The Lost Brother (12 page)

“And more lords like me, who act before they
think,” Morgan said.

“Gwen, it’s what they’ve done in
our
names,” Gareth said.

Gwen took in a sharp breath.

Gareth looked again to Lord Morgan. “I
realize this is a great deal to ask, but will you speak to the
people of your error, and why you made it?”

“It is the least I can do.” Morgan ground
his teeth. “I am angry at whoever arranged for such a nefarious
scheme. Impersonation and murder …” He shook his head.

Gareth’s mind churned with uncomfortable
possibilities. He wanted to assume that he and Gwen were safe
within Morgan’s fort, but he still felt an unnamed menace pressing
on him from beyond the walls.

Gwen had both arms wrapped around her
middle, hugging herself, and Gareth bent down to wrap his arm
around her too and pull her close to him.

“Whatever they planned, whatever ruse they
were employing, it ended with their deaths,” Lord Morgan said. “The
one who killed them either did so because he mistook them for you,
or because he no longer wanted anyone to mistake them for you.”

Gwen rose to her feet, a little stiffly due
to the cold stones on which she’d been kneeling. “Either way, Lord
Morgan, it’s a very uncomfortable thought.”

Gwen

“B
efore we go too
far down either road, a moment ago I found something on his body
that might better direct our inquiries.” Gareth touched Gwen’s
shoulder, and she followed him back to the table where the body
lay.

Gareth had recovered the man with the sheet
while he’d inspected the clothing Gwen had brought inside the
chapel; now, he pulled the cloth away again and tipped the man’s
chin to one side, exposing his neck. Within and underneath his
bushy beard, he bore a series of long scratches.

Gwen gazed at them and then looked up at her
husband. “Those look to me like they could have come from
fingernails.”

“That was my thought,” Gareth said.
“Remember the way the woman’s nails were broken and chipped?”

“This man killed the woman found in the
graveyard?” Morgan had trailed after them to the table and was now
staring down at the wounds on the man’s neck.

“We have no evidence he murdered her, only
that they may have fought,” Gareth said.

“But then—” Morgan began.

Gareth tipped his head in acknowledgement of
Morgan’s puzzlement. “It does raise the possibility that he was
responsible for her death. That then leads to a conclusion that
someone else would have had to have murdered him, changing our
scenario and making it less likely that anyone could have murdered
him because he mistook him for me.”

“I have not only two murders but two
murderers
in Cilcain?” Morgan said. “How can that be? In all
the years my family has ruled these lands, we’ve never had even
one.”

Gwen was just as unhappy as Morgan appeared
to be at the idea of one killer murdering another. She had felt
vulnerable many times in her life. Bad things had happened to her,
from the death of her mother at her brother’s birth, to the loss of
Gareth when she was sixteen, to her abduction by Prince Cadwaladr
before she married Gareth. Tonight’s threat, however, had a newness
to it—and peril—that she’d never felt before.

It wasn’t that finding a dead couple
impersonating her and Gareth was worse than when her mother had
died—how could it be?—but it was a threat that was all potential,
to an end which she was having trouble envisioning or speculating
upon. Gwen had felt something like this in the first throes of
Tangwen’s birth—waiting for what was to come and knowing it could
be death—and not being able to do a thing about it.

When Gwen had first seen the woman’s face,
her first thought had been anger at whoever had killed her before
they could meet. Now, however, she had to accept that this unknown
woman had felt nothing for her, or at least not enough to change
her course.

Since the woman had lost her life to this
ruse, Gwen couldn’t sustain her anger, but as a result, all she was
left with were feelings of helplessness and fear. Who knew what
this couple had done while they were pretending to be Gareth and
Gwen?

“I haven’t ever encountered an investigation
quite like this either,” Gareth said.

“I should hope not!” Morgan said. “Did you
discover anything about the woman that can help us identify
her?”

Gwen almost laughed at the ‘us’.
Almost.

Gareth suppressed a smile too. “I can’t say
for certain how close in age she is to Gwen. It is almost
impossible to determine the age of a woman who is between sixteen
and twenty-five. There wasn’t anything more in her clothing, was
there, Gwen?”

