The Lost Brother (18 page)

Ever since they’d found them, John had been
eyeing the coins with a certain sort of eagerness, but when Gareth
slipped the bag into his own purse to keep it safe, he sighed and
nodded. “You must give them to your lord and let him decide what to
do with the money.” Then his brow furrowed. “It is a very rich man
who leaves coins strewn amidst the grass.”

“You’re right on one hand,” Gareth said,
“but on the other, if the owner of the coins was also the killer,
he had more urgent tasks to complete. In the dark and the cold,
he’d be hard pressed to find the coins again after burying
Cole.”

They mounted their horses again and rode the
last distance to Lord Morgan’s fort, chased by the black clouds
that seemed to have settled over their heads, even though the
drizzle had temporarily abated.

Gareth raised his hand to the gatekeeper. “I
have returned, bringing with me the undersheriff of
Shrewsbury.”

“Welcome back, my lord.” The gate swung open
to admit them.

Gareth had greeted the gatekeeper as if he
and John hadn’t been visible to watchers from the top of the
palisade ever since they’d left the river road. It was a courtesy
on the gatekeeper’s part not to imply they’d been watched the whole
way, and on Gareth’s to pretend he didn’t know. But because of it,
Einion, having been forewarned of their arrival, immediately
hurried down the steps to the hall to greet them.

Gareth pushed back his hood and leaned down
towards the steward without dismounting. “Is the body of the dead
man we found already in the ground?”

“The funeral service for both the man and
the women was to start at sunset at the chapel in Cilcain. Father
Alun thought it fitting to bury the pair together. Lord Morgan left
the fort not long ago in order to attend the service.”

Gareth checked the sky. Travel almost always
took longer than he wanted it to, but even with the stop at Cole’s
death site, he and John had made better time than Gareth had hoped,
and they still had a half-hour until dusk.

“Thank you.” He turned his horse’s head,
prepared to ride to the chapel immediately.

“Wait!” Einion said.

Gareth looked back.

“Lord Morgan instructed me to ask you, were
you to return, if the rumor of King Owain’s coming advance is
true.”

“It is. By tomorrow evening, you’ll be
overrun,” Gareth said. “You should prepare.”

Einion’s face fell as he internally
calculated his stores and wondered how depleted they might become
before this war was over. He had people to look after. He couldn’t
afford to feed King Owain or his court for very long, but he also
had no choice but to provide whatever hospitality the king
required.

Gareth didn’t try to assuage the steward’s
fears because he didn’t know himself where King Owain would choose
to lay his head, if he came east at all.

“Come, John,” Gareth said to the
undersheriff.

The pair rode back the way they’d come, down
the road from Morgan’s stronghold. Rather than heading back into
the mountains, however, they took the ford across the river that
would lead them to Cilcain.

Once on the main road, Gareth spurred
Braith. With the continued cloud cover and mist, it would be hard
to tell the moment that the sun actually set, but sunset had to be
soon. If John was going to be given the chance to see Adeline’s
face, it had to be now, before dirt covered her body for the second
time. Father Alun would be less than willing to accommodate a
request to dig her up again just for John’s peace of mind.

Still, racing to a funeral was unseemly, no
matter the reason, so as they reached the village and then the
crossroads at the village green, they slowed as a courtesy to the
few who’d remained in the street.

The village tavern lay to the west on the
main road, and as he passed riding north, Gareth noted the empty
tables and benches, though a wisp of smoke curled from the hole in
the roof of the accompanying hut. Gareth hoped people might gather
at the tavern after the service, especially if the rain didn’t
start up again. He intended to be one of them if they did. There
wouldn’t be a better time than now to hear all that Cilcain had to
say.

The villagers had turned out in force to
attend the service, even if most were doing so more for a chance to
gossip and to remark on the spectacle of it than out of any sense
of loss at the death of two strangers. The Welsh honored their
dead. It was what separated them from barbarians.

Gareth urged Braith past the last few
mourners straggling towards the church and dismounted in front of
the entrance to the graveyard, in the same spot he’d left Braith
the evening before. A lifetime ago.

