The Good Knight (A Gareth and Gwen Medieval Mystery)

smiling and condescending, as if by bringing her here he’d achieved a great victory instead of fleeing Wales with his tail between his legs. The hall rose before them, also unlike anything she’d ever seen. Because Dublin was unrelievedly flat, there was nothing to indicate they’d reached a special residence, other than the size of the hall, which was four times larger than any other place she’d seen so far.
    “The true king of Dublin lives over there,” Cadwaladr said, waving his hand to indicate the way they’d come. This didn’t help her to orient herself, as she’d gotten turned around in the maze of streets. It was confusing enough that the sea lay to the east, not the west, as in Wales.
    Danish halls, or at least this Danish hall, weren’t rectangular in shape as she might have expected, but was bowed outwards in the middle, tapering to a third less wide on both ends. It had timber walls, a great thatched roof, and was set on a laid-stone foundation that also served as the floor.
    The entrance doors, with two men in full armor to guard them, sat at one of the narrow ends. At Cadwaladr’s approach, both men bowed, not particularly low but enough to acknowledge his higher rank, and moved aside. Cadwaladr had lived in Dublin for a long time and these men probably knew him. She shuddered at the thought of making that crossing from Wales more than once, much less willingly, as Cadwaladr had. She held more tightly to poor Olaf’s arm, trying to contain her exhaustion, and staggered up the stairs after the Welsh prince.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

    H ywel and Rhun returned to Aber with Cadwaladr’s men—without Cadwaladr and Gwen, of course—and King Owain accepted all with glittering eyes. Cold, for now, not hot. The king assigned one loyal man-at-arms to each of Cadwaladr’s wayward men, with the express intent of getting them drunk and hearing each man’s story. King Owain, like Hywel, might have preferred to kill them all, but somehow Rhun’s earnest objections persuaded him to defer that fate. As Hywel remarked to Gareth later, it would be easy enough to kill them later, if the need arose.
    To Gareth’s surprise, King Owain appointed him as one of the ‘trusted’ knights, although his assignment was the poor boy, Tudur, who’d been the first to fall to his knees outside Aberffraw. Gareth watched him drink, not even trying to keep up with his consumption of mead after the first two flagons, which the boy downed before touching his meat. Once he got started, he just kept going, talking through his turnips and onions and roast chicken about how his father had died and he’d inherited his station.
    “I was so proud to serve a prince of Wales,” Tudur said.
    “Even this one?” Gareth said.
    Tudur tried to shake and nod his head at the same time, and almost fell out of his seat. “Who was I to know the man he was? I’d seen the times my father had come home not willing to talk about what he’d been doing, but…”
    Gareth studied the boy, waiting, knowing as only he could what was coming next.
    “… the reality of service was something entirely different.”
    Gareth couldn’t mistake the anguish in the boy’s voice.
    “We sacked a village, you see,” Tudur said.
    As Tudur went on at length about how the peasants had screamed, Gareth’s confusion grew. Raping and pillaging were part and parcel of the internecine warfare that predominated in Wales, though he couldn’t think of a particular lord with whom Cadwaladr had been at war at that time. Then, as Tudur talked more, it dawned on Gareth what Tudur was saying. Gareth put a hand on his arm to stop him talking and grasped his chin with the other hand. “You pillaged one of Prince Cadwaladr’s own villages?”
    Tudur nodded, so drunk now he didn’t even try to stop his tears from falling. “In Ceredigion.”
    “Why?”
    Tudur just blubbered. Money? Disobedience? What could possibly be the reason a lord would murder his own villagers who were the source of his income, whatever their crimes? Cadwaladr’s rationale might not have been clear to Tudur either. Or at least he couldn’t articulate it after five cups of mead.
    Gareth looked around for someone else who was still sober, but as he observed his friends at the other tables, he realized that they were drinking as steadily as their counterparts. He glanced towards the fire where Hywel sat, still as a stone, his chair pushed back and the sole of one boot planted on the edge of