The Lost Brother (17 page)

John took in another deep breath and let it
out. “I would like to see her.”

“She was to have been buried today,” Gareth
said gently, “as was Cole.”

Gwen looked up at Gareth. “We woke to snow.
Father Alun may have waited for the ground to soften before
ordering out the gravediggers.”

Hywel nodded. “Regardless, John needs an
escort back to England. It’s a wonder he made it this far without
being stopped. Many of the men are in a mood to attack first and
ask questions later.”

John hung his head. “Like I did.”

It was by now mid-afternoon, and there was
faint hope that John could reach Cilcain before the burials. Even
if he left this instant, the sun would be setting by the time he
reached the chapel. Still, if John’s interest in Adeline had been
more than that of a friend, he deserved the chance to see her face
one more time before they put her into the ground.

Gareth made an appeasing gesture with one
hand. “With my lord’s permission, I can take you to her—to Cole
too, if you like. At the very least, you can speak to witnesses
other than Gwen and me who saw them both.” He glanced at Hywel, who
nodded his assent.

“I would be grateful,” John said.

Then Gareth moved to Gwen’s side and lowered
his voice. “Can you stay here this time?”

“There’s as much danger for me here as in
Cilcain,” Gwen said, “maybe more if the nobleman we’re searching
for is among King Owain’s retinue.”

“I didn’t say I wanted you to stay here to
keep you out of danger,
cariad
.” Gareth’s voice was low and
steady.

Gwen’s eyes widened as she took in what
Gareth was saying. He was suggesting that she take up the role
she’d played for Hywel before she married Gareth—to act as a spy in
King Owain’s court and to report what she discovered.

Gwen nodded. “I haven’t had a chance to see
to King Owain, and this will give me a perfect excuse to stay by
his side and to meet everyone who currently surrounds him. If our
murderer is here, I will do my best to find him.”

“Safely.” Gareth gazed down at her, a
warning look in his eyes. “Please do not take any risks, even
necessary ones!”

Gwen would have much rather either stayed
with Gareth or returned to her daughter, whose absence was becoming
as constant an ache in her heart as Gareth’s had been earlier. But
she appreciated Gareth’s trust in her and that he wasn’t barring
her from the investigation just because danger was all around them.
They were in the middle of a war. Danger was a way of life.

She put a palm flat on his chest. “I will do
my best.”

“You’d better.”

Prince Rhun approached, having caught the
end of their conversation. “I’m hoping you’ve just told Gwen to
stay with my father.”

“I have,” Gareth said, “and she will.”

“Those medicines are still in my bag. I’ll
get them.” Gwen moved towards the rickety stable in which the
horses sheltered, deciding she’d had enough of standing in the
drizzling rain. John stayed where he was, still eyed suspiciously
by Cynan, Madoc, and Godfrid. However, Rhun, Hywel, and Gareth
walked with Gwen and halted beneath the overhanging roof.

One of the stable boys had removed Gwen’s
saddlebag, brushed down her horse, and given him a blanket. He was
warm and dry now—warmer and dryer than Gwen herself. Her bag rested
on a shelf near the horse’s head, and she went to open it.

Gareth’s horse was tied next to Gwen’s. He
lifted the saddle from its rest near Gwen’s bag and settled it onto
Braith’s back. Rhun waited while he tightened the belt and then
said, “You have less to fear regarding discovery this time. With
the army moving forward, we are no longer worried about alerting
Ranulf to our presence in Cilcain. Let his spies tell him we have
moved. He will know it for certain soon enough.”

Hywel bumped Rhun’s shoulder with his fist.
“While Gwen sees to Father, we should put in an appearance at the
camp to make sure everything is progressing smoothly. The men will
march soon.”

Rhun’s eyes brightened for a moment, in
anticipation of movement, but then his face fell. “I should
stay—”

“No you shouldn’t.” With the box of
medicines tucked under her arm, Gwen approached the princes. “I can
talk to him about staying behind without you. He’s either going to
listen to me or he isn’t. Whether or not you are looking sternly at
him over my shoulder won’t make a difference.”

