The Fourth Horseman (22 page)

Hywel scuttled to where Prior Rhys held the
Norman knight in his arms. “How is he?” Hywel said.

“
Bleeding, but breathing,”
Rhys said. “If we can get him help, I don’t think the wound has to
be fatal. I don’t dare withdraw the arrow, however, until we have a
way to stop the flow of blood.”

“
Don’t worry about me,”
Amaury said, his voice low and guttural. “Find Ralph.”

“
We can do both.” Gareth
jogged to Rhys’s side. Gwen’s stomach roiled again, afraid she’d
see an arrow appear in his chest.

Hywel glanced towards Mari and Gwen. “I’m
sorry, Mari. I don’t see your father.”

“
Likely, the archer is long
gone, too,” Gareth said.

“
You and I should go for
help, Gwen. Gareth and Hywel can track my father and the shooter.”
Mari’s face was very pale, but she wasn’t in tears.

“
That’s the best suggestion
I’ve heard all day,” Hywel said. “Go, Mari. Now. Through the
tunnel.”

Gwen caught Mari’s arm before she dashed
away. “Do you know the tunnel well enough to find your way back?
Because I don’t.”

Mari looked to Hywel, who said, “It would be
safer, surely.”

“
Not if we got lost,” Gwen
said.

“
She’s right, my lord,”
Gareth said. “The archer wasn’t after the women. I want them safe,
too, but getting lost underneath Newcastle is surely not the best
way to accomplish that.”

“
Send them to the friary
for help. Amaury’s life depends upon it.” Rhys pointed to an arrow
lying in the grass ten feet from him. “The archer may not have
accomplished what he came for, but he would know better than to
remain in his roost this long.”

Gareth bent to pick up the arrow. He looked
at it and then held it out to Hywel. “There’s blood on it.”

“
Do you think the arrow hit
my father?” Mari’s voice went high.

Hywel strode to her. “He was well enough to
run, and he’s an old soldier. He’ll be all right.”

“
They should do as Rhys
suggests,” Gareth said. “The healer at the friary can send a cart
and bandages for Amaury. Perhaps if your father is injured, he will
take refuge there as well. You and I, my lord, should do what we
can from here.”

Mari bobbed her head in jerky agreement.
Gwen took her elbow, and the two women set off at a half-run. Their
skirts hindered the movement of their legs, but they discarded
modesty and lifted their hems, following an overgrown track that
started at the front of the abandoned chapel and ran southeast.
Gwen wasn’t sure if she couldn’t feel her ankle because she hadn’t
injured it very badly or if her anxiety was blocking out the
pain.

“
Do you know the way to the
friary?” Mari said.

Gwen gestured ahead of them. “That’s
Newcastle there.” She could see one of the many towers poking above
the trees to the southwest. “I’m following my nose, but the tunnel
dumped us out to the north of the town. We might be on the friary
lands already without knowing it.” Gwen glanced at her friend. “Are
you all right?”

“
I wouldn’t even know,”
Mari said.

“
How did you end up in that
clearing with your father and Prior Rhys?”

“
A man sent by my father
came for us,” Mari said. “He was very straightforward about what he
wanted. He simply handed me a letter written in my father’s hand,
asking for Prior Rhys and me to come to him. Prior Rhys didn’t want
to leave until he’d told someone where we were going. He sent a
message to Gareth through his servant, Tomos.”

“
Unfortunately, we were not
at the camp to get it,” Gwen said.

Mari nodded. “We’d only talked for a few
moments before you arrived.”

“
But you’ve been gone for
hours,” Gwen said. “What have you been doing all this
time?”

“
Once we arrived at the
chapel, the messenger told us that my father would show himself
only when he was sure that we hadn’t been followed.”

Gwen shook her head. “Perhaps he waited too
long, given that the archer got so close. Was it he who subdued the
two guards at the tunnel’s exit?”

“
What guards?” Mari said.
“What do you mean
subdued
?”

Gwen pinched her lips together. “I’ll tell
you later. It’s more important to know the rest of what your father
said to you.”

