The Renegade Merchant (17 page)

“Apparently not.”

John had a rumpled look to him that made
Gareth think the investigation was getting the better of him—and it
had been only one day.

“Never mind him. Tell me what you’ve
discovered.” John straightened in his seat. “I know you’ve
discovered something, else you wouldn’t have come.”

Gareth eased onto a cushioned bench near the
fire. The stone walls of the castle kept the interior far colder
than if they’d been wood. A chill hung in the air that had Gareth
tucking his cloak closer around himself, glad he’d worn it, for all
that the day itself had been warmer than normal.

“I’ve just come from the brothel.” Gareth
held up the coin, which he’d been carrying around in his purse
since they’d discovered it. If he hadn’t been with Gwen just now,
he probably would have presented it to the guard in the doorway of
The Lady’s Slipper. “Gwen and I followed two merchants, who are
staying at the monastery guest house. They went directly there and,
as they entered, your watchman Luke was coming out.”

John’s expression didn’t change. “He is a
single man.” But he turned to look into the fire for a moment
before moving from his seat behind the table to a chair nearer to
Gareth.

“He’s a watchman,” Gareth said, unable to
keep his suspicions to himself. “Don’t tell me that it wouldn’t be
in keeping with Luke’s character to take payment in kind for
keeping the council and the sheriff from bothering the brothel or
its patrons.”

As before, John looked affronted at any
maligning of his sheriff’s honor. “That is not the way we function.
We don’t take payment, in kind or otherwise. As long as those
involved break no law and keep to themselves, we don’t bother
them.”

“Yes, but Luke may have
told them a different story,” Gareth said. “Your sheriff has been
gone over a week.
The mice are
merry
—”

“
—
where there’s no cat
.” John
sank lower into his chair, his hands dangling between his knees.
“The English have that saying too.”

“Something more,” Gareth said. “One of the
merchants goes by the name Flann MacNeill. He says he’s never been
to Ireland, but he is an Irishman. It’s a connection to Conall—not
a strong one, I admit, but I can’t ignore it.”

John’s brow furrowed. “That is more
worrisome than anything you’ve said so far. I can’t say I’ve met
more than one or two Irishmen in the whole of my life, and now we
encounter two in the space of a day? Is that too much of a
coincidence to be believed?”

“Coincidence is always possible, but Conall
had a coin to that brothel, and now Flann and his partner, Will,
have gone to the brothel,” Gareth said. “Is the owner, by chance,
Irish?”

John shook his head. “No.”

“Who owns it?”

John licked his lips. “The Lady’s Slipper is
owned by a group of merchants in the town who went into business
together.”

Gareth threw back his head and laughed.
“You’re telling me that by day these men are respectable business
people? Was Roger Carter by chance one of them?”

“No!” John looked shocked.

Gareth raised his eyebrows. “Can you get me
their names?”

“I-I don’t know them all.”

“But you can find out?”

John nodded. “I confess that I am in no way
looking forward to questioning them.”

“It will have to be you who does it,” Gareth
said. “You can’t leave it to one of your men, or even to me.
They’ll appreciate your discretion, I’m sure.”

“And every one of them will report back to
the sheriff the moment he arrives.” John sighed.

Gareth couldn’t think of anything to say
that would make John feel better, so he said, “Shrewsbury has other
brothels, correct?”

“Two more in the town and, as I said, a
third beyond the town limits.”

“Owned by the same group that owns The
Lady’s Slipper,” Gareth said, remembering.

“Yes,” John said, and he
drew the
s
out in a
long hiss. “You and I will attend to this together in the morning.
The manager of the brothel will be less wary then and won’t be
angry because we disrupted her customers. I will collect
you.”

Gareth rose to his feet. “As you wish.”

“Can I convince you not to bring your wife?”
John looked up at him hopefully.

“It’s hard for us to understand why visiting
a brothel is worse than investigating murder, but—” Gareth snorted
laughter, “I have already persuaded her.”

The look on John’s face was one of pure
relief.

