“Could be several small men,” Llelo said from above them.
Gruffydd grunted his agreement. “Hard to tell. Let’s just say they belong to people smaller than any of us here.” He swept his hand through the dirt and rubbed it between his fingers. “Not all the dirt is native to this cellar either. Several of these clods are of the same type of soil as on the rungs of the ladder and on the floor of the shed.”
“And vice versa.” Llelo’s head was back in the hole. “The dirt down there is reddish, very fine, and not clumped.”
Aron crouched beside Llelo. “Somebody went in and out of this hole more than once.”
“Several someones, I’d say.” Gareth pointed to the side wall four feet away. “A large chest sat there. You can see the outline on the floor and the wall.” He turned slowly on his heel. “This room was at one time full of chests and boxes.”
“And crates.” Gruffydd indicated a crisscross pattern in the dirt by where he was standing.
“Chests and boxes aren’t exactly farm equipment,” Aron said.
Gareth laughed. Evan had spoken to him of Aron’s wit. It wasn’t so much that he had an off-kilter way of looking at the world, though that could be useful, but that he saw to the heart of a matter and had the ability to point it out. “You two can come down if you want to.”
Their heads disappeared instantly, to be replaced by Llelo’s feet and then his whole body as he came down the ladder, followed by Aron a few steps behind. Gareth could hear the rest of the Dragons moving about the shed, their feet clumping on the wood of the floor, which was the cellar’s ceiling. In his experience, most buildings that stored hay had some kind of crawl space at the lower level, or at the very least a wooden frame, to keep the hay off of the dirt. Hay needed the circulation of air to stay dry and not mold through the winter. Whatever had been stored down here couldn’t be damaged by water either, or hadn’t been stored here long.
“What’s right there?” Gareth pointed to the far corner. “Something just glinted in the lantern’s light.”
Llelo cat-walked to where Gareth indicated and crouched to the ground. He swept away some loose dirt with his finger and then drew in a breath. “You have good eyes, Father.” He held up a coin, his own eyes brighter than ever. “Gold.”
Gareth risked marring the floor with his own boot prints and crossed to see for himself. Llelo kept scraping away dirt, at first desultorily and then more enthusiastically, ultimately revealing a leather sack the width of a man’s hand. Mouth wide, Llelo opened it and proceeded to pour gold coins into Gareth’s palm. They came so fast, he cupped both hands to hold them all.
Llelo stopped pouring with the bag still more than half full, and then opened the top wider so Gareth could pour most of them back in. Gareth kept a few, however, to examine. They weren’t all the same, with some ancient and others newer, but they all were gold. One in Gareth’s palm showed a double-headed man on one side and half-naked soldiers on the other with the word Roma written underneath.
His mouth went dry as he contemplated the wealth before him. People kept leaving coins for him to find, but these were unlike any he’d ever seen. Few Welsh kings had the wherewithal to mint their own coins. King Owain hadn’t done it. But these were Roman and ancient and a long way from home. No stretch of the imagination could justify their presence in the cellar of a minor lord’s shed in Deheubarth.
Gruffydd and Aron had come over too, of course, and they looked at the gold in Gareth’s hand. Aron took one of the coins and held it up to the lantern light. “What have we stumbled onto?”
Gareth shook his head. “A treasure, clearly, but whose it is or where the rest of it has gone—and what it has to do with these murders—is yet another mystery.”
Chapter Twenty-three
Hywel
Hywel signaled that the men should spread out. At one time he might have resented not being able to go anywhere without a dozen men around him, but he felt less distaste these days—especially here in Deheubarth where they were surrounded by enemies and former enemies turned temporary friends. Gareth had sent Steffan back to the castle to ask Hywel and Gwen to come to him.
Unusual as that request had been, it was even stranger for Hywel to find himself in a barn adjacent to the Towy River, west of the castle and one of the many properties belonging to St. Dyfi’s monastery. The building was in fine condition, as the cracks in the walls were newly daubed and whitewashed, and the thatch roof was whole and looked new too. Abbot Mathew, as Hywel would have expected, saw to the proper care of his holdings.
