The Good Knight
Page 22
Chapter Twenty-One
The small company rode through the early hours of the morning, stopping every now and then for Gareth to dismount and ensure they still followed the proper path. Even though much of the stonework of the old Roman road remained, grass and dirt had made headway between the rocks and revealed traces of a recent passage of men and horses. Cadwaladr’s company hadn’t tried to disguise their route. Like the act of killing Anarawd itself, it revealed a disturbing overconfidence.
At Caernarfon, some fifteen miles west of Aber, the trail ended, along with the road. Gareth dismounted to crouch beside the last traces of hoof prints, embedded deep in the sandy soil ten feet from the edge of the swift-flowing waters of the Menai Strait, which were just visible beneath the light of the waning moon that had finally managed to peek through the clouds. The other men stopped beside him and stared across the Strait to the opposite shore. Anglesey, the bread basket of Gwynedd, lay before them.
The water slopped at his feet, about half-way between high and low tide. The rest of the footprints had washed away. Cadwaladr’s company, if they’d had any sense, had taken the ferry across the Strait nine hours before, when the tide was at its lowest.
“It’s Aberffraw, isn’t it?” Gareth said to Hywel, who trotted his horse close to where Gareth stood.
“That’s my guess as well,” Hywel said. “I’ve thought so all along.”
I’ve thought so all along. As Gareth stared across the Strait, his prince beside him, Gareth understood Hywel as he never had before. Unlike most men, Hywel never lied to himself. He might not know what was at stake with every task he undertook, but he was clear-eyed about what he knew and what he didn’t know.
His stance and tone told Gareth that this particular venture was only beginning and that Hywel was prepared for it going bad to a degree that surpassed anything they’d ever experienced. It wasn’t that people were going to die, though they might, but that Hywel understood one true thing: that by bringing Cadwaladr to justice—if indeed that became necessary—he would break his father’s heart. By doing so, he would put himself, as the bringer of bad news, in a more precarious position than any he’d ever been in before.
In that light, Hywel’s choice to bring Rhun with them, or rather, to allow him to come along, was no longer odd. Rhun was always ready for adventure—in many ways he was more reckless than Hywel—but he’d not taken part in any of Hywel’s tasks up until this night. King Owain protected his eldest son, and thus he rarely participated in the less savory aspects of ruling Gwynedd. But he was here, now, because Hywel knew that if Rhun told King Owain that Cadwaladr had stolen Gwen; if Rhun told his father that Cadwaladr had been behind the murder of Anarawd and his men, his father would believe him when he couldn’t bring himself to believe Hywel.
For Gareth’s part, he no longer had any doubts.
Evan sighed. “I’ll see about waking a ferryman.”
“Best to cross once it’s light. I’d say we have three hours to rest.” Hywel made a small motion with his hand to settle the men. “If we wait for the slack water before the turn of the tide, the water will be at its lowest and calmest.”
Nodding their acquiescence, the rest of the men dismounted. Gareth continued to stare across the Strait. A light flared in the distance. Perhaps it came from a fire burning in an open pit, and he imagined Gwen sleeping beside it. He measured the distance from shore to shore, wishing he could ride to her immediately. But Hywel was right: he couldn’t rescue Gwen single-handedly, and it would be foolhardy to try to swim the Strait in the dark. The Menai Strait was not something a man should take lightly.
Strong men and too many ships to count had foundered in its waters—at times deceptively slow and at others, moving so fast the current could pull a man under and out into the Irish Sea before anyone could save him. That was not a fate any of them wanted to share.
Besides, if Gwen was still alive, she wasn’t sleeping next to a fire pit but was already at Aberffraw. The castle lay on the western shore of Anglesey, only five miles from where Gareth stood. Aberffraw had always been the seat of the Royal House of Gwynedd. Its construction dated back to Rhodri Mawr, who ruled Gwynedd two hundred years before, and possibly even earlier to the great Cunedda, the legendary founder of the kingdom of Wales.
The castle had been decimated in the past by Viking raiders from the north and west, and by Normans from the east—the last over twenty years ago before King Owain’s father had retaken Anglesey from them. When King Owain succeeded to Gwynedd after the death of his father, he began reconstructing Aberffraw anew, quarrying stone from the east coast of the island and bringing slate from Snowdonia. Meanwhile he lived primarily at Aber, which, if nothing else, was a more convenient location for his many subjects to find him.
“Rest easy, Gareth.” Evan stopped at Gareth’s right shoulder to look across the water with him. “Cadwaladr will not have harmed her.”
Gareth turned to look at him. “Why do you say that?”
“He had plenty of opportunity between Aber and here to kill her and dispose of the body,” Evan said. “Did he?”
“No,” Gareth said. “We would have seen the signs.”
“Exactly,” Evan said. “That means she still serves a purpose—and it’s not to warm his bed. I’m not saying he’s above that, but I’ve never heard that Cadwaladr enjoys forcing women, for all his other faults.”
Gareth clenched his teeth, but nodded and returned his gaze to the water moving in front of him. Come Owain Gwynedd’s wrath, prison cell, or the very gates of hell, he was never letting Gwen out of his sight again.