Hywel
Hywel had been without Gareth often enough in recent weeks both to have grown used to his absence and to long for the days when it was just the two of them. More often than not, it had been Gareth extricating Hywel from an untenable situation. But he had been the one to save Gareth a week ago in Shrewsbury, and as Hywel watched the farmhouse across the field, his stomach clenched at the similarities. He could be grateful, however, that a captive Gareth was not one of them.
“It looks like they’re preparing to move out.” Gareth had his hands cupped around his eyes, narrowing his focus as he turned his head, scanning from side to side. “Many men have crossed to the barn.”
“I don’t think we should wait.” Hywel made a motion with his hand to indicate that his men should spread out. Every soldier with him, with the exception of Gareth, who didn’t have the strength, and Conall, who didn’t know how to use one, wore not only a sword but a bow and quiver. It had been a long time since Hywel himself had gone to war as an archer, but he still practiced several times a week. With the numbers and strength of the bandits uncertain, Hywel had tried to plan for every contingency.
A light showed through the cracks in a shuttered window by the farmhouse door. A second light shone from inside the adjacent barn, which, as at the monastery, had a paddock attached.
From the size of the house, the farmstead had once been prosperous, and Hywel wondered what had caused the owners to leave such fertile land. War, possibly. Because of its proximity to the border with England, the lands between St. Asaph and Denbigh had been fought over ever since the Normans came to Britain, changing hands half a dozen times before his father had gained control of the region a few years ago. Too late for this family, perhaps.
“I don’t like this, my lord.” Evan spoke low in Hywel’s ear.
“There’s nothing to like about it,” Hywel said.
“Rhodri knows we could be coming, and yet nobody seems to be in a hurry,” Evan said.
“It may be that Deiniol misread the situation, and Rhodri remains on our side.” Hywel raised himself up slightly, realizing that this was the chance they’d been waiting for. The cleared space in front of the house was empty. He had seen at least four men enter the barn since they’d arrived. He raised a hand to his men and brought it down.
As one, Hywel’s men rose to their feet and converged from all directions on the farmstead. In short order, all twenty men reached a spot a hundred feet from the house and stopped, crouching down and breathing hard. Nobody had yet come out of the house or the barn.
“This isn’t right.” This time it was Gareth who sounded the warning. He held up two fingers to indicate that two of the men should approach the entrance to the house and two the entrance to the barn. Both pairs of men raced across the clearing unmolested, and each pair set themselves up on either side of their respective doors.
Meanwhile, Gareth straightened, his hands out to his sides, showing that he held no weapon, and walked alone into the cleared space in front of the house. “This is Gareth, captain of Prince Hywel’s guard. You are surrounded. Come out with your hands up. If you surrender yourselves freely, you will not be harmed.”
Silence greeted this announcement. Gareth remained where he was. Hywel pursed his lips, not liking how exposed Gareth was, vulnerable to an arrow that could come from any direction. In the time they’d watched the farmhouse, they hadn’t seen that kind of preparation, but it was still a risk.
For another few heartbeats, nothing moved, but then one of the men by the door to the barn screamed, the sound almost instantly cut off by a gurgling breath. He fell to his knees in the dirt an instant before the soldier on the other side of the door collapsed too. Hywel vaulted to his feet, and he and Gareth reached the fallen men at the same moment, catching them as they fell forward into their arms. The man Hywel held, the one on the left, had been stabbed through the wall of the barn with a sword, spine to sternum.
“Fall back!” Hywel waved an arm at the two men by the house, who hadn’t had a direct angle to see what had happened. With Evan’s help, Hywel dragged the body of his man away from the barn door. A moment later, a spurt of flame shot through the thatch roof of the house. Despite the rainy weather, the wood was dry, and the heat of the fire was already tangible on Hywel’s face. In less time than it took to cross the clearing, the entire house became an inferno.
Gareth stood over the body of the soldier he’d dragged away from the barn. “They were prepared for our numbers.”
Then the side wall of the barn opened outward, where no door had seemed to be before, and a host of men burst from it—somewhere in the vicinity of a dozen—mounted on horses. They galloped down the road away from the farm. Though still recovering from the shock of seeing two of his men die before his eyes, Hywel’s brain started working, and he shouted and pointed at the riders, “Bring them down!”
Hywel’s bow was still in its rest on his back, and his hands were full of the man who’d died, but his men had been ready to shoot anyone who exited the farmhouse. They simply shifted as they stood, turning their bows to follow the riders. The distance was two hundred feet and made easy shooting, especially for those with skills, like Cadoc. At least half the arrows in the first volley hit either a man or a horse, which was a far larger target than the man on its back.
Four horses went down, and then those that had escaped the first volley were stopped by the second or the third. One man did a complete somersault over his horse’s head to land with a sickening thud on the ground. As Hywel’s men converged on the fallen, swords replaced bows.
“Keep at least one alive!” Hywel glanced at Gareth. “It’s time we got some answers.”
Gareth nodded and walked beside Hywel to where the bandits had fallen. Rhodri was unconscious on the ground. One of Hywel’s men was binding him at the wrists and ankles as a precaution. Lwc had taken an arrow just below his collar bone. He was fortunate in that it had lodged high in his chest, having missed his heart. It had to be intensely painful, but not so much that he hadn’t been able to clear his feet from the stirrups as his horse was shot out from under him.
