Gwen
Since Tangwen was asleep, all that was required was to tell Meilyr and Gwalchmai where they were going. And once Gareth assured them that he wasn’t actually taking Gwen to the brothel, neither objected to her accompanying him as far as the mill. It wasn’t that late even—not even eight in the evening—and even with the rain, people were still out and about. There shouldn’t be any danger. Whether in England or Wales, if people didn’t go out because it was raining, chances were they never went out at all.
The brothel they were going to investigate lay on the main road from the southeast into Shrewsbury, just past St. Giles along the road to Atchem, where there was another bridge across the Dee. According to John Fletcher, the brothel doubled as an actual inn. Travelers seeking to avoid the higher rates in Shrewsbury—or wishing to avoid the town altogether—might choose to stay there instead.
“I don’t mean for us to be long,” Gareth said. “Two hours at most, which means we should return shortly after compline.” Compline was the late evening prayer before the monks retired for three hours of sleep.
“And if you’re not back by matins?” Meilyr said. Matins was the midnight prayer. Monks said prayers every three hours throughout the day and night.
“We’ll be back. Don’t worry.” Gareth said.
“But if you aren’t,” Gwalchmai insisted.
Gareth rolled his eyes at his brother-in-law’s worried look. “Tell John Fletcher I went to the brothel. Don’t come searching yourself. If we really do find ourselves in trouble, that wouldn’t be the way to help.”
Meilyr and Gwalchmai seemed satisfied with that response, so Gareth and Gwen collected their horses from the stable and led them out the back of the abbey. The path they took paralleled the main road that ran to the east and took them through the abbey gardens and fields to the abandoned mill the abbey laborer had mentioned when he’d told Gwen and Brother Julian about seeing Conall.
Settlements of varying sizes lay to the east of Shrewsbury. First was the Abbey Foregate, really another village in and of itself, which even had its own priest. A hundred yards on, these homes gave way to fields on both sides of the road. If it had been daylight, Gwen could have made out crofts and barns belonging to people who might worship in the Foregate, but who didn’t live in Shrewsbury proper. After another half-mile, they passed the back entrance to St. Giles, which was closed up for the evening, or they might have returned to the road and the front entrance in order to ask about the dead girl’s dress.
As it was, their current mission was more urgent. “The mill is just up ahead,” Gareth said, “and then the brothel is a matter of a few hundred yards to the east, to the right of the main road.
“I thought you said you hadn’t been here before?” Gwen’s eyes narrowed suspiciously.
“I haven’t! Before we left, I asked the layman working in the stable where it was.” Gareth’s expression turned sheepish. “It didn’t feel right speaking to one of the monks about the location of a brothel.”
“I can see why it wouldn’t.” Amusement bubbled up in Gwen, surprising her. It was raining and cold, but she was out with Gareth. Yes, they were investigating a murder, but in this moment, she had to admit that there was no place she’d rather be.
She took in a deep breath, probing in her mind around the edges of what she was feeling. She was starting to think that perhaps the problem wasn’t with her at all, and her detachment from this investigation wasn’t wrong. Maybe what was wrong was murder itself. To feel numb to it after a while was a natural reaction to something so unnatural that nobody could keep doing what they did—feeling what she’d always felt—and stay whole.
That didn’t mean she and Gareth should keep on as they had, however. They would have to make a pact, for starters, that from now on Tangwen and this baby would always come first, and that they would try harder to keep Gwalchmai and her father out of their cases. And maybe not answer when John Fletcher called.
Gareth directed his horse into the trees, and Gwen followed, ducking her head as branches, heavy with rain, dumped water on her head as she brushed past them. Within three paces, she couldn’t see anything at all, and all of a sudden, the illicit nature of this endeavor had her breath catching in her throat. She wouldn’t have said she was afraid, necessarily, but she didn’t like how dark it was, and not being able to see made her heart beat a little faster.
As always seemed to be the case, Gareth was unerring in his ability to find a track that would take them through the woods, though at one point he dismounted and helped Gwen down before grasping the bridle of his horse and leading it forward. By then, they didn’t have far to go, and soon they came to a halt on the edge of a clearing beneath the sheltering branch of an overhanging oak.
The mill lay in front of them on the far side of a large clearing. A torch on a long pole jammed into the ground shone near the front door.
“I thought you said it was abandoned,” Gareth said.
