The Fallen Princess

by Sarah Woodbury

  Hywel appeared to have put that life behind him with his marriage. Upon entering the hall with her father, Gwen spotted Hywel’s wife, Mari, sitting at the high table among some of the lords of Gwynedd who’d come for Calan Gaeaf. Since Gwen was supposed to wait for King Owain there, she excused herself from her father and made her way to where Mari sat. Gwen wouldn’t normally have merited a chair at the high table, but since it was early in the morning and plenty of seats were empty, she sat when Mari patted the chair beside her.

  “Tell me,” Mari said, “where is my husband?”

  “He’s standing over a body,” Gwen said. “I suppose I can tell you because everyone is going to know shortly, but Hywel believes it to be the remains of his cousin, Tegwen.”

  Mari put her hand to her mouth. “How can that be? She ran away with a Dane five years ago.”

  Gwen wondered how many times she would hear that exact phrase today. The story was legend. After Gwen had returned to Gwynedd last year, she’d even heard girls giggling about their marriage prospects with the caveat you can always run away with a Dane if the man didn’t turn out to be all that a girl wished. Gwen hadn’t realized where the phrase came from until today.

  “Or maybe she didn’t,” Gwen said. “I know that’s the story, but Hywel is very sure that the body is the remains of Tegwen or he wouldn’t have sent me home to Aber to tell King Owain of it.”

  “Do you mean to say that Tegwen has been alive this whole time? Do you have any idea where she’s been living? How could we have not known of her?”

  Gwen shook her head. “No, no. That’s just it. She hasn’t. It looks as if she died years ago—maybe even the very day she disappeared.” The more Gwen thought about it, the more likely that scenario seemed to her. Running away with a Dane would have put Tegwen out of reach, but surely someone would have heard a rumor of her at least once in all these years. Gwen herself had gone to Dublin last year (which was a polite way of putting it, given that Prince Cadwaladr had abducted her) but she hadn’t seen Tegwen among the court. Admittedly, she hadn’t thought to look either. “For some reason, someone left her body on the beach early this morning.”

  Mari’s face had gone very white, and Gwen pressed her hand. “Did you know her?”

  “Yes, I did.” Mari took a sip of warm mead, and some color returned to her face. “My uncle Goronwy and her grandfather were well acquainted. She and I were the same age, and she visited my uncle’s estates often.” Her brow furrowed. “You are of an age with us, more or less. Why didn’t you know her?”

  Gwen explained again why she hadn’t, though she was beginning to wonder if the issue wasn’t so much that Tegwen hadn’t been at court as that Gwen hadn’t sought her out when she’d visited. At the time, Gwen’s life had revolved around Hywel. Gwen’s only other excuse was that Tegwen had married Bran at fifteen, and Gwen had left Gwynedd with her father shortly thereafter, on the heels of King Owain assuming the throne after the war in Ceredigion.

  “Mari, when did you last see her?”

  Mari rubbed at her forehead with her fingers as if she had a headache. Gwen felt one coming on too. “Perhaps … a few weeks before she disappeared? She confided in me that she thought she might be pregnant again.”

  “Did she seem happy?” Gwen said.

  Mari looked at Gwen through narrowed eyes. “Yes, of course. Why are you asking me this?”

  “Mari, Tegwen’s skull was fractured. We suspect—Hywel, Gareth, and I—that someone hit her very hard and killed her. Do you have any idea who could have done such a thing? Or why?”

  Mari rubbed at the back of her neck and looked down at the table.

  “What is it? What don’t you want to tell me?” Gwen said.

  Mari let out a sigh. “When I last saw Tegwen, she told me that she’d learned a terrible secret about her husband. It was tearing her apart.”

  “What was the secret?” Gwen said.

  Mari shook her head. “I tried to get it out of her, but she wouldn’t tell me. She didn’t want to cast aspersions on Bran’s character.”

  Gwen frowned. “If I thought about her at all, I assumed her marriage was unhappy since she’d run away. You’re saying it wasn’t?”

