Chapter Eighteen

Gareth

 

 

Gareth watched Mari and Gwen go and then crouched beside Amaury to take his hand.

The Norman knight’s eyes glinted beneath half-closed lids. “I live, Sir Gareth.”

“Don’t speak,” Prior Rhys said.

Hywel touched Gareth’s shoulder, and Gareth moved with him a short distance away. “We need to track both Ralph and the archer. I’d like to know that the latter, at least, is long gone.”

“That will be my task,” Gareth said, and then added, “I wouldn’t have let the women go if I thought they were in danger.”

“I know. I’m not worried about them.” Hywel glanced to where Amaury lay. The knight’s chest rose and fell. “Someone really didn’t want Ralph to talk to us.”

“He’s a poor shot,” Gareth said, “I’ll say that for him.”

“That he used a longbow, not a crossbow, makes him a Welshman,” Hywel said.

“Any Welshman whose aim is that bad isn’t worthy of the name. Too bad for Amaury.”

“It will be dark soon. Meet me back here before an hour passes.”

“Yes, my lord.”

That Amaury still lived was one of the few pieces of good news in the last two days. Gareth’s comment to Gwen that this investigation got worse with each hour that passed continued to prove true. Bad enough that someone had attacked Gwen and struck Prior Rhys on the head; bad enough that three people had died. A lone archer roaming free in the countryside, against whom it was nearly impossible to defend, left Gareth with an ache behind his eyes. If Prince Henry were to come to Newcastle, they might be able to protect him inside the castle. But outside the castle, he’d be an easy target. A mediocre archer could hit a target at a hundred yards, and an excellent archer at four hundred.

Judging the direction from which the arrows had come, the archer had been hiding in the trees to the east of the chapel. An overgrown clearing surrounded the ruin, so it was a matter of crossing a field of patchy grass and scrub to get to the trees. Gareth made his way towards them, keeping to the bushes as best he could. He assumed the archer had fled, but he wasn’t going to bet his life on it.

Gareth looked back. He could just see Prior Rhys, still bent over Amaury fewer than a hundred yards away. The archer could have easily shot them from this place. Gareth inspected the ground at his feet but couldn’t make out any specific tracks. He moved along the fringe of the trees, glancing every now and again towards Rhys to make sure he didn’t need help. Another few yards along, Gareth came to an old oak. Something bumped into his forehead, and he stopped. Looking up, he saw the knotted end of a rope hanging from the lowest branch, which was at least twelve feet in the air. He hadn’t noticed it at first because he’d been looking at the ground.

Gareth tugged on the rope. It didn’t give way. Its fibers weren’t worn or marred with dirt, as would have happened if it had been hanging in the tree for a while. Gareth knew he needed to get up there. Even though his shoulder hurt more than he wanted to admit, he gritted his teeth and grasped the rope, climbing hand over hand until he reached the branch onto which the rope had been tied. He pulled himself onto it and sat, rolling his shoulders and shaking out his left arm to loosen it and ease the pain. At last he stood, finding his balance, and slid his feet towards the cleft where the branch met the tree. When he reached it, he looked back.

The whole chapel was laid out before him, perfectly visible through a natural break in the oak’s growth that left an eight-foot-wide gap in the branches. Gareth mimed shooting off a bow and revised his estimation of the archer’s ability upward. With the oak branch as an unstable platform, hitting Ralph or Amaury would have meant achieving a tougher shot than if the archer had been standing on the ground.

The only signs that someone might have stood where Gareth himself was standing were scuff marks on the branch, possibly from the archer’s boots. Now that Gareth knew what to look for, he climbed out of the tree and found more boot prints in the dirt below the branch. He circled around the tree and began to track the archer away from the chapel, heading east. The soft earth meant the man wasn’t hard to follow. The archer had made no attempt to hide his retreat. But another quarter of a mile on, the woods and the prints ended at a deeply rutted, dirt road.

