.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Gareth

  Even as Gareth trailed after Derwena, he was cursing himself for following yet another new thread when he’d been dropping the old ones left and right. First and foremost, if Rhodri was the same man who’d ridden to St. Asaph with Erik, they needed to get Deiniol and Rhodri in the same room together to see if they knew each other. He also had yet to question Mathonwy, the milkman, about his visit to the treasury.

  Gareth didn’t necessarily think that Mathonwy had anything to do with the theft. If he had, he would have run, not calmly returned to his milking—but he might have spoken incautious words to someone else, which had then led to the theft. And as always, Gareth told himself not to presume anything without evidence until he had no more threads to pull.

  Evan loped beside him across the courtyard, trying to avoid the puddles that had formed among the dips in the cobbles. It wasn’t raining right now, thankfully, and Derwena was hurrying along at a rapid clip such that by the time they left the guesthouse, she’d already entered underneath the gatehouse.

  “Moves fast for an older woman, doesn’t she?” Evan said under his breath.

  “She does seem to be in a hurry, doesn’t she?” Gareth said.

  Evan checked the location of the moon. “Prince Hywel’s dinner with his father and the other lords who have come should be ending soon.”

  “I should have been among them,” Gareth said.

  Evan scoffed. “You didn’t want to be there any more than you wanted to attend the mass. The last thing you need right now is to involve yourself in politics.”

  Gareth gave a low laugh. “You have the right of that.”

  They reached the gatehouse, passed through it easily because the gat
e was still open, and Gareth lifted a hand to the gatekeeper as he went by. Derwena had, in fact, turned east as if she intended to go the encampment, but once she passed the corner of the stone wall of the monastery that fronted the main road, she turned left in order to head northeast down the side road, heading back to the place where they’d found her by Madog’s camp.

  The older woman trotted along at a rapid clip, and because the road was otherwise deserted, Gareth and Evan had to stay well back lest she look over her shoulder and see them. If this had been mid-afternoon when the monastery was a busy place, they perhaps could have remained undetected, but it was late evening, and there wasn’t another soul but them about. The moon reflected off the puddles and the clouds, allowing them to see well enough to follow. If it had been raining, they couldn’t have seen anything without a torch.

  No longer jesting with one another, Gareth and Evan followed the western margin of the road, trying to keep to the trees. Just past Madog’s encampment, which was considerably quieter than it had been an hour earlier, Derwena slowed. Gareth and Evan held back, thinking they should get no closer than two hundred feet but having no idea why Derwena had returned here. Then a woman holding a torch, the flame of which was blowing hard in the wind, stepped out from a side-path—one that ran through the monastery grounds and intersected the road Derwena had come down. She was followed by a man on horseback.

  Gareth and Evan froze, and their ears strained to hear what the three people were saying. Unfortunately, the wind that was blowing through the newly leafed trees that lined the road prevented them from hearing anything else. It was darker under the trees than on the road too, so Gareth bent over in a half crouch and began to pick his way through the grass and bushes. He’d gone only a dozen feet, however, before the man on the horse reached down and pulled Derwena up behind him. Turning the horse’s head, he cantered away north. The woman, watched them go for a moment and then turned away and hastened back down the path by which she’d come.

  Gareth picked up the pace, though still trying to keep to the soft grass beside the road to disguise the sound of his boots hitting the earth. He called over his shoulder to Evan, “We may have lost Derwena but let’s not lose this other woman!” Even injured as he was, the two hundred feet took Gareth no time at all, though he found himself annoyed again when Evan eventually beat him to the crossroads.

  Earlier, when they’d helped Conall after Derwena had knocked him down, Evan and Gareth had come off the northeast corner of the monastery’s protective stone wall, crossed the cleared space between the wall and an orchard, and then crossed two pastures in order to reach Madog’s camp. They hadn’t used the road the woman had disappeared along, since it was farther north. But as they followed it back through the monastery grounds, Gareth realized it was leading them west towards the barn where Erik’s body had been found.

  Sure enough, the road eventually intersected the cart track that Gareth had been on several times today already and which started at the back gate of the monastery. The woman with the torch was just barely in sight, and Gareth and Evan hustled after her, turning south to follow the cart way. She reached the back entrance, passed through it, and then the gate shut behind her.

  The monks didn’t normally post a guard at the gate, but since the peace conference would start tomorrow and a murderer was on the loose, Hywel had sentried one of his own men here. Gareth and Evan pulled on the latch and found it locked, as it should have been. Thus, as the woman must have done, they knocked on the wooden door. A heartbeat later a little window opened in the door, revealing one eye and the nose of the guard. “Da!”

  “How did you end up pulling this duty, Dai?” And then Gareth waved a hand dismissively. “Never mind. Let us in.”

  “Yes, sir.” The door swung wide.

  Gareth and Evan stepped through it in time to see the skirts of the woman who’d preceded them disappearing around a hedge up ahead. While on the road, she had covered her hair with a veil, but now the covering hung loosely around her shoulders, and the moon glinted off her blonde hair. Gareth pointed with his chin at her retreating back, asking the question of Dai, even though he already knew the answer. “Who was that?”