  “The truth is, when we were girls, Tegwen fell in and out of love every week depending upon which man had talked to her most recently.” Mari shrugged. “I suppose I was like that at fifteen too, but Tegwen never learned constancy. When she told me she no longer loved her husband, I didn’t think anything of it because she’d said as much to me at least once a year and then changed her mind if he bought her a new dress. Still, she seemed different, more somber this time.”

  “Is that why you believed, as we all did, that she ran off with a Dane?” Gwen said.

  “Not exactly,” Mari said. “I thought she’d run away with the man she’d loved before she married Bran.”

  That coincided with her father’s comment, but Gwen still felt a little overwhelmed by what Mari was telling her. She really hadn’t known Tegwen. “Tegwen loved someone before Bran? I mean, more than just a passing fancy?”

  “Oh yes,” Mari said. “So much so that she pleaded to King Owain—though he wasn’t king at that time—for him or his father to intervene and prevent the marriage, but neither saw a reason to go against the wishes of her family. I don’t know if anyone else other than a few of her close friends knew about this other man. I never met him or even knew his name, but if he was a Dane and not well-born, it would have been an impossible match for a princess.”

  “It may come out now that he never existed,” Gwen said.

  “Oh, he was real,” Mari said. “I know that for certain.”

  “How?” Gwen said.

  “She was all mysterious smiles and knowing looks whenever anyone talked about a man whom they were interested in. She referred to him only as ‘B’, and the letter didn’t stand for Bran.”

  “I don’t see why they didn’t elope in the first place,” Gwen said. “In seven years, their marriage could have been as legal as any other.”

  “She was a princess,” Mari said.

  Gwen looked at her friend out of the corner of her eye. “Was she unfaithful to Bran after the wedding?”

  Mari bit her lip. “I think so, but not right away. You met him, didn’t you?”

  “I suppose.” Gwen shrugged, casting her mind back to that long-ago time. “I must have seen him when he came to Aber or Aberffraw.”

  Mari raised her eyebrows. “You must not have been paying attention. Bran was incredibly handsome. All the girls favored him. Tegwen ended up admiring him too. And he treated her very well initially.”

  “So Bran did love her back?”

  “Bran wanted her because she was beautiful and Prince Cadwallon’s daughter,” Mari said.

  “So ‘no’,” Gwen said. “What about Tegwen’s lover?”

  “Whoever he was, he broke it off with her when she married Bran. It was only at the end that she took up with him again.”

  Even as a married woman, Gwen found this story shocking. She knew that women weren’t always faithful to their husbands. Husbands certainly weren’t faithful to their wives, though a wife had the right to compensation and to divorce her husband if he lay with another woman three times. In turn, if Bran discovered Tegwen with another man, he was justified in beating her. “Did Bran find out?” Gwen said.

  “I don’t know,” Mari said.

  “Wait—I didn’t really hear you when you mentioned it the first time, but did you say that she was pregnant when she disappeared?” Gwen said.

  “She told me she was,” Mari said.

  “Was the child Bran’s?” Gwen held her breath.

  “I don’t know.” Mari said the words so quietly Gwen almost didn’t catch them. “The two daughters she gave him definitely were his, but I don’t know about the child she was carrying when she disappeared.”

  “No part of any story I have heard about Tegwen up until now mentions that she was pregnant.” Gwen s
at back, her mind churning at the information Mari had given her. For all that Gwen had traveled the length of Wales, lost her mother to childbirth, spent the last years as a spy for Prince Hywel, and was now a married woman, she could still be surprised by the behavior of those she lived amongst. “And you never knew the name of her lover?”

  Mari shook her head. “I’m sorry. Tegwen would never tell me more than the scantiest details about him, not even after she’d found solace in too much wine and her tongue loosened.”

  Gwen looked carefully at her friend. “Was that a habit of hers, to drink too much?”

  Mari’s eyes were sad. “Married to a man who didn’t love her, pregnant with a child she didn’t want … it isn’t only men who choose that route.”

  Gwen swept a hand down her own belly. She couldn’t help but smile as her child chose that moment to kick.

  Mari was watching her closely. “You can’t understand it, Gwen. Nor can I. But Tegwen deserves our pity, not our judgment.”