“Who told you that?”
Gwen turned at the voice a moment before a hand clapped over her mouth and pulled her away from Gareth. Before she could bite down on it, the hand was removed to be replaced by a gag, and then her hands were wrenched behind her back to be tied at the wrists, and a bag thrown over her head. All she had was the impression that her captor was a large man with a fierce expression.
She tried to scream, but she choked on the gag instead. She heard shouting and the clash of swords, which she assumed meant Gareth was trying to fight off the attackers, but from inside the bag she couldn’t make out what was happening.
Then the fighting stopped, and the only sound she heard was a thud and heavy breathing. “Put them with the others,” the same voice said.
Gwen experienced a moment of weightlessness before she was thrown over a man’s shoulder. She jounced along upside down, hardly able to breathe through the gag and with all the blood rushing to her head. She was thankful she was only a few months pregnant and the baby so small, since she barely showed and her womb hadn’t grown to the point that being upside down on a man’s shoulder would have been utterly unbearable.
They went a hundred steps, though they felt like a thousand. Then a door creaked, and her captor walked across a wooden floor with clunking steps, made louder and heavier by the weight of her on his shoulder. Then another door creaked, and it actually hit the top of her head as it closed behind them. More footfalls, this time descending wooden steps, and then the footfalls became more muffled. The man dropped her to the ground and pulled the bag from her head.
Gwen blinked her eyes, adjusting them to the light, though it wasn’t a difficult transition since the room was hardly more illumined than the absolute blackness of the bag. What light there was came from the glow of a lantern in the hand of a second man. She took in a breath, and now that she felt a tiny bit more in control, she realized that she recognized him as Flann’s partner, Will.
They’d come down a narrow set of stairs, with only six steps, to a damp dirt floor to end up in a room approximately fifteen feet long and twenty wide. An L-shaped bend hid the far corner. Wooden beams supported the ceiling above her head, and the walls themselves were made of wood, plastered to keep out the wind, though as she leaned back against the wall, she could feel the force of the weather, rattling something loose. A strangely narrow door—closed, of course—was centered in the wall opposite the stairs.
It was an exit, though Gwen didn’t know to where until she noted the rhythmic creaking and sound of splashing water coming from beyond the narrow door. She’d briefly been in a room just like this in Aberystwyth. It made up the lower level of the mill, necessary to give access to the water of the mill race and to maintain the waterwheel, but where nothing could be stored because of the dampness.
These men, however, were storing women here. Crowded together against the rear wall were a dozen women of varying ages, though none looked older than thirty. They were dirty and obviously cold, since they huddled against one another, some sleeping, others merely staring vacantly at the newcomers.
Her initial captor, a man with a scruffy brown beard, stuck his face into Gwen’s. “We have one rule here: if you scream, you die. Do you understand? There’s nobody out there to hear you anyway.”
Gwen nodded, not because she planned to obey, but because she needed him to remove the gag, and she would have promised him anything if only he would do so.
He did.
“What do we do with him?” A third man with a neatly trimmed black beard, who was younger than either Will or the man who carried her, appeared at the bottom of the steps with Gareth on his shoulder. Blood dripped down Gareth’s left arm, and he had blood on his face from a wound at his hairline. If Gwen’s hands had been free, she would have put them to her mouth.
“Is he dead?” Will said.
Blackbeard laid Gareth on the ground ten feet from Gwen. “No. Just knocked out. It seemed a waste to kill him when someone will pay a pretty penny for a warrior like him.”
“If we can control him,” Will said.
Blackbeard jerked his chin to point at Gwen. “Isn’t that his wife?”
Will nodded.
The man smirked. “It won’t be hard then, will it?”
“We’ll leave it to fate. If he lives, we’ll sell him.” Will stood with his hands on his hips, looking down at Gwen, though he didn’t speak to her but to Blackbeard. “How long until we’re ready to move?”
“Flann hasn’t returned from town,” Blackbeard said.
Will pressed his lips together. “We can wait another hour. Then we have to leave in case someone comes looking for these two.”
Scruffy beard scoffed. “Who is going to care about a couple of Welsh dogs?”
“I saw Gareth with the Deputy Sheriff,” Will said. “Fletcher might care. The girl did see the wheel we fixed.”
“They don’t know anything,” Blackbeard said.
