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Day Four
Rhys
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Now that the day was at an end, the inn was packed with customers. Math and Ralph were meant to be on duty shortly so had passed the torch to Rhys. Gwrgenau had subsequently pointed out the two men in question and then left the inn on his own reconnaissance, perhaps to pursue his evening count of the horses.
The boy would be an acquired taste for anyone threatened by his prodigious memory, not seeing it for the useful tool it was. Rhys wasn’t sure how easily directed the youth might be in the long run, but they had been happy to have him helping them as long as he had been willing to do so.
For this new undertaking, Rhys had removed his gear and wore what he thought of as traveling clothes. He had also brought reinforcements in the form of Miles de Bohun and Catrin’s brother, Hywel. Maybe it was unorthodox to ask his friends to dress like common men, but he knew from experience that Miles could look like anyone he wanted, and Hywel had always been one for adventure. Rhys and Hywel, in fact, had been adventuring together far longer than Rhys and Simon, or Rhys and Miles—since birth, really, having both grown up in Llywelyn’s court.
Rhys studied the two brothers for a moment as they sat talking and drinking before making his move. He didn’t want to scare them into rabbiting. However, they’d planned for that event too, in that Miles had chosen a spot near the corridor that led to the back entrance to lean casually against the wall, and several of his men kept watch around the outside of the inn. All of them were dressed plainly too.
Hywel and Rhys had acquired cups of mead, to better blend in with the clientele. Rhys was just happy they were close enough to Wales to get the drink easily. It was very watered down to minimize drunkenness (as well as to make the supplies last longer). Cups in hand, they edged their way through the crowd to where the brothers sat on benches near one of the few windows, darkened now against the night sky. Math had figured it was just as well he wasn’t coming along, since he and Ralph had removed Roger de Retondeur from this very inn earlier in the day and might be recognized, even without their royal gear.
As promised, the brothers were large and blond, with a white scar marring one brother’s cheek. Further examination revealed work-roughened hands, with thick fingers, big feet and broad shoulders. Either one would have had no difficulty with the physical demands of strangling Moriddig or stabbing Hugh.
The nature of their fingers did give Rhys a moment’s pause, however. Neither wore a ring, and it would be hard to imagine how a ring could comfortably fit on any of their fingers.
“Have you heard the news?” Rhys spoke in Welsh, approaching from one side, while Hywel slid onto the bench on the other.
With them safely buttressed, Miles was then able to leave his position and sit on the other side of the table. Rhys’s initial move had been casual, but there was no hiding the sudden intensity each of them exuded.
The scarred brother looked from one to the other and then correctly determined that Rhys was in charge. “What news would that be?”
His accent was South Walesian. Rhys understood what he was saying, but to his ear, the man’s words came out mushy compared to the clear tones of someone from the north.
“Steward Hugh is dead.”
The man lifted his cup. “We did hear about that.”
The other brother drained his drink and set his cup on the table with a thunk, his manner immediately more combative. “Why would a king’s man be speaking of it to us?”
“So you know who I am?” Rhys said.
“Spotted you the moment you came in,” he gestured to Hywel and Miles, and seamlessly switched to French, “you and the lords.”
Miles replied in the same language. “I was wondering if you’d recognized me. It’s been a long time, Einion.” He looked at the brother with the scar. “And you, Bari.”
“That it has,” Bari said, “and that you’re looming over us once again must mean you aren’t any more pleased with us tonight than you were all those years ago in the Holy Land.”
Miles was intent. “That day, you were a hair’s-breadth from being hanged.”
“We were too good at fighting, and you had too few men who were healthy to disable those that could walk. You had to settle for a night in the stocks. Besides, we did nothing wrong, did we? Just held back when the skirmish was a lost cause. We were far from the only ones.”
“You allowed good men to die.”
“Better them than us.”
Rhys had caught on by now to the incident they were referencing. “These are the men?”
“Indeed.” Miles eased back in his seat, the cloud that had figuratively been looming over his head dissipating a bit. “Bari and Einion, after all these years.”
Once again, memories of the crusade rose to the fore. Rhys didn’t dream of those days nearly as often as he once had. He’d survived. They’d survived. Maybe that really could be an end to it.
Except the crusade kept coming back into Rhys’s life, not the least because the king surrounded himself with former crusaders as a matter of course. “We understand the two of you, plus Hugh and Moriddig, spent an evening together last week.”
