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Day One (late evening)
Rhys
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“Combrogi.”
Rhys didn’t glance in acknowledgment of the person who’d spoken, one of a dozen locals who’d gathered in the darkness of late evening to stand vigil over the dead body they’d found at the abandoned barn set on rising ground amidst a wood above Caernarfon Castle. The accolade had been said in an undertone, for Rhys’s ears alone, and it told him someone he’d passed knew who he was and respected him for it.
Countryman, the speaker had said.
It was a cry in the dark and a thumbing of the nose against the winds of fate. For the truth was stark: they didn’t have a country anymore. Combined as they now were into one country, serving one king, the Welsh and their Norman masters had never been further apart than they were today.
Guy fitz Lacy, an illegitimate son of the deceased Earl of Lincoln and the county coroner, was walking beside Rhys, but he gave no sign he’d heard. Of course, as a Norman, he spoke no Welsh, so even if he had heard, he wouldn’t have understood either the obvious meaning or the more subtle one.
A coroner was a most trusted servant of the king, responsible for collecting taxes and payments owed to the king upon the death of one of the county’s residents. King Edward had created coroners and sheriffs as part of the statute that annexed Wales to England. To the king’s mind, Divine Providence had wholly and entirely transferred under our proper dominion, the land of Wales, with its inhabitants, heretofore subject unto us, in feudal right ...
Gone was the Kingdom of Gwynedd, replaced by English counties. Except for a few remnants, gone also were the ancient Laws of Hywel Dda, which had governed Wales for hundreds of years, replaced by English common law.
Oliver de Poitiers, the coroner’s underling, was waiting for them at the entrance to the barn. “It isn’t pretty.” He spoke in French and also had a Welshman at his side to translate commands and questions to the Welsh peasants who surrounded them. “And it smells worse.”
“Pretty covers a great deal of ground,” Rhys said to Dai, Oliver’s Welsh companion, whom he knew well. Every Welshman in Caernarfon knew every other one well, by virtue of their joint survival.
Dai grimaced. “The mochyn is right. It’s worse than I’ve ever seen. And odd. Oliver almost vomited on his boots.” Mochyn was the Welsh word for pig and the standard epithet everyone had taken to using when referring to any Norman. Dai had spoken, however, in an utterly calm tone and with an expressionless face. “You’re going to be sorry you came.”
Rhys shook his head. “The summons saved me from having to stay a moment longer at the feast.”
“Lord Tudur had to bend the knee again?”
“All of us did. No knight could refuse. I managed not to throw up on my own boots. Truly, I’ll take a dead body any day over having to grit my teeth and smile for one more hour.”
The Normans he served knew Rhys was a knight, but since he didn’t dress like one, nor attempt to garner privileges to himself, more often than not they dismissed him as irrelevant. As a rule, it was how he preferred it, the better to go about his business without interference. That wasn’t to say he didn’t miss the comforting weight of his sword at his hip.
“You have many more hours of that ahead of you, combrogi. Know that we thank you for it.” Dai paused. “And so you don’t have to lie about what we’ve been discussing, my mother is well, thank you very much.”
In another life, any conversation about submitting to some Norman overlord, if necessary at all, would have been accompanied by rolled eyes and smirks. The two of them managed it tonight with hardly a twitch of an eyebrow. It was a matter of personal pride.
Guy glared at the two Welshmen. “What are you saying? We haven’t even seen the body yet!”
Rhys smoothly switched to French. “I apologize, but it is our way to speak of our families when we encounter one another before discussing murder.”
“Save it for your own time. I want to get this over with. I have a great deal to do, as you well know. I’ll be leaving in a few days, and I don’t want some local murder keeping me here overlong.”
Rhys bowed. “Of course, my lord.”
In recent days, Guy had spoken of little else beyond his promotion. For the last year, he’d acted as coroner for this region of Gwynedd, but last month he’d been promoted to Sheriff of Denbigh. Denbigh castle and town were similar in every way to Caernarfon except, rather than being ruled directly by the king, they were controlled by Guy’s half-brother, Henry, who’d inherited the title Earl of Lincoln. Earl Henry also managed all of Gwynedd east of the River Conwy, making him the second most hated man in Wales, after King Edward. Rhys was just as happy to see Guy gone as Guy was to leave—except for the fear that his replacement would be smarter and more cruel.
Guy also avoided saying Rhys’s name because he could never manage the breathy sound and the trill of the r. And since a Welsh surname wasn’t a place name Poitiers or a family name like Lacy, but rather the name of a man’s father, Guy couldn’t call Rhys by that either, as it was Iorwerth, which Guy couldn’t pronounce—or spell had he been able to write in Welsh. To Rhys, in public, Guy was Coroner Lacy or my lord, and when Guy referred to Rhys as anything at all, he called him Reese.
