John’s expression didn’t change. “He is a single man.” But he turned to look into the fire for a moment before moving from his seat behind the table to a chair nearer to Gareth.
“He’s a watchman,” Gareth said, unable to keep his suspicions to himself. “Don’t tell me that it wouldn’t be in keeping with Luke’s character to take payment in kind for keeping the council and the sheriff from bothering the brothel or its patrons.”
As before, John looked affronted at any maligning of his sheriff’s honor. “That is not the way we function. We don’t take payment, in kind or otherwise. As long as those involved break no law and keep to themselves, we don’t bother them.”
“Yes, but Luke may have told them a different story,” Gareth said. “Your sheriff has been gone over a week. The mice are merry—”
“—where there’s no cat.” John sank lower into his chair, his hands dangling between his knees. “The English have that saying too.”
“Something more,” Gareth said. “One of the merchants goes by the name Flann MacNeill. He says he’s never been to Ireland, but he is an Irishman. It’s a connection to Conall—not a strong one, I admit, but I can’t ignore it.”
John’s brow furrowed. “That is more worrisome than anything you’ve said so far. I can’t say I’ve met more than one or two Irishmen in the whole of my life, and now we encounter two in the space of a day? Is that too much of a coincidence to be believed?”
“Coincidence is always possible, but Conall had a coin to that brothel, and now Flann and his partner, Will, have gone to the brothel,” Gareth said. “Is the owner, by chance, Irish?”
John shook his head. “No.”
“Who owns it?”
John licked his lips. “The Lady’s Slipper is owned by a group of merchants in the town who went into business together.”
Gareth threw back his head and laughed. “You’re telling me that by day these men are respectable business people? Was Roger Carter by chance one of them?”
“No!” John looked shocked.
Gareth raised his eyebrows. “Can you get me their names?”
“I-I don’t know them all.”
“But you can find out?”
John nodded. “I confess that I am in no way looking forward to questioning them.”
“It will have to be you who does it,” Gareth said. “You can’t leave it to one of your men, or even to me. They’ll appreciate your discretion, I’m sure.”
“And every one of them will report back to the sheriff the moment he arrives.” John sighed.
Gareth couldn’t think of anything to say that would make John feel better, so he said, “Shrewsbury has other brothels, correct?”
“Two more in the town and, as I said, a third beyond the town limits.”
“Owned by the same group that owns The Lady’s Slipper,” Gareth said, remembering.
“Yes,” John said, and he drew the s out in a long hiss. “You and I will attend to this together in the morning. The manager of the brothel will be less wary then and won’t be angry because we disrupted her customers. I will collect you.”
Gareth rose to his feet. “As you wish.”
“Can I convince you not to bring your wife?” John looked up at him hopefully.
“It’s hard for us to understand why visiting a brothel is worse than investigating murder, but—” Gareth snorted laughter, “I have already persuaded her.”
The look on John’s face was one of pure relief.
Chapter Sixteen
Hywel
Like most nights—and most knights—Hywel dreamed of violence, much of it directed at him. Tonight, he woke with a start just as he blocked an opposing knight’s sword, which had been aimed at his head.
It was a relief to wake, but as Hywel lay in bed, breathing quietly to himself in the dark, he realized that it hadn’t been his imminent demise that had woken him, but something else: a noise. He heard it again, the scrape of a shoe in the corridor and then the creak of wood. The room in which Hywel lay with Cadell and Cadifor wasn’t completely dark, as they hadn’t closed the shutters against the cold night air, and the nearly full moon made a square of light on the floor as it shown through the open window.
As he listened, hardly daring to breathe, Hywel felt motion to his right and was in no way surprised to see Cadifor already crouched beside his pallet on the floor. Hywel had never been able to put anything over on his foster father, who seemed to sleep with one eye open.
Cadifor gestured with one finger, a quick slash to the left, to indicate that he should wake Cadell, with whom Hywel was sharing the bed. Hywel obeyed, rolling over and slipping a hand over Cadell’s mouth before putting his lips to his ear and saying as softly as he could, “Wake up.”
