The Fourth Horseman (29 page)

Mari gasped another few breaths but then
breathed more easily as she gained control of herself.

“
Good girl,” Hywel said,
his voice barely a whisper. “Now. How tightly are you
tied?”

“
Tightly—but only at my
wrists and ankles.” Mari lifted her hands to show him the rope that
bound her hands in front of her. Hywel raised his eyes to say a
prayer of gratitude that whoever had abducted them was an
idiot.

“
Can you sit up?” Hywel
said.

“
I think so.” Mari rolled
onto her stomach, bending at the waist and putting all of her
weight onto her elbows until she could get her knees under her. The
skirt of her dress made it difficult to move her legs, but she
managed to scoot forward so she could kneel in front of Hywel. She
lifted her hands to touch his cheek. “You’re hurt.”

“
I hadn’t noticed.” It
seemed as if someone had punched him a few times while he was
asleep, just to make sure he stayed that way. “Can you wriggle
around to the back of the chair and untie my hands?”

“
I can try. These bonds are
very tight; I can barely move my fingers.”

Still, Mari tried to do as he asked. She
tugged at the front of her dress with the fingers she could move,
and managed to pull the hem out from beneath her knees. Even so,
her legs got tangled up in her skirt the first time she tried to
move. She squeaked as she lost her balance, falling forward with
her forehead butting into Hywel’s shoulder.

“
It’s all right,” Hywel
said, trying to shush her again. He wished he could put his arms
around her to steady her.

“
Sorry.” By holding onto
one arm of the chair and allowing Hywel’s weight to counterbalance
her own when she leaned back, Mari got her feet under
her.

“
Good girl,” Hywel said
again.

“
Do you know how we got
here?” Mari said. “My head hurts when I try to
remember.”

“
I can’t imagine I remember
any more than you,” Hywel said. “Evan brought us that wine
and—”

“
What do you think might
have happened to Evan since he’s not here with us?” Mari said, her
eyes wide.

“
Hopefully, he is asleep in
an out-of-the-way place.” Hywel prayed that Evan wasn’t dead; he
didn’t even want to speak of it. To voice his fear would mean
admitting it might be true. “If he wakes as we have, he will
understand immediately that something has happened to us. He’ll
find my brother or Gareth and Gwen.”

“
All of whom you insisted
were to make Prince Henry’s safety their first priority,” Mari
said. “They’ll be among those watching for him, and since we have
no idea of the current time, he could be arriving at any
moment!”

“
I think we have to accept
that we are out of this particular fight, Mari,” Hywel said.
“Control over whether or not Prince Henry lives or dies has moved
beyond us.”

“
Do you know why we’re even
here?” Mari worked her way around the chair with little hops and
bent to work at the rope that bound his hands. “We haven’t figured
anything out yet!”

“
We’re not here because the
traitor is afraid of what we know,” Hywel said. “We’re here because
he wants his emerald.”

“
As if you would tell him
where it is,” Mari said.

“
I would tell him in a
heartbeat if I thought it would get us out of here or if he
threatened to hurt you if I didn’t,” Hywel said. “But how long
after I told him do you think he’d let us live?”

Mari grunted as her fingers wrenched and
slipped on his bonds. “Not long—”

A chair scraped the floor above them, and
they both froze. They had been speaking very quietly, and even the
sound of Mari’s hopping had been muffled by the dirt floor, but
they needed more time if they were to get free. They would get only
one chance at this.

Hywel gave it a long count of ten before he
shifted his shoulders, working to ease the strain on them from
having his hands pulled so tightly behind his back.

“
I feel like an animal
waiting for slaughter,” Mari said.

“
I’m afraid too,
cariad,”
Hywel
said.

“
How could this happen?”
The last word would have been a wail if she hadn’t spoken it right
in his ear.

“
I made a mistake,” Hywel
said. “I trusted the wrong person. I just wish I knew who that
person was.”

