The Unexpected Ally (32 page)

“We needed to have a look at him before you
did. We didn’t know who killed Erik, but we feared what Erik might
have on him that could be traced back to us. Besides, if he had a
token from the King of Gwynedd, that could have been useful.”

“But why cut him open?” Gareth said, not
mentioning that out of all of what Lwc knew, or thought he knew,
that Erik worked for Gwynedd was the nearest he’d come to the
truth.

“It was something Jerome said to us about
swallowing incriminating evidence if we were caught.” Lwc made a
disgusted face. “Anyway, I figured it was worth a look, and it
isn’t as if he could be more dead than he already was.”

“Did Erik have anything in his stomach?”
Gareth said.

“No. Whoever killed him had already taken
all his possessions.”

“Why dump the body?” Gareth said.

“I was raised in a monastery. I know that
monks view such things as the work of devil worshippers. It was to
put you off our trail. I knew as soon as I saw you—and with the few
things that Abbot Rhys said—that you would dig and dig until you
found answers. I couldn’t allow that to happen.”

“What about the barn?” Gareth said.

“What barn?” Lwc’s eyes strayed to the barn
currently going up in flames as the fire had jumped from roof to
roof and nobody had seen fit to try to put it out.

“Back at the monastery, you denied that you
set fire to the monastery’s barn as a distraction so you could rob
the treasury,” Hywel said. “Do you deny it still?”

“With Erik dead and Jerome gone, I decided
things were falling apart. One of my men set the fire as a
distraction—which would have worked out too if not for those
meddling boys.”

“You destroyed the monastery at Wrexham. Why
not wait for the peace conference to be over to destroy St.
Kentigern’s?” Gareth said.

“What kind of sense would that have made?”
Lwc’s laugh was disbelieving at the stupidity of the question, even
as he was growing paler by the heartbeat. Hywel wanted this over
before Lwc passed out from pain and blood loss. “At Wrexham, we had
no chance of entering the treasury. With me as the abbot’s
secretary, we did. The point of this was wealth, not destruction.
Besides, with the peace conference over, you wouldn’t be distracted
anymore, and I’d heard by now that you always got your man. I
didn’t want that man to be me.”

Hywel couldn’t look at Lwc anymore. “Get
that arrow out of him and bind his wounds. We may have more
questions later.” He turned away. Though complex in its
implementation, the villainy was unremarkable. He hadn’t
encountered a band like this before, but the lengths to which
they’d gone for greed were entirely familiar.

Gareth nudged Hywel’s elbow, indicating he
wanted a more private conference. “Do you believe that he didn’t
kill Erik?”

“I don’t want to, but I can’t help but
believe him. Jerome must be the man we found burned in the
barn.”

“But who killed him and took Erik’s
belongings?” Gareth said. “Your ring is still at large.”

“Someone we haven’t yet thought of.” Hywel
gazed around at the wreckage of the farmstead and the carnage at
his feet. “We’re a mile south of St. Asaph, Gareth.”

“I thought of that as soon as we saw the
farmstead. It could be that if Rhodri and Lwc hadn’t led us
here—”

Hywel nodded. “My Aunt Susanna would
have.”

Gwen

T
he first thing
that was obvious about the burned man was how tall he was. Even in
death and slightly shrunken from being burned, his feet hung off
the end of the table. His boots were larger than any man’s she’d
ever seen, and—his missing fingertip aside—his hands were the size
of serving platters. Few men would have been strong enough and
large enough to get the jump on Erik, but this man was among those
who could have.

Gwen began by cutting what was left of his
coat and shirt off him, and she was immediately struck by a series
of cuts on his forearms. She’d noticed the slashes in his coat, but
hadn’t looked closely since large parts of it were burned anyway.
With a lantern in one hand for light, she lifted up the arm to see
it better.

“Defensive wounds.” Abbot Rhys’s voice spoke
from behind her.

Gwen turned at the sound. “It looks that way
to me too.”

“I won’t bother telling you that you
shouldn’t be here and that you promised not to, so instead I’ll
just ask if he was more wounded than what we see here?
Particularly, did he have a wound that would have made him unable
to leave the barn?”