Cadell was a sound sleeper, still more a child in that than a grown man, but his eyes popped open instantly, and they widened to see Hywel hovering above him. “What is it?”
“We don’t know.” Hywel lifted his chin to point at Cadifor, who had by now moved off his pallet to the end of Hywel’s bed.
Hywel had removed only his shirt and boots before getting into bed—not because he expected treachery from his uncle, but because he didn’t need a specific lesson to know not to trust where it hadn’t been earned. He slipped his shirt over his head and reached for his boots. He was trying to be as quiet as possible, while at the same time hurrying, even as he cursed to himself that they’d been caught so unawares.
Cadifor, meanwhile, had cat-walked to the door, which remained closed. With his boot knife in his right hand, a wicked long blade that Hywel had been afraid even to hold as a boy, he put his back to the wall beside the frame. If someone came through the door, Cadifor would be right there to stop him.
Cadell hastily pulled on his boots too, while Hywel drew his own knife from its sheath. In the confined space of the room where a swinging sword might end up hurting Cadifor or Cadell, a knife was the better weapon.
Hywel peered out the window of the room, looking for an escape that didn’t require them to go through the door. The barracks, in which their room was located, abutted the wooden palisade that encircled the castle. Unfortunately, while their room was on the top floor, the window faced south instead of overlooking the wall. Hywel could have had a more spacious room in the main living quarters of the castle next to the hall, but he’d insisted on sleeping with his men, who were mixed up among Madog’s men in the dormitory one floor below. He hadn’t wanted to put anyone out. That instinct was looking near-to-prescient now.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t an easy drop to the ground, and since the window didn’t give them access to the exterior of the castle, they couldn’t actually leave like every muscle in Hywel’s body was screaming at him to do.
“Hywel.”
Hywel turned back at Cadifor’s breathy warning. The latch had clicked and the door swung open on greased hinges. The room was shadowed enough that all Hywel saw at first was the glint of a knife coming through the door.
His second boot still in his hand, Cadell bounded forward without waiting for Cadifor to move first. The sight of his prey, upright and alert instead of lying in bed, even if he held a boot instead of a sword, gave the intruder a moment’s hesitation. That was all the time Cadifor needed to thrust his knife through the man’s back and turn with him so that the body was between Cadifor and the door. The move saved his life since a second man had come through the door behind the first.
This man was better prepared for opposition than his companion, and he launched himself towards Hywel with a muted grunt. The two men fought silently and yet brutally, in quick hand-to-hand combat, Hywel countering the man’s knife with his own.
Meanwhile, a third man sprang upon Cadell and backed him up against the bed, followed by a fourth, who didn’t get past the doorway because Cadifor was right there to stop him, having dropped the first man he’d killed to the floor. Hywel finally managed to get his knife under his opponent’s guard, and he shoved it through the man’
s chest. Like the first man through the door, this intruder wasn’t wearing armor. Perhaps he knew that leather creaked and mail clinked, and he’d been aiming for a silent attack.
Before the man could even fall to the floor, Hywel pulled his knife from his body, spun around, and drove it into the back of the man who was fighting Cadell. While Hywel had been busy with his own opponents, Cadifor had already killed two more.
Then Cadifor shouted a warning, and Hywel turned again to see yet another man coming through the door. This latest attacker was too much for Cadifor, however, and he was forced backward, causing him to trip over one of the bodies behind him. Hywel leapt over his foster father in order to slice through the man’s neck.
That man collapsed and Cadifor, thankfully still breathing, scrambled to his feet to rejoin the fight. Containing the attackers within a foot of the doorway was their best option, and the two of them fought shoulder to shoulder. Unfortunately, as the next man went down beneath one of Hywel’s thrusts, the blade of Hywel’s knife snapped. When he held it up, only the hilt and two inches of jagged blade remained, since the rest of the blade remained in the man’s body.