“It wasn’t just the four of us that first evening,” Bari said. “It was a whole crowd from the old days. I didn’t even recognize Moriddig when he first arrived.”
“He wept to see us, though.” Einion gave a shake of his head. “He said he was working on a song about our friendship.”
“Was that in the way of making amends?” Miles asked.
Between one breath and the next, the men’s faces turned completely blank. And then Bari said, “What would he have to make amends for?”
“We know about that first eisteddfod,” Rhys said. “We know that Hugh spent the intervening years taking bribes. It’s what drove you apart.”
Einion rolled his eyes. “That was a long time ago. It wasn’t what drove us apart anyway.”
“It was important enough to send you two to the Holy Land,” Miles said.
“That was later,” Bari said. Given that the two brothers were a good ten years older than Rhys and Miles, the timing made sense. “We were never going to be good enough musicians to become bards, and we knew it. That’s why the four of us went our separate ways. We didn’t resent Moriddig for his talent and his victory. While it’s true he always thought too much of himself, we were too different and our paths would have diverged eventually. It just happened sooner rather than later because he won that eisteddfod.”
“But you resented Hugh?” That was from Hywel, who was perceptive enough to notice the hitch in Bari’s voice when he talked about Hugh as compared to Moriddig.
“He became too good for us, but in a different way,” Bari said. “To be fair, he had money, and we didn’t, and we didn’t like him thinking that made him better than us.”
“Did you seek him out when you returned from crusade?” Rhys always wondered at the way he had to prompt his informants. They rarely just spilled out what they knew all in one go. Then again, maybe they didn’t think about their lives in an orderly fashion and see how they needed to explain something such that a stranger would understand. To them it was obvious.
“We didn’t bother.” Bari held up his hands. “We found another calling. Stone masons, both of us.”
“That’s why we came to Overton, not because of Hugh or Moriddig.” Einion looked forlornly into his empty cup. Rhys would have had it filled again for him if the inn’s proprietor wasn’t currently besieged by requests from customers three-deep around the bar. “We heard the king was hiring.”
“So if you had already met Hugh and Moriddig again, why did you pay a trollop to bring Hugh to you the day before he died?” Rhys asked.
“It was Hugh who paid a trollop to find us.” Bari settled back a bit more in his seat, in a sign that he was sure of his answer and comfortable with it. Rhys had asked the question that way on purpose, just to see if he would agree with Mina. “He wanted to speak to us, not the other way around.”
“Why?” Hywel put in.
“Because it was bloody well time!” These words burst from Einion. “We were friends once, and we were going to be again if he hadn’t gone and got himself killed!”
“We were friends for nearly a week.” Bari consoled his brother. “He wanted to make amends, but he also wanted something from us.”
“There was a lad bothering his daughter,” Einion took up the story. “The silly girl imagined herself in love with him. Hugh had bought him off with a horse, and he asked us to make sure the promise stuck.”
“This is a fellow named Roger?” Rhys said.
Bari blinked. “You already know about him? We saw him dragged out of here earlier today. That was for you?” He didn’t wait for Rhys to do more than nod before adding, “Stupid fool. Watching him was dull, but it isn’t as if we were going to stop.”
“Even with Hugh dead?”
“Especially with Hugh dead! It was Hugh’s last request of us, and with him gone, who does his wife and daughter have but us?”
“Since Roger is very much alive and staying at this inn,” Hywel said, “maybe he killed Hugh to get to Jane.”
Rhys was happy to have the question posed. Emma and Stephen had met at the abandoned barn. Roger and Jane could have met there as well and been spied upon by Hugh. Then, after Jane left, Hugh could have tried to bribe Roger again, this time with coin, and been murdered for his pains. However unlikely, Roger could have dumped the offending coins on his corpse in an act of disdain.
It could have been a viable theory except they already knew Jane had been with her mother the entire day her father died. And now, Einion confirmed that Roger hadn’t been at the barn. “I wish it were true, but he can’t have. We haven’t let him out of our sight since Hugh asked us to keep an eye on him. We even followed Roger and your men out of here, so we wouldn’t lose him if they let him go and he wandered off.”
Bari looked balefully at Rhys. “My brother and I are left wondering if it’s Hugh’s back, rather than Roger’s, we should have been watching.”