Hywel

L
ike most nights—and most knights—Hywel dreamed of violence,
much of it directed at him. Tonight, he woke with a start just as
he blocked an opposing knight’s sword, which had been aimed at his
head.

It was a relief to wake, but as Hywel lay in
bed, breathing quietly to himself in the dark, he realized that it
hadn’t been his imminent demise that had woken him, but something
else: a noise. He heard it again, the scrape of a shoe in the
corridor and then the creak of wood. The room in which Hywel lay
with Cadell and Cadifor wasn’t completely dark, as they hadn’t
closed the shutters against the cold night air, and the nearly full
moon made a square of light on the floor as it shown through the
open window.

As he listened, hardly daring to breathe,
Hywel felt motion to his right and was in no way surprised to see
Cadifor already crouched beside his pallet on the floor. Hywel had
never been able to put anything over on his foster father, who
seemed to sleep with one eye open.

Cadifor gestured with one finger, a quick
slash to the left, to indicate that he should wake Cadell, with
whom Hywel was sharing the bed. Hywel obeyed, rolling over and
slipping a hand over Cadell’s mouth before putting his lips to his
ear and saying as softly as he could, “Wake up.”

Cadell was a sound sleeper, still more a
child in that than a grown man, but his eyes popped open instantly,
and they widened to see Hywel hovering above him. “What is it?”

“We don’t know.” Hywel lifted his chin to
point at Cadifor, who had by now moved off his pallet to the end of
Hywel’s bed.

Hywel had removed only his shirt and boots
before getting into bed—not because he expected treachery from his
uncle, but because he didn’t need a specific lesson to know not to
trust where it hadn’t been earned. He slipped his shirt over his
head and reached for his boots. He was trying to be as quiet as
possible, while at the same time hurrying, even as he cursed to
himself that they’d been caught so unawares.

Cadifor, meanwhile, had cat-walked to the
door, which remained closed. With his boot knife in his right hand,
a wicked long blade that Hywel had been afraid even to hold as a
boy, he put his back to the wall beside the frame. If someone came
through the door, Cadifor would be right there to stop him.

Cadell hastily pulled on his boots too,
while Hywel drew his own knife from its sheath. In the confined
space of the room where a swinging sword might end up hurting
Cadifor or Cadell, a knife was the better weapon.

Hywel peered out the window of the room,
looking for an escape that didn’t require them to go through the
door. The barracks, in which their room was located, abutted the
wooden palisade that encircled the castle. Unfortunately, while
their room was on the top floor, the window faced south instead of
overlooking the wall. Hywel could have had a more spacious room in
the main living quarters of the castle next to the hall, but he’d
insisted on sleeping with his men, who were mixed up among Madog’s
men in the dormitory one floor below. He hadn’t wanted to put
anyone out. That instinct was looking near-to-prescient now.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t an
easy drop to the ground, and since the window didn’t give them
access to the exterior of the castle, they couldn’t actually
leave
like every muscle in
Hywel’s body was screaming at him to do.

“Hywel.”

Hywel turned back at Cadifor’s breathy
warning. The latch had clicked and the door swung open on greased
hinges. The room was shadowed enough that all Hywel saw at first
was the glint of a knife coming through the door.

His second boot still in his hand, Cadell
bounded forward without waiting for Cadifor to move first. The
sight of his prey, upright and alert instead of lying in bed, even
if he held a boot instead of a sword, gave the intruder a moment’s
hesitation. That was all the time Cadifor needed to thrust his
knife through the man’s back and turn with him so that the body was
between Cadifor and the door. The move saved his life since a
second man had come through the door behind the first.

This man was better prepared for opposition
than his companion, and he launched himself towards Hywel with a
muted grunt. The two men fought silently and yet brutally, in quick
hand-to-hand combat, Hywel countering the man’s knife with his
own.

Meanwhile, a third man sprang upon Cadell
and backed him up against the bed, followed by a fourth, who didn’t
get past the doorway because Cadifor was right there to stop him,
having dropped the first man he’d killed to the floor. Hywel
finally managed to get his knife under his opponent’s guard, and he
shoved it through the man’s chest. Like the first man through the
door, this intruder wasn’t wearing armor. Perhaps he knew that
leather creaked and mail clinked, and he’d been aiming for a silent
attack.