He hadn’t been able to run more than a few steps, however, before Gruffydd stopped him by grabbing the arrow’s fletching and holding on. Lwc was frozen into position, unable to move and barely able to breathe for the pain it would cause.
Hywel approached with Gareth a pace behind. “If you tell the truth, the whole truth, I will see that you don’t hang. If you lie to me about even one detail, I will leave you to bleed to death beside this road. Do you understand me?”
Lwc mouthed a yes.
“This is the crew that sacked the monastery at Wrexham?”
A nod.
“Where’s the rest of them? This can’t be all.”
Lwc carefully cleared his throat. “They’re gone.”
Gruffydd moved the arrow a hair’s-breadth to the right. “Gone where?”
The flash of pain that crossed Lwc’s face had Hywel’s own stomach clenching.
“East to England.”
By now Conall had arrived, and he observed Lwc with arms folded across his chest. “Everything you claimed back at the monastery was a lie.”
Lwc managed a swallow. His wound was bleeding, and unless he wanted to make it worse, he couldn’t move any part of him but his eyes, which flicked from one man to another. He would find no sympathy in any of them.
“Rhodri was part of this gang?” Hywel said.
“Yes. We agreed beforehand not to know each other if we were caught.”
“What about Deiniol?” Gareth said.
“He was never one of us.” For a moment, a spark appeared in Lwc’s eyes, and he added, “You almost believed me! You might really have done so, and the timing of finding him in the stable couldn’t have been better.”
“Better for you. Worse for him,” Hywel said. “What did he say when you came face to face at St. Kentigern’s, and he learned you’d become the abbot’s secretary?”
“He was confused as to how it had come about, but happy for me. Deiniol really is a simple soul.” Lwc grimaced. “We didn’t know about the peace conference when we planned this.”
Hywel sensed that Lwc would have spat on the ground if it didn’t mean moving.
“Who paid you to steal from St. Kentigern’s?” Gareth asked.
“Paid? Nobody. It was my idea.” Lwc seemed very proud of this fact.
Hywel rubbed his chin. “When did you conceive the plan?”
“Our gain was considerable at Wrexham, even with what we had to give to our masters—Queen Susanna, I suppose, though I believed it was King Owain, myself,” Lwc said. “Why not try it elsewhere?”
Hywel dropped his hands, genuinely puzzled. “You were raised at the Wrexham monastery from birth. Why did you destroy it?”
“I hated it there! I snuck out whenever I could. But if I was going to strike out on my own I needed money. I knew people by then. People who could help me get free from the monastery. That’s when he came to me.”
“Me?” Gareth said.
Lwc scoffed. “No. That was Rhodri’s contact, earlier.”
“Then who?” Hywel didn’t know if he could believe anything Lwc had said so far. He’d lied so often, maybe Lwc himself didn’t know the truth anymore.
“A man named Jerome.”
“By the fingers of St. Peter, who is Jerome?” Hywel said.
Lwc made a helpless gesture with his right hand, the only one he dared move. “Jerome was our leader. He organized everything. Before Wrexham, he brought us the surcoats with Owain’s crest, the weapons, and the food, but he disappeared the night Erik died. I figured from the start that he killed Erik and ran off.” Lwc waggled a finger. “I know you were looking for someone with a damaged tenth finger, and that’s what he had.” Lwc tried to gesture again but stopped instantly at the pain that shot through him.
“Who was Erik to you?”
“He was nobody to me; he was Jerome’s friend. At times it seemed as if Erik outranked him. When Erik found out that we were planning to steal from St. Kentigern’s, he was very angry. I know he and Jerome argued about it more than once.”
If Hywel hadn’t been so angry himself, he might have admired the complexity of the plot, and Lwc’s apparent ability to carry it out—if not for ending up caught and most of his men dead. “I think Erik was going to stop you from stealing from St. Kentigern’s, and you killed him.”
Lwc seemed momentarily dumbfounded by this conclusion. “I—we—had nothing to do with his death. Everything went wrong from the moment he died.”
“Amazingly, we don’t believe you now any more than we did earlier.” That was Conall again, and his detached amusement reminded Hywel that he would get nowhere with anger.
“How many times do I have to deny it before you believe me! Neither I nor any of my men killed him! But—” Lwc stopped abruptly, swallowing, as if he hadn’t meant to add the but.
Hywel had caught it, however, and he knew not to let it go. “But what?”
Lwc didn’t want to answer, and thus it was Gareth who said, “You didn’t kill him, but you cut him open? How did you gather your men quickly enough once you found out he was dead to arrange for that?”
“I saw the body with Prior Anselm and Abbot Rhys, and then the abbot sent me to fetch you. Before I did, I ran to the village to wake Rhodri, who’d found a girl to stay with a stone’s throw from the monastery.”
Conall grunted. “You took your secret passage under the wall.”
Even wounded, Lwc still had the capacity to smirk. “Nobody noticed I was gone, and there was plenty of time for Rhodri to ride to the farm, roust the others, and set up the ambush of the cart, which I knew the monks would need to haul Erik back to the church. I knew exactly the path it would follow.”
“Why would you do all that?” Gareth said.
“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 had 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.”