“Don’t worry about me,” Amaury said, his voice low and guttural. “Find Ralph.”
“We can do both.” Gareth jogged to Rhys’s side. Gwen’s stomach roiled again, afraid she’d see an arrow appear in his chest.
Hywel glanced towards Mari and Gwen. “I’m sorry, Mari. I don’t see your father.”
“Likely, the archer is long gone, too,” Gareth said.
“You and I should go for help, Gwen. Gareth and Hywel can track my father and the shooter.” Mari’s face was very pale, but she wasn’t in tears.
“That’s the best suggestion I’ve heard all day,” Hywel said. “Go, Mari. Now. Through the tunnel.”
Gwen caught Mari’s arm before she dashed away. “Do you know the tunnel well enough to find your way back? Because I don’t.”
Mari looked to Hywel, who said, “It would be safer, surely.”
“Not if we got lost,” Gwen said.
“She’s right, my lord,” Gareth said. “The archer wasn’t after the women. I want them safe, too, but getting lost underneath Newcastle is surely not the best way to accomplish that.”
“Send them to the friary for help. Amaury’s life depends upon it.” Rhys pointed to an arrow lying in the grass ten feet from him. “The archer may not have accomplished what he came for, but he would know better than to remain in his roost this long.”
Gareth bent to pick up the arrow. He looked at it and then held it out to Hywel. “There’s blood on it.”
“Do you think the arrow hit my father?” Mari’s voice went high.
Hywel strode to her. “He was well enough to run, and he’s an old soldier. He’ll be all right.”
“They should do as Rhys suggests,” Gareth said. “The healer at the friary can send a cart and bandages for Amaury. Perhaps if your father is injured, he will take refuge there as well. You and I, my lord, should do what we can from here.”
Mari bobbed her head in jerky agreement. Gwen took her elbow, and the two women set off at a half-run. Their skirts hindered the movement of their legs, but they discarded modesty and lifted their hems, following an overgrown track that started at the front of the abandoned chapel and ran southeast. Gwen wasn’t sure if she couldn’t feel her ankle because she hadn’t injured it very badly or if her anxiety was blocking out the pain.
“Do you know the way to the friary?” Mari said.
Gwen gestured ahead of them. “That’s Newcastle there.” She could see one of the many towers poking above the trees to the southwest. “I’m following my nose, but the tunnel dumped us out to the north of the town. We might be on the friary lands already without knowing it.” Gwen glanced at her friend. “Are you all right?”
“I wouldn’t even know,” Mari said.
“How did you end up in that clearing with your father and Prior Rhys?”
“A man sent by my father came for us,” Mari said. “He was very straightforward about what he wanted. He simply handed me a letter written in my father’s hand, asking for Prior Rhys and me to come to him. Prior Rhys didn’t want to leave until he’d told someone where we were going. He sent a message to Gareth through his servant, Tomos.”
“Unfortunately, we were not at the camp to get it,” Gwen said.
Mari nodded. “We’d only talked for a few moments before you arrived.”
“But you’ve been gone for hours,” Gwen said. “What have you been doing all this time?”
“Once we arrived at the chapel, the messenger told us that my father would show himself only when he was sure that we hadn’t been followed.”
Gwen shook her head. “Perhaps he waited too long, given that the archer got so close. Was it he who subdued the two guards at the tunnel’s exit?”
“What guards?” Mari said. “What do you mean subdued?”
Gwen pinched her lips together. “I’ll tell you later. It’s more important to know the rest of what your father said to you.”
“We had so little time before you came,” Mari said. “He did apologize for leaving me alone.”
“Did he tell you why?” Gwen said.
The track led them into the friary from the rear, through the gardens. By now the sun had gone down behind the hills to the west, but Gwen could still see well enough to navigate.
After a short pause, Mari said, “He said disappearing was the only way to protect me.”
“From what?” Gwen said. The two women slowed to a walk as they pushed through a gate between an orchard and the kitchen garden.