Before the man could even fall to the floor,
Hywel pulled his knife from his body, spun around, and drove it
into the back of the man who was fighting Cadell. While Hywel had
been busy with his own opponents, Cadifor had already killed two
more.

Then Cadifor shouted a warning, and Hywel
turned again to see yet another man coming through the door. This
latest attacker was too much for Cadifor, however, and he was
forced backward, causing him to trip over one of the bodies behind
him. Hywel leapt over his foster father in order to slice through
the man’s neck.

That man collapsed and Cadifor, thankfully
still breathing, scrambled to his feet to rejoin the fight.
Containing the attackers within a foot of the doorway was their
best option, and the two of them fought shoulder to shoulder.
Unfortunately, as the next man went down beneath one of Hywel’s
thrusts, the blade of Hywel’s knife snapped. When he held it up,
only the hilt and two inches of jagged blade remained, since the
rest of the blade remained in the man’s body.

Cadifor shoved at Hywel’s shoulder to get
him out of the way, just as two more men attacked simultaneously.
Cadifor was pressed hard by the first and thus unable to stop the
second from chasing after Hywel, who skidded across the bloody
floor to his sword, which he’d propped in the corner by the window.
He grabbed his sheath, but wasn’t able to pull out his sword before
his opponent raised his own, prepared to bring it down on his head,
just like in the dream—except Hywel had no sword this time to
counter it.

Crash
!

The man with the sword keeled over, and
Hywel found himself facing Cadell, who held a piece of the washing
basin in each hand.

Hywel gaped at him, finding uncontrolled
laughter overcoming him. “A wash basin? Where’s your knife?”

Cadell looked ruefully down at the heavy
pieces of pottery he held and then gestured with one of them to
where his knife lay on the floor under the window. “He was on you
so fast, I grabbed the first thing to hand.”

Cadifor grunted as he poked his head into
the hallway. “More are coming!” Feet pounded on the stairs, and men
shouted from the common room below.

Hywel raced forward to help Cadifor drag the
dead men away from the door so it would close. He eased the door
shut, making sure it didn’t bang, though it was probably very much
a matter of tuning a harp after a string had already broken. “My
uncle didn’t think very much of our skills if he sent only ten men
to kill us. He should have sent two dozen.”

“He may have, since more are coming.”
Cadifor crouched next to one of the men, feeling along his body for
weapons. “My guess, we were supposed to be dead asleep, thanks to
the potency of the drink he served us.”

He found a knife in the man’s boot, a sharp
one, sturdily made, which he tossed to Hywel, who caught it and
slid it into his empty sheath.

“Should we kill those who aren’t dead?”
Cadell said.

“Not in cold blood.” Even counting the fight
in the room, Cadell hadn’t yet killed a man in battle, and seeing
how the attackers who weren’t dead were unconscious, they posed no
threat. Hywel saw no reason for Cadell to cross that particular
barrier today.

“We need to get our men and get out of
here,” Cadifor said.

“Any suggestion as to how we do that?” Hywel
said. “We have more of Madog’s soldiers coming up the stairs,
wondering where these men have got to, and a barracks full of
enemies between us and the exit. I imagine if our men aren’t yet
dead, they soon will be.”

“Likely,” Cadifor said, without emotion,
though Cadell looked stricken at the thought. In response, the
older man held out his arm to Cadell. “I’m happy to fight at your
side any time, my lord.”

Cadell had been raised by
his own mother, so he had never met Cadifor and his sons before
Hywel had requested that they join his
teulu
. But even short acquaintance had
Cadell coveting Cadifor’s approval, as well he might. Cadell wanted
to be a warrior, and nobody could mistake the experience and wisdom
in Cadifor’s craggy face.

Thus, Cadell eagerly grasped Cadifor’s
forearm, prompting Hywel to roll his eyes, though he made sure he
was slightly to the right and behind Cadell when he did it so that
only Cadifor could see.