The Renegade Merchant (18 page)

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.

 “How many did we lose?” Hywel said as
they found refuge in the darkness of the stable, having come into
the stable through one of the side doors. There were three doors in
all—one on each end and a main, double doorway on the long front
side facing the courtyard of the castle.

The horses were whinnying and rearing,
smelling smoke and fearing it. Cadell ran from one to another,
freeing them. Stable boys were helping, and with the smoke and the
darkness, nobody looked closely at Cadell or wondered why he was
still alive and not dead on the floor of his room in the
barracks.

“Four, my lord,” Cadifor said.

Hywel nodded, accepting for now what
couldn’t be changed. Evan, Gareth’s close friend, was one of the
other survivors, and he took the arm of the man Hywel had carried
from the barracks and eased him to the ground. He felt at the man’s
neck and then looked up at Hywel. “Five, my lord.”

“Leaving the five of us.” Hywel shook his
head, even as he ripped at the tail of his shirt to staunch the
blood flowing from a gash he’d just discovered on his upper arm.
“This is my fault.”

“Recriminations are for later, my prince.”
Gruffydd, Rhun’s former captain, approached and took the cloth from
Hywel in order to wrap it around Hywel’s arm. The wound wasn’t
deep, and later it would hurt, but it didn’t now.

Hywel acknowledged that it was no
coincidence that the two most experienced men in his company were
the only two to survive the attack in the common room. He was glad
beyond measure that Cadell had been sleeping with him, or the youth
would have been among the dead too. Madog’s men had nearly finished
the job. “We must leave now.”

Cadell came running back from the main
entrance to the stable. “The front gate is open.”

“It would be. They can hardly fight this
fire bringing up one bucket at a time from the well,” Cadifor
said.

Hywel took in a breath and looked at the
others—fellow warriors, friends, brothers. “We ride out that gate,
and we don’t stop for anyone or anything.”

“Except for me.”

Hywel spun on his heel to see his Aunt
Susanna standing in the doorway that led to the courtyard, her hand
to her chest, recovering her breath. Likely, she’d run here from
the hall. All of the horses but their five were out of the stable
now, so they were alone.

“Aunt,” Hywel said.

“You can’t go out the front. There are too
many men between you and safety, but you can lead your horses out
the postern gate. I’ve sent the guard away to help fight the fire.
It’s just through here.” She hastened across the stable towards a
far doorway, opposite the one they’d come in from the barracks, and
waited for them while they hastily collected their horses.

The blacksmith’s shop was adjacent to the
stable, on the opposite side from the barracks. Behind a stack of
kindling for feeding the forge lay a narrow gateway, just wide
enough for a horse to pass through.

Hywel glanced back. The fire had consumed
the barracks’ roof. He wouldn’t have said that a thousand buckets
of water could contain the blaze now and thought Madog would be
better off soaking everything around the barracks instead of the
barracks itself. Meanwhile, Susanna opened the gate, and the others
filed through it. Hywel was last, and he hesitated as he reached
his aunt, who was waiting for him. “Thank you.”

“I guessed what my husband planned to do,
and I didn’t warn you,” she said. “I would never have forgiven
myself if you’d died.”

Hywel leaned forward and kissed her cheek.
“I regret that I will repay your loyalty with war against your
husband.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m counting on
it.”

That took Hywel back apace. Her hatred for
Madog had to be immense to say such a thing. “And your sons.”

Susanna took in a deep breath. “I beg you to
spare them, if you can.”

Hywel’s heart filled with pity. “You have my
word.”

Hywel

N
one of the others had suffered anything more in the fight than
sore muscles and a few bloody scrapes, which was fortunate, because
the postern gate opened onto the narrowest track Hywel had ever
seen. Its poor state of repair had to be deliberate, since of
course Madog didn’t want anyone coming up it.

The main road wended its way to the castle
from the southwest and the village, and he supposed it was a good
thing it wasn’t daylight now because, by the light of the moon,
they could make out only the outlines of what they had to contend
with to escape. He honestly didn’t want to know what broad daylight
would have shown them.

The track led them down the north slope of
the mountain, and they slipped and slid along it in their frantic
descent away from Dinas Bran. Hywel cursed himself the whole way
for being naïve, for thinking that his uncle wouldn’t take this
ultimate step to gain power, and for allowing himself to be
buttered up enough by praise to sing late into the night. While
he’d known enough to drink sparingly, which may well have saved his
life, he was more tired that he ought to be, and that was affecting
his judgment.

The track switched back and forth across the
mountain’s face. At one point, though Cadifor was in the lead and
Hywel at the back, they reached a point where they were
face-to-face as they passed one another going in opposite
directions.

“I’m sorry, my lord,” Cadifor said in an
undertone. “I should have warned you that something like this might
happen.”

Hywel scoffed. It was just like Cadifor to
deflect blame onto himself when it was really Hywel’s. “Did you
have some forewarning that my uncle would take to murder?”

“No, my lord—”

 And then he was past his foster
father, huffing and puffing along with the others as fast as he
could away from the castle. The horses could see better in the dark
than they, and Hywel had his fingers woven through Glew’s mane, the
better to keep himself upright.

On the next switchback, Hywel had time to
say, “Then the blame belongs to me, not you. The lives of my men
rest on my shoulders, and I let you all down by bringing you
here.”

“It isn’t your fault either, Hywel.” Cadell
was walking behind Cadifor, and couldn’t help but overhear. His
tone was uncharacteristically tart. “If anything, my brothers and I
should have heard something of your uncle’s unrest, seeing as how
Denbigh is far closer to Dinas Bran than Aber or Meirionnydd.”

“Gruffydd and I had no inkling of what was
to come either,” Evan said from in front of Hywel. His normally
blond hair was dark with soot. “We ordered the men to drink
sparingly, as is always warranted in a strange hall, but Madog’s
men were very disciplined. They gave nothing away.”

Gruffydd, walking in the
exact middle, grunted his assent. As Rhun’s former captain, he’d
been nearly as lost as Hywel these last months. Hywel had folded
him and the survivors of the ambush that had killed Rhun into
his
teulu
, now
dramatically expanded to a full fifty, with enough men left over to
garrison the various castles around Wales that were now his
responsibility. “We failed you, my lord. Evan and I were taking
turns sleeping, but even with our precautions, they attacked so
suddenly, I had time only to leap to my feet and shout a warning
before they were on us.”

Hywel was bringing up the rear, so he could
see Evan shaking his head up ahead of him. “What is it, Evan?”

“Madog has to realize what he’s started,
doesn’t he? This means war.”

“I said as much to my aunt as we were
leaving. Madog must believe that the time is ripe for rebellion
against my father. Since Rhun’s death, the king is seen as weak.”
Hywel heaved a sigh. “Father has been weak, but Madog was a fool to
think I was.”