The Unexpected Ally (31 page)

“Why did you flee the monastery with them if
you aren’t one of them?” Conall said.

“I was more afraid to stay than to go, given
what you accused me of! With them gone, I could have been hanged
because someone had to be.”

Gareth shushed him with soothing words, and
Deiniol continued in a more modulated tone. “Rhodri escaped his
cell and freed Lwc first. I begged to come with them, and they said
that I could if I didn’t slow them down.”

“Why are you here now?” Hywel said.

“I started having second thoughts almost
immediately. I feigned a sprained ankle and told them I’d make my
own way. Since I didn’t know where they were going, if you caught
me, I wouldn’t have anything to tell you. I hid myself while I
tried to decide what to do, but then when your company passed by, I
followed.”

Deiniol was either blessed with a remarkable
presence of mind nobody had noticed before or an incredible sense
of self-preservation. In honesty, it was looking like both.

“You’re saying that Rhodri and Lwc are
working together?”

Deiniol nodded, but then he frowned. “Lwc
seemed to know what he was doing, far more than I would have
thought given his behavior up until now.”

Hywel pursed his lips and looked at Gareth
and Conall. “We’ve misread this entire situation.”

“I told you he was lying about me being
involved, and you didn’t believe me.” Deiniol’s self-satisfied look
was briefly back. “I tell you, he knew exactly what he was doing
and where he was going.”

“Did they talk about what their plan
was?”

“No. Not to me. Deliberately, I think, and I
was afraid to ask.”

Hywel

H
ywel had been
without Gareth often enough in recent weeks both to have grown used
to his absence and to long for the days when it was just the two of
them. More often than not, it had been Gareth extricating Hywel
from an untenable situation. But he had been the one to save Gareth
a week ago in Shrewsbury, and as Hywel watched the farmhouse across
the field, his stomach clenched at the similarities. He could be
grateful, however, that a captive Gareth was not one of them.

“It looks like they’re preparing to move
out.” Gareth had his hands cupped around his eyes, narrowing his
focus as he turned his head, scanning from side to side. “Many men
have crossed to the barn.”

“I don’t think we should wait.” Hywel made a
motion with his hand to indicate that his men should spread out.
Every soldier with him, with the exception of Gareth, who didn’t
have the strength, and Conall, who didn’t know how to use one, wore
not only a sword but a bow and quiver. It had been a long time
since Hywel himself had gone to war as an archer, but he still
practiced several times a week. With the numbers and strength of
the bandits uncertain, Hywel had tried to plan for every
contingency.

A light showed through the cracks in a
shuttered window by the farmhouse door. A second light shone from
inside the adjacent barn, which, as at the monastery, had a paddock
attached.

From the size of the house, the farmstead
had once been prosperous, and Hywel wondered what had caused the
owners to leave such fertile land. War, possibly. Because of its
proximity to the border with England, the lands between St. Asaph
and Denbigh had been fought over ever since the Normans came to
Britain, changing hands half a dozen times before his father had
gained control of the region a few years ago. Too late for this
family, perhaps.

“I don’t like this, my lord.” Evan spoke low
in Hywel’s ear.

“There’s nothing to like about it,” Hywel
said.

“Rhodri knows we could be coming, and yet
nobody seems to be in a hurry,” Evan said.

“It may be that Deiniol misread the
situation, and Rhodri remains on our side.” Hywel raised himself up
slightly, realizing that this was the chance they’d been waiting
for. The cleared space in front of the house was empty. He had seen
at least four men enter the barn since they’d arrived. He raised a
hand to his men and brought it down.

As one, Hywel’s men rose to their feet and
converged from all directions on the farmstead. In short order, all
twenty men reached a spot a hundred feet from the house and
stopped, crouching down and breathing hard. Nobody had yet come out
of the house or the barn.

“This isn’t right.” This time it was Gareth
who sounded the warning. He held up two fingers to indicate that
two of the men should approach the entrance to the house and two
the entrance to the barn. Both pairs of men raced across the
clearing unmolested, and each pair set themselves up on either side
of their respective doors.

