The Fallen Princess (6 page)

“So on top of everything else, this is
murder,” King Owain said.

“The location of the wound makes a fall from
a horse unlikely but not impossible,” Gwen said. “Hywel may already
have discovered more about it, but he sent me to find you so you
wouldn’t learn of this from someone else.”

King Owain pursed his lips. “Wait for me in
the hall. I would speak to you further.”

Gwen curtseyed. “Yes, my lord.”

The king looked at Taran. “We’ll have to
inform Gruffydd.”

“He and Sioned should be arriving at Aber
this afternoon.” Taran’s mouth turned down. “They’ll be bringing
Tegwen’s daughters with them.” After Bran’s murder, Tegwen’s
grandparents had taken her two daughters in to raise, as they’d
raised Tegwen upon Ilar’s death.

“That is a conversation I am not looking
forward to.” King Owain went back into his room and shut the
door.

The three companions in the corridor heaved
a mutual sigh of relief. “That went better than I had any right to
expect,” Taran said.

But as they turned away to head to the great
hall to wait for the king as he’d requested, a crash resounded from
within King Owain’s bedroom. “A chair has met its demise, I would
say,” Meilyr said.

Taran walked steadily down the hall.
“Cristina will see to him.”

“Coward,” Meilyr said.

Turning his head to look back at them, Taran
shot Gwen and her father a grin. “Definitely.” Then he sobered and
stopped a few feet from the end of the corridor. “Putting entirely
aside the matter of Tegwen’s death and that we’ve been deceived all
these years as to the manner in which she left us, why would
someone remove her from her grave and leave her on the beach?”

“I do not know, my lord. I don’t even know
if that’s what has happened,” Gwen said. “I think we won’t know
until Gareth and I—and Prince Hywel, of course—start asking
questions. It may be difficult to discover the sequence of events,
however, given how long ago she disappeared.”

“I will give you any assistance I can—”
Taran turned to look towards the doorway to the great hall.

Gwen waited a beat. “What is it?”

Taran cleared his throat, and it was only
when he wiped at the corner of his eye that she saw the tears on
his cheeks. “She was a dear girl. I liked the thought of her in the
arms of some mighty Dane. She deserved to be loved and
protected.”

“What about Bran—?” But Gwen had asked the
question to Taran’s back. Two strides had taken him into the hall
where he was immediately besieged by men wanting to know what had
happened.

Meilyr rested a hand on Gwen’s shoulder.
“Let him go. He’ll speak to you again when he’s ready.”

Gwen swung around. “Do you know what he’s
talking about? Obviously if everyone accepted that she ran away
with a Dane, something was wrong with Tegwen’s marriage to
Bran.”

Meilyr’s mouth thinned. “I do not know the
details.”

“I don’t need the details as much as I need
to know what you’re thinking,” Gwen said. “I can fill those in
later from someone who knew her better.”

“You may recall that I played at the
wedding?” Meilyr said. At Gwen’s nod, he continued, “She was not a
happy bride.”

When her father didn’t elaborate further,
Gwen said, “Is that all?”

“To tell you the truth, I didn’t inquire at
the time. It was none of my business. Gwalchmai wasn’t even four. I
had my own troubles.”

“We all did.” She fixed her father with a
look. “So you can’t tell me any more than that?”

Her father was silent for a moment and then
said, “Let’s just say there were rumors that Tegwen didn’t come to
the marriage bed a maiden.”

Gwen raised her eyebrows. Her father did
think she had grown up if he was willing to speak so openly to her.
“Such is the case with many girls, or so I understand, but it isn’t
usually something the rest of Gwynedd knows about.”

Meilyr’s lips pressed together. “Taran
believed that Tegwen was a sweet girl, but I never got that
impression. Maybe she was quiet, but still waters can run deep. Of
course, I didn’t know her as well as Taran did, and we left Gwynedd
not long after her wedding.”

For all that she and Tegwen had been close
in age, Tegwen had never befriended Gwen, having friends of her own
of a nobler class, and it hadn’t been Gwen’s place to join them. In
fact, until today, Gwen hadn’t thought anything much about Tegwen
at all and struggled to recall a substantial memory with Tegwen in
it. Hywel had known her better, but then, Hywel had always made it
his business to acquaint himself with every girl, eligible or not,
cousin or not, within a hundred mile radius of wherever he was
living at the time.