“I’m not sorry to leave the castle,” Gwen said as they reined in. “I feel like everybody’s watching me all the time, waiting for me to announce some new finding that will indicate the investigation is over.”
“They want answers, and they think you have them—or might have them. And it just may be that we will have more in a moment,” Hywel said.
“Poor Angharad is now going to be barraged with questions in our absence,” Evan said.
Gwen smiled. “I’m pretty sure she’s used to the complexities of Deheubarth’s court, and it won’t be the first time she hasn’t told the whole truth to her uncle.”
Evan grunted. “It would be nice if it were the last, however.”
That was enigmatic, but Hywel didn’t pursue what was happening with Evan’s personal life—not yet anyway—and lifted his chin to point to Gareth, who’d come out of the barn to greet them. “Why are we meeting here?”
“I don’t trust anyone in the castle,” Gareth said without apology, “particularly not with this.”
He helped Gwen from her horse, and then they moved into the barn, empty for the day except for doves cooing among the rafters. At night, the barn would house cows, pigs, and sheep, all of which were either in an adjacent pasture or rooting their way around the muddy stockade. Twenty men on horses were entirely out of place in such a setting, but the water trough was full, and there was feed for the horses, so Hywel wasn’t discontented.
Once inside, Gareth went straight to his saddlebag and pulled out a heavy leather bag, tied at the top. Its contents clanked a bit in a fashion Hywel had come to associate with money, though he hadn’t ever seen such a large moneybag before.
“More to the point, I didn’t want to be walking around the castle with this in my possession.” Gareth held it out.
Hywel looked around at the Dragons, who were the only other people in the barn, since Hywel had left his teulu outside. The men weren’t exactly grinning, but their eyes were alight with expectation. That made Hywel almost more wary, and he eyed Gareth as he took the bag from him. It was even heavier than he’d thought, and he weighed it in his hands while Gareth helpfully untied the string at the top.
Hywel took out a coin and held it up to the afternoon sunlight coming through the open doorway, which faced west.
“The sack was buried in the dirt in a corner of an otherwise empty cellar underneath one of Alban’s ramshackle sheds.” Gareth gestured to his son. “Llelo dug it up.”
“Only because you saw one of the coins glinting from the dirt, Father.”
Gruffydd moved to stand beside Gareth. “The shed hasn’t been standing empty for long. At some point recently, maybe as recently as yesterday or the day before, it contained many boxes and trunks. We could still see the impressions they’d made in the earth floor. Fresh earth clung to the rungs of the ladder and was scattered on the floor of the shed.”
As Gareth and Gruffydd related what they’d seen and discovered, Hywel found himself in that uncomfortable moral gray area where what exactly was the honorable thing to do was less than clear.
Gwen had been uncharacteristically silent up until this moment, but now she frowned. “Did Alban know you were in his shed?”
“Yes,” Gareth said. “He came with us and showed no concern at all that we were there. In fact, the only thing he seemed to care about was that we put his cart back in place when we were done.”
“Was he there when
you found the gold?” Gwen said.
“No,” Gareth said. “He left before we went into the cellar, though he knew we were going to.”
“I’m thinking he knew something had been there,” Aron said flatly. “Alban didn’t care that we looked in the shed because he’d already moved what was inside.”
“But he wasn’t the one who buried the gold.” Gwen bit her lip, her expression pensive. “If he had, would he have walked away?”
“No, he would not have,” Iago said. “No man would have. He would have stayed to protect it. If you’d found it, he could have claimed it for himself.”
Hywel weighed the bag in his hand. “Are you thinking this gold is one piece of a larger treasure? That this is a small fraction of what was there that has since been moved?”
“I hate to speculate,” Gareth said. “If Alban is involved, and how could he not be, that would explain why he didn’t care that we went down there.”