Meanwhile, Gareth straightened, his hands
out at his sides, showing that he held no weapon, and walked alone
into the cleared space in front of the house. “This is Gareth,
captain of Prince Hywel’s guard. You are surrounded. Come out with
your hands up. If you surrender yourselves freely, you will not be
harmed.”

Silence greeted this announcement. Gareth
remained where he was. Hywel pursed his lips, not liking how
exposed Gareth was, vulnerable to an arrow that could come from any
direction. In the time they’d watched the farmhouse, they hadn’t
seen that kind of preparation, but it was still a risk.

For another few heartbeats, nothing moved,
but then one of the men by the door to the barn screamed, the sound
almost instantly cut off by a gurgling breath. He fell to his knees
in the dirt an instant before the soldier on the other side of the
door collapsed too. Hywel vaulted to his feet, and he and Gareth
reached the fallen men at the same moment, catching them as they
fell forward into their arms. The man Hywel held, the one on the
left, had been stabbed through the wall of the barn with a sword,
spine to sternum.

“Fall back!” Hywel waved an arm at the two
men by the house, who hadn’t had a direct angle to see what had
happened. With Evan’s help, Hywel dragged the body of his man away
from the barn door. A moment later, a spurt of flame shot through
the thatch roof of the house. Despite the rainy weather, the wood
was dry, and the heat of the fire was already tangible on Hywel’s
face. In less time than it took to cross the clearing, the entire
house became an inferno.

Gareth stood over the body of the soldier
he’d dragged away from the barn. “They were prepared for our
numbers.”

Then the side wall of the barn opened
outward, where no door had seemed to be before, and a host of men
burst from it—somewhere in the vicinity of a dozen—mounted on
horses. They galloped down the road away from the farm. Though
still recovering from the shock of seeing two of his men die before
his eyes, Hywel’s brain started working, and he shouted and pointed
at the riders, “Bring them down! Bring them down!”

Hywel’s bow was still in its rest on his
back, and his hands were full of the man who’d died, but his men
had been ready to shoot anyone who exited the farmhouse. They
simply shifted as they stood, turning their bows to follow the
riders. The distance was two hundred feet and made easy shooting,
especially for those with skills, like Cadoc. At least half the
arrows in the first volley hit either a man or a horse, which was a
far larger target than the man on its back.

Four horses went down, and then those that
had escaped the first volley were stopped by the second or the
third. One man did a complete somersault over his horse’s head to
land with a sickening thud on the ground. As Hywel’s men converged
on the fallen, swords replaced bows.

“Keep at least one alive!” Hywel glanced at
Gareth. “It’s time we got some answers.”

Gareth nodded and walked beside Hywel to
where the bandits had fallen. Rhodri was unconscious on the ground.
One of Hywel’s men was binding him at the wrists and ankles as a
precaution. Lwc had taken an arrow just below his collar bone. He
was fortunate in that it had lodged high in his chest, having
missed his heart. It had to be intensely painful, but not so much
that he hadn’t been able to clear his feet from the stirrups as his
horse was shot out from under him.

He hadn’t been able to run more than a few
steps, however, before Gruffydd stopped him by grabbing the arrow’s
fletching and holding on. Lwc was frozen into position, unable to
move and barely able to breathe for the pain it would cause.

Hywel approached with Gareth a pace behind.
“If you tell the truth, the whole truth, I will see that you don’t
hang. If you lie to me about even one detail, I will leave you to
bleed to death beside this road. Do you understand me?”

Lwc mouthed a
yes
.

“This is the crew that sacked the monastery
at Wrexham?”

A nod.

“Where’s the rest of them? This can’t be
all.”

Lwc carefully cleared his throat. “They’re
gone.”

Gruffydd moved the arrow a hair’s-breadth to
the right. “Gone where?”

The flash of pain that crossed Lwc’s face
had Hywel’s own stomach clenching.

“East to England.”

By now Conall had arrived, and he observed
Lwc with arms folded across his chest. “Everything you claimed back
at the monastery was a lie.”

Lwc managed a swallow. His wound was
bleeding, and unless he wanted to make it worse, he couldn’t move
any part of him but his eyes, which flicked from one man to
another. He would find no sympathy in any of them.

“Rhodri was part of this gang?” Hywel
said.

