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Day One
Rhys
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Rhys turned to the crowd gathered outside the barn. “The coroner wants me to take the man who found the body to the castle for questioning.”
Instantly, a murmur of fear spread amongst them. Iago stood with his arm around his girl and was about to step forward when Dai blocked his attempt. The addition of Rhys’s stern look had him staying where he was.
“I am sorry to have to ask this of you. I will try to protect whoever comes forward, but you know as well as I that I cannot guarantee his safety. It appears we have a dead Norman in the barn, and there is a very real chance the coroner will want to find someone to blame as quickly as possible so as to put this behind him, especially with his own departure imminent and the king in residence. He will view a quick arrest as a way to impress the king. You have my word that I will work to find the real killer equally quickly.” Then Rhys smiled. “Provided Iago didn’t do it, of course.”
That prompted a general laughter and a momentary easing of the tension, as Rhys hoped it would. Iago was eighteen years old, large and awkward as boys sometimes were before they grew into their bodies. He was also lovable, quite handsome, and wouldn’t hurt a fly. His father despaired of ever properly teaching him his trade, but there was merit in the attempt. Iago also really liked girls, and Mari was hardly the first one who’d fallen for his sweet smile.
“I’ll do it.”
Rhys let out a sigh to see Aron stepping forward. He was in his mid-fifties, lean to the point of thinness and short of stature. He had lost his wife the year before, and he had a hollowness to his cheeks that meant he wasn’t as healthy as he liked to pretend. He was also one of the people in the village whom, from long experience, Rhys respected and trusted. He didn’t want to see him imprisoned, but he wasn’t surprised either that he’d been the one to come forward.
The people around Aron eased away from him as a sign of respect for his sacrifice.
“What were you doing when you found the dead man?”
“Looking for a lost lamb,” Aron said promptly. “My dog sniffed out the body in the barn.”
“Good.” Rhys bobbed his head. “Where were you before that?”
“He was with me.” Aron’s son-in-law piped up. “We shared a cup of mead.”
“And with me.” This came from Iago’s granny.
“Did you find the sheep?”
One of Mari’s older brothers put up a hand. “I did. He was caught in a bramble.”
Rhys looked at Aron again. “Where were you two nights ago when the man was killed?”
The timing was news to them, and they murmured amongst themselves. While in a normal investigation Rhys might have held that information back, and he was concerned about finding the real killer, in this moment, he cared most about protecting his people. That meant giving them as much information as he had himself.
Then an older woman, a widow, blushed to the very roots of her hair. Her red face was visible even in the light of the torches and lanterns they carried. “He was with me.”
Aron swung around, eyes wide, but at her sharp nod, he bent his head respectfully and turned back to Rhys. “Bronwen speaks the truth. I was with her all night.”
“Excellent.” Rhys’s gaze traveled among them, unconcerned that nothing they’d concluded was true—except for maybe the liaison between Aron and Bronwen. “We’ll start with that and see how it goes. Thank you.”
Rhys walked Aron to where Guy waited. The coroner’s face held a look of extreme disgruntlement. Mostly, Guy viewed the Welsh language, like everything else in Wales, as beneath his dignity. At the same time, it irked him to know it was up to Rhys to explain: “Aron says he found the body while looking for a lost lamb, and a woman in the village claims he was with her all night two nights ago.”
“Can he prove any of that?”
“Several other villagers will attest to his whereabouts this evening.”
“We’ll see.” Guy jerked his chin towards Oliver. “Take him to the castle. We’ll hold him until we know more, and we have enough evidence to question him further.”
“Yes, my lord.”
Dai met Rhys’s eyes for a moment. The two of them would do their best for Aron, as Rhys had promised, even as they both knew their deception was extraordinarily dangerous to continue. Rhys didn’t see any suspected traitors amongst the people before him, but the harder Edward squeezed, the more of Rhys’s people would defect. Selling out a neighbor—selling out him—might put food on an otherwise empty table.