“I don’t know.” Mari shrugged. “I’m surprised to find myself calmer than I ever would have expected about it. I can’t change my father. I can’t change the past. Let’s get to the healer.”
Gwen and Mari hustled through the garden and almost ran into a brother bending over an herb bed with a hoe, pulling at a last few weeds before the onset of full dark. He straightened. “May I help you?” He was youngish—thirty perhaps—and had kilted his robe so the hem didn’t trail in the dirt while he worked. Another man hoed the garden ten feet away. He wore breeches and a shirt, which meant he was a lay brother, not a monk.
“A man has been shot, one of the knights in Earl Ranulf’s company,” Gwen said without preamble. “We need a stretcher, bandages, and the healer if you have one.”
“I am Matthias, the herbalist.” Then he pointed at the second man. “Find me three others to help.” He turned back to Gwen. “Where?”
“The old chapel.” Gwen gestured to the northwest. “Do you know it?”
Matthias’s brows drew together in an expression of concern, but he nodded. The other man ran off, still holding his hoe, and Matthias followed, headed towards the center of the monastery. Mari and Gwen trotted after him.
Gwen had seen larger monasteries, but none richer than this friary. The stained glass in the windows, the slate roofs, the well-tended grounds, and the bustle in the courtyard all pointed to considerable wealth. Maybe all monasteries in England were better supported than their Welsh counterparts, but either way, Gwen had hope that their infirmary would be well-stocked, and more importantly, that this healer was knowledgeable. He certainly exuded confidence.
Gwen and Mari arrived in the courtyard, breathless, and pulled up at a sign from the healer. “Wait here.”
Gwen bent over, her hands on her knees. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d run as far as this. She tried to calculate the relationship of the castle to the friary and to the chapel and decided that the three locations formed an uneven triangle, with the chapel at the northernmost point.
Matthias had disappeared, but he came hustling back a quarter of an hour later with another monk. “A cart will meet us on the track that leads to the chapel. Take me to your man.”
Breath or no breath, Mari and Gwen set off again. And it was only after they arrived back at the chapel that Gwen remembered Mari’s father. She had forgotten to ask about him, and she and Mari had seen no sign of him.
Chapter Eighteen
Gareth
Gareth watched Mari and Gwen go and then crouched beside Amaury to take his hand. The Norman knight’s eyes glinted beneath half-closed lids. “I live, Sir Gareth,” he said.
“Don’t speak,” Prior Rhys said.
Hywel touched Gareth’s shoulder, and Gareth moved with him a short distance away. “We need to track both Ralph and the archer. I’d like to know that the latter, at least, is long gone.”
“That will be my task,” Gareth said, and then added, “I wouldn’t have let the women go if I thought they were in danger.”
“I know. I’m not worried about them.” Hywel glanced to where Amaury lay. The knight’s chest rose and fell. “Someone really didn’t want Ralph to talk to us.”
“He’s a poor shot,” Gareth said, “I’ll say that for him.”
“That he used a longbow, not a crossbow, makes him a Welshman,” Hywel said.
“Any Welshman whose aim is that bad isn’t worthy of the name,” Gareth said. “Too bad for Amaury.”
�
��It will be dark soon. Meet me back here before an hour passes,” Hywel said.
“Yes, my lord,” Gareth said.
That Amaury still lived was one of the few pieces of good news in the last two days. Gareth’s comment to Gwen that this investigation got worse with each hour that passed continued to prove true. Bad enough that someone had attacked Gwen and struck Prior Rhys on the head; bad enough that three people had died. A lone archer roaming free in the countryside, against whom it was nearly impossible to defend, left Gareth with an ache behind his eyes. If Prince Henry were to come to Newcastle, they might be able to protect him inside the castle. But outside the castle, he’d be an easy target. A mediocre archer could hit a target at a hundred yards, and an excellent archer at four hundred.