“He was stabbed in the back.” Gwen swept the
light over the man’s body. “I’ll show you if you help me turn him
over.”

Rhys took the man’s shoulders while Gwen
pushed up on his hip and rolled the corpse onto its side. The skin
was badly charred along the whole length of his back, indicating to
her that he’d been face down on the ground when the fire had
reached him.

The abbot sighed. “He could have killed Erik
but been wounded in the fight, resulting in his death at a later
hour.”

“It would be convenient if our two murdered
men murdered each other.” Gwen settled the body back onto the
table. “It might even be true, but we would still be missing the
most important piece of the puzzle.”

“What would that be?”

“Why he killed Erik and, once he was dead,
what happened to Erik’s possessions?”

Footsteps sounded outside the room, and
Prior Anselm poked his head between the half-open door and the
frame. “It is almost time for Compline, Father.”

Anselm’s warning was as much for her as for
Rhys. It wouldn’t be appropriate for her to be examining a body
while the monks were at their prayers. From the passing sneer on
Anselm’s face, he didn’t think her being here had ever been
appropriate. It was his right to think so, and Gwen was enough used
to that attitude by now that she was able to (mostly) ignore it.
“I’ll be off to check on Tangwen.”

Gwen flipped the sheet back over the top of
the dead man, and the two men moved out of the way to let her
precede them into the cloister. She walked along the flagstones a
few yards and then stopped near a pillar. Alone in the dark, she
debated waiting for the monks to leave and then returning to finish
her examination.

Then Rhys and Anselm exited the church, and
she heard Rhys say, “How are you feeling Anselm? You’ve been ill
for a few days now, haven’t you? You have a strong singing voice
that we’ve missed at the last few night vigils.”

That was pure flattery, but Anselm didn’t
seem to know it. “I am much better, thank you, Father. These
illnesses befall me every now and again.”

Rhys and Anselm had turned in the opposite
direction, heading towards the dormitory so they could process into
the church with their fellow monks. Their voices echoed among the
stones, and Gwen stayed where she was so they wouldn’t know that
she was eavesdropping.

“I’m glad to hear you’re better. The other
night after Matins, I went to the infirmary to check on you, but
you were not there.”

“What day was this?”

“It must have been just before King Owain’s
party arrived at the monastery.”

“I was probably in the latrine,” Anselm
said. “I’ve been on the mend since then.”

“I’m sure you’re right.”

Their voices echoed away down the passage,
and Gwen moved out of the shadows, listening and wondering. Anselm
might not realize it, but any time a man said,
I’m sure you’re
right
, what he was really saying was,
I don’t believe it for
a heartbeat, but I’m not going to argue with you about it
.

She stood alone in the covered walkway,
hesitating not because she was unsure of what she needed to do but
because she was struggling to find the courage to do it. It might
even be that Rhys guessed she was still in the cloister and
inquired of Anselm’s whereabouts so she could overhear. Anselm
hadn’t appeared ill that first morning when Mathonwy had found
Erik’s body. He didn’t appear ill now. Was that what Rhys was
trying to tell her?

Anselm was the one man throughout everything
that had happened whom nobody had questioned—and yet, he’d arrived
at St. Kentigern’s with Lwc only a week ago. He’d been a constant
fixture at Rhys’s side since they arrived, and because he was a
smaller than average man with perfectly formed hands and fingers,
soft and unused to manual labor as appropriate for a prior at a
monastery, she hadn’t seriously considered him to be a part of
this.

Maybe it was time to reconsider that
assumption.

The monastery bell began to toll, and then
the Latin processional rose in chorus from the monks’ dormitory.
The sound decided her. With hasty steps, though on tiptoe so they
wouldn’t echo, she hurried down the passage to the west side of the
monastery where Prior Anselm had his quarters adjacent to Abbot
Rhys’s. The brothers were still processing when she reached his
door, looked both ways down the walkway, and slipped inside. In a
monastery, no door but the treasury was ever locked.