Gareth pulled up and bent to the last boot print. From that point, he moved in a gradually widening circle until he reached the base of another tree where he found the hoof prints of a single horse. Gareth stepped into the road, which carried on due north for a time before being lost in the hills in the distance. Going the other way, the road headed south before curving west. Gareth hadn’t been here before, but the width of the road suggested to him that if he were to follow it, it might take him all the way back to Newcastle.

Suddenly, he heard the thud of a horse’s hooves, coming from the south. Gareth’s first instinct was to move toward the sound, but then he thought better of that action and retreated to the woods. Soon a riderless horse appeared, pounding down the road towards Gareth. He stepped from the trees, his hands up, making himself as large as possible to slow the racing horse. “Whoa! Whoa!”

The horse had been panicked, but he wasn’t wild. Gareth caught his bridle and ran with him a few yards until the horse stopped, breathing hard and whickering.

“That’s a good boy.” Gareth patted the horse’s neck and ran his hands down his legs. The horse was uninjured, but something had to have spooked him to have sent him racing away from his master. Still holding the reins, Gareth walked around to the horse’s other side—and noticed the longbow strapped to the saddle bags.

Gareth was already almost through the hour that Hywel had given him, but it was worth the extra time to find where this horse might have left his master. Gareth swung himself into the saddle and directed the horse’s head back down the road in the direction from which it had just come. Two hundred yards on, as the road curved west from Gareth’s initial position, which was now hidden behind him, Gareth found a dead man. He lay in the brush beside the road, his throat cut.

Damn was the mildest curse Gareth spit out as he dismounted and crouched by the body. Blood still trickled from the man’s neck, indicating he’d been killed very recently, and Gareth swiveled on his toes, wondering if he was in danger too. The road was empty of movement, however, and Gareth decided he should just get to work.

He studied the dead man, noting his slender build, well-worn clothing, and cheap leather armor. Then he picked up the man’s left hand. The bruising at the wrist indicated that someone had grasped it tightly, even wrenched it. The man’s other wrist was undamaged, but something wasn’t right with his fingers. Gareth didn’t realize what it was until he compared the dead man’s fingers to his own. Gareth didn’t shoot his bow often, but despite the finger tabs he always wore when shooting, his right hand had callouses from pulling at the bowstring. This man’s fingers did not.

Gareth ran his hand through his hair, wondering what the hell it meant. Questions mounted in his mind, not the least of which was whether or not this man was even the archer Gareth had been seeking. The lack of callouses said he wasn’t, but the bow on the horse’s back said that he was. Furthermore, whatever the man’s identity, Gareth wanted to know who had sent him, why had he sent him, and who had killed him. Gareth glanced back the way he’d come, imagining the series of events that had resulted in this death:

The archer fails to kill Ralph, shooting Amaury instead, and without a good angle of fire, gives up and flees to the edge of the woods where he left his horse. He rides south and west (back to Newcastle?) where he encounters another man, perhaps his superior, perhaps someone sent to silence him. One of the men dies but cannot control the horse, which races away. The killer hears Gareth calling to the horse, realizes he is out of time, and flees.

Gareth rummaged through the saddle bags, looking for something he could wrap the body with, and came up with a cloak. It was finer than he would have liked to waste on a dead man, but it wasn’t his, and he felt that he was out of time and too exposed out here on the road. Although the killer could be a mile away from here by now, he could also be watching Gareth from the trees, waiting for his chance to strike. In the dusk, he would then have all the time he might need to hide both both bodies.

Gareth laid the cloak on the ground and rolled the body into it, all the while trying to look in every direction at once. After untying the quiver and bow from the saddle bags and slinging them on his own back, Gareth threw the body over the horse. Then he took the reins and began walking, not back the way he’d come but towards Newcastle. Fifty yards on, he left the road for the woods. Because he had the newly risen moon to guide him by its light and location, he decided that he was better off finding his way back to the chapel by dead reckoning than taking the road to wherever it led.

After a quarter of a mile, Gareth reached a narrow track. He was about to turn onto it when he heard voices coming towards him. A moment later, a cart creaked into view, along with a number of other people on foot. Gareth recognized his wife, and he lifted a hand in greeting.

