The Fourth Horseman (18 page)

Alard absorbed that news with an impassive
expression, but it took him a moment to answer. “I spend much of my
time in France. If I were planning to murder Henry, I would have
done it there.”

“
According to Philippe,
Prince Henry has been in England since the Christmas feast,” Gareth
said.

That, of all Gareth’s news, rocked Alard
back on his heels. He cursed in French and paced away from the
hole. He returned before Gareth could start to worry that he wasn’t
coming back. “The empress swore to me that she would not allow her
son to come to England!”

“
Philippe says that he’s
been living in Bristol and is on his way here now,” Gareth said.
“He arrives in two days’ time.”

“
It should have been my job
to protect him.” Alard glared at Gareth. “Does the empress know of
this plot against him? Does she believe I am at its center and that
is why she sent me to cool my heels in Scotland at the court of
King David while she brought her son across the
channel?”

“
That I cannot tell you,”
Gareth said.

Alard paced away from the hole again,
muttering to himself. “That must be it. That’s why she did not call
me to her side as I expected.”

“
It would have made more
sense to do so, actually,” Gwen said.

Alard spun back to the trap door. “What did
you say?”

“
If the empress believed
you to be a traitor, all she had to do was summon you and arrest
you in her receiving room,” Gwen said. “There would have been no
need to send David or John to kill you.”

“
My wife has a point,”
Gareth said. “Much here does not add up.”

Alard bent forward, his
hands on his knees. “You
must
get to the truth, for all our sakes.”

“
Let us out and we will do
what we can,” Gwen said.

“
Our conversation has been
productive, but still, I cannot have you following me. If you would
just give me a moment—” Alard broke off and looked towards the
door. Gareth couldn’t hear anything, but he was in a deep cellar.
The corners of Alard’s mouth turned down.

“
Wait!” Gareth
said.

But Alard was already striding to the door,
his boots resounding hollowly on the floor. He went through it and
did not return.

Chapter
Fourteen

Gwen

S
tunned at Alard’s abrupt departure and hoping for his quick
return, Gwen kept her eyes on the opening in the ceiling. “What
just happened?”

Gareth put his arm around her. “Don’t worry.
We’ll get out of here.”

Gwen rested her cheek against his chest. “I
know we will. I’m not worried about that.” She gestured to the
weaponry in the storeroom. “We can dig our way out if it comes to
that. But I’m still confused as to what, exactly, Alard was telling
us and what he hopes we can do for him.”

“
Nothing more than
discovering the real reason Philippe has accused Alard of treason,
finding out who stole David’s body, and saving Prince Henry,”
Gareth said, grinning.

“
Is that all?” Gwen laughed
and then tucked her hand into Gareth’s. His attention remained on
the floor above them. They both strained to listen for any sound of
Alard’s return. It suddenly struck Gwen that having the trap door
open exposed them to anyone who might come along.

“
Did you hear what drew
Alard away?” Gwen said.

“
No,” Gareth said, “but I
don’t think he’s coming back.”

“
You know what we never got
him to tell us?” Gwen said.

“
Who helped him out of the
brook, I know,” Gareth said. “Believe me, I’m kicking myself right
now.”

Gwen cast around the room, looking for
something that would help them to escape. Nothing came to mind,
short of digging through the dirt that formed the walls of the
house and tunneling up to ground level. Unfortunately, a stone
foundation supported the farmhouse. It wouldn’t be easy getting
around that.

“
Help me move the
table.”

Gwen laughed as she took up one end of the
table. “I would have cooled my heels down here for hours before I
thought of something so simple.” They maneuvered the table
underneath the hole. The tabletop was a little more than two feet
off the ground, so when Gareth stood on it and stretched, his
fingers could just reach the opening.

“
Come here.” Gareth
gestured that Gwen should join him on the table.

Gwen put her knee on the
tabletop, but as soon as she got both feet under her, the table
gave an ominous
creak.
Gareth froze, bent forward with one hand on her arm and the
other reaching for her waist.

