Saran
Saran had seen Gwen and Gareth enter the barracks, following four boys who were carrying a body. One of the boys was Llelo, Saran’s new grandson. To her utter delight, she and Llelo had come to an understanding almost immediately upon her attachment to Meilyr. Llelo was Gwen’s foster son and Saran was Gwen’s stepmother, but grandson and grandmother the two of them would be. Almost overnight, Saran had found herself with a family to care for, and she couldn’t be happier about it.
Though Llelo and his brother, Dai, were ostensibly in the retinue of Prince Hywel’s younger brother, Cynan, they’d come with Gareth first to Dolwyddelan Castle and then to Deheubarth. They were enmeshed now in Hywel’s teulu, and it seemed likely to Saran, who’d spent a lifetime in one castle or another, that neither was ever going back to Denbigh.
It wasn’t that they hadn’t been learning what they needed to in Cynan’s company, but Prince Hywel—and thus Gareth by extension—had decided he needed every man he could trust beside him, no matter how young. To that end, he’d also brought in all of the sons of Cadifor, his foster father, in one way or another, though the eldest remained in service to King Owain as the captain of his guard. Cadifor himself remained at Aberystwyth, personally responsible for Mari’s safety and the safety of Hywel’s sons.
From the beginning, Llelo had proved himself to be thoughtful and competent, and the fact that he was Gareth’s son made him all the more trustworthy. While some not so favored might resent what they saw as premature advancement, family ties were an important bond. Hywel would be foolish not to exploit them.
Though Saran might have gone after Gareth and Gwen whether or not they were following a body, that there was a body at all meant something fairly disastrous had happened in the great hall during her short absence in the latrine. She hurried towards the barracks after them and just managed to stop herself from hurtling into the room.
By then, all of the boys but Llelo had left, and he, Gwen, and Gareth had their heads together over the body.
“Who died?”
“Come in! Come in!” Gwen, bless her sweet heart, beckoned Saran closer. “You’re just the woman we were looking for. Where have you been?”
Saran blinked, more pleased than she could say that Gwen had welcomed her. When she’d arrived at St. Kentigern’s Monastery a few months ago, she’d been surprised and overjoyed to discover Gwen not only alive but whole. Since then, Gwen, like Llelo, had included Saran in her family with hardly a break in stride. Saran had no intention of replacing Gwen’s mother, but it would have been a shame for Meilyr and Saran to spend another year alone. They’d married soon after they’d arrived at Dolwyddelan—not so much in haste, as with purpose. “My stomach hasn’t been happy for a few days.”
That got Gwen’s attention. “We think this man could have been poisoned! Are you sure you’re all right—”
Saran put up a hand. “I’m fine. As I said, it has been a few days.”
That got a different kind of attention from Gwen, who then said, her eyes widening, “You don’t think—”
“Absolutely not.”
Gwen wasn’t convinced, as evidenced by the smile that hovered on her lips.
Saran put her mouth to Gwen’s ear and spoke so the men couldn’t overhear. “I’m too old for a child, and you know it.”
“You’re forty-eight,” Gwen said flatly. “Not too old, and you know it.”
Saran huffed out a breath, anxious to change the subject. She, of all people, having tended to women since she herself had become one thirty-five years ago, should know better than to deny what God had in store for her, and acknowledge that a healer was often most blind to her own health. Still, she wouldn’t entertain the idea of a child until there was no other possible explanation. “Have you seen your father?”
“Meilyr was in the hall last I saw. Cadell asked him to sing again to distract from the untimely death.” Gareth spoke absently while removing the man’s boots and socks one at a time and dropping them to the floor. The dead man’s feet looked nothing out of the ordinary, though he had thick yellowing toenails that might have been causing him some discomfort.
Saran gestured to the body. “Who is this?”
“His name is Meicol,” Gwen said.
“The castle healer should be here too, Gareth,” Saran said. “He will take offense if you examine the body without asking for his advice.”
Gareth scoffed under his breath. “I would, but he’s drunk.” With Gwen’s assistance, he worked to remove the dead man’s cloak and jacket.
Saran tsked through her teeth. “He’s a drunkard on his best day. I don’t know what hold he has over the king to keep him on all these years.”
