The Worthy Soldier

by Sarah Woodbury

  “You can’t blame yourself.” Saran was back, now with a stewpot of her own. At the high table, Rhys was carefully spooning chowder first into his brother’s mouth and then into William’s. “Our poisoner knew what he was doing; he didn’t seem to care how many were harmed.”

  Gareth lifted his chin to point to a nearby table. “Cadell’s men seem more affected than anyone else’s.”

  “Some of the other lords may have had the same policy we did,” Hywel said.

  “Don’t eat from the common dish, you mean?” Saran said. “Don’t trust anyone?”

  “Let this be a lesson to us all.” Meilyr bent his head to Hywel. “I confess, I was skeptical of your command.”

  “But you obeyed it?” Hywel raised one eyebrow.

  “Always, my lord.”

  Hywel didn’t quite guffaw, seeing as how the circumstances were too serious and dire for that. Meilyr had a twinkle in his eye for a moment too, before his expression hardened. “This has gone far beyond the death of one man, my lord. Cadell has a traitor in his midst.”

  Gareth looked around the room. “There are no servants in this hall, my lord.” Even as he added, “We should check the kitchen,” both he and Hywel were already moving towards the door behind the high table.

  This was a back door into the hall, fronted by an anteroom, which then opened into the rear of the bailey. The postern gate was nearby, and a covered walkway led to the kitchen, which was a large adjacent building within Dinefwr’s palisade. Dinefwr, like Aber, was a royal palace, a llys, far more than a castle. As a motte and bailey castle, Wiston had been built with defense in mind and nothing else. It was small and uncomfortable—and a symbol of foreign rule meant to intimidate the populace and protect the invaders.

  Welsh royal courts, on the other hand, were meant to house hundreds of people at one time, and the palisades that surrounded them often encompassed huge spaces. Unless a fortress was built in stone, however, it was only nominally defensible. That was why Welsh palaces also tended to be built on high hills or the tops of mountains rather than in the lowlands as the Normans preferred. Wooden palisades were also relatively cheap to build and could be constructed in a summer and expanded as necessary.

  The door to the kitchen was open, as might be expected given the constant comings and goings to serve the great hall. But before Gareth and Hywel could cross the threshold, a young man with tousled brown hair crawled onto the flagstones of the walkway and collapsed, moaning, half in and half out of the door.

  Gareth bent to him, but Hywel stepped over the body and entered the kitchen. None of the servants were on their feet. Several were vomiting into buckets, and the chief cook, a squat man with a large belly, was bent over the table, his head in his arms. A small boy lay near the fire, twitching and unconscious.

  “Is he alive?” Hywel called to Gareth over his shoulder.

  “No.” Gareth spoke abruptly and left the dead man where he lay in the doorway.

  “Get someone to help these people. There has to be something here that will tell us what was poisoned.”

  “Whatever you do, if you find it, don’t touch it. Many poisons can be absorbed through the skin, and I’m thinking this is one of the more dangerous ones.”

  Hywel swallowed down the snide comment that rose in his throat. Gareth was speaking the obvious because he was protecting Hywel, not insulting his intelligence. He swung around to look at his captain. “Is it possible Meicol did all this but mishandled the poison—and died because of it?”

  “I don’t know. One moment he’s the victim, then he’s the perpetrator, and back again. I’ll get Gwen.” Gareth dashed for the hall.

  Hywel turned back to the room, going first to the head cook. He put a hand on his shoulder, making sure he was still breathing, and then went to the stewpot that hung over the fire. Ladling out a cup of chowder, he brought it to the man and set it in front of him. “Eat.”

  “I can’t.” The man moaned.

  “According to the healer, this will help.”

  The man was alive enough to scoff. “He knows nothing—”

  “I meant Saran.”

  Such was her reputation that the cook immediately acquiesced and started to sip the chowder, even going so far as to swallow down a clam. Fearful the man would die before Hywel could question him, he pulled up a stool and sat. “What did you eat?”

  “Everything.”

