The Fallen Princess (3 page)

Always considering himself to be one of
Gareth’s men, even though he was only thirteen, Llelo had gathered
a handful of children to him and was bending forward to speak to
them, his hands on his knees. Gareth patted him on the shoulder as
he passed him on the way back to where Hywel and Gwen waited. “All
right there?”

“Yes, sir,” Llelo said.

“Let me know what you discover,” Gareth
said.

“I already promised Gwen I would,” Llelo
said, looking slightly affronted that Gareth would tell him his
job. Gareth held back a smile.

Gwen had mentioned designating tasks to the
other two attendants on the scene, Rhodri and Dewi, but they seemed
to have disappeared. As Hywel had dismounted from his horse, Adda
had tried to explain to him how inadequate to the task of
investigating the death Gwen had been. Gareth had brushed past him
with a disdainful look, but he probably should have found out if
Adda had discovered anything important. Contrary to Adda’s opinion,
Gareth was pleased with how Gwen had taken charge in his absence
and how quickly the investigation had moved into full swing.

“I gather that you don’t recognize Tegwen
yourself, Gareth?” Gwen said as he reached them.

He shook his head. “I never met her.”

“She disappeared a few months before you
began your service with me, Gareth,” Hywel said.

“And you, Gwen?” Gareth said. “You must have
grown up with her.”

Gwen bit her lip. “Not really.”

“Tegwen was the same age as I am.” Hywel had
returned to his usual matter-of-fact manner, pacing around the body
with his eyes on the ground as he talked. “She was the result of a
liaison between my uncle, Prince Cadwallon, and a girl named Ilar,
the daughter of a man-at-arms turned knight of my father’s
generation. His name is Gruffydd.”

Gareth’s brows drew together. “Do I know
him?”

“You should,” Hywel said. “Tegwen’s
grandfather still lives. He’s the castellan at Dolwyddelan.”

Gareth’s expression cleared. “He’s a good
man. He was very helpful last year when Anarawd—” Gareth broke off
as Hywel glanced at him, his mouth twisting in wry amusement.

“Yes. Exactly,” Hywel said. “Ilar died
birthing Tegwen, so Gruffydd and his wife raised her themselves. My
grandfather appointed Gruffydd to be the castellan at Dolwyddelan
at Uncle Cadwallon’s request, in remembrance of Ilar and so
Gruffydd could raise Tegwen as befitted her station as a princess
of Gwynedd.”

Gareth would have wondered why Cadwallon
hadn’t brought the child to Aber and raised her himself if he
hadn’t been a prince. Any peasant would have, but Cadwallon was a
warrior and was often absent from home. It was common practice to
foster out royal children, either at birth if the mother was dead
and the parents hadn’t married, or at the age of seven when a child
began to prepare for his adult life.

“That was why I barely knew her,” Gwen said.
“I was only eleven when Cadwallon died, twelve years ago now.
Tegwen lived mostly with her mother’s family, and I saw her in
court only a few times.”

“When she was fifteen years old, Tegwen
married Bran ap Cynan, whose father was the Lord of Rhos.” Hywel
looked at Gwen. “You attended the wedding, didn’t you?”

Gwen shook her head. Rhos, a sub-kingdom to
Gwynedd with the lord’s seat at Bryn Euryn, was a little more than
ten miles from Aber Castle. “My father provided the entertainment,
but Gwalchmai was a small child, and Meilyr left me at Aberffraw to
mind him. Don’t you remember? You came home with your head full of
new songs, though you’d sung none of them because your voice was
still changing and my father didn’t trust it.”

“I was fifteen myself.” Hywel had gone back
to a crouch beside the body, his head bent.

Gareth wasn’t sure if he should speak since
it appeared that Hywel was struggling to control his emotions
again. He cleared his throat. “My lord, why are you so sure this
woman is Tegwen?”

“By her dress, her belongings.” Hywel threw
out one hand, the gesture halfway to despair, pointing at the
necklace at the woman’s throat. “She never took that necklace off.
It was a gift from her husband.”

The body lay as Gwen had left it, the cloak
spread out in the sand, and now Hywel flipped back the edge of the
cloak to reveal a hem embroidered with tiny red lions, half
obscured by sand and dirt. “This is her cloak. The lions were a
tribute to her father’s personal coat of arms. My father gave it to
her the day she became betrothed to Bran. I don’t know what has
been done to her or how she came to look like this, but …” Hywel’s
voice trailed away.