Cadifor shoved at Hywel’s shoulder to get him out of the way, just as two more men attacked simultaneously. Cadifor was pressed hard by the first and thus unable to stop the second from chasing after Hywel, who skidded across the bloody floor to his sword, which he’d propped in the corner by the window. He grabbed his sheath, but wasn’t able to pull out his sword before his opponent raised his own, prepared to bring it down on his head, just like in the dream—except Hywel had no sword this time to counter it.
Crash!
The man with the sword keeled over, and Hywel found himself facing Cadell, who held a piece of the washing basin in each hand.
Hywel gaped at him, finding uncontrolled laughter overcoming him. “A wash basin? Where’s your knife?”
Cadell looked ruefully down at the heavy pieces of pottery he held and then gestured with one of them to where his knife lay on the floor under the window. “He was on you so fast, I grabbed the first thing to hand.”
Cadifor grunted as he poked his head into the hallway. “More are coming!” Feet pounded on the stairs, and men shouted from the common room below.
Hywel raced forward to help Cadifor drag the dead men away from the door so it would close. He eased the door shut, making sure it didn’t bang, though it was probably very much a matter of tuning a harp after a string had already broken. “My uncle didn’t think very much of our skills if he sent only ten men to kill us. He should have sent two dozen.”
“He may have, since more are coming.” Cadifor crouched next to one of the men, feeling along his body for weapons. “My guess, we were supposed to be dead asleep, thanks to the potency of the drink he served us.”
He found a knife in the man’s boot, a sharp one, sturdily made, which he tossed to Hywel, who caught it and slid it into his empty sheath.
“Should we kill those who aren’t dead?” Cadell said.
“Not in cold blood.” Even counting the fight in the room, Cadell hadn’t yet killed a man in battle, and seeing how the attackers who weren’t dead were unconscious, they posed no threat. Hywel saw no reason for Cadell to cross that particular barrier today.
“We need to get our men and get out of here,” Cadifor said.
“Any suggestion as to how we do that?” Hywel said. “We have more of Madog’s soldiers coming up the stairs, wondering where these men have got to, and a barracks full of enemies between us and the exit. I imagine if our men aren’t yet dead, they soon will be.”
“Likely,” Cadifor said, without emotion, though Cadell looked stricken at the thought. In response, the older man held out his arm to Cadell. “I’m happy to fight at your side any time, my lord.”
Cadell had been raised by his own mother, so he had never met Cadifor and his sons before Hywel had requested that they join his teulu. But even short acquaintance had Cadell coveting Cadifor’s approval, as well he might. Cadell wanted to be a warrior, and nobody could mistake the experience and wisdom in Cadifor’s craggy face.
Thus, Cadell eagerly grasped Cadifor’s forearm, prompting Hywel to roll his eyes, though he made sure he was slightly to the right and behind Cadell when he did it so that only Cadifor could see.
Then Hywel straightened, pushing aside the loss of his companions, Evan and Gruffydd among them, whom he’d left to their own devices downstairs, and forcing himself to concentrating on saving Cadell and Cadifor.
“Why aren’t they attacking?” Cadell said.
“Because they’re followers, Cadell, and not used to thinking for themselves, not in Madog’s domain.” Hywel worried at his lower lip with his teeth. He recognized one of the dead men as the captain of Dinas Bran’s garrison. What he wasn’t was the leader of Madog’s teulu. Where that man was, Hywel didn’t know, and it could be that Madog was endeavoring to keep certain hands clean. At this stage, however, Hywel didn’t see why he was bothering. Murdering the edling of Gwynedd was going to start a war, no matter who did it.
Then again, maybe that was Madog’s plan. If he believed Hywel’s father to be weak beyond reason, by killing Hywel, he would leave Gwynedd rudderless and ripe for the taking.
That wasn’t quite the ending for his life Hywel had envisioned. Certainly, he wasn’t ready to die with Cadwaladr unpunished. With sudden resolve, he moved to the oil lamp that lay on the table beside the bed and lit it with a strike from the fire starter that had been left beside it.
