The Fourth Horseman (36 page)

“
Because she didn’t
drown.”

“
What do you mean?” Adda
said. “Sailors and fisherman often wash up on our shore when they
don’t end up on the Great Orme.”

Adda was right. The villagers knew to come
to the beach after a storm to look for valuable items they could
salvage from boats lost at sea, even if they had come for the clams
today.

“
The body is barely damp,
Adda,” Gwen said as gently as she could.

Adda pressed his lips together.

Gwen didn’t know either man well. But while
Dewi seemed something of a simpleton, Adda was far from stupid,
even if he annoyed her by being pompous and overbearing.

It should have been clear to an experienced
man such as he that the woman had been dead long before today, but
he was also a stubborn man with fixed opinions. Gwen encountered
men like him all the time. They were older, set in their ways, and
did not welcome the notion that a young woman might have anything
to contribute to a murder investigation.

“
Perhaps while we wait for
Gareth to arrive, Dewi and Rhodri could survey the beach?” Gwen
gestured to the area around the body. “I know that we’ve disturbed
the sand with our footprints, but they could look for tracks from a
cart or from a man walking as if he was carrying something—her—on
his shoulder? Given how dried out the body is, she wouldn’t have
been very heavy for a grown man, but his boots should have sunk
deeper into the sand than if he carried nothing.”

Adda raised his eyebrows. “Sir Gareth would
want the body removed from the beach first.”

Gwen just managed not to grind her teeth.
She’d given him a long speech and was trying to be as polite as she
could. “My husband, and Prince Hywel, of course, will be very
grateful to you when they return for moving the investigation
forward in their absence. I’m sure they will personally want to
hear from you whatever you discover.” She gave him her sweetest
smile and tried to keep her expression as sincere as possible.

Adda’s chin still stuck out stubbornly, but
as Gwen had hoped, he grunted his consent. It was unlikely that
Adda would tell her anything of what he found now that she’d
wounded his pride, but Gareth would tell her what Adda had to say
as soon as he heard it. There was only so much she could do here
all by herself, and she did need Adda’s help.

Adda motioned for Rhodri to join him and
Dewi, and Gwen went back to studying the body, finding it hard to
reconcile its condition to its presence on the beach. She fingered
the cloth of the woman’s dress. Blue like the cloak, with a close
weave that was still fine to Gwen’s touch, it was embroidered at
the bodice and had a full skirt, the hem of which would have
trailed behind the woman as she walked. Her linen shift and
underdress were also embroidered. Even without the garnet ring
strung on a gold chain around the woman’s neck, Gwen would have
known by her clothing alone that this was no serving girl. She’d
been noble or at the very least had dressed like it.

Whoever had left her on the beach hadn’t
just dumped her here, either. He’d arranged the woman’s long braid
of reddish-brown hair so that it trailed down her right shoulder
past her hip. In Wales, girls trimmed their hair until they reached
womanhood, keeping it shoulder length and easier to care for, after
which they never cut it again. Comparing this woman’s braid to
Gwen’s own, and taking into account that not every woman’s hair
grew at the same rate, the dead woman had been at least five years
past womanhood when she died.

A dirty band of fabric that might once have
been white was tied around her head. A dark patch on it—dried, of
course—had Gwen carefully unwinding the cloth, tugging on it to
unstick it from the right side of the woman’s head and knowing
before she saw the mat of blood in the woman’s hair that someone
had to have hit her very hard to cause the wound. The same dark
stains that Gwen guessed were blood instead of mud or the decay of
time marred her dress at the right shoulder too.

Gwen gently worked her fingers underneath
the matted hair and found the wound. As Gwen traced the edges of
shattered bone, she came upon an abrupt indentation in the center
of the wound as if a sharp point had been driven into the bone.

Gwen sat back. Trying to gain control of her
thoughts, she blocked out the image of the woman as she was now in
order to take stock of what the girl had once been: she was more
than eighteen years old, possibly noble, and had been dead for
years. Gwen ran her thumb along the woman’s slender wrist. The
flesh still adhered to the bones and, like the rest of her arm,
wasn’t a uniform medium brown. The skin was mottled all along the
arm—darker in some places than others—but a thin band of darker
skin went around each wrist. Given the unusual state of
decomposition, Gwen didn’t want to speculate if these were bruises
or a natural result of the desiccation of the body. Gwen had never
seen a body like this one, so she honestly didn’t know what was
normal in such a case.

Other than the head wound, of course, which
clearly wasn’t.

For the first time in months, Gwen felt her
stomach rebelling. She swallowed down the bile at the back of her
throat, grateful now that Rhodri had woken her from a deep sleep,
and she hadn’t had the opportunity to eat anything before she rode
to the beach.

“
Gwen!”

She looked up at the sound of her husband’s
voice. Gareth had appeared in the gap between two dunes,
accompanied by Prince Hywel and ten other men. Gwen had drowsily
kissed Gareth goodbye before he’d ridden out of Aber Castle with
Hywel. At the sight of him now, her spirits lifted, alleviating
some of the sickness in her stomach. Gareth and the other men
reined in and dismounted near where Gwen had left her horse and the
cart had been parked.

Gwen’s pleasure faded, however, as Adda
stepped in front of Hywel, talking quickly. They were too far away
for Gwen to make out Adda’s words, and apparently Gareth wasn’t
interested in hearing what Adda had to say because he strode past
him, crossing the last few yards of sand to where Gwen waited. He
was careful—as Gwen had been—to take a circuitous route so as not
to disturb the already churned up sand more than he had to.

Gwen rose awkwardly to her feet and gestured
to the body in the sand. “As you can see, we have had some trouble
here.”

Gareth slipped an arm around her waist,
holding Gwen close for a moment while she pressed her cheek to his
chest. To Gwen’s dismay, tears pricked at the back of her eyes, and
she shook her head to stop them from falling, determined not to
lose her composure just because Gareth had arrived and she no
longer needed to keep it.

“
Are you all right?” He
kissed her temple.

“
I have lost count of the
number of people who have asked me that this morning,” Gwen said.
That wasn’t entirely true; in fact, she’d kept a careful count.
Gareth was the third.

“
You didn’t answer my
question,” Gareth said, but he must have decided that if she could
talk back to him, she really was fine, because he released her and
crouched in Gwen’s place beside the dead woman.

While Gwen related what she’d discovered so
far, Gareth went over the body as she had. Hywel, on the other
hand, once he dismissed Adda, stood chewing on his lower lip, his
arms folded across his chest and every line of his body revealing
his tension and unhappiness. Gwen had assumed that the strange
state of the body and the length of time since her death would make
it difficult to identify the woman quickly, but the prince’s
expression said otherwise.

“
Do you know her?” Gwen
said.

Hywel breathed deeply. “I don’t want to; I
shouldn’t be able to.”

Gareth looked up from his examination. “My
lord?”

Hywel didn’t answer. He seemed to be
struggling with himself somehow.

Gwen stepped closer, looking at him with
some concern. “Whoever she is, we’re here to help, like we always
are.”

“
After all these years, I
can’t believe she’s dead.” Hywel scrubbed at his hair with one
hand, his gaze never leaving the body.

“
Who’s dead, my lord?”
Gareth said.

“
My cousin, Tegwen,” Hywel
said.

_________________

The Fallen Princess
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