Hywel, who’d been walking beside one of the monks, quickened his steps to outpace the cart. “Your hour was up long since. Gwen would have had my head if something had happened to you.”

“I apologize, my lord, but I couldn’t leave him in the road.” Gareth gestured to the body on the back of the horse.

Hywel eyed the dead man and then the bow on Gareth’s back. “I gather that’s what remains of our archer?”

“I don’t know who he is,” Gareth said, not ready to draw any firm conclusion yet.

“Did you kill him?”

Gareth barked a laugh, unoffended by Hywel’s question. “Not I. Someone else killed him moments before I found him, but I didn’t see who it was.”

Hywel swept a hand through his hair. “The dead are going to be stacked up like firewood in the chapel before we’re through.”

“Gareth!” Gwen hopped down from the cart when it reached him, and he caught her up in his arms.

“I’m all right,” he said.

“I had to trust that you would be,” Gwen said.

“How is Amaury?”

The cart carrying the Norman knight passed them by. He lay in the bed, the arrow still rising from his left shoulder. The prior sat in the cart with Amaury, while Mari perched beside him on the rail.

“He’s alive,” Gwen said. “The healer, Matthias, says the wound isn’t as serious as all that, even though it has bled heavily. Even Prior Rhys is reluctantly optimistic.”

“We’ll take care of him,” said a man in monk’s robes, walking behind the cart.

“Mari keeps saying that this is her fault because she agreed to meet with her father,” Gwen said.

“It is Rhys who should have known better,” Gareth said.

Hywel scoffed. “As if he could have done anything else. Mari was going to see her father, with or without him.”

“Any luck finding Ralph, my lord?” Gareth said.

“No,” Hywel said. “He took to horseback within a dozen yards of the chapel. I couldn’t follow him.”

“So he’s lost to us, too, until he chooses to come in,” Gareth said.

“He could be going to the farmhouse,” Gwen said.

“He could, but I don’t see us waiting for him there on the off-chance he decides to appear,” Gareth said. “Unless it was Ralph himself who killed our dead friend, here.”

“Possible,” Hywel said, “but how likely?”

“I have no idea,” Gareth said.

“All we know of him is what he has chosen to tell us, much like Alard,” Gwen said.

“We have yet another killer to chase,” Gareth said. “We can’t afford to hunt for Ralph and Alard, not when they clearly don’t want to be found.”

“Which reminds me,” Hywel said, “you’ve not yet told me all that you learned from Alard.”

As the three companions followed the cart towards the friary, Gareth relayed the gist of their conversation with the empress’s horseman. When he’d finished, Hywel came to a halt, standing with one arm across his chest and a finger tapping his chin. “I’m inclined to believe Alard when he says that he killed David in self-defense.”

“Alard told the truth about not killing John, too,” Gwen said.

Gareth scoffed. “He told the truth, which is to say that Ralph killed him before Alard could get to him.”

“We heard all sorts of truths today,” Hywel said. “It may even be true that David didn’t steal that emerald; he may be a traitor—one of several, apparently—and was given it.”

“I would say so, too,” Gareth said. “To my mind, however, we’ve cleared Alard’s name.”

“Given that both John and David are dead, is the threat to Prince Henry over?” Gwen said.

“I wouldn’t assume that,” Gareth said. “We have three emeralds unaccounted for.”

“My guess, and you know how much I hate guessing,” Hywel said, “is that once David was dead, our culprit didn’t want anyone to find the emerald among his possessions. He took the body from the chapel so he could retrieve it at his leisure.”

Hywel gazed down the road that led to the friary, lost in thought. The cart had disappeared, and Gareth shifted, hoping the movement would prod his prince into action. The dead man hung over the horse, which continued to calmly crop the grass. But the body was cooling, and Gareth wanted to get it inside before it stiffened.

“I wish my father were here,” Hywel said. “He would know how to talk to Earl Robert—and whether we should talk to him at all.”

“I think you have no choice but to speak to him,” Gwen said. “None of what we have discovered will matter if Prince Henry dies.”