Gwen looked over at Saran with a smile. “As I recall, that position was offered to you, once upon a time.”
“Ach.” Saran waved a hand dismissively. “I was happy at Carreg Cennan.”
Meilyr’s voice came from behind Saran. “I hope you’re not reconsidering your changed circumstances.”
Gareth threw up his hands in mock despair as his father-in-law appeared in the doorway. “Anyone else coming? Because we might as well leave the door open!”
Gwen patted Gareth’s arm soothingly. “We’re all family here.”
Gareth subsided, and Saran smiled at her new husband. Gwen was right, and while Gareth and Gwen had been involved in many murder investigations over the years—and Llelo too, she understood—Saran and Meilyr were no stranger to them either, if only by association. And if bonding over a dead body was a little odd for a family to do, at least they were bonding. Saran and Gwen had first become friends at Carreg Cennan during a murder investigation that had implicated Meilyr, so it was really a matter of destiny.
Since they were all here now, and the evening was growing old, Saran moved to stand beside her new son-in-law. He appeared to be avoiding removing Meicol’s breeches, so the next thing to come off was his shirt, which Gareth tugged off over his head with quick movements.
That left his torso exposed—and everyone recoiled at the sight of the man’s purpling bruises.
“Ouch.” Gwen’s hand went to her own belly.
“That couldn’t have been comfortable,” Gareth said in gross understatement. Then he shook his head. “Meicol’s last words to Evan were help me.”
Saran put her hand to her mouth, her own stomach rebelling at the pain the man had experienced. “He needed help, that’s for certain, but—” She frowned as she looked more closely, “—I would have said whoever beat him did so before tonight.”
“I agree. These bruises are far too pronounced to have happened an hour ago in the hall. Barri didn’t do this—at least not today.” Gareth gently touched Meicol’s stomach. “This one in particular reveals the shape of a man’s knuckles.”
Gwen lifted Meicol’s right hand. The body was newly dead, so it wasn’t yet stiffening. It would be good to get the examination over quickly before it did. “And yet, his hands are unmarred—or as unmarred as a warrior’s ever gets. He didn’t fight back.”
Meilyr frowned. “He did fight in a battle two weeks ago.”
“That’s too long ago for his skin to still be this color,” Gareth said.
Nobody contradicted him. He’d fought in that battle too. By two weeks, bruises would be yellow or green, not this fresh purpling. These were two or three days old and had to have been paining Meicol badly.
“Could the beating be the cause of his death?” Gwen said. “Perhaps he has a broken rib and his lung was punctured when Barri shoved him to the ground.”
“Maybe.” Saran moved on to the dead man’s right arm, and she lifted it to show Gareth the rounded burns on the tender skin that made up the inside of his upper arm. They were white, indicating they were old. “And what of these?”
Meilyr, who’d taken up a position against the wall, sighed. “Those are from a charred stick.”
Everyone turned to look at him, so Meilyr sighed again and straightened, moving closer to look at the scars, though the sadness in his eyes told Saran he didn’t need to see them more closely to know what they were. “You put a stick in the fire, burn the end, and press it to a child’s skin. It’s cruel. Evil, even. But that’s where he got them.”
Saran swallowed. “How do you know?”
“Because I have some just like it from my father.” He shrugged his cloak away from his arms and rolled up his left sleeve to show the inside of his upper arm. “If I had to guess, this is Meicol’s father’s work. And he did it on the inside of his arm so it wouldn’t show, and nobody would know.”
“You never told me.” Saran traced a gentle hand along Meilyr’s scars. She had half-noticed them, but had thought nothing of them. If anything, she had assumed they were childhood burns from spattered oil.
Gwen said softly. “You never told me either.”
Meilyr didn’t look away from either of them. “It doesn’t matter anymore. My father is long dead.” He smiled sadly, and after placing a gentle hand on Saran’s shoulder, moved past her to his daughter. “We can stop wondering what made Meicol belligerent.”
“From what I saw in the hall, he was something of a bully,” Gareth said.
Gwen blinked. “That’s exactly what Angharad said.”
Meilyr kissed Gwen’s forehead. “Scars like these heal over in time, but only if a man is lucky enough to find love later in life. As I have.”