Rhun gave way with relief, and he and Hywel
moved to where their horses were tethered, giving Gwen and Gareth
some privacy so they could say their goodbyes. Gareth put his arm
around Gwen, and she kissed his cheek. “Be careful,” she said.

“You too,
cariad
.” A smile flashed
across his face. “King Owain’s temper being what it is, it is you
who have the more dangerous task.”

Gareth

G
areth was neither
pleased to be parted from Gwen nor excited to return to Lord
Morgan’s fort and the tedious job of questioning every one of the
inhabitants of Cilcain as to whether or not they’d seen Adeline,
Cole, or strange goings-on before midnight the evening Adeline and
Cole died. John, at least, seemed to have taken hold of himself and
his emotions.

“She was your betrothed?” Gareth said, at
last asking what he—and everyone else who’d watched John’s reaction
to the news of Adeline’s death—had assumed.

“No,” John said.

“No?” Gareth glanced at him, truly
surprised.

John didn’t look at him, instead continuing
to stare straight ahead. The track was ten feet wide for the first
leg of the journey, allowing them to ride side-by-side, but both
men’s hoods were up against the drizzle so Gareth couldn’t see
John’s face. They were riding to Cilcain on the same path he and
Gwen had come down a few hours earlier. Gareth would have taken the
main road to Cilcain, but he wanted show Cole’s burial site to John
and give himself another chance to look at it to see if he’d missed
anything the first time.

“I’ve known her since childhood is all,”
John finally said. “She’s my sister’s closest confidant, and they
were each to be married come spring—to brothers.”

Gareth felt a tug of relief. He had felt
uncomfortable prying into the man’s personal life, but if Adeline
had been intended as his future wife, that would have given John a
very different stake in her death than if she’d been merely an
acquaintance or friend of his family.

Gareth’s next comment, therefore, was
somewhat more matter-of-fact. “One might conclude that Adeline was
looking forward to her marriage with something less than
anticipation.”

John barked a laugh. “You could say that. My
sister’s future husband is a good man, but Adeline was set to marry
his older brother, with whom he works closely in their business as
cartwrights. He is well respected within the community and
comfortably well-off, which is why Adeline’s father accepted his
offer for her hand, but he has a temper, and Adeline wouldn’t have
chosen him for herself. I understood from my sister that Adeline
had always had her eye on someone else.”

“You?” Gareth said.

Another laugh. “Not I. It was one of the
sheriff’s men-at-arms she wanted.”

“Somehow I don’t see taking up with a known
criminal as the best way to attract the attention of one of the
sheriff’s men,” Gareth said.

“You wouldn’t think so.” John’s laughter
subsided, and he was back to sighing. “It was never easy to tell
that girl anything.”

“Who was her father?” Gareth said.

“A weaver in Shrewsbury—and a good one,”
John said, “but his wife died at Adeline’s birth, and he didn’t
remarry. Adeline has always run a bit wild, though with the
upcoming marriage, we hoped she’d settle down.”

“Did you investigate Adeline’s disappearance
specifically?”

“Her father asked the sheriff to look into
it, and we made some inquiries, but she had been seen with other
men over the weeks before her disappearance, from sons of merchants
to the aforementioned man-at-arms at Shrewsbury Castle. None could
give an account to us of her last day or could be distinguished as
the last person to see her alive.”

John turned his head to look at Gareth. “As
it turns out, she was simply biding her time until she could run
away.”

Gareth nodded, only half-listening, because
he was really thinking about the possibility that the weaver’s wife
had given her husband a daughter fathered by another man, namely
Meilyr, Gwen’s father. If the weaver knew of the deception, it was
good of him to raise the girl as his own.

Only Meilyr could tell them the truth now,
and that was a conversation Gareth was not looking forward to
having with his father-in-law. It would be up to Gwen whether or
not they had it at all, because now that Adeline was dead, perhaps
the identity of her real father didn’t matter. The same could be
said of Cole in regards to Gareth’s family. But if Cole had been a
long lost brother, Gareth felt strangely unaffected by the
loss.

“What about you, my lord?” John said.

“What about me?” Gareth said.

“How did you come to be involved in these
deaths? Surely your skills are wasted on two English miscreants
from Shrewsbury?”