“
Just take it slow,” Gareth
said.

Gwen carefully stood, and then Gareth
crouched so she could clamber onto his shoulders, her skirt
scrunched up around her thighs. When he straightened to his full
height, her head poked through the trapdoor. She grasped the edge
of the hole with both hands—and then screamed as Gareth suddenly
disappeared out from under her. The table legs had given way,
dumping him to the ground and leaving Gwen hanging from the
opening.

“
Gareth!”

She looked down. He knelt on the dirt floor,
his hand on his left shoulder and his head bent. Gwen twisted her
hips, fighting to maintain her hold on the edge of the floor, but
even that movement cost her whatever grip she had, and she fell.
She landed in a heap beside Gareth, letting herself roll onto her
side to better take the force of the fall. As she sat up, she
realized that she’d hurt her ankle. Gareth hovered over her. “I’m
so sorry!”

“
What happened to you? Are
you all right?” she said. They faced each other, both still on the
floor, getting back their breath.

Gareth continued to rub at his left
shoulder, and then he rotated his arm, working at the muscle and
joint. “I’m fine. Stupid, but fine.”

“
You couldn’t know the
table was going to break in that instant,” Gwen said. “I almost
made it out of the cellar.”

Gareth grimaced as he moved to help her
upright. “I shouldn’t have risked you at all. I should have pulled
myself up. At the very least, I should have caught you before you
fell.”

Gwen rotated her ankle; it wasn’t broken.
“Why didn’t you? What’s wrong with your shoulder?”

Gareth twitched his shoulder again. “It
gives me trouble when I ask it to bear my full weight. It has for a
while.”

“
Why didn’t you say
something?” Gwen stared at her husband, appalled. “I could have
been working on it with a salve all this time.”

Gareth shrugged. “You know how it is. I have
aches and pains much of the time that come from working with the
men. It seemed a small thing.” He made a rueful face at Gwen’s
continued glare. “It won’t happen again.”

“
Especially not if it means
that we’re stuck here all night.” Gwen scrutinized the trap door,
which looked farther away than ever.

“
Let’s look through what
the horsemen have left us,” Gareth said. “I already have a few
ideas about what might get us up there.”

But Gwen couldn’t see a way. They had rope
but nothing to tie it to. None of the trunks were as large as the
table, and they were built even less sturdily. The lone chair
couldn’t get Gareth close enough to the hole to grasp the edge and
his weakened shoulder meant he couldn’t pull himself through the
hole even if he could reach it.

“
Why don’t you lift me up
to stand on your shoulders?” Gwen said.

Gareth observed the hole ruefully. “I could
manage that, but your ankle isn’t quite right.” Gwen made a face
and paced around the cellar with determination. Every time she put
her foot down, she winced. Gareth found a length of cloth and
wrapped her ankle tightly, which helped.

“
You sit here. I have an
idea.” Gareth found a length of rope and took three spears from the
rack on the wall.

Gwen sat in the chair with her foot elevated
on a trunk and watched him. Then she said, “What’s going to happen
when we get home?” She’d thought about asking him this a hundred
times since they’d left Wales but never quite managed to get the
words out. It wasn’t that she thought he wouldn’t answer, or would
be angry, but that she hadn’t decided if she really wanted to
know.

“
What do you mean?” Gareth
sat cross-legged on the floor and began to tie a knot in the rope
at every foot. When Gwen didn’t answer right away, he lifted his
head. “You’re talking about my duties to Prince Hywel, aren’t
you?”

Gwen nodded and within the space of a single
breath found her throat constricting. It was a stupid time to be in
tears and a stupid thing to be in tears about. Gareth put down his
rope and crouched in front of her, rubbing a thumb along one of her
cheeks and coming away with a salty droplet. He kissed her forehead
and then her lips.

“
Likely I will go south
with the prince,” Gareth said. “I do not yet know if I can bring
you with me.”

“
I don’t want to be parted
from you,” Gwen said.