“Yes. We agreed beforehand not to know each
other if we were caught.”

“What about Deiniol?” Gareth said.

“He was never one of us.” For a moment, a
spark appeared in Lwc’s eyes, and he added, “You almost believed
me! You might really have done so, and the timing of finding him in
the stable couldn’t have been better.”

“Better for you. Worse for him,” Hywel said.
“What did he say when you came face to face at St. Kentigern’s, and
he learned you’d become the abbot’s secretary?”

“He was confused as to how it had come
about, but happy for me. Deiniol really is a simple soul.” Lwc
grimaced. “We didn’t know about the peace conference when we
planned this.” Hywel sensed that Lwc would have spat on the ground
if it didn’t mean moving.

“Who paid you to steal from St.
Kentigern’s?” Gareth asked.

“Paid? Nobody. It was my idea.” Lwc seemed
very proud of this fact.

Hywel rubbed his chin. “When did you
conceive the plan?”

“Our gain was considerable at Wrexham, even
with what we had to give to our masters—Queen Susanna, I suppose,
though I believed it was King Owain, myself,” Lwc said. “Why not
try it elsewhere?”

Hywel dropped his hands, genuinely puzzled.
“You were raised at the Wrexham monastery from birth. Why did you
destroy it?”

“I hated it there! I snuck out whenever I
could. But if I was going to strike out on my own I needed money. I
knew people by then. People who could help me get free from the
monastery. That’s when he came to me.”

“Me?” Gareth said.

Lwc scoffed. “No. That was Rhodri’s contact,
earlier.”

“Then who?” Hywel didn’t know if he could
believe anything Lwc had said so far. He’d lied so often, maybe Lwc
himself didn’t know the truth anymore.

“A man named Jerome.”

“By the fingers of St. Peter, who is
Jerome?” Hywel said.

Lwc made a helpless gesture with his right
hand, the only one he dared move. “Jerome was our leader. He
organized everything. Before Wrexham, he brought us the surcoats
with Owain’s crest, the weapons, and the food, but he disappeared
the night Erik died. I figured from the start that he killed Erik
and ran off.” Lwc waggled a finger. “I know you were looking for
someone with a damaged tenth finger, and that’s what he had.” Lwc
tried to gesture again but stopped instantly at the pain that shot
through him.

“Who was Erik to you?”

“He was nobody to me; he was Jerome’s
friend. At times it seemed as if Erik outranked him. When Erik
found out that we were planning to steal from St. Kentigern’s, he
was very angry. I know he and Jerome argued about it more than
once.”

If Hywel hadn’t been so angry himself, he
might have admired the complexity of the plot, and Lwc’s apparent
ability to carry it out—if not for ending up caught and most of his
men dead. “I think Erik was going to stop you from stealing from
St. Kentigern’s, and you killed him.”

Lwc seemed momentarily dumbfounded by this
conclusion. “I—we—had nothing to do with his death. Everything went
wrong from the moment he died.”

“Amazingly, we don’t believe you now any
more than we did earlier.” That was Conall again, and his detached
amusement reminded Hywel that he would get nowhere with anger.

“How many times do I have to deny it before
you believe me! Neither I nor any of my men killed him! But—” Lwc
stopped abruptly, swallowing, as if he hadn’t meant to add the
but.

Hywel had caught it, however, and knew not
to let it go. “But what?”

Lwc didn’t want to answer, and thus it was
Gareth who said, “You didn’t kill him, but you cut him open? How
did you gather your men quickly enough once you found out he was
dead to arrange for that?”

“I saw the body with Prior Anselm and Abbot
Rhys, and then the abbot sent me to fetch you. Before I did, I ran
to the village to wake Rhodri, who’d found a girl to stay with a
stone’s throw from the monastery.”

Conall grunted. “You took your secret
passage under the wall.”

Even wounded, Lwc still had the capacity to
smirk. “Nobody noticed I was gone, and there was plenty of time for
Rhodri to ride to the farm, roust the others, and set up the ambush
of the cart, which I knew the monks would need to haul Erik back to
the church. I knew exactly the path it would follow.”

“Why would you do all that?” Gareth
said.