  “You misunderstand, Mari. I don’t judge her, and I do pity her. I also know that with a few different twists of fate, her situation could have been mine. Wasn’t Gareth in the same position as this lover of Tegwen’s—worse, even, as he was banished from Cadwaladr’s retinue and sent to wander Wales until he could find a lord to take him in?”

  “I suppose,” Mari said. “Come to think on it, I could have shared her fate as well, except that it was I who was impoverished, not the man I loved.”

  “And now you’re married to a prince!”

  The two friends clasped hands.

  “I will do my best by Tegwen,” Gwen said. “I promise.”

  Chapter Five

  Gareth

  As he trudged up the beach beside his young charge, Gareth eyed the small sack Llelo had slung over his shoulder. “Are we having clams for breakfast?”

  Llelo shot him a woeful look. “I didn’t have time to dig up very many. It’s not enough to share with more than a few people. I should give them to the king, shouldn’t I?”

  “Lucky for you, King Owain doesn’t eat clams for breakfast,” Gareth said. “Bring them to the kitchen for boiling and you can eat them at the cook’s table. I know you spend half your life at it already.”

  “That’s because I’m always hungry!”

  Gareth shook Llelo’s shoulder. “I saw you huddled with the children. I would think that there might be a few nightmares among them over the next day or two.”

  “Is it true that the body is that of the king’s niece?” Llelo said.

  “You heard that, did you?” Gareth said. “I can’t say for sure. Prince Hywel thinks so.”

  “How could she come to look like that?” Llelo said. “If she drowned, her body would have been bloated, but if she died a long time ago, wouldn’t her body have rotted away?”

  “How would you know about that?” Gareth said.

  Llelo shrugged. “I’ve seen plenty of dead animals. I found the remains of sheep we lost during a previous winter. Usually they’re just bones by the time I get to them.”

  “Right. Of course.” Gareth nodded, acknowledging that his thirteen-year-old self would have known as much, which was why it always stumped him when he came across adults who had no experience with dead bodies. Common folk who lived off the land or worked it had a very different perspective on life and death than the nobility. “Regardless of how recently she died, whether last month or years ago, her body was kept in a dry place and all the moisture leached from her before she could rot.”

  “Like if you leave a dead frog in the sun?” Llelo said.

  “Even so,” Gareth said.

  Llelo’s brow furrowed. “I came upon a cave once with a dead sheep inside. The body was all brown and dried out like this body. The wool was still soft!”

  Gareth nodded. “That sounds like the right kind of place. You probably don’t remember since you were so young, but we had a dry spring and summer the year Tegwen may have died. Crops failed, even on Anglesey, because of it.” Herders had found the high pastures in the mountains parched along with the lowlands. Creeks and pools that had never failed in living memory had lacked water. Gareth had suffered himself in his trek to Dolwyddelan, finding places to fill his water skins in short supply.

  The boy driving the cart that would carry Tegwen’s body to Aber Castle had turned the horse around so it faced away from the beach, and Prince Hywel stood by the cart bed. Evan nodded at Gareth as he approached and stepped closer. “I have given a report to Prince Hywel.”

  “I will hear it from him and then from you,” Gareth said. “Good work.”

  While Gareth moved to stand beside Prince Hywel, the men formed up behind them. Everyone would walk back to the castle behind the cart to honor the burden it was carrying. “Tegwen will receive the ceremony due her, even if five years too late,” Hywel said.

  “I’m sorry, my lord,” Gareth said. “I wish there was something I could say to make this easier.”

  “We can find out who murdered her,” Hywel said. “It’s the least I can do. I failed her in life; I refuse to fail her in death.”

  “How did you fail her?” Gareth said. “It’s hardly your fault that she’s dead.”

  Hywel sighed. “She told me she didn’t want to marry Bran, and I didn’t help her talk to my father. I knew Bran had little regard for her and was marrying her because she was Cadwallon’s daughter, but—” The muscles around his eyes tightened.

  “Marrying for love is rare among noblemen,” Gareth said.