“
We had so little time
before you came,” Mari said. “He did apologize for leaving me
alone.”

“
Did he tell you why?” Gwen
said.

The track led them into the friary from the
rear, through the gardens. By now the sun had gone down behind the
hills to the west, but Gwen could still see well enough to
navigate.

After a short pause, Mari said, “He said
disappearing was the only way to protect me.”

“
From what?” Gwen said. The
two women slowed to a walk as they pushed through a gate between an
orchard and the kitchen garden.

“
I don’t know.” Mari
shrugged. “I’m surprised to find myself calmer than I ever would
have expected about it. I can’t change my father. I can’t change
the past. Let’s get to the healer.”

Gwen and Mari hustled through the garden and
almost ran into a brother bending over an herb bed with a hoe,
pulling at a last few weeds before the onset of full dark. He
straightened. “May I help you?” He was youngish—thirty perhaps—and
had kilted his robe so the hem didn’t trail in the dirt while he
worked. Another man hoed the garden ten feet away. He wore breeches
and a shirt, which meant he was a lay brother, not a monk.

“
A man has been shot, one
of the knights in Earl Ranulf’s company,” Gwen said without
preamble. “We need a stretcher, bandages, and the healer if you
have one.”

“
I am Matthias, the
herbalist.” Then he pointed at the second man. “Find me three
others to help.” He turned back to Gwen. “Where?”

“
The old chapel.” Gwen
gestured to the northwest. “Do you know it?”

Matthias’s brows drew together in an
expression of concern, but he nodded. The other man ran off, still
holding his hoe, and Matthias followed, headed towards the center
of the monastery. Mari and Gwen trotted after him.

Gwen had seen larger monasteries, but none
richer than this friary. The stained glass in the windows, the
slate roofs, the well-tended grounds, and the bustle in the
courtyard all pointed to considerable wealth. Maybe all monasteries
in England were better supported than their Welsh counterparts, but
either way, Gwen had hope that their infirmary would be
well-stocked, and more importantly, that this healer was
knowledgeable. He certainly exuded confidence.

Gwen and Mari arrived in the courtyard,
breathless, and pulled up at a sign from the healer. “Wait
here.”

Gwen bent over, her hands on her knees. She
couldn’t remember the last time she’d run as far as this. She tried
to calculate the relationship of the castle to the friary and to
the chapel and decided that the three locations formed an uneven
triangle, with the chapel at the northernmost point.

Matthias had disappeared, but he came
hustling back a quarter of an hour later with another monk. “A cart
will meet us on the track that leads to the chapel. Take me to your
man.”

Breath or no breath, Mari and Gwen set off
again. And it was only after they arrived back at the chapel that
Gwen remembered Mari’s father. She had forgotten to ask about him,
and she and Mari had seen no sign of him.

Chapter
Eighteen

Gareth

G
areth
watched Mari and Gwen go and
then crouched beside Amaury to take his hand. The Norman knight’s
eyes glinted beneath half-closed lids. “I live, Sir Gareth,” he
said.

“
Don’t speak,” Prior Rhys
said.

Hywel touched Gareth’s shoulder, and Gareth
moved with him a short distance away. “We need to track both Ralph
and the archer. I’d like to know that the latter, at least, is long
gone.”

“
That will be my task,”
Gareth said, and then added, “I wouldn’t have let the women go if I
thought they were in danger.”

“
I know. I’m not worried
about them.” Hywel glanced to where Amaury lay. The knight’s chest
rose and fell. “Someone really didn’t want Ralph to talk to
us.”

“
He’s a poor shot,” Gareth
said, “I’ll say that for him.”

“
That he used a longbow,
not a crossbow, makes him a Welshman,” Hywel said.

“
Any Welshman whose aim is
that bad isn’t worthy of the name,” Gareth said. “Too bad for
Amaury.”

“
It will be dark soon. Meet
me back here before an hour passes,” Hywel said.

“
Yes, my lord,” Gareth
said.

