The Fourth Horseman (2 page)

She pressed her face into his neck for an
instant before collecting herself. “Did you see the man who pushed
him?”

Gareth nodded. The murderer’s cold blue eyes
were burned into his memory. “Someone needs to stop him,” he
said.

Gwen clenched Gareth’s arms. “Look around.
Nobody is moving. We may be the only ones who saw what the man
looked like or what he did. It’s you who needs to go!”

This wasn’t Gareth’s
castle. This wasn’t
his
fight, but he had no difficulty following his wife’s
direction. As usual, she made immediate sense. He thrust past the
other onlookers and took the steps up to the keep two at a time.
Two men guarded the door. A Welshman racing into a Norman keep was
something they were trained to prevent, but neither responded
quickly enough to stop Gareth nor asked what he was doing. Likely,
they were as stunned as the other bystanders by what they’d just
seen.

Gareth skidded to a halt in the anteroom to
the great hall, though the room was bigger than the main hall at
Aber Castle. Two dozen people who clustered on the margins of the
room stared at him. Gareth took in their expressions, ranging from
stunned surprise to haughty condescension. His plain cloak, tunic,
loose breeches, and low boots marked him as Welsh. At the same
time, the men waiting to attend to Earl Robert looked foppish to
Gareth, with their floppy hats and high, fringed boots into which
they’d tucked the ends of their too-tight breeches.

“
Which way?” Rhun’s voice
rang around the room. The prince bumped into Gareth as he, too,
tried to stop his headlong rush.

“
One way or the other, the
man has to come down from the tower,” Gareth said. “We should split
up, my lord. If you could go that way.” He pointed to a stairwell
to the right. “You’re looking for a man with a shock of hair so
blond it’s nearly white. And tall.”

“
Right!”

Rhun and Gareth took off in opposite
directions. Gareth raced up the left stairwell, keeping his hand on
the hilt of his sword so it wouldn’t slap against his thigh. Gareth
judged that the murderer would be looking for a less obvious exit
than the front door to the keep: if Gareth had just thrown a man
over the battlement, he wouldn’t have walked down a main stairwell
afterwards. Then again, it puzzled Gareth as to what the man could
have been thinking, killing in broad daylight in front of so many
potential witnesses. While Gareth had never murdered anyone, he’d
had more experience with it than was probably good for him, and in
his estimation, murder was best accomplished in the dark.

He came out of the stairwell into a
corridor, empty but for two maidservants gossiping at the far end.
They leaned against opposite walls, their buckets of water on the
floor and their washing cloths forgotten. Gareth fumbled for a
moment with his English and then managed, “Did a man come through
here? One with light hair?”

They gaped at him. One girl
put her hand over her mouth and giggled. Gareth got a grip on his
impatience and tried again, this time in French. The second
girl—woman, really, as she was older than Gwen—shook her head and
added a very French, “
Non!”

“
Thank you!” Gareth
continued up two more flights of stairs and came out at the top of
a tower. A weathered roof protected the thirty feet of wall walk
between his tower and the one opposite, from which the dead man had
fallen. That was the stairwell he’d just sent Rhun up, but perhaps
Rhun had found either more luck or more trouble, because Gareth saw
no sign of the prince.

Gareth took a moment to peer over the
battlement into the bailey of the castle. So many people were
clustered around the body, Gareth couldn’t see it. He could see
Gwen, however, standing with Prince Hywel and Ranulf, and nodded to
himself. He could leave the dead to his wife and Hywel. Gareth had
a living man to catch.

He pushed off the embrasure and raced along
the wall walk of the castle, dodging past two guards who paced it,
pikes resting on their shoulders. Gareth couldn’t guess where this
pair had been when the murderer had dropped the dead man from the
tower. He wouldn’t like to be in their boots when their captain got
wind of their negligence.

As Gareth neared the southeast tower ahead
of him, still without seeing the culprit, what little hope he’d had
that he might catch him faded. If he hadn’t met the murderer yet,
the man had already descended to a lower level and Gareth was too
late. The murderer could lose himself in the castle, and nobody
would be the wiser. Newcastle was so huge, it might have thirty
rooms in which a man could hide until such a time as he felt it was
safe to depart.