“Whoever killed her took her purse,” Gwen
said, “or she didn’t have one on her.”

“This man here didn’t either,” Morgan
said.

“The one who killed him could have taken
them both with him.” Gareth flipped the sheet back over the man’s
face. “Tomorrow I’d like to visit the site where he died to see if
the killer left anything for us to find. Tonight I would like to
speak to the husbandman who found him.”

Morgan made a noncommittal motion with his
head.

“No?” Gareth said.

“At this hour of the evening, you might not
get much out of him that makes sense,” Morgan said. “I keep an eye
on him, for his son’s sake, but he lost his wife last winter and
hasn’t been the same since.”

Gwen understood that all too well. After the
loss of her mother, her father had drowned his sorrows in drink for
a time, before gradually coming to his senses. Now, with the birth
of Tangwen, Meilyr seemed a different man entirely, more like he’d
been when Gwen herself was a child.

“Are we done here for now, Gareth?” she
said.

At Gareth’s assent, the three of them
returned to the hall, where they found Father Alun just arriving.
He’d decided to do more than pray and had ridden his mule to the
fort, leading Gwen’s horse.

“I am pleased to find you well,” Father Alun
said as he took Gwen’s hand.

Gwen smiled to see the priest, some of her
anxiety dissipating in the warmth of the hall. “It was a
misunderstanding that has been resolved. No more need be said about
it than that.”

Gwen had been very angry when Morgan first
accused Gareth—so angry she had been nearly shaking with it. But
allowing it to consume her for more than a short while gave the man
who’d arranged all this too much power over her.

Morgan invited Gareth, Gwen, and Father Alun
to sit at the high table with him, and when food was placed in
front of her, Gwen suddenly discovered she was hungry. The sickness
in the pit of her stomach that had nagged her since she’d learned
of the woman’s death fell away, and their visit to Morgan’s hall,
which had begun in suspicion and fear, began to turn into a
friendly party—or as friendly as it could be given that they had
two dead bodies on their hands.

Under the influence of food and drink,
Father Alun turned talkative. “Could I ask what you’ve discovered
about the death of the woman in my chapel?”

“You can ask,” Gareth said. “Neither our
latest findings, nor the conclusions we have drawn from them, are
at all comforting.” Then Gareth related what they’d learned since
they’d last spoken to the priest. “It is possible that the dead man
in Lord Morgan’s chapel had a hand in the death of the woman in
yours. Who killed him, however, remains a mystery.”

Father Alun leaned in, his expression grave.
“I see an odd combination of ruthlessness and blunder in the way
this pair were murdered and buried.”

“What do you mean by that?” Morgan said.

Father Alun tapped a finger to his chin. “It
seems to me that in regards to the actual murders, both deaths were
brutally—and ruthlessly—accomplished, but when it came time to
dispose of the bodies, it’s as if the killer stumbled in his mind,
or was suddenly afraid of being found out, where before he’d been
single-minded in his resolve. It’s almost as if he was thinking too
hard about the problem, instead of applying the same ruthlessness
to their burials as he did to their deaths.”

Gareth took Gwen’s hand and sat back in his
chair, indicating to Gwen that they should let Alun and Morgan
talk. If Hywel were here, he would have stopped the speculation and
the assumptions, but this wasn’t Gwen and Gareth letting their
imaginations run wild. In some instances, fresh eyes on the
investigation could be a good thing.

Morgan pushed back his chair and moved to
pace in front of the fire. “It’s clear to me that if the girl was
murdered at the second killer’s behest, than the death of her
killer was a matter of tying up loose ends.”

Lord Morgan turned to query Gareth. “Is this
how you see it too?”

“You both have far too devious minds,”
Gareth said.

Gwen heard a touch of admiration in his
voice, and she agreed with Gareth that both of them had taken on
the problem with an unseemly eagerness. But that wasn’t to say they
were wrong.

Morgan canted his head. “I’ll take that as a
compliment, coming from you.”