But in deciding to return to Gwynedd, Rhys had also resolved not to let fear of the future stop him. Ever since Cilmeri, he’d been living on borrowed time anyway. If he had to live as a lackey and cooperator in order to protect his people, he would do it.
In this moment, that meant going back into the barn to inspect it for any evidence the killer had left behind. Someone also had to deal with the body itself. Rhys could see in Guy’s eyes that he had no stomach for it.
So he ventured another suggestion. “My lord, if all that remains here is the matter of the body, perhaps I could be of service and see to it before I visit Lady Catrin. You could return to the castle and the feast. The longer you remain outside the walls, the more likely it is that the king and his officers will notice your absence and remark upon it. Given the distastefulness of the scene, perhaps you don’t want to trouble the king with the details unless and until it’s absolutely necessary?”
It was a convoluted way to tell Guy what to do, and for a moment Rhys feared he’d bungled it, but then Guy’s expression cleared. “Fine. See to it. I suppose Dai can return to the castle with me and manage any necessary translations with this villager—though once you return, I will dismiss him. His French isn’t as good as yours.”
Rhys bowed to cover his surprise. “Thank you, my lord. I am happy to be of service.”
The sneer returned. “I’m sure you are.”
Sometimes Rhys feared his sycophancy was excessive, but Guy appeared to wallow in it, viewing it as his due while at the same time despising him for exhibiting it. In truth, Rhys despised himself for it too.
“To where shall I have the body brought, my lord?”
Guy hemmed and hawed for a moment, legitimately debating. St. Peblig’s was the church nearest to the barn, a matter of a few hundred yards away, and had been the local place of worship for as long as there had been churches in Wales. And maybe longer, if some of the oldest burials in the associated cemetery were any indication. Those stones were engraved with Latin names, from that long-ago time when a Roman legion had ruled the land.
These days, the little church was overseen by a Welsh priest, and thus out of favor, as one might expect, with the newcomers. The church building wasn’t grand enough for the royal court anyway, though it was built in stone, whitewashed inside and out, with a stone wall that went all the way around it to keep out roaming sheep and to demarcate sacred ground.
King Edward and his court worshipped within the castle itself, but the garrison, the English workers, and the imported English settlers in the newly established town of Caernarfon had only a wooden church tucked into the corner of the town wall to worship in, if they didn’t want to make the trek to the Welsh church on the hill above them.
Most didn’t—and anyway, St. Peblig’s could hardly accommodate the spiritual needs of all those people. Certainly the nave couldn’t handle the nearly one thousand laborers on the castle, plus the garrison and servants. Thus, on Sundays, the English priest had taken to holding an open-air mass in the bailey of the castle for everyone who wanted to attend. The king liked this because it, in effect, made the entire castle sacred ground.
Much of what Rhys himself had been thinking was visible on Guy’s face, which was why in the end he made a genuinely sensible decision. “Bring him to St. Mary’s within Carnarvontown. If he turns out to be Welsh, at this point highly unlikely, we’ll send him out again.”
Rhys bowed his head, trying not to bristle at the harsh way Guy pronounced Caernarfon. Instead, Rhys spoke words that yet again were what his response had to be: “Yes, my lord.”
Their departure did leave Rhys alone with the body and without a living Norman in sight, which was just the way he liked it. He could feel the relief in the villagers too, who began to disperse, though Rhys asked Iago and Mari to remain behind, and that meant Iago’s father, Bron, and Mari’s father, Gruffydd, stayed too.
In addition to being Mari’s father, Gruffydd was the community’s headman, and he and his wife, Sian, had become Rhys’s landlord—in that Rhys had been given a bed in their homestead.
Hospitality was a fundamental principle of Welsh society, though Rhys had since found ways to supplement their food supply and their livelihood, suggesting that the cook at the castle take advantage of Sian’s exceptional baking skills. Sian had no small children underfoot anymore and (so she said) enjoyed the change of pace. She’d promised Rhys not to spit in the king’s food before serving it to him.
In addition to being the headman, Gruffydd was an accomplished fletcher. Since the English didn’t know how to fletch arrows properly, he’d been conscripted to work at the castle too, and it was his job to train several apprentices. Meanwhile, Rhys, though hardly the best archer he knew, had been called in to teach everyone to shoot.
