The Fallen Princess Read online

  A Gareth & Gwen Medieval Mystery

  The Fallen Princess

  by

  Sarah Woodbury

  Copyright © 2014 by Sarah Woodbury

  Cover image by Christine DeMaio-Rice at Flip City Books

  The Fallen Princess

  Hallowmas 1144. With the harvest festival approaching, Gareth has returned from fighting in the south, hoping for a few months of peace with Gwen before the birth of their first child. But when an innocent foray to the beach turns up the murdered body of Prince Hywel’s long lost cousin, a woman thought to have run away with a Dane five years earlier, it is Gareth and Gwen who are charged with discovering her killer. The trail has long since gone cold, or so Gareth and Gwen think, until their investigation threatens to expose dangerous truths that everyone from king to killer would prefer to keep buried.

  No secret is safe, and no man, whether lord or peasant, can escape the spirit of Hallowmas in The Fallen Princess, the fourth Gareth and Gwen medieval mystery.

  To my Taran

  The Gareth and Gwen Medieval Mysteries:

  The Bard’s Daughter (prequel)

  The Good Knight

  The Uninvited Guest

  The Fourth Horseman

  The Fallen Princess

  The Unlikely Spy

  The Lost Brother

  The Renegade Merchant

  The After Cilmeri Series:

  Daughter of Time

  Footsteps in Time

  Winds of Time

  Prince of Time

  Crossroads in Time

  Children of Time

  Exiles in Time

  Castaways in Time

  Ashes of Time

  Warden of Time

  Guardians of Time

  The Lion of Wales Series:

  Cold My Heart

  The Oaken Door

  Of Men and Dragons

  The Last Pendragon Saga:

  The Last Pendragon

  The Pendragon’s Quest

  www.sarahwoodbury.com

  A Brief Guide to Welsh Pronunciation

  a ‘ah’ as in ‘rah’ (Caradog)

  ae ‘eye’ as in ‘my’ (Cadfael)

  ai ‘eye’ as in ‘my’ (Owain)

  aw ‘ow’ as in ‘cow’ (Alaw)

  c a hard ‘c’ sound (Cadfael)

  ch a non-English sound as in Scottish ‘ch’ in ‘loch’ (Fychan)

  dd a buzzy ‘th’ sound, as in ‘there’ (Ddu; Gwynedd)

  e ‘eh’ as in ‘met’ (Ceri)

  eu ‘ay’ as in ‘day’ (Ddeufaen—this would be pronounced ‘theyvine’)

  f ‘v’ as in ‘of’ (Cadfael)

  ff as in ‘off’ (Gruffydd)

  g a hard ‘g’ sound, as in ‘gas’ (Goronwy)

  i ‘ee’ as in ‘see’ (Ceri)

  ia ‘yah’ as in ‘yawn’ (Iago)

  ieu sounds like the cheer, ‘yay’ (Ieuan)

  l as in ‘lamp’ (Llywelyn)

  ll ‘shl’ sound that does not occur in English (Llywelyn)

  o ‘aw’ as in ‘dog’ (Cadog)

  oe ‘oy’ as in ‘boy’ (Coel)

  rh a breathy mix between ‘r’ and ‘rh’ that does not occur in English (Rhys)

  th a softer sound than for ‘dd,’ as in ‘thick’ (Arthur)

  u a short ‘ih’ sound (Gruffydd), or a long ‘ee’ sound (Cymru—pronounced ‘kumree’)

  w as a consonant, it’s an English ‘w’ (Llywelyn); as a vowel, an ‘oo’ sound (Bwlch).

  y the only letter in which Welsh is not phonetic. It can be an ‘ih’ sound, as in ‘Gwyn,’ is often an ‘uh’ sound (Cymru), and at the end of the word is an ‘ee’ sound (thus, both Cymru—the modern word for Wales—and Cymry—the word for Wales in the Dark Ages—are pronounced ‘kumree’).