At least Gareth knew what the man looked
like, which should help Earl Robert identify him and track him
down. Gareth reached the southeastern tower that overlooked the
Lyme Brook, intending to find stairs that would take him down
again, but then skidded to a halt at the sight of a rope looped
around one of the merlons that formed the battlement. Gareth
touched the knot, noting how tightly it had been tied, and then
peered through the crenel (the gap between two merlons). Thirty
feet below him, a man hung above the river.

Gareth looked around for the guards he’d
passed, but when he didn’t see them, he waved a hand to a man who
stepped from the southwestern tower. And then he realized that the
man was Prince Rhun. “My lord!”

As Rhun crossed the wall walk that separated
them, Gareth looked down at the murderer again. He was almost at
the water. Even with Rhun’s help, Gareth wouldn’t be able to haul
him back over the battlement. Gareth pulled out his knife and began
to saw at the rope.

Rhun reached Gareth and peered over the
wall. “Don’t bother. You’re out of time.”

Gareth followed Rhun’s gaze just as the
murderer tipped back his head to look up at them. The man lifted a
hand in salute, unexpectedly grinning, and released the rope. He
landed in the brook with a splash.

“
I’ll tell Ranulf to search
the river for him,” Rhun said.

“
He’ll be long gone by
then,” Gareth said. “That man knows what he’s doing.”

Rhun leaned out to haul the rope back up the
wall. “He was prepared; I can say that for him.”

Gareth’s brow furrowed. “Surely he was, if
he had the foresight to leave himself a way out of the castle, but
none of this makes sense.”

“
How so?” Rhun allowed the
rope to coil onto the walkway at their feet.

“
I could accept that the
murderer prepared his escape route in advance,” Gareth said, “if I
could say the same about the murder itself. Who plans to murder a
man at mid-morning, in front of two hundred people? And what are
the chances that the murderer would drop the body at our
feet?”

Rhun had been fingering his lip, gazing
south across the English landscape, but then he came out of his
reverie. With a laugh, he clapped Gareth on the shoulder. “Very
high, I would think, given that you and Gwen seem to find
evil-doers everywhere you go. Another murder for you, Gareth. I’m
sure Earl Robert will be delighted that we brought you with us to
help catch him.”

Chapter Three

Gwen

A
s
Gareth and Prince Rhun raced up the stairs and into the keep after
the assassin, other men surged towards Gwen and the dead man at her
feet.

“
Isn’t that just our luck?”
Hywel reached Gwen’s side and studied the body, a finger to his
chin. “Or rather, yours.”

Gwen glanced at the prince, a knot forming
in her stomach. Other men appeared on her right, jostling her. The
prince nodded at Evan, who stepped between the onlookers and the
body and began setting up a perimeter around it.

“
Sweet Mary.” Ranulf
appeared on the other side of Hywel. “I’ve never seen the
like.”

Hywel met Gwen’s eyes, his
own flashing with impatience. Her lord had already assessed Ranulf
and found him wanting. Gwen pressed her lips together, hiding
amusement and stifling her irritation that Hywel had the capacity
to make her laugh, even under these circumstances. Then Hywel
canted his head toward the body, a hint of a smile hovering around
his lips. Gwen knew what that meant. Prince Hywel didn’t care if
she was wearing her finest dress and newly polished boots.
Here was a dead man! Let’s have a look at
him!

A growl of disgust rose in Gwen’s throat,
but she obeyed Hywel, lifting her skirts to step to the far side of
the body and moving in unison with him. A cluster of spring flowers
grew against the wall of the keep, and Gwen was careful not to
crush them beneath her boots. Hywel crouched on the near side and
put a hand to the man’s throat, feeling for his pulse.

“
What are you doing?”
Ranulf said.

“
Checking to see if he’s
dead,” Hywel said in French, not looking at the Norman lord. “It
was a long fall but not impossible that he might have survived
it.”