“What was in the cellar doesn’t have to have been valuable,” Gwen said. “If the items were really farm equipment or household goods—it makes the place all the better to hide something like this bag.”
“I would be more likely to agree if the items hadn’t been recently removed,” Gareth said, “and maybe in a hurry, since whoever did it left the gold behind.”
“In which case, the people who moved the rest of the items were not the same as those who buried the bag,” Hywel said.
“It was very dark down there. Gareth spotted a coin from across the room, but only because the lantern light hit it at just the right angle. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have known it was there.” Aron put out a hand to Gareth. “What if it wasn’t children playing down there, but women? The feet were booted, not barefoot, as children often are this time of year.”
“What’s this about women?” Hywel asked.
Gareth turned to him and explained, “Many of the boot prints were smaller than you might expect if they’d been made by men.” He looked at Gwen.
She raised her eyebrows. “It wasn’t me.”
Aron laughed. “We didn’t mean to imply it might have been. Would you mind showing me your foot?”
Gwen found a seat on an overturned bucket and stuck out one foot. Then the Dragons gathered around. Hywel laughed at the intensity of their expressions as they studied her boot.
“So what are we thinking?” Steffan said. “This is Caron’s doing?”
“Or a servant, or any of a dozen women in the area,” Gareth said, frustration in his voice. “The shed is isolated enough that the whole cantref could have had access to it—and Alban and Caron might not even have known about it.”
“If not Alban, could the gold have belonged to Sir Robert?” Llelo had been quiet throughout most of the conversation, perhaps feeling as if he didn’t really belong, even though he’d dug up the bag. “He could have buried it and told no one.”
“At which point, with his death, it belongs to Alban,” Iago said.
But Gruffydd shook his head. “You forget that a few coins were left loose within the surface dirt. The sack was buried hurriedly, recently, and not well.”
Steffan tapped a finger to his chin in mimicry of Hywel. “Why would that be?” He was not much younger than Gwen and a proficient swordsman (and knifesman), but that devotion to his art had been somewhat at the expense of a study of the way people thought.
Aron snorted. “Because whoever buried them wanted to keep the gold a secret from his partners.”
Gruffydd rubbed his chin. “If a man finds a penny beside the road, to whom does it belong? Clearly the true owner is the one who lost it, but how does he find that man, and how would that man ever prove it was his?”
“And what if he’s dead? Or stole that penny in the first place?” Aron said.
“Here’s what I know—” Hywel motioned that his men should gather around him. “I swore to you when I brought you together that the tasks I laid upon you would never compromise your honor or mine. You would be soldiers more than spies, and if I asked you to spy, it would be for Gwynedd, not for me. But I find myself in a quandary as to the right thing to do here.”
“With the gold, you mean?” Evan said.
Hywel nodded. “My impulse, of course, is to keep it; to hide it. Certainly, in no way do I want to bring it to the attention of Cadell or any of the other lords here.”
There was silence for a moment, and then it was Cadoc who spoke. He was normally not one to involve himself in strategy or politics. He shot his arrows where Hywel pointed and protected his brothers. Anything else he viewed as not of his concern. “It doesn’t matter to whom it once belonged. It’s yours now. You should send it home to Aberystwyth today. We know the gold isn’t Cadell’s. It certainly isn’t Alban’s rightful property—nor Sir Robert’s for that matter. That makes it fair game, no matter whose land it was found on.”
That was a response Hywel would have expected from Cadoc. A former assassin, he had little regard for anything beyond the practical. But Steffan nodded too. “Cadoc is right, my lord. Wealth is power. You need to keep it. To give the treasure to Cadell serves nobody but Cadell.”
“What would be the disadvantage of keeping it?” Hywel said.
“We can’t use it as evidence,” Gwen said immediately. “We have to pretend you went to Alban’s house, Gareth, and found nothing.”