  “No—I mean from whose dishes did you eat? Every one of your staff is ill, but not everyone in the hall is. That means you consumed tainted food. When did you do so and for what table was the food intended?”

  “I don’t know.” He moaned and laid his head back onto the table. “My mouth hurts.”

  Hywel looked around the kitchen. The workers had their own long dining table, which still contained the remnants of their dinner. If life at Dinefwr was similar to Aberystwyth or any other place Hywel had lived, during feasts like this, the kitchen workers ate in shifts, in bits and pieces when they could. Other meals might take place at odd hours when no official meals were being served. It looked like a dozen people had eaten well. Hywel went over to the table to look over what remained. It was the standard fare that had been served in the hall itself.

  He sniffed the mead—no wine was served in the kitchen—but didn’t dare drink it for fear of what it might contain. It occurred to him that whoever had poisoned the residents of Dinefwr had dosed the kitchen staff so there would be nobody to testify to what he’d done.

  Finding nothing that stood out immediately as helpful, he went to the back door, which led to the well, and stood in the doorway to gaze out at the rear palisade wall. It was here firewood was chopped, and to the right was a walled herb garden, only one of several gardens that served the castle, with the larger vegetable gardens planted outside the palisade wall. Here also was the latrine, a long low building abutting the palisade. Waste fell into a deep trench, to which lime and ash were added weekly—daily in summer—to keep down the stench.

  Hywel pressed his lips together. If he had a vial that had once held poison, he would have discarded it in the latrine. If that was the case, God help him, Hywel wasn’t going after it.

  The scrape of a boot sounded behind him, and he turned to see Gareth entering the kitchen. He’d brought a woman and a man from the hall to see to the workers, though Hywel feared there was little hope for some of them.

  “I did a quick assessment of the state of our people. All obeyed the stricture not to indulge tonight—except for Dai. Llelo found him vomiting outside the hall. Gwen is with him now.”

  Hywel’s heart clenched for his friend. “I’m sorry.”

  Gareth drew in a breath. “He is well enough to apologize for not obeying your orders. He said he had only one bite of the pie. He has a raging sweet tooth. Always has.”

  Hywel grunted. “It looked good to me too, but I am not thirteen.”

  “If I had been Dai’s age,” Gareth said, “I would have been tempted too.”

  “No, you wouldn’t have,” Hywel said shortly.

  Gareth lifted his head. “I wouldn’t?”

  “You obey orders. That’s what made your disobedience to Cadwaladr so memorable.” Hywel returned to the head cook, who was still alive, if barely, and bent to him. “Who made the dessert, and what was in it?”

  “Eggs, flour, cream, and honey in a nut pastry shell with a currant sauce topping,” the cook said. “As always, I made it myself.”

  “Is there any left?” Gareth said.

  “It would be in there.” The cook gestured feebly to the right, indicating an open door to a subterranean pantry. Food that needed to stay cool was kept there, and a custard pie would qualify.

  Once inside the pantry, Hywel gaped at the abundance of foodstuffs, which made his stores at Aberystwyth seem paltry by comparison. Cadell was doing very well for himself in terms of tithes.

  On a small table near the entrance had been left various crocks containing food destined for immediate use. Garet
h lifted the lid over a ceramic tray to reveal rows of sliced mutton. A second lid covered cheeses destined for later in the evening. Gareth lifted a third lid and recoiled. The dish contained the last half of a pie the width of Hywel’s forearm—but also a dead mouse.

  Hywel let out a wavering breath. “Cadell asked that the pie be served to distract everyone after the fight between Barri and Meicol.”

  “If not for the dead mouse, it would look delicious,” Gareth said. “The liquid in the vial was reddish, but because of the currants, it wouldn’t be noticed.”

  “Someone has it in for Cadell.”

  “Are you worried he’s going to think it’s you?”

  Hywel barked a laugh. “That never occurred to me. I was ruminating along the lines of Maurice. You’ll note his brother, William, is among the ill.”