Ranulf cleared his throat and grunted
something in French that Gwen didn’t catch. Unsurprisingly, the
fallen man had no pulse. Hywel shot Gwen a look of resignation.
Ranulf’s teeth snapped together. His hands, which had been on his
hips, dropped to his sides. Then he raised his head and faced the
men who’d gathered behind him. Those in the back were clustered six
deep, craning their necks to see over the heads and shoulders of
their neighbors.

“
This is no place for
lay-abouts! See to your duties.” Ranulf said the words first in
French and then in English for the benefit of the few craft workers
and servants who might not understand the language of their
masters. He didn’t speak in Welsh, not that there was any reason
for him to know how. All of the Welsh folk Hywel had brought with
him understood French, though Gwen probably spoke it the least well
of anyone, despite her father’s many attempts to teach her better.
Hywel, of course, was fluent.

The onlookers murmured their dismay at
having to leave the scene, but after some hesitation, most of them
dispersed. Meanwhile, Hywel and Gwen briefly examined the body. As
Ranulf turned back to them and came to stand at the dead man’s
head, Hywel rose to his feet and brushed his fingers off on his
cloak. “You know him, don’t you?”

“
What makes you say that?”
Ranulf said.

“
He fell from the tower of
a Norman keep, one that just happens to belong to your
father-in-law.” Hywel raised his eyebrows. “Besides, I saw
recognition in your eyes.”

“
Surely—surely, you aren’t
accusing me of anything!” Ranulf said.

Gwen glanced up, startled
at Ranulf’s defensiveness. Hywel hadn’t been accusing him of
anything, but Ranulf’s reaction made her want to ask him what
he
had
done. Hywel,
for his part, watched Ranulf steadily.

Ranulf puffed out his cheeks. “But, yes, he
was one of my men.”

“
And now he’s dead,” Hywel
said.

Gwen looked away, too
uncomfortable to watch Hywel antagonize a Norman lord in a Norman
castle. It was
dangerous
to speak to such a powerful man in that way. But
her head jerked back involuntarily at Hywel’s next words: “One of
your men, did you say? That surprises me, since he is a Welshman,
one David ap Ianto, who has served my father well for many years.
Or so my father has always thought.”

Ranulf cleared his throat. “Is that so?” His
face suffused with blood, turning his cheeks a color approaching
purple.

Hywel’s gaze didn’t move from Ranulf’s face.
He didn’t actually accuse Ranulf of using David to spy on King
Owain, but if David had served both lords, he couldn’t have been
anything but a spy. And not for Hywel’s father. Both men knew
it.

Ranulf didn’t seem to know what to say to
Hywel. Instead, he craned his neck to look up at the battlement and
changed the subject. “How could he have fallen from there? Only a
fool would lean that far over the edge.”

Gwen blinked. Even if Ranulf hadn’t seen the
assassin push the dead man, he had to know that no man could
mistakenly fall over a chest-high wall. She glanced at Hywel, who
didn’t correct the Norman lord, and then decided she could do it
herself. “He didn’t fall on purpose, my lord.”

Ranulf’s eyes narrowed. “What do you
mean?”

Gwen almost wavered under
the earl’s stare.
Almost.
“Another man pushed him.”

“
Pushed
him
.” Ranulf had gone from angry and
defensive to disturbingly calm.

She gestured towards the body. “Furthermore,
he didn’t die from the fall. When he went over the wall, he was
already dead—or dying.”

Ranulf’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know
that?”

Gwen glanced at Hywel, who lifted his chin,
indicating that it was his turn to speak. Gwen was happy to let the
prince tell Ranulf the rest of the bad news. “Before he fell, David
was stabbed in the back,” Hywel said.

As they’d been talking, Gwen had been edging
away from the body. A pool of blood had formed in the dirt under
David’s back and begun trickling towards the flowers that grew
against the stones.

Looking where Gwen pointed, Ranulf snorted
his disgust. Then he went down on one knee, reached under the body,
and pushed up on David’s left shoulder blade to reveal the entry
wound.

Hywel knelt with him and traced it with one
finger. “A slit only, made by a very narrow blade, sharpened to a
fine point so it could penetrate his armor.”