Gareth
Even as Gareth trailed after Derwena, he was cursing himself for following yet another new thread when he’d been dropping the old ones left and right. First and foremost, if Rhodri was the same man who’d ridden to St. Asaph with Erik, they needed to get Deiniol and Rhodri in the same room together to see if they knew each other. He also had yet to question Mathonwy, the milkman, about his visit to the treasury.
Gareth didn’t necessarily think that Mathonwy had anything to do with the theft. If he had, he would have run, not calmly returned to his milking—but he might have spoken incautious words to someone else, which had then led to the theft. And as always, Gareth told himself not to presume anything without evidence until he had no more threads to pull.
Evan loped beside him across the courtyard, trying to avoid the puddles that had formed among the dips in the cobbles. It wasn’t raining right now, thankfully, and Derwena was hurrying along at a rapid clip such that by the time they left the guesthouse, she’d already entered underneath the gatehouse.
“Moves fast for an older woman, doesn’t she?” Evan said under his breath.
“She does seem to be in a hurry,” Gareth said.
Evan checked the location of the moon. “Prince Hywel’s dinner with his father and the other lords who have come should be ending soon.”
“I should have been among them,” Gareth said.
Evan scoffed. “You didn’t want to be there any more than you wanted to attend the mass. The last thing you need right now is to involve yourself in politics.”
Gareth gave a low laugh. “You have the right of that.”
They reached the gatehouse, passed through it easily because the gate was still open, and Gareth lifted a hand to the gatekeeper as he went by. Derwena had, in fact, turned east as if she intended to go the encampment, but once she passed the corner of the stone wall of the monastery that fronted the main road, she turned left in order to head northeast down the side road, heading back to the place where they’d found her by Madog’s camp.
The older woman trotted along at a rapid clip, and because the road was otherwise deserted, Gareth and Evan had to stay well back lest she look over her shoulder and see them. If this had been mid-afternoon when the monastery was a busy place, they perhaps could have remained undetected, but it was late evening, and there wasn’t another soul but them about. The moon reflected off the puddles and the clouds, allowing them to see well enough to follow. If it had been raining, they couldn’t have seen anything without a torch.
No longer jesting with one another, Gareth and Evan followed the western margin of the road, trying to keep to the trees. Just past Madog’s encampment, which was considerably quieter than it had been an hour earlier, Derwena slowed. Gareth and Evan held back, thinking they should get no closer than two hundred feet but having no idea why Derwena had returned here. Then a woman holding a torch, the flame of which was blowing hard in the wind, stepped out from a side-path—one that ran through the monastery grounds and intersected the road Derwena had come down. She was followed by a man on horseback.
Gareth and Evan froze, and their ears strained to hear what the three people were saying. Unfortunately, the wind that was blowing through the newly leafed trees that lined the road prevented them from hearing anything else. It was darker under the trees than on the road too, so Gareth bent over in a half crouch and began to pick his way through the grass and bushes. He’d gone only a dozen feet, however, before the man on the horse reached down and pulled Derwena up behind him. Turning the horse’s head, he cantered away north. The woman watched them go for a moment and then turned away and hastened back down the path by which she’d come.
Gareth picked up the pace, though still trying to keep to the soft grass beside the road to disguise the sound of his boots hitting the earth. He called over his shoulder to Evan, “We may have lost Derwena but let’s not lose this other woman!” Even injured as he was, the two hundred feet took Gareth no time at all, though he found himself annoyed again when Evan eventually beat him to the crossroads.
Earlier, when they’d helped Conall after Derwena had knocked him down, Evan and Gareth had come off the northeast corner of the monastery’s protective stone wall, crossed the cleared space between the wall and an orchard, and then crossed two pastures in order to reach Madog’s camp. They hadn’t used the road the woman had disappeared along, since it was farther north. But as they followed it back through the monastery grounds, Gareth realized it was leading them west towards the barn where Erik’s body had been found.
Sure enough, the road eventually intersected the cart track that Gareth had been on several times today already and which started at the back gate of the monastery. The woman with the torch was still barely in sight, and Gareth and Evan hustled after her, turning south to follow the cart way. She reached the back entrance, passed through it, and then the gate shut behind her.
The monks didn’t normally post a guard at the gate, but since the peace conference would start tomorrow and a murderer was on the loose, Hywel had sentried one of his own men here. Gareth and Evan pulled on the latch and found it locked, as it should have been. Thus, as the woman must have done, they knocked on the wooden door. A heartbeat later a little window opened in the door, revealing one eye and the nose of the guard. “Da!”
“How did you end up pulling this duty, Dai?” And then Gareth waved a hand dismissively. “Never mind. Let us in.”
“Yes, sir.” The door swung wide.
Gareth and Evan stepped through it in time to see the skirts of the woman who’d preceded them disappearing around a hedge up ahead. While on the road, she had covered her hair with a veil, but now the covering hung loosely around her shoulders, and the moon glinted off her blonde hair. Gareth pointed with his chin at her retreating back, asking the question of Dai, even though he already knew the answer. “Who was that?”
“Queen Susanna.”
Evan would have hurried after her, but Gareth caught his arm and stopped him. “Wait.”
Evan subsided, and Gareth looked at his son. “Did she say anything to you about where she’d been?”
“No.”
“Will you tell me what she did?”
He gave an elaborate shrug. “She took one of the torches that lit the gate and headed off east.”
“How long did you have to wait for her to return?” Gareth said.
Dai shook his head and looked down at the ground while mumbling, “I don’t know. A while.”
Something was wrong. Dai hadn’t wanted to answer that question. “Did you see with whom she met?”
Dai’s eyes skated towards the left for an instant and then came back to his father. “No.”
Gareth looked at his son. “Dai.”
Dai wavered, but he was an honest boy at heart, and capitulated without Gareth having to order him again to speak. “It was my duty to guard the door, but I was curious about what the Queen of Powys was doing outside the monastery so late in the evening, so I followed her. It was easy because of the torch.”
“Leaving the gate unguarded and open,” Gareth said.
Dai returned his eyes to his feet.
Gareth ran a hand through his hair and scrubbed at it before dropping his hand. “Pray something good comes of this. What did you see?”
“Queen Susanna met a man on horseback who was waiting for her in the middle of the track that led east. He pulled her up behind him, after which I had to run to keep up. Then just before they reached the crossroads, Susanna dismounted, and they waited, hardly speaking, for a long time. I was wavering, knowing that I’d left the door unguarded and feeling guilty about it, when a woman stopped on the road to talk to the queen.”
“We saw that last part,” Gareth said. “Could you identify the man if you saw him again?”
“He wore a hat pulled down low over his head, but—” Dai frowned.
“But what?” Gareth waited. His son had always been more observant than most.
Dai turned his body this way and that, motioning with his left hand. And then his expression cleared. “Both when he helped Queen Susanna mount and when he pulled the woman onto his horse, he held out his left hand to them, and—” He stopped again, clearly still puzzled as to whether or not what he saw could be true.
Gareth placed a hand on Dai’s shoulder. “And what?”
“He was missing the last finger on his left hand.”