Gareth straightened in his chair. “As to
your analysis of the murders, your guesses are as good as mine. We
won’t know the truth until we learn far more than we have yet
discovered. It would be most helpful to put a name to either
victim.”

“I’m sorry these people chose Cilcain for
their foul deeds.” Father Alun gave a shiver of distaste.

“No, that’s where you’re wrong,” Morgan
said. “As Gwen said earlier, we should be glad the murders happened
here, because that meant Gareth and Gwen were only a short ride
away. Without their expertise, how would we even have begun to go
about this investigation? Certainly our chances of discovering who
murdered the dead couple would have been much diminished, and we
would have been further hampered by the mistaken idea that Gareth
and Gwen themselves were the victims.”

Gwen just managed not to shake her head at
Morgan’s complete reversal of his earlier position. Not that she
didn’t appreciate it. “It’s—”

She broke off with a glance at her husband,
who ended up finishing her sentence for her.

“It’s what we do,” Gareth said.

“Sir Gareth, we must consider why someone
would want to ruin your reputation,” Morgan said.

“I have angered many men in my life—more so
in the last few years,” Gareth said.

“Creating a false Gareth and Gwen can’t be
for such a simple reason, Lord Morgan. My husband is a remarkable
man, but the man who did this put an enormous effort into the
endeavor, and I can’t see how anyone could hate Gareth so much for
something so intangible. At the very least, the killer risked
having the results easily refuted with proof that Gareth was
somewhere else when whatever heinous deed he was supposed to have
perpetrated was occurring.”

While she and Gareth had made enemies over
the years, most of those they’d mightily offended had received
justice at the hands of a lord or the king. And many were dead. The
only possibility she could think of was that, as had been the case
with the attempted murder of King Owain several years ago, the
person coming after them was a child or relative of one of these
people, who had taught him to hate.

Father Alun nodded. “I find it more likely
that ruining Gareth’s reputation was an ancillary goal for the
killer instead of the main one. It could even be that impersonating
Gareth and Gwen was a means to an end only.”

“What end?” Lord Morgan said.

“What if tarnishing Gareth’s reputation is
in the service of creating distrust between him and his lord and
ensuring Gareth’s removal from Prince Hywel’s side?” Father Alun
said.

Gareth’s jaw turned rigid, and it looked
like he was finding it impossible to speak around it. Gwen wanted
to deny Father Alun’s conclusions, but she found it impossible to
do so.

Morgan nodded as he thought. “Thus leaving
room for another, who does not have your lord’s best interests at
heart. I don’t like the sound of that.”

Gareth finally managed to unstick his jaw.
“Nor do I.”

Gareth

G
areth had noted
the absence of an inn in Cilcain but hadn’t worried about having no
real place to sleep. Welsh hospitality being what it was, he’d
assumed that he and Gwen would find a place to lay their heads
eventually. And then after his arrest he’d feared Gwen would be
left unprotected and alone in Lord Morgan’s hall while he spent the
night in a cell.

As it turned out, Lord Morgan had given them
a pallet in a corner of the hall. Gareth and Gwen were warm under
thick blankets and were able to whisper to one another without fear
of being overheard. Although the day had been relatively fine, if
cold, the wind was howling on the other side of the wall a foot
from Gareth’s back as he lay on his side facing Gwen.

“Do you remember last summer when that poor
cloth apprentice was murdered and put into the millpond?” Gwen
said.

“Of course,” Gareth said. “It isn’t
something I’m likely to forget any time soon.”

Gwen gave him a playful poke to the belly.
“Let me finish. Do you remember my comment that I thought Prince
Rhun was a little too fascinated by the investigation?”

Gareth caught Gwen’s hand before she could
poke him again. “Father Alun and Lord Morgan are the same.”

“Yes,” she said, “which is why I didn’t
pursue the last thought I had any further while we were with
them.”

“Which thought was that?” Gareth’s eyes had
been on the verge of closing when Gwen had started talking, and he
was trying to wake up again without actually having to think.
Gareth kissed his wife’s hand, stalling for time. He really would
rather not think or talk, but Gwen was wide awake, her mind
churning, which meant this was important.