Saran had lived all of her nearly fifty years in close proximity to families, good and bad, large and small, and she’d tended children of abusive fathers. She understood too that in this moment, Meilyr was apologizing to Gwen for the times he’d bullied her—and asking for her forgiveness and understanding.
Gwen, sweet child that she was, had forgiven her father long since.
To give the pair of them a chance to recover, Saran turned to Gareth and said straightforwardly, “What led up to his death?”
Gareth related what he knew so far, mentioning the vomiting last. Gareth was speaking to her, but his eyes kept flicking to his wife and father-in-law.
Saran frowned, and her hand went to her own belly. “Is anyone else sick?”
“Not that we know,” Gareth said, “which is why I didn’t raise a general alarm. How likely do you think it is that it was poison?”
“He died, which can’t be a good sign. Many poisons cause vomiting. The herb garden outside the castle walls contains elderberry.” She glanced up at Gareth. “There are more dangerous herbs, of course, but not grown at this castle. Aconite, for one—that’s Monkshood to you—could have been administered in his wine. But the world is full of poisons. If people really knew how many, they’d never leave the hall.” She barked a sardonic laugh. “They’d certainly never eat in one.”
“He was drinking mead, as we all were,” Gareth said.
Saran bent forward to sniff around the dead man’s mouth, and then opened it, immediately recoiling at the half-dozen blisters that had formed on his tongue and on the inside of his cheeks. They had to have been painful.
“Could these have been caused by boiling liquid?” Gareth said.
“The clam chowder wasn’t boiling when it was served, and who drinks boiling water unless he’s being tortured? Even then …” She frowned and put a hand to her head, thinking hard. “I have never seen anything like this. If this is poison, I’d have to consult my book to tell you which one.”
Gwen kept an accounting of the murders she’d investigated in a little book. As a wedding present, she’d given Saran something similar to write in so she could keep track of herbs and treatments. Between the two of them, they might find some herb that would explain the blisters, though as Saran had said to Gareth, she could not think of any poison that caused blisters in the mouth.
Meanwhile, Gwen had moved to a side table and had begun to unpack the satchel they’d found next to Meicol. She laid out its contents one by one. “Doesn’t Monkshood kill instantly?”
“Not always.” Saran rubbed at her forehead, feeling a headache coming on. “Sometimes the symptoms are similar to drowning or asphyxiation, and it takes longer. Do we have the cup he drank out of?” She held her breath. It was really too much to ask.
Gareth’s eyes lit. “We do.” He tipped his head to indicate a clay cup on the table next to where Gwen was working. “That’s how I know he was drinking mead. It’s over there.”
Saran leaned forward to smell the cup’s contents, but all she could smell was fermented honey. “Monkshood has an unpleasant taste—or so I’ve been told—but it would be far less noxious in mead.”
“Be careful, cariad,” Meilyr said.
“I am,” she said mildly, rather than retorting that she knew what she was doing, even though she did. He was expressing his love for her, something she hadn’t had shown her often enough before this year.
“Oh.” Gwen drew back slightly. “Look at this!” She showed Saran a clay vial, four inches high, stoppered and sealed, which she’d found in Meicol’s knapsack. The vial could have come from Saran’s own workshop, and was similar to ones she’d seen a hundred times in other healers’ collections. Containers such as this were used to hold potions for ailments. Gwen herself had a box with many similar vials that Saran had helped stock.
And because she recognized the container, Saran didn’t reach for it immediately, and she was pleased Gwen had handled it only after wrapping it in a cloth first. Saran sniffed around the edges without unstoppering the lid, but as with the cup, she couldn’t name what was inside—if it contained anything dangerous at all. “Without opening it, I can’t tell you more than it isn’t elderberry, which has an extremely pungent odor.”
“In fact, elderberry smells like cat piss,” Meilyr said.
Saran shot him a look. They hadn’t been married long, but he had apparently been paying attention. “More like rotting fruit,” she said diplomatically. “With a crush of people in a hall, someone poisoned with it might not notice the—” she glanced at Meilyr again, “—fragrance.”
Meilyr grinned. “Cat piss. The only way Meicol wouldn’t have noticed if he was poisoned with elderberry was if he was too drunk to notice anything.”