“
We’ll know before we die,”
Mari said. Her voice came out much more matter-of-fact this time.
“We’ll have that satisfaction, at least.”

Hywel grunted his assent. “How’s it going
back there?”

“
My fingers are very stiff.
I wish I had a knife—” And then her fingers stiffened on his hands.
“I do have a knife, a tiny one. Let me see if I can get it from my
boot.”

“
Take your time.” Hywel
leaned back his head and closed his eyes, breathing in and out,
searching for patience and not wanting to put any additional
pressure on Mari. He could think of only one other woman who
wouldn’t have been reduced to tears to find herself bound and left
to rot in a dark cellar—and who might carry a knife in her boot as
a matter of course—and that was Gwen.

While he waited, he strained to hear more
from the guard above them. He hoped it wasn’t too much to ask that
he could have fallen asleep.

“
I’ve got it.” She worked
at the bonds some more, and it took long enough to slice through
them that he guessed the blade wasn’t as sharp as it could have
been. “There,” Mari said at last. The strand of rope fell to the
ground.

Hywel brought his arms around in front of
him, working one wrist and then the other to renew the circulation
in his hands. Then he took the knife Mari handed him and began
sawing through the rope that constrained his ankles.

He got his feet free and moved around the
chair so he could crouch in front of Mari to free her hands. “We’re
going to have to trust that Gareth and Gwen will do what they can,
and that what is meant to happen, will.”

“
You are very sensible,”
Mari said.

“
I’ve had to be,” Hywel
said. “And I would return the compliment. While I regret that your
father abandoned you for his work for the empress, your upbringing
has made you strong. Capable.”

Mari regarded him with a composed
expression. It was on the tip of Hywel’s tongue to speak of how he
felt about her, but now that it came to it, he had no idea what to
say. He’d had more women than he’d had any right to, wooing them
with an eloquent tongue—or more often a song—and yet anything he
thought to say to Mari sounded trite and insincere when he
rehearsed it in his head. His default was to simply kiss her, but
that might send the wrong message. She had kissed him, true, but
she’d had no idea what she was doing.

He did. It was up to him to make this
right.

“
Why are you looking at me
like that?” Mari said.

Now that her hands were free, she let Hywel
ease her down to sit on the ground. She straightened her legs so
her feet were in front of her and he could get to the rope that
tied her ankles together.

“
I was thinking about two
things of equal importance,” Hywel said. “The first is how we’re
going to get past that guard up there. The second—” He almost
looked away but at the last moment told himself not to be a coward,
“—the second is how to tell you that I love you.”

The bonds around Mari’s ankles loosened and
dropped to the floor. Hywel grasped her hands and pulled her to her
feet. He didn’t let her go.

“
Do you really?”

Hywel was glad his hands were no longer tied
because he knew what to do with them. He slipped one around her
waist and brushed a stray hair back from her face with the other.
“I do.”

“
Why?” Mari
said.

Hywel made to laugh but then swallowed it
back, afraid the guard would hear him. The cellar wasn’t the place
for this, and it certainly wasn’t the time, but now that the words
were out, the rest was easy. “You may know that I haven’t given any
woman my full attention in a long while, but I don’t think you know
the reason for it.”

Mari didn’t speak, just remained focused on
his face.

“
After I lost a woman and
her babe—our babe—three years ago, I swore I would never care that
much about anyone ever again,” Hywel said, remembering the path of
self-destruction he’d followed for far too long after Branwen’s
death. “Although I meant it at the time, I know now that I was
wrong to make that oath, and I cannot keep it, not if it means I
can’t have you.”

Mari put the palm of her hand to his cheek.
“Whether you admit it or not, you are a sweet man, Hywel ap Owain,
and I love you too.”

A bang from above had them jumping
apart.

“
Who are you?” their guard
said.

A chair scraped on the floor, and then a
different voice said, “I am someone about whom you should be very
worried.”

“
Prior Rhys—” Mari breathed
the name. Hywel would have recognized the prior’s educated French
accent anywhere.