Just as the wick flared, more shouts came up from the common room below them, along with the unmistakable clash of metal on metal. Hywel picked up the lantern. “It appears, Cadell, that they aren’t waiting.” Hywel met Cadifor’s gaze, the lamp in his hand. “Yes?”
“I’d say so, my lord.”
While Cadell’s eyes widened, Hywel dropped the oil lamp onto the bed, and then flung his arm out across Cadell’s chest to stop him from leaping forward.
“What are you doing?” Cadell said.
“Getting us out of here,” Hywel said.
The lamp had tipped onto its side, spilling oil onto the bedding, which immediately lit where the oil had pooled. It was a matter of a few heartbeats for the fire to get going, at which point Hywel gathered up the rest of his belongings, his sword among them, while waving a hand at Cadell that he should buckle on his own sword.
Cadell obeyed, his eyes never leaving the flames, which in those few moments spread across the bedcover to reach the hangings.
Cadifor jerked his head. “Time to go.”
Trying to breathe without tension, Hywel waited in front of the door for Cadifor, who stood to one side of the frame as he had earlier, to open it. At a nod from Hywel, he swung it wide and Hywel bounded through it, driving his new knife into the chest of a man on the other side, who from his awkward position looked like he’d been about to put a boot through the door.
A moment later, Cadifor and Cadell were through too, their swords bare in their hands, and it was chaos in the corridor and the stairs as the three men from Gwynedd fought their way down it.
The passage was narrow, and the stairs circled around to the right, which gave the advantage to right-handed men, but forced the men coming up to defend left-handed. Hywel was so focused on the men coming towards him that he didn’t glance back at the death behind him, though he had made sure to leave the door ajar, so the air would feed the flames as it flowed through the door and out the window they’d also left wide open. He gave a passing thought for the men they’d left unconscious in the room. He was still glad not to have murdered them outright. They had a fighting chance, which was more than they had aimed to give Hywel, Cadell, and Cadifor.
Cadifor skewered the man in front of him, and they all leapt over the body in turn as they thudded down the last few steps to ground level and came out of the stairwell into a room seething with fighting men, straining and hacking away at each other in the dark, since the windows in here had been
left closed for the night. Then the front door opened—perhaps bringing reinforcements, perhaps bringing someone who’d gone out to relieve himself.
It didn’t matter why. Hywel felt the gust of air whoosh past him, moving up the stairs towards the fire which was greedily consuming everything in its path.
Boom! Something crashed to the floor—a section of the roof, Hywel guessed.
Cadifor took the noise as his signal to leap into the fray, though not to fight. “Fire! The barracks are on fire!”
He’d always had a voice that carried, though by this point, even the most intent or dimwitted could smell smoke and feel heat from the flames raging above them.
“Move! Move!” The leader of the garrison might be dead upstairs, but he had an able second, and that man urged his men out the front door. Several who’d been fighting Hywel’s men fought shoulder-to-shoulder with each other instead to be the first to escape out the door.
“Our turn,” Hywel said, but he didn’t follow where Madog’s men had gone. On the far side of the room there was a second door, which opened towards the stable. “This way, men!”
In the dark, Hywel’s people wouldn’t be able to make out his features, but all of them should recognize his voice. Those who could walk struggled after him. On the way, Hywel scooped up one of the younger men, who was on his knees, bleeding heavily from his right side. Flinging the man’s arm across his shoulder and grasping him around his waist, Hywel staggered with him out the door, which Cadell had reached first. Smoke billowed everywhere around them and, in an unorganized bunch, they hurried across the gap between the barracks and the stable.
With the fire lighting the sky above them, the moon shining stolidly down, and the torches blazing from sconces at the gatehouse and from the great hall, it was nowhere near dark. But the few men from Gwynedd were lost amidst the chaos in the courtyard as men ran to and fro, waking the castle to the threat. The whole of Dinas Bran was built in wood, and there was a very real danger that the fire in the barracks would spread to adjacent buildings, not to mention the palisade.
The Renegade Merchant Page 13