“Which he may have been.” Saran narrowed her eyes at Gwen. “Is this the only vial you found? There are no others?”
Gwen shook her head.
“Open it, Saran,” Gareth said. “We need to know for certain what we’re dealing with.”
Saran pulled her belt knife from the sheath at her waist, took in a breath, and pried the stopper out of the vial. First she poured a drop into the cup of mead. The reddish liquid spread out, coloring the surface of the drink for a moment, before becoming too diffuse to be noticed. Then Saran sniffed the vial, which only caused her to frown more, and she narrowed her eyes as she thought. “Reddish liquid, bitter smell.”
“Bitter how?” Gwen said.
“Like I just tasted a dandelion.” Saran held the vial away from her daughter-in-law. “Not for you.”
“Do you know what it is?” Gareth said.
“Whatever it is, it isn’t common in liquid form.” Saran sniffed again. “Wild cherry, perhaps? We should assume it is poison until we are certain it isn’t.”
Gareth grunted his agreement. “What I don’t understand is if Meicol is the one with a vial of poison, why is he the one who’s dead? And does the fact that he begged Evan for help mean he knew he was poisoned, or was the quest for help about something else?”
Saran looked down at the body, but like everyone else in the room, she had no answer to those questions—though she did have one of her own. “Meicol was a warrior, wasn’t he?” And at Gareth’s nod, she continued, “Do you know a warrior who could prepare a poison on his own?”
Gareth eyed the vial. “Would he need a healer’s hut to do so?”
“Most likely,” Saran said. “I suppose there are a few instances of sap being poisonous and something you could collect in the wild, but liquid comes from berries, which have to be crushed and the juice extracted. Seeds have to be soaked, and roots mashed and combined with oil.” She glanced towards the dead man. “If he did that without being an accomplished healer, he is a fool.”
“Maybe he was foolish and ingested his own poison by mistake,” Gwen said.
Saran picked up each of Meicol’s hands in turn. “No discoloration, no oil splatters or burns, no scrapes, cuts, or rashes.” She shook her head. “He doesn’t work with plants.”
“Do you have Monkshood in your collection?” Gareth asked.
“No, it’s too dangerous, and anyway, this isn’t that. Monkshood doesn’t cause blisters in the mouth, and it’s the roots and seeds which are the most dangerous. They’re not red.”
“What about elderberry?” Gwen said.
“Yes, I have that. Elderberry tincture can help heal wounds, and when ingested it aids coughs and sniffles. The berry must be well cooked, however. Cooking destroys the poison. I wear gloves when I gather the berries and immediately put them into a pot to cook.” She gestured to Meicol’s body. “But even uncooked, it takes a great deal of elderberry to kill a man.”
“Could he be dead now because he handled the vial?” Gwen said.
Saran pressed her lips together as she thought. “You and I both know poison can be absorbed through the skin, but only the most potent ones: aconite, as I said; belladonna; hemlock. And they work fast.”
“Could he have handled them this morning and died tonight?” Gareth said.
Saran waggled her head from side to side, not ready to say anything definitive. “I don’t know the poison, Gareth—but two to six hours is possible if the dose was small enough. He could have been feeling ill all afternoon and evening.”
“He was certainly belligerent.” Gwen tapped a finger to her lips. “That he asked for help doesn’t preclude him being responsible for his own death, only that he knew he was ill.”
“He could have had an accomplice,” Llelo said, speaking for the first time. He’d propped himself in one corner, looking on and absorbing what everyone else was saying. Saran had glanced at him once or twice, but he’d kept so quiet she’d almost forgotten he was there. “What if Meicol is an agent of King Stephen or of Walter FitzWizo, and he saw an opportunity to eliminate a host of enemies in one night without fighting a battle?”
Everyone turned to look at the young man. He’d been twelve when Gareth and Gwen had adopted him and was now a very mature fifteen.
“That’s a terrifying thought.” Gwen studied her son. “Normally, we worry about the why of murder after we figure out the what and who.”
“Except this time, the body isn’t telling us enough,” Llelo said.
Gareth threw Meicol’s own cloak over the body and headed for the door. “I’ve seen enough for now. If you’re right, Llelo, we need to speak to Prince Hywel immediately. Everyone in the hall could be in danger.”