  Cast of Characters

  The Living

  Owain Gwynedd – King of Gwynedd (North Wales)

  Rhun – Prince of Gwynedd (illegitimate)

  Hywel – Prince of Gwynedd (illegitimate)

  Cadwaladr – Owain’s younger brother

  Gwen – spy for Hywel, Gareth’s wife

  Gareth – Gwen’s husband, Captain of Hywel’s guard

  Taran – Owain’s steward

  Cristina – Owain’s second wife

  Mari – Gwen’s friend, Hywel’s wife

  Evan – Gareth’s friend

  Llelo – Gareth and Gwen’s foster son

  Dai – Llelo’s younger brother

  Meilyr – Gwen’s father

  Gwalchmai – Gwen’s brother

  Iorwerth – Prince of Gwynedd (legitimate)

  Ifon – Lord of Rhos

  Gruffydd – Castellan of Dolwyddelan

  Sioned – Gruffydd’s wife

  The Dead

  Tegwen –Hywel’s cousin, Cadwallon’s daughter

  Ilar – Tegwen’s mother

  Bran – Tegwen’s husband, Ifon’s older brother

  Marchudd – Ifon’s eldest brother

  Cynan – King of Rhos, Ifon’s father

  Gwladys – Owain’s first wife (mother of Iorwerth)

  Prince Cadwallon – Owain’s elder brother

  King Gruffydd – King of Gwynedd, Owain’s father

  Chapter One

  Gwen

  “This won’t be a pleasant sight, my lady.” Rhodri helped Gwen dismount. He’d come to Aber Castle to find Gareth, but Gwen’s husband had risen from his bed long before dawn, leaving to ride with Prince Hywel and his men on patrol.

  “It never is,” Gwen said.

  Rhodri set her gently on the soft sand, its usual yellowish-brown color turned to gray in the pre-dawn light. The cart intended for carrying away the body rumbled to a halt behind them, and another soldier, Dewi, jumped off the seat, leaving the stable boy who’d been driving the cart to wait with it and hold the horse’s head.

  The tense expression in Rhodri’s face didn’t ease, so Gwen added, “I’m well, Rhodri. Truly.” Many women struggled with their health during pregnancy, but other than an annoyingly strong sense of smell, Gwen hadn’t had any difficulties so far beyond a few unpleasant mornings, particularly in the beginning, and an increased need for sleep. Even at this late stage, with the baby due at the end of January, some people still didn’t notice right off that she was carrying a child.

  While the men shooed away the crowd of onlookers, Gwen circled the body, trying to disturb the scene as little as possible. She considered the corpse from all angles—though as it was well wrapped in a cloak, there wasn’t much to see. From the closeness of the weave, the cloak had once been very fine. It was dirty now, of a color that she thought should have been blue. The hood half-covered the face, implying that one of the onlookers had drawn it back and then, when death had been definitively determined, hastily thrown it over the face again.

  Gwen braced herself for the need to see who this was and bent to lift away the cloth.

  At the grotesque appearance of the face, Gwen’s breath caught in her throat. Then a hand touched her shoulder, and she jumped a foot. “By all that is holy—”

  “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Llelo said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  Gwen let out a burst of air. “What are you doing here? Is Dai here too?”

  “He’s a laze-about,” Llelo said, answering her second question first. “I came for the clams. Are you all right?”

  “Why does everyone think I’m not well? I’ve seen dead people before.”

  Llelo frowned, staring past her to the body. “Not like this one, I don’t think.”

  Gwen deliberately hadn’t looked again at the dead woman’s face. Instead, she gestured towards a group of children looking anxiously in their direction. “They shouldn’t be here.”
r />   “They’re the ones who found her,” Llelo said.

  Gwen inspected her young charge. He’d grown four inches since he’d come to live with them and loomed over her. If she were to stand, he’d be taller than she was. Thirteen years old going on twenty, as Gareth had said privately to her more than once. Upon the death of his father, Llelo had needed to grow up quickly in order to care for his younger brother, Dai. Gareth had discovered both boys in an English monastery last May and taken them under his wing.

  The boys had spent most of the summer with Gwen on Anglesey while Gareth was in Ceredigion serving Prince Hywel, but they had all gathered at Aber this week to celebrate Calan Gaeaf, what the Church called All Saints’ Day. It was the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter. In the traditions of her people, at this time of year the veil between the next world and this one thinned. Tomorrow night, Nos Galan Gaeaf, or Hallowmas, the spirits of those who’d died would walk the earth. Gwen shivered to think that this poor soul could be among them.

  “Since you’re here, you might as well help,” Gwen said. “The children will talk to you. Find out what they know while I see who this is.”

  “You can tell it was once a woman,” Llelo said, with all the morbid fascination of the young.

  Gwen waved her hand at him. “Off you go.” Asking Llelo to help her might turn out to be the worst idea she’d had this month, but since he was here, it was better to keep him busy.