Judging the direction from which the arrows had come, the archer had been hiding in the trees to the east of the chapel. An overgrown clearing surrounded the ruin, so it was a matter of crossing a field of patchy grass and scrub to get to the trees. Gareth made his way towards them, keeping to the bushes as best he could. He assumed the archer had fled, but he wasn’t going to bet his life on it.
Gareth looked back. He could just see Prior Rhys, still bent over Amaury fewer than a hundred yards away. The archer could have easily shot them from this place. Gareth inspected the ground at his feet but couldn’t make out any specific tracks. He moved along the fringe of the trees, glancing every now and again towards Rhys to make sure he didn’t need help. Another few yards along, Gareth came to an old oak. Something bumped into his forehead, and he stopped. Looking up, he saw the knotted end of a rope hanging from the lowest branch, which was at least twelve feet in the air. He hadn’t noticed it at first because he’d been looking at the ground.
Gareth tugged on the rope. It didn’t give way. Its fibers weren’t worn or marred with dirt, as would have occurred if it had been hanging in the tree for a while. Gareth knew he needed to get up there. Even though his shoulder hurt more than he wanted to admit, he gritted his teeth and grasped the rope, climbing hand over hand until he reached the branch onto which the rope had been tied. He pulled himself onto it and sat, rolling his shoulders and shaking out his left arm to loosen it and ease the pain. At last he stood, finding his balance, and slid his feet towards the cleft where the branch met the tree. When he reached it, he looked back.
The whole chapel was laid out before him, perfectly visible through a natural break in the oak’s growth that left an eight-foot-wide gap in the branches. Gareth mimed shooting off a bow and revised his estimation of the archer’s ability upward. With the oak branch as an unstable platform, hitting Ralph or Amaury would have meant achieving a tougher shot than if the archer had been standing on the ground.
The only signs that someone might have stood where Gareth himself was standing were scuff marks on the branch, possibly from the archer’s boots. Now that Gareth knew what to look for, he climbed out of the tree and found more boot prints in the dirt below the branch. He circled around the tree and began to track the archer away from the chapel, heading east. The soft earth meant the man wasn’t hard to follow. The archer had made no attempt to hide his retreat. But another quarter of a mile on, the woods and the prints ended at a deeply rutted, dirt road.
Gareth pulled up and bent to the last boot print. From that point, he moved in a gradually widening circle until he reached the base of another tree where he found the hoof prints of a single horse. Gareth stepped into the road, which carried on due north for a time before being lost in the hills in the distance. Going the other way, the road headed south before curving west. Gareth had never been here before, but the width of the road suggested to him that if he were to follow it, it might take him all the way back to Newcastle.
Suddenly, he heard the thud of a horse’s hooves, coming from the south. Gareth’s first instinct was to move toward the sound, but then he thought better of that action and retreated to the woods. Soon a riderless horse appeared, pounding down the road towards Gareth. He stepped from the trees, his hands up, making himself as large as possible to slow the racing horse. “Whoa! Whoa!”
The horse had been panicked, but he wasn’t wild. Gareth caught his bridle and ran with him a few yards until the horse stopped, breathing hard and whickering.
“That’s a good boy.” Gareth patted the horse’s neck and ran his hands down his legs. The horse was uninjured, but something had to have spooked him to have sent him racing away from his master. Still holding the reins, Gareth walked around to the horse’s other side—and noticed the longbow strapped to the saddle bags.
Gareth was already almost through the hour that Hywel had given him, but it was worth the extra time to find where this horse might have left his master. Gareth swung himself into the saddle and directed the horse’s head back down the road in the direction from which it had just come. Two hundred yards on, as the road curved west from Gareth’s initial position, which was now hidden behind him, Gareth found a dead man. He lay in the brush beside the road, his throat cut.
Damn was the mildest curse Gareth spit out as he dismounted and crouched by the body. Blood still trickled from the man’s neck, indicating he’d been killed very recently, and Gareth swiveled on his toes, wondering if he was in danger too. The road was empty of movement, however, and Gareth decided he should just get to work.