A branch overhung the wall, and he looped
the horse’s reins around it. John dismounted too, with somewhat
less enthusiasm than he’d shown up until now—not surprising, given
that the funeral was for a friend.

Gareth hesitated for a moment in the archway
to the grounds, his eyes scanning the congregants, who were spread
out among the graves to the west of the church. Adeline’s and
Cole’s burial site was about as far from Lord Morgan’s
grandfather’s, to the northeast of the chapel, as it was possible
to be and still have them both in the same graveyard.

Lord Morgan had placed himself at the front
of the crowd, and his head was bowed. Several of his men stood near
him. Gareth thought he recognized the shape of Bran as well, made
more likely by the presence of his sheepdog tied to the leg of the
bench upon which Father Alun had sat last night in front of the
chapel entrance.

The service had already begun, but as he
raised his hands to give the blessing, Father Alun caught Gareth’s
eye, and Gareth bent his head in greeting.

Fortunately for John, this funeral was
typical for Wales, and the bodies weren’t yet in the ground. They
lay in their temporary coffins, which after today would be stored
away against the day they were needed to carry another dead
parishioner to his funeral. It was only after the crowds had
dispersed that the gravediggers would remove the bodies to bury
them in just their shrouds. At that point, John would be free to
look upon the faces of Adeline and Cole.

Gareth was relieved to have made it in time,
though probably not as relieved as John. Until the undersheriff
confirmed for himself who the victims were, Gareth didn’t want to
say definitively that he knew their identities.

“I hate funerals,” John said to Gareth in an
undertone from his position just to Gareth’s right.

Others had said those words to Gareth in the
past, including his own wife and Prince Hywel, and he always felt
like saying in reply, “who
likes
them?” Gareth would be far
more concerned about John if he’d told him he was looking forward
to it. But Gareth, as always, refrained from any response at all.
He understood that some people disliked the necessities surrounding
death more than others, and their level of animosity was often
directly related to the number of loved ones who’d died and whose
funerals they’d attended. So Gareth could be forgiving.

Gareth’s own parents had died when he was
young. As he stood and waited for Father Alun to finish, the
dripping of water onto the back of his neck from the overhanging
trees had him recalling that day.

It had been much the same time of year as
now, and Gareth could almost see in his mind’s eye, even
twenty-five years later, the boy he’d been, standing before the
open graves of his mother and father. He could almost feel the rain
falling on his bared head, the pressure of his uncle’s hand on his
shoulder, and the fog of his own stunned grief. At five years old,
he’d barely understood anything of what was happening, other than
the obvious fact that his parents were never coming back.

Most recently, Gareth had attended the
burials of the men who’d fallen in battle against the Earl of
Chester’s forces. And for that reason, Gareth could say, equally
with John, that he hated funerals too.

Gareth

T
his funeral was
soon over, however, and since they hadn’t had the chance to tell
Father Alun the names of the dead before the service, it had a
particularly perfunctory air. The crowd dispersed quickly. Nobody
cared to stand around in the wet grass and the dark to watch the
interment of two people they hadn’t known. The main focus of the
mourners was to get to their mead so they could discuss the funeral
in detail and speculate on the identity of the dead and their
killers. The former point, at least, could be made clear to
everyone as soon as John had a chance to look at the victims’
faces.

Gareth and John waited until the last of the
mourners had turned away before stepping forward from where they’d
watched the funeral. Gareth moved first to the smaller of the two
coffins, which had to be Adeline’s, and put out a hand to the
gravediggers, indicating that they should hold. They’d been about
to lift her body out of the box to put her into the grave.

“Sir Gareth.” Father Alun had been
overseeing the work, and he gave Gareth a nod of his head in
greeting, as well as a small smile.

“You chose a nice spot for them,” Gareth
said.

“They may have died violently and unshriven,
but that doesn’t mean they can’t rest in peace,” Father Alun
said.