They followed the undercoroner and Dai into the barn—and almost found their way back out again immediately, driven off by the promised foul smell. Rhys had the foresight to bring a sachet of herbs, which he held to his nose. He tossed another to Dai and then, with a bow, handed two more to Guy and Oliver, who accepted them without thanks.
The scene was as difficult and odd as Dai had indicated. A larger-than-average man, broad-shouldered and tall, with hair long enough to curl around his ears, much like King Edward himself wore, and clothed only in a knight’s surcoat, lay in the center of an incomplete hexfoil or daisy wheel—a six-pointed petaled flower inscribed inside a circle. Except, in this instance, the circle was incomplete and the sixth petal missing. Rhys had a momentary flashing memory of heat and dust and sunbaked bricks, before coming back to the coolness of the Welsh April night.
By the narrowness of the line and its depth, the curse had been drawn with the point of a knife—maybe the same knife used to kill the man—rather than a stick or, God forbid, the dead man’s blood.
Every woman in Britain, whether Welsh or English, had at one time or another carved a hexfoil, either in the dirt, on a door frame, or in a whitewashed church wall. Hexfoils were a request to God and the saints for protection—to foil a hex, in other words. The miracle of the symbol was in its endless loop. A demon would follow the circle or along the edges of the petals perpetually, never getting out again to do harm.
No housewife would ever leave the circle open. It was possible the dead man had carved this particular hexfoil as a last request for protection as he was dying, but when making the symbol, generally a person made the full circle first and then etched the flower within it. It would have been far too much to ask of the man who lay within the circle, dead from what appeared to be, after a quick check under the surcoat, three stab wounds to the right side of his belly.
The circle had been drawn in the center of the barn, which, for all that it was abandoned, remained in relatively good repair. The roof was solid, and wisps of hay trailed down from the loft. The floor was hard-packed earth, still dry and swept clean by wind blown through the open doors, one of which was half-off its hinges.
“Madness!” Guy stared at the body with a mix of horror and revulsion, standing well back to prevent blood from marring his boots and where the smell was slightly better.
A decade younger than Rhys, Guy wasn’t even thirty, and while he’d participated in the war that had destroyed Rhys’s prince, he hadn’t led forces of his own. It was Rhys’s thought that Guy had never actually killed another man himself, and thus his familiarity with violent death was limited. He hadn’t been acting as the coroner for Caernarfon because of his experience, but because of his name.
Thus, when Guy’s revulsion turned to anger, his face flushing, and he asked, “Do we know the man?” Rhys was hesitant to say anything at all. Guy was right to wonder, since the dead man was cleanshaven like a Norman rather than sporting a mustache like most Welshmen or a full beard like an Englishman.
Oliver cleared his throat. “I don’t recognize him myself, my lord.”
Guy was forced to move closer and stare into the dead man’s face. Though Guy hated showing uncertainty at the best of times, he forgot himself long enough to scratch the back of his head. “Nor I. There’s something familiar about him, however.” He gestured to the incomplete hexfoil. “And about this.”
Rhys himself had seen an incomplete hexfoil many times before. He very much wanted to know where Guy had seen it, but before he could figure out the most diplomatic way to ask, Dai said with total innocence, “You have come upon such a symbol before, my lord?”
Guy shot him a look that said he was irritated at being questioned, but he still answered. “Not I myself, but I have heard tales of others seeing it.”
“Where would that have been?”
“The Holy Land.”
Rhys had mouthed the words even as Guy spoke them out loud. In the Holy Land, it had been a symbol of a renegade group of Templars who were trying to bring down their order. Since then, others had adopted it for their own nefarious purposes.
Oliver’s focus was elsewhere, and he spoke tentatively. “Note the crest on his surcoat, my lord.”
“She couldn’t have had anything to do with this.” Guy glared at his underling, as if the sight of him was a personal affront.
Oliver put up both hands. “I would never think it, my lord!”
The she in question was Catrin, a widow in the royal court and one of the queen’s ladies. Just this evening, before he and Rhys had been called to the scene of the death, Guy had made a foray in her direction—and been roundly rejected. It seemed the pair had encountered each other before, not surprising since Catrin had spent the last twenty years living in England, and Guy was the brother of the Earl of Lincoln, even if he had no title himself.
Guy carried the Lacy name, since his father had acknowledged him, but in the Norman system, he would inherit nothing and had to fight for everything he had. Until the conquest, the law in Wales had said that all of a man’s sons, including the illegitimate ones their father had acknowledged, inherited equally. Now under English law, illegitimate sons had no standing anywhere. At the same time, given the Norman penchant for bestowing all of a dead man’s wealth on the eldest son, Guy wasn’t much worse off than if he’d been legitimate but simply born second or third.