“I wouldn’t say that, even if a miscreant
was all Cole was,” Gareth said. “Every unlawful death deserves the
best effort of the man sent to investigate it. Why would you think
investigating their deaths beneath me anyway?”

“You consort with kings.”

Thankfully, their arrival at Cole’s grave
gave Gareth an excuse not to respond to that statement. He didn’t
really know how to anyway, or what to make of John’s comment. To
his mind, all he was doing was his job.

Except to Hywel and Gwen, he never talked
about his role in the investigations he undertook. Solving murder
was at times interesting, but mostly Gareth endeavored not to
relive the moments of tension and terror he’d felt during past
investigations. He certainly didn’t pretty up the details over a
shared carafe of wine or a cup of mead, even when those details
were true.

It was quite dark under the trees, even
though sunset wasn’t yet upon them, so after Gareth tethered Braith
to an overhanging branch, he removed his fire starter from his pack
and made a makeshift torch out of a stick and a wad of oiled cloth
he kept for such a purpose. Then, lit torch aloft, he walked with
John to the hole, which Morgan hadn’t seen fit to refill when he’d
left.

“This is it?”

Gareth canted his head. “Not much of an
end.”

“We all end up in a hole in the ground
eventually, I suppose.” John’s head came up, and he looked around
the little clearing. “Did you find any clues as to the identity of
the killer?”

“A few boot prints. Nothing else.” Gareth
circled the clearing. “Wait a moment.”

He moved to the place where Gwen had spotted
the blood and then beyond it. The whole area had been covered in
snow when they’d been here earlier, and it had been impossible to
properly survey the ground. It was only Gwen’s keen eyes that had
allowed her to find the blood in the first place.

Now, the torch light glinted off something
in the grass about five feet from the bloody leaves. Bending,
Gareth retrieved a small silver coin. And then he found a second
one a foot away from the first.

John had followed him and, at the sight of
what Gareth held in his hand, bent forward with his nose
practically to the ground looking for more coins. “There’s one! And
another!”

Gareth stabbed the end of the torch into the
ground, and soon both men were on their knees in the wet, searching
more with their hands than with their eyes until they’d collected
eleven silver coins and two gold pieces. It was a small
fortune.

Gareth sat back on his heels, peering into
the trees and trying to picture a scene where the coins would have
been thrown across the grass. Then he spied a small leather purse
that had caught on the end of a branch in a bush a few feet away,
looking very much like a long brown leaf. He stood to retrieve it
and brought it back to where John waited with the coins he’d
found.

“What happened here, Sir Gareth?” John’s
mouth was slightly agape and maybe even watering at the sight of so
much coinage.

“Why don’t you take a guess?” Gareth
said.

His eyes narrowing in thought, John stepped
backwards a few paces to give himself a wider view of the whole
area. He looked to the grave, and then to the blood, and then to
the pile of coins and the bag. He walked towards the river and bent
to gather a handful of pebbles.

Then he moved back to Gareth. “May I?”

Gareth gave him the bag but kept the
coins.

John poured about half the stones into the
purse while leaving the rest loose in his palm. “Hit my hand with
yours so the stones scatter towards the trees.”

Impressed and amused at the same time,
Gareth swung his arm, backhanding John’s hand such that the stones
and the bag flew into the air in a trajectory that had them landing
not quite as far—but not too far off—from where they’d found the
coins. It seemed Gareth hadn’t hit John’s hand quite as hard as the
man who’d scattered the coins. If that man had been Cole, and he’d
refused payment for the murder of Adeline or because he didn’t
think the money he was being given was enough, he’d died angry.

Gareth clutched the coins in his fist, each
one burning a hole in his flesh. They represented blood money,
quite literally, and even worse, they had been last touched by the
man who’d murdered Cole. Gareth didn’t want to claim Cole as a long
lost brother, repelled as he was by what Cole had done, but he was
equally repulsed by standing where his killer had last stood and
handling the coins Cole had refused.

Gareth stooped to collect the bag, which had
fallen near to the original bush but hadn’t caught in it, and
slipped the coins inside it.