“Not nothing,” Gareth had spent the last few moments with his back to the group, looking out the doorway. But he’d been listening, and now he turned back. “We could say we found one coin in the dirt, which is true as far as it goes, and there is ample evidence there was more at one time. Even one Roman coin would be outside Alban’s purview.”
“Here’s a downside, my lord,” Evan said. “If Cadell discovers we found more than one coin and didn’t tell him about it, it could jeopardize your current alliance.”
Gruffydd shook his head. “This alliance is going to last only as long as Cadell sees an advantage to it. He wants Ceredigion and is only biding his time until he attacks us at Aberystwyth.” He gestured to the five other Dragons. “We all know it.”
“Gareth is right, however, that we should say we found a coin. Two or three might be better.” Evan was tapping a finger to his lip while staring at the sack, which by now Hywel had closed and tucked in the crook of his arm. “This is a murder investigation, and I don’t think we should hide the fact that something is very much not right at Alban’s estate.”
Hywel scratched the top of his head. The Dragons were confirming what he wanted to do, but that didn’t mean the decision wasn’t of dubious morality. So he turned to the personification of his conscience. “What do you think, Gwen?”
She spread her hands wide, but didn’t articulate an answer.
“You don’t disagree?”
“Even if I do, it doesn’t mean I have a better idea. The coins were stolen from someone who can’t be Cadell—and, quite frankly, I find it hard to believe that such an individual would be an ally of Gwynedd.”
Gareth looked at his wife. “You sound more sure of that than any of us. Why?”
She laughed. “Cadell would hardly have entrusted you with any investigation if he knew Alban’s cellar contained enough wealth to build a castle. Or three.”
“As usual, you speak good sense.” Hywel jerked his head towards the horses. “Gruffydd, Steffan, I want you to take the gold and ride home to Aberystwyth.”
The men nodded their acceptance. Hywel’s decision might be entirely misguided, but at least he and his closest companions were unified around it, and today it was the only decision he could make. “But first—” He reached into the sack and pulled out a handful of coins. Then he went around the barn, giving one to each man, including Llelo, who took his and clenched it in his fist without looking at it or Hywel.
Gruffydd, however, wasn’t so quiet, and he tried to give back the coin Hywel had forced into his hand. “What is this for, my lord?”
“No more and far less than you deserve. I believe
in rewarding men when they excel at their work. I haven’t always had the means to do so as I would like. Today I do.” He looked around at all of them. “You each gave me your opinion with honesty and without expectation of gain for yourselves. You, individually and together, are worth more to me than fifteen sacks of gold.”
Then Hywel turned to Gwen and dropped a coin into her lap, and when she looked up at him, brow furrowing, he said, “Don’t argue with me.”
Their gaze met for another few heartbeats, and then she nodded. “No, my lord. I won’t.”
Hywel turned back to Gruffydd and handed him the bag. “If you leave now, you can reach Ceredigion by morning. Best you don’t stop unless you have to.”
“You have my word,” Gruffydd said.
“Thank you. Cadell notices everything, but given the upheaval in his household, he can hardly question me about the whereabouts of my men.”
“If you show him the coins, it will distract him—especially when you suggest there might be more.” Gruffydd moved to put the sack of gold into the pack on his horse’s back while Steffan mounted his own stallion.
But before Gruffydd could buckle the straps closed, Gareth said, “Wait.” He put out a hand to Gwen, “Give me your coin.” Gwen obeyed, and then Gareth went around to each of the others and took their coins too.
Such was the trust among Hywel’s men that they gave them to Gareth without hesitation. He dumped them all back in the sack, fastened the buckle on the saddle bag, and finally turned to Hywel, who’d watched him without intervening, but without understanding either. “We appreciate the gesture, my lord, and we aren’t throwing your generosity back in your face, but imagine Cadell’s response if he discovered a gold coin on any of us.”
Hywel’s expression cleared. “He’d be apoplectic. He certainly would think there were more and know I’d lied to him.” Then he laughed. That had been a close call.
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