Will shot Blackbeard an unreadable glance. “They know everything now.”
“Fat lot of good it will do them.” That was scruffy beard again.
Gareth’s head lolled to one side, but now that Gwen had managed to blink back her tears, she could see his chest rising and falling. It might even be that the blood on his arm was from a surface wound and not grievous—though if it suppurated, any wound could be mortal.
Gwen supposed it wasn’t surprising that her captors hadn’t questioned her, since she was a woman, and her value was only in what they could sell her for. She certainly wasn’t going to volunteer the information that her father knew where she was. Even if the whole lot of them were leaving this place within the hour, they could hardly travel far undetected, not with this many people to transport. A cart could only move so fast, and she doubted that these women were going to be in any condition to ride horses. Besides, they would have had to be tied onto them, which would be even more noticeable, whether or not it was dark.
All that passed through Gwen’s head as a way to reassure herself. Rhun’s death had shaken her confidence that everything would always turn out all right in the end, because that time it hadn’t. Despair threatened to overwhelm her, but she hadn’t spent nearly ten years as Hywel’s spy for nothing. For Tangwen’s sake, and the sake of her unborn child, she was going to get them out of here—or die trying.
Her hands itched to touch her husband, and she prayed that these men wouldn’t hurt either of them anymore, and that they might even leave. Leave us alone, leave us alone cycled through her mind in a litany, as if somehow her thoughts could be conveyed to them and influence their behavior. She presumed that the exterior door, which she made sure not even to look at in case one of them noticed, was locked or even nailed shut, or else they wouldn’t have left the women here without a guard in the first place. If someone watched the door, there would be no reason for any of them to remain inside the room.
As the men obeyed her unvoiced command and moved towards the steps, Gwen gave a huge sigh of relief and turned her attention to her fellow captives. A few of the women gazed back at her, blinking sleepily, but none seemed very awake, and none had said a word throughout the entire exchange among the men. One of the women curled up into a ball on the floor, and it was then that Gwen realized that not only were the woman’s hands free, but none of her companions were constrained at all.
Sadly, Will took the lantern, but after the door closed behind him, it looked as if he then set the lantern on a table near the door because it continued to shine faintly into the room through the many gaps between the slats of the walls and around the doorframe. Thus, even in its absence, Gwen was able to see how rickety her prison really was. Maybe they assumed, because they were leaving within the hour, that she didn’t have time to escape. With Gareth unconscious, she had to admit she was at a disadvantage.
But she wasn’t helpless.
Gwen propped her shoulder against the wall of the cellar, using it to brace herself until she could get her feet under her. Even though her hands were tied behind her back, she was able to feel for the knife in her boot that Gareth always insisted she carry. He would be missing all his weapons, of course, but the men hadn’t bothered to search her.
Gwen edged towards the woman closest to her. She was about Gwen’s age, with lighter color hair, dark eyes, and a ragged dress. “Can you untie me?” Gwen said in English, holding out the knife. She was willing to do it herself if she had to, but slicing through the ropes with the knife at such an awkward angle might well end up with blood everywhere.
The woman looked at her blankly, so Gwen tried again in Welsh.
The woman’s eyes widened. “I can’t,” she replied in the same language. “He’ll beat me.”
Hell.
Gwen didn’t often resort to profanity, but the situation seemed to call for it. She gazed around at the faces turned towards her, and even as she looked at them, she saw many lose interest, or perhaps even forget that she was there. Gwen puzzled over their odd behavior for a moment before concluding that they must have been given some kind of potion that muddled their minds. She had to get out of here before it was given to her too.
Gritting her teeth, acknowledging that she was on her own, and her and Gareth’s best hope for survival was herself, she gripped the hilt of the blade, turning it on end in her palm, and sawed through her bonds.
It was only as the bonds fell away, having nicked the fat part of one thumb but freed herself nonetheless, that Gwen noticed the man lying in the far corner of the room. His arms were tied behind his back at the wrists and his legs at the ankles. Thinking that he could be an ally, once she cut his bonds and provided she could wake him, Gwen hastened through the women, who didn’t even move aside to let her pass. It was as if they didn’t even see her.
She dropped to one knee to turn the man so she could see his face, and then recoiled when she realized she was looking at Conall, the missing merchant. He wasn’t looking so renegade anymore—nor, seeing as how he was as much a captive as they, much like a murderer.