  Gareth laughed mockingly. “Which makes Maurice an obvious culprit.” Then he shook his head. “Several of Maurice’s men are ill as well. It’s just that Maurice left after Meicol died. Most of the men at Dinefwr are Cadell’s people, and thus they comprise most of the sick. At least ten have already died.”

  “Poison.” Hywel shivered. “Every lord’s nightmare. A coward’s weapon.”

  Gareth had his lips pressed tightly together, and when he didn’t speak, Hywel looked at him curiously. “What is it, Gareth? It isn’t like you to hold back your opinions.”

  “Cadell himself is no stranger to poison, my lord. We never determined what exactly was in that bottle of wine he gave to that merchant in Aberystwyth, but it killed him just the same.”

  “Are you suggesting this poisoning has something to do with that one? Revenge, perhaps?”

  “No.” Gareth gave a sharp shake of his head. “Not so much that, but Cadell is a poisoner himself. He got his poison from somewhere and someone.”

  “Are you thinking to ask him who was his supplier?” Hywel gave a low laugh. “That won’t go over well. For now, I’m more concerned with stemming the tide of deaths tonight. We can worry about the who after we find the what.”

  Then Gareth lifted his chin to point beyond the wall. “There’s more that concerns me here, my lord. What if this is the first wave of an attack? Does an army wait beyond these walls, biding its time until the moment of our greatest weakness?”

  “You mean now.” As before in the hall, the two men surged at the same moment for the exit and the stairs up to the wall-walk. Hywel allowed Gareth to precede him to the top, as was his duty, and a moment later they stood together, looking down at the landscape below them and the campfires that dotted the fields along both sides of the road. These were the remains of the large army that had taken Wiston.

  Because most soldiers in Wales were, in fact, farmers and herders, only great lords had the wealth to employ a permanent army. Even Hywel, as the edling of Gwynedd, had a force of only fifty that went everywhere with him. They were camped in the fields of the monastery located three-quarters of a mile away and not visible from this side of the castle.

  “It seems quiet,” Gareth said, “but I should send out the Dragons, along with our usual scouts, to discover if anything is amiss. Cadell’s men killed three of FitzWizo’s men on the road tonight. There could be more.”

  “Do it.” Sometimes Hywel worried that the name he’d given his elite fighting force skated a little too close to the four horsemen for comfort, but he’d sworn when he recruited them that their service would always be honorable. The oath was a promise to them and a check on Hywel himself, truth be told—and given the carnage in the hall, he could hardly regret calling them into being. It was their suspicious minds, training every day to think more like spy than soldier, that had saved them all.

  Before the poisonings and deaths had given the day new purpose, Hywel had been at war with himself as to whether he should have stayed at home in Aberystwyth rather than traveling to Dinefwr for the celebrations. He’d told himself he’d come out of obligation to the new alliance, but at the same time, he had to be honest with himself that there was more to it. He’d been absent from Ceredigion since his music festival last August, and the last time he’d been there, he’d been with Rhun. They’d spent the summer together, and everything about the place reminded him of what he’d lost.

  Rhun had been brother, companion, and friend. Hywel had admired him, trusted him implicitly, and the hole in his life left by Rhun’s absence was nearly impossible to bear. Certainly it was impossible to fill.

  What was occupying his thoughts now was the memory of that last week in Aberystwyth during the music festival when Hywel had boldly proclaimed his desire for Cadwaladr’s next misdeed that would require his banishment from Wales forever. Rhun had cautioned that he didn’t really want that. “Hate blinds you to what is before you in favor of what you want to see—or hope to see—or perhaps even need to see,” he’d said.

  Rhun had been right. At the time, they’d feared for their father’s life, but Rhun’s concern had been that whatever their uncle might unleash would be far worse than having Cadwaladr himself sitting beside their father at Aber’s high table. Again, he’d been right. And it had been Rhun who’d been caught up in Cadwaladr’s evil. Hywel would give everything he had to go back to that day and make different choices. He could have encompassed his father’s death more easily than Rhun’s. He’d never admitted that fact out loud, even to Mari. It skated too close to a similar truth that his father felt the same and would have traded Hywel for Rhun any day.