Thirty years ago, after losing badly to the Welsh in a battle, King Henry, Edward’s father, had decreed that all men between the ages of fifteen and sixty must equip themselves with bow and arrow. The law had never been routinely enforced in England and anyway missed the mark in not recognizing that in order for a man to become accomplished with a bow, he not only had to practice (something the statute failed to mention) but ideally should train from the age of seven, as the Welsh had done for centuries.
Surprisingly, after the war ended, Edward hadn’t confiscated the Welsh bows that had wreaked so much havoc on his army. Instead, every Sunday after mass, he required every man to practice his archery on the green outside the castle. They were Englishmen now, subject to English law, even here in Gwynedd.
To Rhys’s mind, the ulterior motive was clear: by making the populace practice in public, the king’s officers were able to document who could shoot well and who couldn’t—and record the owner and location of every bow. So far, none of his countrymen had betrayed the large stash of bows and arrows, many of which Gruffydd had also fletched, hidden in caves scattered throughout the mountains of Snowdonia.
“Now,” Rhys said to Mari and Iago. Standing as they were in front of not only him but their respective fathers, Rhys imagined a wedding might be in the offing sooner rather than later. “Tell me what really happened.”
When neither made to answer, and Mari blushed to the roots of her hair, Rhys made a dismissive motion with his hand. “I’m not talking about what happened between the two of you.”
“Nothing happened between us! We were out walking, that’s all,” Iago said.
Mari nodded vigorously. “We looked in the barn, and there he was!”
Having been young once himself, Rhys guessed that at first they had been too involved with each other to notice the dead man. Likely, they hadn’t had a light. But as he’d said, he didn’t care what they’d been doing. “And then what?”
“We ran for help, of course.” Iago spoke without hesitation.
“They came to find me first,” Bron said, “and then together we went to Gruffydd.”
As had been the case every time Rhys had glanced at Gruffydd up until now, the fletcher was glowering at his daughter, who was refusing to meet his eyes. Rhys managed to attract his attention. “There really is nothing more?”
His reply was four head shakes.
“Did any of you see any activity up here in the last few days?” While the coroner had been present, Rhys had deliberately avoided touching the body more than was absolutely essential, but now he walked all around it to study it before finally bending to it again.
Rhys tried not to read too much into the presence of the tunic with Catrin’s dead husband’s crest but, like Guy, it made him uneasy to see the connection to her. After a twenty-year absence, she’d returned to Wales yesterday with the queen. She and Rhys had been amiable as children, since he was a companion to her brothers, but so far she’d refused to speak to him beyond what was required to be civil.
His only consolation—if one could call it that—was that she’d barely spoken more than three words to any of her brothers either. As a girl, she’d been smart and capable, so he didn’t see how she could have changed so profoundly, even in twenty years married to a Norman. That just wasn’t the girl Rhys had thought he’d known. But even if she might bear Rhys ill will for some reason, he didn’t want to see her involved in a murder any more than Guy did.
“You haven’t said you know him. Am I to understand that none of you have ever seen this man before?”
Again, to a person, they shook their heads.
Rhys sighed. “Any doubt he’s Norman?”
“He could be a Welshman attempting to pass as a mochyn,” Gruffydd suggested, “like you can.”
“Believe me, no Norman has ever mistaken me for one of them.”
“Dai says you speak French better than they do,” Bron said.
“I think that might be the problem.” Rhys laughed ruefully. “I need you to stay away from here, all of you, until this is resolved.”
They nodded somberly, and Gruffydd added, “Yes, my lord.”
“Find me some strong boys to carry him back to town, will you?”
Gruffydd hesitated. “They won’t be let in the gate.”
“They will on my say-so. And if the guards at the gate don’t like it, they themselves can carry the body the rest of the way to the laying out room by the church.”
Rhys swung his arm in a get out of here motion, and they departed, leaving Rhys alone in the barn with his lantern, his doubts and fears, and the murdered man.