Hywel appeared to have put that life behind
him with his marriage. Upon entering the hall with her father, Gwen
spotted Hywel’s wife, Mari, sitting at the high table among some of
the lords of Gwynedd who’d come for Calan Gaeaf. Since Gwen was
supposed to wait for King Owain there, she excused herself from her
father and made her way to where Mari sat. Gwen wouldn’t normally
have merited a chair at the high table, but since it was early in
the morning and plenty of seats were empty, she sat when Mari
patted the chair beside her.

“Tell me,” Mari said, “where is my
husband?”

“He’s standing over a body,” Gwen said. “I
suppose I can tell you because everyone is going to know shortly,
but Hywel believes it to be the remains of his cousin, Tegwen.”

Mari put her hand to her mouth. “How can
that be? She ran away with a Dane five years ago.”

Gwen wondered how many times she would hear
that exact phrase today. The story was legend. After Gwen had
returned to Gwynedd last year, she’d even heard girls giggling
about their marriage prospects with the caveat
you can always
run away with a Dane
if the man didn’t turn out to be all that
a girl wished. Gwen hadn’t realized where the phrase came from
until today.

“Or maybe she didn’t,” Gwen said. “I know
that’s the story, but Hywel is very sure that the body is the
remains of Tegwen or he wouldn’t have sent me home to Aber to tell
King Owain of it.”

“Do you mean to say that Tegwen has been
alive this whole time? Do you have any idea where she’s been
living? How could we have not known of her?”

Gwen shook her head. “No, no. That’s just
it. She hasn’t. It looks as if she died years ago—maybe even the
very day she disappeared.” The more Gwen thought about it, the more
likely that scenario seemed to her. Running away with a Dane would
have put Tegwen out of reach, but surely someone would have heard a
rumor of her at least once in all these years. Gwen herself had
gone to Dublin last year (which was a polite way of putting it,
given that Prince Cadwaladr had abducted her) but she hadn’t seen
Tegwen among the court. Admittedly, she hadn’t thought to look
either. “For some reason, someone left her body on the beach early
this morning.”

Mari’s face had gone very white, and Gwen
pressed her hand. “Did you know her?”

“Yes, I did.” Mari took a sip of warm mead,
and some color returned to her face. “My uncle Goronwy and her
grandfather were well acquainted. She and I were the same age, and
she visited my uncle’s estates often.” Her brow furrowed. “You are
of an age with us, more or less. Why didn’t you know her?”

Gwen explained again why she hadn’t, though
she was beginning to wonder if the issue wasn’t so much that Tegwen
hadn’t been at court as that Gwen hadn’t sought her out when she’d
visited. At the time, Gwen’s life had revolved around Hywel. Gwen’s
only other excuse was that Tegwen had married Bran at fifteen, and
Gwen had left Gwynedd with her father shortly thereafter, on the
heels of King Owain assuming the throne after the war in
Ceredigion.

“Mari, when did you last see her?”

Mari rubbed at her forehead with her fingers
as if she had a headache. Gwen felt one coming on too. “Perhaps … a
few weeks before she disappeared? She confided in me that she
thought she might be pregnant again.”

“Did she seem happy?” Gwen said.

Mari looked at Gwen through narrowed eyes.
“Yes, of course. Why are you asking me this?”

“Mari, Tegwen’s skull was fractured. We
suspect—Hywel, Gareth, and I—that someone hit her very hard and
killed her. Do you have any idea who could have done such a thing?
Or why?”

Mari rubbed at the back of her neck and
looked down at the table.

“What is it? What don’t you want to tell
me?” Gwen said.

Mari let out a sigh. “When I last saw
Tegwen, she told me that she’d learned a terrible secret about her
husband. It was tearing her apart.”

“What was the secret?” Gwen said.

Mari shook her head. “I tried to get it out
of her, but she wouldn’t tell me. She didn’t want to cast
aspersions on Bran’s character.”

Gwen frowned. “If I thought about her at
all, I assumed her marriage was unhappy since she’d run away.
You’re saying it wasn’t?”

“The truth is, when we were girls, Tegwen
fell in and out of love every week depending upon which man had
talked to her most recently.” Mari shrugged. “I suppose I was like
that at fifteen too, but Tegwen never learned constancy. When she
told me she no longer loved her husband, I didn’t think anything of
it because she’d said as much to me at least once a year and then
changed her mind if he bought her a new dress. Still, she seemed
different, more somber this time.”