It was obvious to Gareth that Tegwen could
have discarded the cloak and necklace at any time between her
wedding and her disappearance, making this a completely different
girl, but he kept his lips together. It would be one thing if what
she was wearing was the only piece of evidence, but if Hywel
thought he recognized her shape as well, Gareth wasn’t going to
argue with him.

He’d never seen Hywel so shaken by a death.
It worried him that if this was Hywel’s reaction—a man who wore
stoicism and cynicism like a cloak—the effect of the news of
Tegwen’s death on the rest of the inhabitants of Aber would be far
more tumultuous.

Gareth put his hand on Gwen’s arm. “Gwen,
you should ride ahead and tell the king that we will be bringing
Tegwen’s body into Aber as soon as we’ve finished examining the
scene.”

“What? Why me? Gareth, please—”

Gareth moved his arm up to her shoulders and
bent his head so he could speak gently in her ear. “It has to be
you. Right now, the three of us are the only ones who know this
woman may be Tegwen. The news of her death would be better coming
from you, since you’ve seen and touched her, than from any of the
people here. The last thing we want is to arrive at Aber with the
body and surprise King Owain with the news. We’re lucky it’s still
early in the morning. You know how fast gossip spreads. In another
hour, the news that the body of a richly dressed woman was left on
the beach this morning will have reached half of Gwynedd. We have
to reach the king before he hears of it from someone else and
wonders why he’s been kept in ignorance.”

Gwen groaned audibly. “I’ll have to wake
him.”

“I know,” Gareth said. “But maybe that’s for
the best too. He won’t be in the hall yet. He shouldn’t have to
learn of Tegwen’s death with his people watching.”

Gwen wrinkled her nose at Gareth. He hoped
she wasn’t angry at him, even if he was right, but she didn’t
complain further and then shot him a bright-eyed look over her
shoulder as she turned to head up the beach to where the horses
were picketed. At a gesture from Gareth, two members of the guard
intercepted her, and she accepted the help of one of them to mount
her horse. She lifted her hand to Gareth one last time and rode
away, a guard on either side of her.

Turning back to Tegwen, Gareth stood on the
other side of the body from Hywel, waiting for him to finish his
examination. Hywel had crouched to feel at the head wound, and
after a moment, he looked up at Gareth. “Help me turn her.”

Gareth crouched beside his lord and pushed
up on Tegwen’s right hip to roll the body up onto its side. As Gwen
had said, the sand was damp beneath her, and though the moisture
had seeped into her clothing, the cloth covering her front was
relatively dry. Neither Gareth nor Hywel acknowledged this
observation to the other, just laid her gently back down to the
sand.

Hywel picked up one of Tegwen’s narrow
wrists, stroking gently. “It’s broken.”

“Do you think it happened before or after
her death?” Gareth said.

Hywel turned the hand over and back. “I
can’t say. The skin is discolored, but so is her entire body. It
has been too long since she died for me to read events clearly.” He
gestured down the length of her. “She didn’t die here, that’s for
certain.”

Bodies that had been moved always made for
more difficult investigations. “She was struck on the head, but I
don’t see how that relates to a broken wrist,” Gareth said.

“Maybe it doesn’t. Someone could have
dragged the body roughly once she was dead,” Hywel said.

“Could the damage have happened as recently
as last night?” Gareth picked up her other wrist. The bones were so
dry and brittle that he feared he would break more of them and
destroy whatever evidence they had. “You could see how easy it
would be to do.”

“The head wound occurred prior to death,”
Hywel said, “and I would say with some certainty that it caused her
death, but I have never been faced with a body in this condition
before.”

Hywel pointed to Tegwen’s feet, and Gareth
moved around the body in order to inspect the heels of her boots.
He knelt in the sand to lift up one heel and then the other. “I see
scuff marks. I could match them to the scene if she’d died
yesterday, but after all this time, it will be impossible to
trace.”

“She was murdered; that’s what matters
most.” Hywel straightened and stepped back from the body, his hands
on his hips. “This will enrage my father.”

“Will he ask us to discover who killed her?”
Gareth said.

“Who else?”

“Even after all this time?” Gareth said.