That Amaury still lived was
one of the few pieces of good news in the last two days. Gareth’s
comment to Gwen that this investigation got worse with each hour
that passed continued to prove true. Bad enough that someone had
attacked Gwen and struck Prior Rhys on the head; bad enough that
three people had died. A lone archer roaming free in the
countryside, against whom it was nearly impossible to defend, left
Gareth with an ache behind his eyes. If Prince Henry were to come
to Newcastle, they
might
be able to protect him inside the castle. But
outside the castle, he’d be an easy target. A mediocre archer could
hit a target at a hundred yards, and an excellent archer at four
hundred.

Judging the direction from which the arrows
had come, the archer had been hiding in the trees to the east of
the chapel. An overgrown clearing surrounded the ruin, so it was a
matter of crossing a field of patchy grass and scrub to get to the
trees. Gareth made his way towards them, keeping to the bushes as
best he could. He assumed the archer had fled, but he wasn’t going
to bet his life on it.

Gareth looked back. He could just see Prior
Rhys, still bent over Amaury fewer than a hundred yards away. The
archer could have easily shot them from this place. Gareth
inspected the ground at his feet but couldn’t make out any specific
tracks. He moved along the fringe of the trees, glancing every now
and again towards Rhys to make sure he didn’t need help. Another
few yards along, Gareth came to an old oak. Something bumped into
his forehead, and he stopped. Looking up, he saw the knotted end of
a rope hanging from the lowest branch, which was at least twelve
feet in the air. He hadn’t noticed it at first because he’d been
looking at the ground.

Gareth tugged on the rope. It didn’t give
way. Its fibers weren’t worn or marred with dirt, as would have
occurred if it had been hanging in the tree for a while. Gareth
knew he needed to get up there. Even though his shoulder hurt more
than he wanted to admit, he gritted his teeth and grasped the rope,
climbing hand over hand until he reached the branch onto which the
rope had been tied. He pulled himself onto it and sat, rolling his
shoulders and shaking out his left arm to loosen it and ease the
pain. At last he stood, finding his balance, and slid his feet
towards the cleft where the branch met the tree. When he reached
it, he looked back.

The whole chapel was laid out before him,
perfectly visible through a natural break in the oak’s growth that
left an eight-foot-wide gap in the branches. Gareth mimed shooting
off a bow and revised his estimation of the archer’s ability
upward. With the oak branch as an unstable platform, hitting Ralph
or Amaury would have meant achieving a tougher shot than if the
archer had been standing on the ground.

The only signs that someone might have stood
where Gareth himself was standing were scuff marks on the branch,
possibly from the archer’s boots. Now that Gareth knew what to look
for, he climbed out of the tree and found more boot prints in the
dirt below the branch. He circled around the tree and began to
track the archer away from the chapel, heading east. The soft earth
meant the man wasn’t hard to follow. The archer had made no attempt
to hide his retreat. But another quarter of a mile on, the woods
and the prints ended at a deeply rutted, dirt road.

Gareth pulled up and bent to the last boot
print. From that point, he moved in a gradually widening circle
until he reached the base of another tree where he found the hoof
prints of a single horse. Gareth stepped into the road, which
carried on due north for a time before being lost in the hills in
the distance. Going the other way, the road headed south before
curving west. Gareth had never been here before, but the width of
the road suggested to him that if he were to follow it, it might
take him all the way back to Newcastle.

Suddenly, he heard the thud of a horse’s
hooves, coming from the south. Gareth’s first instinct was to move
toward the sound, but then he thought better of that action and
retreated to the woods. Soon a riderless horse appeared, pounding
down the road towards Gareth. He stepped from the trees, his hands
up, making himself as large as possible to slow the racing horse.
“Whoa! Whoa!”

The horse had been panicked, but he wasn’t
wild. Gareth caught his bridle and ran with him a few yards until
the horse stopped, breathing hard and whickering.

“
That’s a good boy.” Gareth
patted the horse’s neck and ran his hands down his legs. The horse
was uninjured, but something had to have spooked him to have sent
him racing away from his master. Still holding the reins, Gareth
walked around to the horse’s other side—and noticed the longbow
strapped to the saddle bags.