He studied the dead man, noting his slender build, well-worn clothing, and cheap leather armor. Then he picked up the man’s left hand. The bruising at the wrist indicated that someone had grasped it tightly, even wrenched it. The man’s other wrist was undamaged, but something wasn’t right with his fingers. Gareth didn’t realize what it was until he compared the dead man’s fingers to his own. Gareth didn’t shoot his bow often, but despite the finger tabs he always wore when shooting, his right hand had callouses from pulling at the bowstring. This man’s fingers did not.
Gareth ran his hand through his hair, wondering what the hell it meant. Questions mounted in his mind, not the least of which was whether or not this man was even the archer Gareth had been seeking. The lack of callouses said he wasn’t, but the bow on the horse’s back said that he was. Furthermore, whatever the man’s identity, Gareth wanted to know who had sent him, why had he sent him, and who had killed him. Gareth glanced back the way he’d come, imagining the series of events that had resulted in this death:
The archer fails to kill Ralph, shooting Amaury instead, and without a good angle of fire, gives up and flees to the edge of the woods where he left his horse. He rides south and west (back to Newcastle?) where he encounters another man, perhaps his superior, perhaps someone sent to silence him. One of the men dies but cannot control the horse, which races away. The killer hears Gareth calling to the horse, realizes he is out of time, and flees himself.
Gareth rummaged through the saddle bags, looking for something he could wrap the body with, and came up with a cloak. It was finer than he would have liked to waste on a dead man, but it wasn’t his, and he felt that he was out of time and too exposed out here on the road. Although the killer could be a mile away from here by now, he could also be watching Gareth from the trees, waiting for his chance to strike. In the dusk, he would then have all the time he might need to hide both both bodies.
Gareth laid the cloak on the ground and rolled the body into it, all the while trying to look in every direction at once. The blood had mostly stopped seeping from the dead man’s wound when he’d lain in the ditch, but as soon as Gareth moved him, the bleeding started again. He’d leave a trail behind him that a blind man could follow.
After untying the quiver and bow from the saddle bags and slinging them on his own back, Gareth threw the body over the horse. Then he took the reins and began walking, not back the way he’d come but towards Newcastle. Fifty yards on, he left the road for the woods. Because he had the newly risen moon to guide him by its light and location, he decided that he was better off finding his way back to the chapel by dead reckoning than taking the road to wherever it led.
After a quarter of a mile, Gareth reached a narrow track. He was about to turn onto it when he heard voices coming towards him. A moment later, a cart creaked into view, along with a number of other people on foot. Among them, Gareth recognized his wife.
Gareth lifted a hand in greeting and Hywel, who’d been walking beside one of the monks, quickened his steps to outpace the cart. “Your hour was up long since,” said the prince. “Gwen would have had my head if something had happened to you.”
“I apologize, my lord, but I couldn’t leave him in the road.” Gareth gestured to the body on the back of the horse.
Hywel eyed the dead man and then the bow on Gareth’s back. “I gather that’s what remains of our archer?”
“I don’t know who he is,” Gareth said, not ready to draw any firm conclusion yet.
“Did you kill him?”
Gareth barked a laugh, unoffended by Hywel’s question. “Not I. Someone else killed him moments before I found him, but I didn’t see who it was.”
Hywel swept a hand through his hair. “The dead are going to be stacked up like firewood in the chapel before we’re through.”
“Gareth!” Gwen hopped down from the cart when it reached him, and he caught her up in his arms.
“I’m all right,” he said.
“I had to trust that you would be,” Gwen said.
“How is Amaury?”
The cart carrying the Norman knight passed them by. He lay in the bed, the arrow still rising from his left shoulder. The prior sat in the cart with Amaury, while Mari perched beside him on the rail.
“He’s alive,” Gwen said. “The healer, Matthias, says the wound isn’t as serious as all that, even though it has bled heavily. Even Prior Rhys is reluctantly optimistic.”
“We’ll take care of him,” said a man in monk’s robes, walking behind the cart.
The Fourth Horseman Page 16