  But now, while he never would be glad to have lost his brother, Hywel had grown and changed as a result. He couldn’t go back, and although he would give anything for Rhun to be alive again, he didn’t want to go back.

  As he stood on the wall-walk of his former enemy’s castle, he also knew Rhun would not have had a suspicious enough mind to have refused to eat and drink from Cadell’s kitchen. He would not have had the knowledge or the men to uncover whatever plot was being played out in Dinefwr’s hall. That was Hywel’s domain and always had been. Rhun had been the soldier and Hywel the spy. It was long past time Hywel embraced the knowledge that not only did he need to be both, but he wanted to.

  Chapter Eight

  Gwen

  “Go! Go now before they come again!” Gareth moaned and rocked in his sleep.

  After the carnage of last night, she, Gareth, and Meilyr had ultimately taken refuge in a closet-like room on the second floor of the guest hall. Gwen glanced to where her father slept on, a hand-span away. Gwen, along with Angharad and Saran, had taken turns nursing the sick through the night, among them her own Dai, but Llelo had finally sent Gwen herself away, declaring he would stay with his brother for the last few hours before dawn. Gwen had gone because Dai still lived, and Saran had been cautiously optimistic that he would continue to do so.

  For once Gwen wasn’t fearful Gareth would wake Tangwen, since she’d been left at Aberystwyth with her nanny, Abi. But still, Gwen didn’t like to see Gareth distressed, and she put a hand on his chest and her lips to his forehead. He tossed and turned for another few heartbeats, but then at her continued gentle whispering, he quieted and opened his eyes. For a moment, they were unseeing, but then they narrowed to focus on Gwen hovering above him. “Did I say something?”

  “You were speaking of battle, I think.”

  Gareth threw an arm across his eyes, breathing deeply in and out. “I’m sorry.”

  Gwen stroked a lock of hair back from his forehead. Since Rhun’s death, he’d worn his hair short, but it had been a month since she’d cut it, and he was developing a curl that kept falling onto his forehead. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”

  “It is wrong of me to corrupt our bed with war.”

  “You were sleeping,” Gwen said practically, adjusting the blanket that covered him and smoothing it across his chest. “You can’t help what you dream, and you were just in battle. Will you tell me of it?”

  “I will, but not here.” Gareth sat up abruptly. His head was still bent, and he wouldn’t look at her, but
he reached for his boots. “Outside.”

  Gwen had changed her ruined dress for a fresh one before she’d lain down. But while she’d closed her eyes for a few hours, even exhausted as she was, she’d found it hard to sleep.

  Gwalchmai was the only family member who hadn’t come to Ceredigion with Prince Hywel. The young bard remained in King Owain’s retinue, currently located at his court in the village of Llanfaes, across the Menai Strait from Aber. Llanfaes was the largest village in Gwynedd. It not only guarded Anglesey at the entrance to the Menai Strait but was also on the other end of the ancient pathway across the Lavan Sands from the mainland. Traders and travelers had been using the pathway at low tide since before there was a Gwynedd. The king had wanted to spend a few weeks close to his sister, Susanna, who was currently confined to the convent adjacent to the village.

  They’d left Gwalchmai behind because, at nearly sixteen, he needed to experience the responsibilities of court bard on his own, without Meilyr looking over his shoulder all the time. Gwalchmai himself had argued for it, saying rightly that manhood came at fourteen in Wales, and if the station was to mean more than words, he had to be given the opportunity to be a man, in the same way it was given to the sons of knights (he meant Llelo and Dai, who was still thirteen). If nothing else, Gwen was glad Gwalchmai hadn’t been here to get sick too.

  Once outside, she took in a deep breath and bent back her head to look up at the blue sky, trying to shake off her exhaustion. There were few enough clouds above her to indicate that a predominantly sunny day might be in the offing, a rare enough occasion in south Wales to warrant celebration.

  Gareth reached for her hand. “I want to see Dai.”

  “He lives, Gareth.”

  “But many more do not. I’ll see him, and then I’ll take up the investigation again.”