As befitting a monk’s sensibilities, the
room was neat and clean, with few possessions: a table, stool, and
bed, and three hooks on the wall, one empty. A monk’s robe and a
fine, soft wool cloak hung from the others. A quick look in the
trunk in the corner revealed nothing more than a few spare
garments. Gwen swung around to survey the room. She didn’t know
what she’d hoped to find, but she wasn’t seeing anything out of
place.

Deciding she could afford a few more moments
of looking, she unfolded and refolded the blanket on his bed and
then lifted up the pallet to see what was underneath. It was a
basic rope bed surmounted by a mattress stuffed with sacking and
cloth. Down would have been more comfortable but was inappropriate
for a monk, even a prior.

However, as she moved around the bed to make
sure everything was in place, she noted a lump in the mattress near
the head of the bed. Lumpy mattresses were more normal than not,
but she pulled the sheet away and lifted up the mattress to reveal
a mostly flattened leather satchel, which couldn’t have been
comfortable to sleep on. It was the kind of bag that a man would
wear on his lower back with the strap at a diagonal across his
chest.

On her knees beside the bed, she opened the
satchel. Inside lay a packet of letters bound with a ribbon, along
with another that was loose. Beneath them in one corner of the bag
was a gold signet ring.

Hywel’s signet ring.

She clenched it in her fist, her heart
pounding, and then slipped it into her purse. For the first time,
she understood why a spy might choose to swallow their lord’s token
rather than allow it to fall into enemy hands. It didn’t appear
that Anselm had done anything with it yet, but he hadn’t had it
very long either.

She eased out a breath she hadn’t realized
she’d been holding and pulled off the ribbon that held the
documents together. All of their seals were broken. The first one
was addressed simply to ‘A’, which could have been
Anselm
,
but a quick scan of the letter revealed that it was a detailed list
of the writer’s activities in England over the last month, some of
which Gwen already knew about. It was signed with the words,
your devoted husband
and a flourished ‘C’. She put the
letter aside, and with trembling hands picked up the one that had
been loose. It had been sealed with the crest of the Deheubarth and
was a letter of introduction for Anselm from King Cadell to the
Bishop of Bangor.

“I should have memorized the contents and
burned them. More to the point, I should have left immediately
after I acquired them.”

Gwen had become absorbed in reading and thus
negligent of her surroundings. Now she gaped at Anselm as he stood
in the doorway. The door was open, so she could hear the monks’
chorus from the church. She hadn’t been wrong to think that
Compline was ongoing, but Anselm had left early, and she was frozen
on her knees on the other side of his bed. She put her hand on the
hilt of her knife and then slowly eased it away again. She didn’t
want him to think she was going to fight him. The letters were
evidence of wrongdoing but not worth her life.

She looked past him to the cloister. Nobody
moved in it. “Why didn’t you?” It was a stall for time, though she
really did want to know the answer.

“Hubris, mainly, and the feeling that if I
left, I would leave too much undone.”
Anselm gently closed the door, blocking her view of the cloister
beyond and dashing whatever hope she might have had of calling for
help. The monks were singing so loudly that she could hear them
even through the door. If she screamed, nobody was going to hear
her.

Anselm lifted the cloak from its hook, swung
it around his shoulders, and then crossed to the trunk. He opened
it and removed the clothing, which he rolled into a tight bundle
and tucked under his arm. “There was more happening here than I
supposed when I first came to the monastery. St. Asaph is the
crossroads of Wales.”

“You killed Erik.”

“I did no such thing.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said. “You serve
King Cadell.”

He glanced down to where she knelt by the
bed with the letters in her lap. The one from King Cadell was on
top, his seal plainly visible. “King Cadell sent me to pick up the
trail of Prince Cadwaladr, who betrayed my king as he has betrayed
so many others.” He bowed. “I came highly recommended from my king
and the Bishop of St. Dafydd.”

Gwen held up the letters. “One of these is
from Prince Cadwaladr to his wife, Alice. What are the others?”

“Communication between Susanna and Alice;
several missives from Cadwaladr to various lords in Gwynedd, asking
for their support in his quest to regain his lands; and a letter
from Cadwaladr to King Cadell, discussing a return to their
alliance.”