Such was the case with Rhys’s childhood friend, Hywel, whose family had owned extensive estates in Gwynedd and Anglesey and been second in status only to Prince Llywelyn himself. With the abrogation of Welsh law, his elder brother Tudur inherited everything—land the family had been able to hold onto only by bowing to Edward and begging forgiveness for supporting Llywelyn. Suddenly deprived of lands he’d held for half his life and having survived the war and the purge afterwards, Hywel was making his way in the world the best he could. At this point, his station was hardly higher than that of Rhys himself, whose family had been noble but far more minor.
Catrin was Hywel and Tudur’s sister.
Rhys could conjure dozens of images of Catrin, growing from a ragamuffin with unruly red hair and mischievous hazel eyes to the smooth perfection she’d developed as a young woman before her marriage. The way her eyes had snapped at Guy in the exact same way they had at Rhys himself a thousand times as a youth had made Rhys smile, even as he worried that she shouldn’t antagonize Caernarfon’s coroner any more than Rhys should.
Given that rejection, and that it was Catrin’s dead Norman husband’s crest on the victim’s chest, Rhys had to give Guy credit for not holding her treatment of him against her. So far, all Rhys had done was lift the surcoat, but now he bent to touch the body, putting his fingers gently around a wrist. The skin was cool to the touch, and the arm came up, though not flaccidly, indicating rigor was passing but had not entirely passed. In truth, the smell had told Rhys the timing before he’d lifted the arm.
Rhys set the dead man’s wrist down again.
“We will have to address the issue, my lord,” Oliver said, still talking about the surcoat.
Rhys wet his lips, considering the wisdom of offering an opinion and deciding it was worth the possibility of censure. “My lord, you have so many duties, it would be a shame to trouble yourself with something so slight. If you were to delegate me to confer with the lady, you needn’t concern yourself with the matter again.” Though still crouched by the body, he gave another partial bow. If courtesy were butter, it wasn’t possible to lay it on too thick. “I’m sure you’re correct that she is blameless. The man has been dead longer than the royal party has been in Caernarfon.”
“Why do you say that?” Guy narrowed his eyes, looking for ridicule or worse, pity, in Rhys’s eyes or voice.
“I’d say he was killed roughly two nights ago and not in this barn.”
“Explain,” he said, snapping his fingers with impatience.
“The body is cool and still has a touch of rigor, so he has been dead in the vicinity of two days. He was stabbed in the belly, but I see no blood on the floor of the barn, indicating he was killed elsewhere and placed here after.”
Guy grunted, finding nothing to dispute in what Rhys had concluded. “I will leave Lady Catrin to you, then. But first, determine which of these villeins found the body so we can bring him to the castle for questioning. Clearly one of your people did this. If the dead man is Norman, an example will have to be made.” He turned on his heel and made for the door.
Rhys simply rose to his feet, smiled politely, and said to Guy’s retreating back. “Of course, my lord.”
Dai understood French as well as Rhys, which was the reason he’d been assigned to the undercoroner in the first place. For once, he was unable to maintain his impassive façade. In urgent tones he said to Rhys in Welsh, “No, combrogi! You cannot do as he asks! We know what will happen to anyone you take.”
Rhys did know. He scrubbed at his hair, though he kept it too short these days to truly muss, a legacy from when the monks, in the aftermath of the disaster at Cilmeri, had shaved his head in order to bandage his wounds. Before, he’d kept it longer and tied back from his face with a leather string. With his trimmed beard, which he’d started growing only in the last year, his current presentation was a disguise of a sort, for those who might remember him in his youth.
“Who found him?”
“Iago, the butcher’s son.”
“What possessed him to come here?” Before Dai could answer, Rhys put up a hand. “Never mind. I know why. Who was he with?”
“Mari, one of headman Gruffydd’s girls.”
Rhys growled his acknowledgement and understanding. Since the fall of Gwynedd to the Normans, the barn had become derelict and thus an ideal meeting place for young couples. It was located on the edge of a property that, until a year ago, had been a royal llys—a palace—of Gwynedd’s princes and kings for generations if not centuries. King Edward had ordered the palace dismantled and pieces used to build Caernarfon Castle itself.
Of the palaces in the region, only the one at Aberffraw on Anglesey remained intact. One of Edward’s many vassals lived there now, despite its overall lack of grandeur and eight-foot-high walls, designed more to keep out marauding cattle than men.
After Prince Llywelyn’s death, Rhys had contemplated leaving Wales entirely, taking the cross again perhaps, or selling himself as a mercenary in someone else’s war. In the end, he’d come to the decision that to do so would be the coward’s way out. His people were indentured to Edward, villeins as Coroner Lacy had said. Rhys had returned to help them if he could. These days, the Welsh had very little left to them except their lives. King Edward had defeated them utterly, and now he was solidifying his control by building castles and taxing the people into impoverishment.
For Rhys, there could be no nobler place to stand than alongside them.