Grunts, slaps, and thuds
resounded throughout the house, and then Hywel heard a loud
thunk
as if something
heavy had fallen to the floor.

Taking a chance, Hywel raced to the opening.
“We’re here!”

“
My lord.” Prior Rhys
crouched above them, grinning and shaking his hand to ease its
hurt. His knuckles were scraped red and bleeding.

“
I’m glad you haven’t
forgotten how to fight,” Hywel said.

“
Son, I can’t say that I’m
glad I had to use my skills, but I’m certainly not sorry I have
them,” Rhys said. “Let’s get you out of there. We have a traitor to
catch.”

Chapter
Twenty-four

Gwen

G
wen gripped Gareth’s hand tightly as they stood with Prince
Rhun, Gruffydd, and the two boys near the cluster of huts that
lined the road to the west of the castle. They had converged
together in the last quarter of an hour after Gareth and Gwen had
ridden to Newcastle at the tail end of Prince Henry’s entourage.
Rhun and Gruffydd had come from the castle with the bad news that
Evan, Mari, and Hywel were missing, and Llelo and Dai had run all
the way from the Welsh camp to tell Gwen that Prior Rhys still
couldn’t be found. No one had seen him since she’d said good night
to him and retired to her tent with the boys.

To top it off, Gwen was focusing very hard
on not allowing the roiling in her stomach to overwhelm her
completely. She’d woken every morning for the last week feeling as
if she didn’t want breakfast and would lose it if she ate it. At
first, she’d told herself that her queasy feeling was due to
anxiety over the trip or the progress of the investigation.
Yesterday, she’d decided that she’d eaten a bad piece of meat. But
she couldn’t deny the other changes in her body any longer.

While part of her wanted to shout from the
highest tower in Newcastle that she was carrying Gareth’s baby, she
knew it would be better to wait to tell Gareth until they were
alone, maybe even in their own bed at home. If her courses hadn’t
returned by then, she could be absolutely sure of her pregnancy,
and Gareth wouldn’t have so much else to worry about.

The entire village of Newcastle, not to
mention the residents of the castle itself, had come out to greet
Prince Henry as he arrived. The boy himself appeared innocent
enough, waving as he passed, though he had to be uncomfortable
wearing his fine clothes and thick ermine-trimmed cloak in the
brightness of the early morning sun. On his head he wore a gold
circlet, which wasn’t quite his right, since his mother was
uncrowned as yet. Gwen felt sorry for him for having a mother who
insisted on full ceremony at every occasion.

“
If Empress Maud and Earl
Robert can’t protect the prince, nobody can,” Gareth said. Gwen and
Gareth had tried to close the distance between them and the prince
during the ride, but the boy’s retainers had protected him, and it
was reasonable to believe that they would continue to do
so.

“
I can accept that,” Rhun
said, “especially if it means we can turn our attention to what
concerns us specifically: where my brother and Mari have
gone.”

“
Where do we even begin to
look?” Gwen said. A dozen worst-case scenarios were skipping
through her head, each one more evil than the last and all of them
ending in her friends’ deaths.

“
We could try the tunnel
again,” said Gareth. “Amaury said that other passages branched from
the main one with plenty of places to hide a body if a man wanted
to.”

Rhun nodded. “That’s a good place to
start—”

“
The prince! The
prince!”

“
No—” Gwen choked on the
word as more shouts came from the gatehouse. A woman ran towards
them, screaming and sobbing, her arms spread wide. “He’s
dead!”

Onlookers had overflowed the road when
Prince Henry had ridden by. They’d begun to disperse once the
parade was over but now surged towards the castle. At the same
time, some inside the castle looked to flee, and they fought to get
past each other at the gate.

Rhun let out a sharp breath and pointed at
Gruffydd. “Begin your search for Prince Hywel in the village. Go
from house to house if you have to. Perhaps someone noticed a
cart—anything—leaving the castle that could have hidden two or
three people.” Gruffydd nodded and departed at a run.