“Is that why you believed, as we all did,
that she ran off with a Dane?” Gwen said.

“Not exactly,” Mari said. “I thought she’d
run away with the man she’d loved before she married Bran.”

That coincided with her father’s comment,
but Gwen still felt a little overwhelmed by what Mari was telling
her. She really hadn’t known Tegwen. “Tegwen loved someone before
Bran? I mean, more than just a passing fancy?”

“Oh yes,” Mari said. “So much so that she
pleaded to King Owain—though he wasn’t king at that time—for him or
his father to intervene and prevent the marriage, but neither saw a
reason to go against the wishes of her family. I don’t know if
anyone else other than a few of her close friends knew about this
other man. I never met him or even knew his name, but if he was a
Dane and not well-born, it would have been an impossible match for
a princess.”

“It may come out now that he never existed,”
Gwen said.

“Oh, he was real,” Mari said. “I know that
for certain.”

“How?” Gwen said.

“She was all mysterious smiles and knowing
looks whenever anyone talked about a man whom they were interested
in. She referred to him only as ‘B’, and the letter didn’t stand
for Bran.”

“I don’t see why they didn’t elope in the
first place,” Gwen said. “In seven years, their marriage could have
been as legal as any other.”

“She was a princess,” Mari said.

Gwen looked at her friend out of the corner
of her eye. “Was she unfaithful to Bran after the wedding?”

Mari bit her lip. “I think so, but not right
away. You met him, didn’t you?”

“I suppose.” Gwen shrugged, casting her mind
back to that long-ago time. “I must have seen him when he came to
Aber or Aberffraw.”

Mari raised her eyebrows. “You must not have
been paying attention. Bran was incredibly handsome. All the girls
favored him. Tegwen ended up admiring him too. And he treated her
very well initially.”

“So Bran did love her back?”

“Bran wanted her because she was beautiful
and Prince Cadwallon’s daughter,” Mari said.

“So ‘no’,” Gwen said. “What about Tegwen’s
lover?”

“Whoever he was, he broke it off with her
when she married Bran. It was only at the end that she took up with
him again.”

Even as a married woman, Gwen found this
story shocking. She knew that women weren’t always faithful to
their husbands. Husbands certainly weren’t faithful to their wives,
though a wife had the right to compensation and to divorce her
husband if he lay with another woman three times. In turn, if Bran
discovered Tegwen with another man, he was justified in beating
her. “Did Bran find out?” Gwen said.

“I don’t know,” Mari said.

“Wait—I didn’t really hear you when you
mentioned it the first time, but did you say that she was pregnant
when she disappeared?” Gwen said.

“She told me she was,” Mari said.

“Was the child Bran’s?” Gwen held her
breath.

“I don’t know.” Mari said the words so
quietly Gwen almost didn’t catch them. “The two daughters she gave
him definitely were his, but I don’t know about the child she was
carrying when she disappeared.”

“No part of any story I have heard about
Tegwen up until now mentions that she was pregnant.” Gwen sat back,
her mind churning at the information Mari had given her. For all
that Gwen had traveled the length of Wales, lost her mother to
childbirth, spent the last years as a spy for Prince Hywel, and was
now a married woman, she could still be surprised by the behavior
of those she lived amongst. “And you never knew the name of her
lover?”

Mari shook her head. “I’m sorry. Tegwen
would never tell me more than the scantiest details about him, not
even after she’d found solace in too much wine and her tongue
loosened.”

Gwen looked carefully at her friend. “Was
that a habit of hers, to drink too much?”

Mari’s eyes were sad. “Married to a man who
didn’t love her, pregnant with a child she didn’t want … it isn’t
only men who choose that route.”

Gwen swept a hand down her own belly. She
couldn’t help but smile as her child chose that moment to kick.

Mari was watching her closely. “You can’t
understand it, Gwen. Nor can I. But Tegwen deserves our pity, not
our judgment.”

“You misunderstand, Mari. I don’t judge her,
and I do pity her. I also know that with a few different twists of
fate, her situation could have been mine. Wasn’t Gareth in the same
position as this lover of Tegwen’s—worse, even, as he was banished
from Cadwaladr’s retinue and sent to wander Wales until he could
find a lord to take him in?”