  “Queen Susanna.”

  Evan would have hurried after her, but Gareth caught his arm and stopped him. “Wait.”

  Evan subsided, and Gareth looked at his son. “Did she say anything to you about where she’d been?”

  “No.”

  “Will you tell me what she did?”

  He gave an elaborate shrug. “She took one of the torches that lit the gate and headed off east.”

  “How long did you have to wait for her return?” Gareth said.

  Dai shook his head and looked down at the ground while mumbling, “I don’t know. A while.”

  Something was wrong. Dai hadn’t wanted to answer that question. “Did you see with whom she met?”

  Dai’s eyes skated towards the left for an instant and then came back to his father. “No.”

  Gareth looked at his son. “Dai.”

  Dai wavered, but he was an honest boy at heart, and capitulated without Gareth having to order him again to speak. “It was my duty to guard the door, but I was curious about what the Queen of Powys was doing outside the monastery so late in the evening, so I followed her. It was easy because of the torch.”

  “Leaving the gate unguarded and open,” Gareth said.

  Dai returned his eyes to his feet.

  Gareth ran a hand through his hair and scrubbed at it before dropping his hand. “Pray something good comes of this. What did you see?”

  “Queen Susanna met a man on horseback who was waiting for her in the middle of the track that led east. He pulled her up behind him, after which I had to run to keep up. Then just before they reached the crossroads, Susanna dismounted, and they waited, hardly speaking, for a long time. I was wavering, knowing that I’d left the door unguarded and feeling guilty about it, when a woman stopped on the road to talk to the queen.”

  “We saw that last part,” Gareth said. “Could you identify the man if you saw him again?”

  “He wore a hat pulled down low over his head, but—” Dai frowned.

  “But what?” Gareth waited. His son had always been more observant than most.

  Dai turned his body this way and that, motioning with his left hand. And then his expression cleared. “Both when he helped Queen Susanna mount and when he pulled the woman onto his horse, he held out his left hand to them, and—” He stopped again, clearly still puzzled as to whether or not what he saw could be true.

  Gareth placed a hand on Dai’s shoulder. “And what?”

  “He was missing the last finger on his left hand.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Hywel

  That his Aunt Susanna was involved in the intrigue swirling around the monastery surprised Hywel when he heard about it, which wasn’t until the next morning as he was preparing for the conference. Or rather, he wasn’t surprised that she was involved in intrigue—only that she would sully her hands with murder. Then again, her relationship with Derwena and the defingered man remained to be established. Hywel needed to confront her with it—he couldn’t leave that task to Gareth—but like the rest of the investigation, it would have to wait until after today’s meetings.

  The men who would speak of peace were gathering in the chapter house, which was the largest room in the monastery outside the dormitory or the church itself. This was where the monks met every day to listen to their Rule read and to discuss monastery business. Conall loitered by the gatehouse, watching the riders as they came in. After each one passed, he would signal to Hywel and Gareth with one or two fingers or a raised fist to indicate whether they wore their weapons and how many he noted, or if the man had left them at home as promised.

  So far, though no man openly wore a sword, Conall had counted three boot knives among Madog’s men, and seven men who wore dart sheathes up their sleeves. Conall himself had a knife hidden ingen
iously in his bracer, a design Hywel was determined to ask his armorer to copy next he saw him. Unfortunately for Conall, he hadn’t been wearing his bracers when he’d been captured back in Shrewsbury, which was what had given him the thought to look for weapons among Madog’s men.

  Hywel stood in the courtyard, Gareth at his left shoulder. Gwen fussed over them both, making sure their belts were straight and their surcoats smoothed across their chests. For the fifth time, she adjusted the way Hywel’s cloak draped around his shoulders, and he caught her hands before she could twitch the fabric again. “It’s fine, Gwen. You shouldn’t be nervous. You don’t have to attend.”

  “It would be easier if I were attending! I hate waiting.”

  Gareth put a hand on her shoulder. “Perhaps you can take Tangwen for a walk into the village. Saran should be there, and—”

  Gwen subsided, something of a grim set to her chin. “I suppose I could ask around about Erik again. You found nothing, but you couldn’t have talked to everyone. I want to be of use.”

  Hywel met Gareth’s eyes for an instant over Gwen’s head, and his captain gave him a brief nod. Showing Erik’s image around the village in broad daylight was a better occupation for her than nearly anything else they could think of, and Gareth was silently saying that having approval come from Hywel himself was better than from Gareth. “That’s a good idea, Gwen. Let us know when we adjourn if you discover anything.”

  “Of course.” Gwen bent to pick up Tangwen from where she was crouched with a stick over a puddle. When she straightened, Conall, whom Gareth had already signaled to approach, was standing beside her. At the sight of him, she shook her head and tsked. “And I suppose you’re coming with me?”

  “It seems so.” Conall always had an air about him that implied both that he couldn’t care less about something and a certain resigned amusement. But he smiled genuinely at Gwen. Gwen rolled her eyes at her husband, but with Tangwen on her hip and well-guarded by Conall, she left the monastery courtyard.