Gareth canted his head. “Excuse the
interruption, but I’d like to present to you John Fletcher of
Shrewsbury, who arrived today at King Owain’s headquarters on a
similar quest to your own.”

“More men have been murdered?” Father Alun
said, aghast.

Gareth gave a tsk of dismay. “I phrased that
badly. I should have said that he came to King Owain looking for
these two. He has been searching for them for some time.” He
gestured John closer, adding, “He thinks he can identify them for
us.”

Father Alun’s face collapsed into an
expression of pure relief. “That I had to bury them unnamed has
been a weight on my heart since Lord Morgan told me that you’d
returned to Prince Hywel.”

“Is that what he said? That we’d abandoned
the investigation?” Gareth looked around for Lord Morgan, but he’d
left with the other mourners. Gareth hadn’t made himself known to
him, and since the only light came from several torches surrounding
the gravesite and two lanterns on the step of the church, Morgan
could perhaps be forgiven for not noticing Gareth’s arrival. “He
was the one who practically ordered us to go.”

As soon as he spoke, Gareth wished he could
take back his words. Father Alun might be gentle, but he’d proven
last night that his mind worked as well as anyone’s. Gareth had
implied that Lord Morgan had lied, which was a mistake.

Father Alun frowned. “Maybe I simply
inferred it.”

“I’m sure it was something like that,”
Gareth said, backtracking. “As it is, I’ve returned and am ready to
continue the investigation.”

Father Alun gave a slight bob of his head.
“Thank you, Sir Gareth.”

Gareth held up one hand. “Don’t thank me
yet.” He turned to look at John, who was crouched over Adeline’s
coffin. He hadn’t yet moved aside the part of the shroud that
covered her face.

“Are you ready for this?” Gareth was
beginning to think that John himself may have lied—in this case
either about his relationship with Adeline or his experience with
death and murder.

John looked in Gareth’s direction and waved
a hand dismissively. “I’ve seen bodies before, of course.”

“Of course,” Gareth said, “but it is a very
different thing to examine closely someone who has been murdered,
particularly if you knew her in life. Anyone would be feeling
queasy about now.”

A swift breeze came from the west,
thankfully blowing away any foul smell that might be developing in
the corpses. They were reaching the end of the grace period when a
body
had
to be put into the ground. Instead of commenting on
it, Gareth moved to crouch beside John, deciding to remove from
John’s hands the burden of unwinding the cloth from Adeline’s face.
Gareth also wanted to make sure that the death wound on her neck
wasn’t revealed. Undersheriff or not, used to death or not, John
didn’t need to see it.

A few swift movements and it was done.
Gareth’s stepped back and left John to it. The undersheriff looked
into Adeline’s face for a count of ten, pausing long enough that
Gareth suddenly feared they’d been mistaken about her identity. But
then John nodded. “That’s Adeline.” He carefully rearranged the
cloth so it covered her face again.

“God bless her soul.” Father Alun stepped to
the side of the coffin, opposite Gareth, and made the sign of the
cross above her body.

“Will you look upon Cole as well?” Gareth
said.

One of the gravediggers had already exposed
his face—without fuss, Gareth was glad to see. He hadn’t questioned
either of them yet, but he reminded himself to do so. Since they’d
been involved in the uncovering of Adeline’s body, they might have
a different perspective on the circumstances of it than Father
Alun.

As an answer to Gareth, John straightened to
a standing position and walked the few feet to where Cole lay in
his coffin. John didn’t crouch beside the body this time but just
gave another curt nod, and Father Alun signaled that the
gravediggers could complete their work.

Gareth remained concerned about John’s
wellbeing, and when John looked over at him next, his expression
had turned even more severe, the worry lines around his eyes
deepening.

“What’s wrong?” Gareth gestured with one
hand. “Beyond the obvious, I mean.”

“When you unwrapped the cloth from Adeline’s
face, you tried to hide the wound at her throat, but I saw it
anyway.”

“I was trying to spare you grief,” Gareth
said.

John gave a mocking laugh. “Instead, I
almost missed seeing it, which would have been regrettable.”