  Gwen turned back to the body, no longer able to avoid looking at it. As Llelo had said, it was that of a woman, but beyond this simple observance, Gwen didn’t know that she’d ever seen a stranger circumstance. For starters, the woman’s body wasn’t bloated with water like it should have been had she drowned. Instead, her skin was dried out, leathery and brown like an old apple, more bones than flesh, though flesh still adhered to the bone. The woman could have been dead for months, if not years. The cloak that wrapped her wasn’t wet either, which Gwen would have noticed earlier if she hadn’t been so distracted.

  On the ride to the beach, Gwen had conceived two scenarios that would have put the body here this morning. One would have been a drowning, though the sea had been calm last night, despite three weeks of solid rain. The second and more complicated possibility had been that the body had been buried in the sand somewhere—a dune or a cliff face near the water’s edge—and over time, wind and tide had worn away the sand that covered her grave until it was fully exposed and the body fell into the sea.

  In that case, the body could have washed up here because of the way the water moved in and out of the Menai Strait. Both possibilities would have involved a recent death, because that was the only way the body would have remained intact enough to wash up on the beach in the first place.

  And if the body had washed up on the beach, even many hours ago, it would have been wet from head to toe. That wasn’t the case, which meant that someone had placed it here.

  With these thoughts spinning in her head, Gwen put her hand flat on what remained of the woman’s belly. The fabric of her dress was damp, like laundry left out on the line all night, but it wasn’t sopping. Gwen looked up, meeting the eyes of several villagers, who gazed at her with expressions ranging from curious to revolted to worried. She, herself, was among the worried. She didn’t know who this was, but she knew nobody was going to be happy when she discovered the woman’s name. Somewhere, sometime, someone had lost a daughter. It would be Gwen’s task—and Gareth’s and Hywel’s—to find out who that was.

  “Who found her?” she said.

  Llelo lifted a hand to gain Gwen’s attention and brought the group of children closer. “They did, all together.”

  “Did you touch her?” Gwen studied the children’s faces as they shook their heads vehemently in turn. She ended up looking intently at a medium-sized boy of about nine with a mop of dark hair and dark eyes.

  “No, my lady.” He shook his head too.

  Gwen looked sideways at him. “Not even a little?”

  “It was I who pulled back her hood, Lady Gwen.” A burly villager stepped forward. “Once I saw that she was dead—long dead from the looks—I went to find Rhodri, there.” He gestured to where Rhodri guarded the pathway between the body and the cart.

  If he’d come to the same conclusion Gwen had—that the woman hadn’t drowned—he’d realized that it was along that trajectory that evidence, if there was any evidence, would be found. All of the men-at-arms at Aber, whether they served Prince Hywel, his brother Rhun, or King Owain, knew from experience that Gareth would want to inspect the entire area personally and would be displeased if it had been marred by the curious and the careless. Beyond Rhodri, Dewi had gone back to the cart and was talking to someone, though since the man had his back to her, Gwen couldn’t tell who it was.

  She glanced up at the sky. The sun was coming up over the hills to the southeast, revealing a cloudless sky, unusual for so late in October. A warm breeze was blowing into her face from the south. She’d woken to dozens of mornings like this on Anglesey over the summer, and for a moment she wished that she was back at her little cottage, wiggling her bare toes in the warm sand instead of on this windswept beach crouching over a dead body. “When is low tide, Llelo?”

  “Just now, Ma,” Llelo said. “That’s why we all came down here this morning. After the rain we’ve had, we were looking forward to a good haul of clams.”

  Gwen focused on the damp sand around the body. The high tide mark was another ten feet further up the beach, beyond where the woman lay, which meant that she’d been laid down on this beach sometime after midnight. Otherwise, she would have been washed away with the tide. That led Gwen to conclude—though Hywel would say it was far too soon to conclude anything—that whoever had laid her here had wanted her to be found. Otherwise, he should have left her where he found her, wherever that was, or put her closer to the water’s edge so the tide could have taken her out to sea.

  “Can we move her now?”

  Gwen looked up and struggled not to let dismay show on her face. Adda, the commander of one of King Owain’s companies, had arrived at Gwen’s side with Dewi in tow. Adda bent over the body, his hands on his knees. Dewi wore a look of revulsion on his face.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but we really can’t,” Gwen said.

  “Why not?” Adda said.

  “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, a
nd 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.