“Hallowmas is tomorrow night,” Hywel said.
“The discovery of this death will make everyone uneasy. How much
worse will it be if my father does nothing to find her killer?”
Then Hywel shrugged. “Even if he doesn’t ask, I will insist we
try.”

That was as Gareth had assumed, though he’d
felt the need to ask. He rose to his feet too, brushing the sand
from his knees. “It’s hard to know where to start.”

Hywel scowled. “We should treat it no
differently from any other murder. If we ask enough questions,
eventually we will ask the right ones of the right people, and we
will learn things we didn’t know before. All cases can be solved
given time and a little luck.”

“Make that
a lot of luck
,” Gareth
said.

Hywel looked over at him, his gaze
sharpening. “I need to know that you will put your full efforts
into this, Gareth. I can’t have you doubting what we do.”

Gareth tamed his skepticism and reluctance
in an instant. “Of course.” At Hywel’s continued hard look, Gareth
added, “I apologize, my lord.” He blew out his cheeks. “But I must
point out that we will have to reexamine everything we knew about
her. She was a princess and your cousin. You might not like what we
find.”

“Knowing the truth is always better than
believing a lie,” Hywel said.

Gareth nodded. It wasn’t the first time
Hywel had said those words, and Gareth believed he meant them.
“Then I have my first question, and it needs to be put to you: Gwen
said that Tegwen married Bran, a prince of Rhos. Why don’t I know
of him? Is he a younger son who hasn’t participated in your
father’s endeavors?”

“Was that before your time too?” Hywel said,
surprise in his face. And then he shook his head. “No, it couldn’t
have been.”

“Was what before my time?”

“Bran was the heir to the throne of Rhos,”
Hywel said. “His older brother, Marchudd, died after Bran married
Tegwen, and then his father died—of old age, mind you—between
Marchudd’s death and Tegwen’s disappearance. I can’t remember the
specifics at the moment, since Bran had taken charge of the cantref
long before that. Then Bran himself was murdered three years ago by
an arrow through his heart as he journeyed along the road from
Caerhun to Dolwyddelan.”

Gareth’s brow furrowed as he thought back to
three years ago and what he’d been doing at the time. He’d been a
member of Hywel’s company for almost two years by that point.
“Tegwen was married to
that
Bran?”

“Indeed,” Hywel said.

Gareth looked away, his mind churning. “I
remember that he died. In fact, wasn’t he ambushed not far from
where Anarawd’s company was ambushed?” At this second mention of
Anarawd’s murder, Gareth didn’t look at Hywel and hurriedly
continued, “Why wasn’t I among those investigating his death? Where
was I? Where were you?”

“You were with me,” Hywel said. “We spent
most of that year in Ireland, remember? I didn’t learn of his death
until my father told me of it six months after it happened. By
then, with no trail to follow and nothing to investigate, he didn’t
see the point in wasting my time with an inquiry.”

“Who benefited from Bran’s death?” Gareth
said.

Hywel gave him a dark look. “That is the one
question that we never ask, and you know it. Bran was the Lord of
Rhos and had no sons. Who do you think benefited?”

“His younger brother. I see, but surely—”
Gareth broke off what he’d been about to say:
but surely his
brother wouldn’t have murdered him?
But surely he would have,
if it meant gaining the lordship.

“Bran was the second son of his father, and
Tegwen had given him only daughters.” Hywel had gone back to
studying the body of his cousin. “The elder brother died, as did
many of our men, during the wars in Ceredigion, and upon Bran’s
death, the third son, Ifon, inherited.”

Given that King Owain himself had inherited
Gwynedd under identical circumstances—the untimely death in battle
of an older brother—it was no wonder that he didn’t want to delve
too deeply into Bran’s murder and the subsequent inheritance of the
cantref by a third son. How King Owain had for so long tolerated
having his younger brother, Prince Cadwaladr, anywhere near him was
a mystery to Gareth. All that stood between Cadwaladr and the
throne of Gwynedd was Owain himself. Then again, King Owain might
think it was better to keep an eye on the treacherous prince than
to have him far away doing God knew what.

Until Prince Hywel had elevated Gareth to
the captain of his guard and given him lands of his own, the
politics of Gwynedd had concerned him only as far as they concerned
Hywel. More recently, Gareth had started paying more attention.