“
I know. And I want to be
with you. But whether or not it can happen will depend on how
restless our Norman and Welsh neighbors in Ceredigion continue to
be. It would be one thing to bring you south if I am to assume my
regular duties over Prince Hywel’s
teulu
. It’s quite another to bring you
into an ongoing war. The castle at Aberystwyth has burned twice
already.”

Gwen found that she could look into Gareth’s
eyes. “What’s wrong with our Welsh allies? Is King Cadell not the
ally King Owain hoped for?”

“
He has settled into his
inheritance,” Gareth said, returning to his work. He put the three
spears together and began to wind the rope around them. “And he has
voiced his opinion that Gwynedd should have no hold in
Deheubarth.”

“
Anarawd gave Ceredigion to
Gwynedd as thanks for King Owain’s help in the 1136 war,” Gwen
said.

“
That’s a nice way to think
about it,” Gareth said flatly, “but the truth is rather that Owain
and Cadwaladr annexed it. I do not believe Anarawd was given a
choice in the matter. His father was dead—”

“—
because Anarawd himself
murdered him,” Gwen said.

“
Yes, but nobody but Prince
Hywel knew it at the time,” Gareth said. “Regardless, as the new
king of Deheubarth, put there by King Owain, he was in no position
to argue. That was years ago, and seeing how Anarawd is dead too—”
Gareth broke off.

They didn’t need to speak of what had
happened last August, since solving that case had brought the two
of them together, and neither of them was in any danger of
forgetting. Prince Cadwaladr had paid mercenaries from Ireland to
murder Anarawd and had then abducted Gwen when he thought she was
getting close to uncovering his secret. While King Owain had
punished Cadwaladr by taking Ceredigion from him, he hadn’t given
the region to Cadell, Anarawd’s heir and brother, but to his son,
Prince Hywel.

“
I need the chair,
cariad
.” Gareth put his
hand to the rail at the back. “How’s the ankle?”

“
Better.” Gwen rotated it
and found to her surprise that it was better. She stood and let
Gareth take the chair. He put it under the hole. In his right hand
he held the three six-foot spears, now tied tightly together with a
long length of rope.

“
You just needed to sit and
let some of the swelling go down.” Gareth stood on the chair and
tossed what he’d created through the hole so it landed with a thud
on farmhouse floor. Then he tugged the spears back towards him at
an angle and ended up with the spears across the hole and the rope
hanging from their center like a candle maker with a fresh
wick.

“
That’s very clever of
you,” Gwen said, admiring his creation.

Gareth laughed. “Prince Hywel counts on me
to figure things like this out.” He waved an arm at Gwen, who got
up on the chair with him. “I don’t know how much weight the spears
can hold. A great deal I would think, but if I stand under you and
help you up, can you climb this rope?”

“
Of course.” Gwen hadn’t
climbed a rope since she was ten—Hywel’s doing, naturally—but she
reached up to grasp a higher knot and began to shimmy up it. The
knots really helped, though she found that, proportionate to her
adult body, her arms were far less strong than they had been when
she was a girl.

She reached the top and hung suspended,
catching her breath. “Now what?” She looked down at Gareth.

“
I’m going to put the palms
of my hands on the soles of your feet while you haul yourself up
over the edge,” Gareth said.

It sounded easy when he said it, and as it
turned out, it wasn’t as difficult as she had thought it might be
before she started. A moment later, she lay on her back on the
floor of the farmhouse, gasping a little for breath but happy to be
out of the cellar.

“
Are you all right?” Gareth
said.

“
Just getting the ladder.”
Gwen pushed it across the floor to the trapdoor and tipped it
downward. Then Gareth climbed out too.

“
Excellent,” he said.
“Let’s put everything back the way it was and get out of
here.”

Gwen agreed with that plan and marveled at
how perfectly crafted the house had been, such that when the
floorboards were properly arranged, it looked again as if the
cellar wasn’t even there. They left the farmhouse, collected the
horses, and led them west through the screen of trees. They arrived
on the path—and walked right into Llelo and Dai.