  “Not in my family,” Hywel said. “We all marry for love. Why do you think my father sacrificed the Church’s regard to marry Cristina?”

  “He wanted to unite the last remnants of his family—”

  “He loves her,” Hywel said simply. “I love Mari. Rhun will find a wife soon too, and if he chooses a woman he doesn’t love, my father will not accede to his request.”

  Gareth loved Gwen more than life itself, so he could understand what Hywel was saying. And it was certainly true that a Welsh woman of whatever status generally had more say in whom she married than a Norman noble woman. A couple’s ability to elope was codified into Welsh law. King Owain’s own sister had eloped with the much older King of Deheubarth, which was how Gwynedd had become involved in Ceredigion in the first place. While her husband was absent, negotiating a treaty in Gwynedd, a Norman force attacked her castle and killed her by hanging her from the battlement.

  “So why didn’t your father discourage Tegwen’s union with Bran?” Gareth said.

  “I don’t know. Maybe her marriage is what made him think about his own unions differently,” Hywel said. “I didn’t know my father as well then as I do now. It’s hard to think of him as ever being wrong about anything.”

  Gareth didn’t know what to say to that. King Owain had thrown Gareth into a cell a year ago, having accused him of a murder he didn’t commit. Hywel must have guessed what he was thinking, because he shot him a sardonic glance. “Except when he’s angry, my father is usually a good judge of character.”

  “Was Bran a good man?” Gareth said. “I’m getting the sense that he wasn’t.”

  “I didn’t know him well.” Hywel shrugged. “Many would say that my character leaves much to be desired, and yet my father trusts me, and I have ever sought to serve him. Perhaps the same could be said of Bran.”

  Gareth bowed his head, granting Hywel his point. “Given that Bran is dead, he cannot be our immediate concern. He was not the one who left Tegwen’s body on the beach.”

  “We know who left her body on the beach,” Hywel said.

  “Cadwaladr,” Gareth said.

  Hywel scowled. “The question now is what drove my uncle to do so five years after Tegwen’s disappearance.”

  “Five years after he killed her,” Gareth said.

  Hywel held up one finger. “We don’t know that. We don’t know anything about the circumstances of her death, and until we do, we will not speculate.”

  �
��Yes, my lord.” Gareth acknowledged Hywel’s authority in this matter, but just because they weren’t going to talk about it didn’t mean Gareth couldn’t think it.

  The cart started rolling forward, and after a pause for it to get a few yards ahead, Hywel lifted his horse’s reins to get him moving. Gareth did the same.

  “My lord, if I may, you were only fifteen when Tegwen married Bran,” Gareth said, changing the subject in order to abide by his prince’s wish. Maybe they didn’t have to talk about Cadwaladr now, but they would have to face his involvement eventually. Gareth knew it was petty of him, but he couldn’t be happier to learn of Cadwaladr’s culpability. The man was a menace—to himself and to his country. King Owain was going to have to face his treachery eventually, and to Gareth’s mind it was better to do so sooner rather than later, before he betrayed them more completely than he already had.

  “I was a man,” Hywel said. “That should have been enough.”

  Gareth shook his head. Even if Hywel was chastising himself for his failure now, the man he was then would never have interfered in the marriage of his cousin, no matter how much he loved her. Hywel’s concern for Tegwen did shed new light on his intervention in his sister’s marriage to Anarawd, who by all accounts hadn’t been a good man either. In fact, it might explain everything.

  Llelo tugged on Gareth’s sleeve. “Da.” Llelo had started calling him that in the last week since Gareth had returned from Ceredigion. It was a familiarity that warmed Gareth’s heart, and he hoped their coming baby wouldn’t put Llelo off or make him jealous. Every child needed an older brother—two in this case—though Dai, for all his youthful enthusiasm, was taking longer to warm up. “I found out one more thing. One of the boys I talked to lives to the west of the beach. He—Ceri—heard a cart pass by as he was returning from the latrine in the middle of the night. Carts never pass by at that hour, so he ran after it to see who it was.”

  Hywel came out of his reverie and looked past Gareth to Llelo. “Did Ceri recognize the driver?”