Cadfael had drawn back his arm, and for a moment wondered what troubled him about the palm he had lifted from the grass beside Rhisiart’s breast. Then he knew. Where he knelt the grass was perceptibly damp from the morning’s sharp shower, he could feel the cling of the habit when he shifted his knee. Yet under the outflung right arm the grass was dry, his hand rose from it with no hint of moisture, no scent of rain. He touched again, ran his fingers up and down alongside Rhisiart’s right flank. He was down to the knee before he felt the dampness and stirred the green fragrance. He felt outwards, the width of the body, to find the same signs. Strange! Very strange! His mind recorded and forbore to wonder then, because there were other things to be observed, and all manner of dangers were falling in upon all manner of people.
The tall shape looming at his back, motionless and chill, could be none other than Prior Robert, and Prior Robert in a curious state of exalted shock, nearer to Brother Columbanus’ ecstatic fit than he had ever been before or would ever be again. The high, strained voice asked, over the shuddering quietness of Sioned’s tearless sobs: “He is dead?”
“Dead,” said Cadfael flatly, and looked into Sioned’s wide, dry eyes and held them, promising something as yet undefined. Whatever it was, she understood it and was appeased, for he was Welsh, too, he knew about the blood- feud. And she was the only heir, the only close kin, of a murdered man. She had a task far above sorrow.
The prior’s voice soared suddenly, awed and exalted. “Behold the saint’s vengeance! Did I not say her wrath would be wreaked upon all those who stood in the way of her desire? Tell them what I am saying! Tell them to look well at the fulfilment of my prophecy, and let all other obdurate hearts take warning. Saint Winifred has shown her power and her displeasure.”
There was hardly any need for translation, they had the sense of it already. A dozen of those standing close shrank warily away, a dozen voices muttered hurried submission. Not for worlds would they stand in the saint’s way.
“The impious man reaps what he sows,” declaimed Robert. “Rhisiart had his warning, and did not heed it.”
The most timorous were on their knees by then, cowed and horrified. It was not as if Saint Winifred had meant very much to them, until someone else wanted her, and Rhisiart stated a prior claim on behalf of the parish. And Rhisiart was dead by violence, struck down improbably in his own forests.
Sioned’s eyes held Cadfael’s, above her father’s pierced heart. She was a gallant girl, she said never a word, though she had words building up in her ripe for saying, spitting, rather, into Prior Robert’s pallid, aristocratic, alabaster face. It was not she who suddenly spoke out. It was Peredur.
“I don’t believe it!” He had a fine, clear, vehement voice that rang under the branches. “What, a gentle virgin saint, to take such vengeance on a good man? Yes, a good man, however mistaken! If she had been so pitiless as to want to slay — and I do not believe it of her! — what need would she have of arrows and bows? Fire from heaven would have done her will just as well, and shown her power better. You are looking at a murdered man, Father Prior. A man’s hand fitted that arrow, a man’s hand drew the bow, and for a man’s reason. There must have been others who had a grudge against Rhisiart, others whose plans he was obstructing, besides Saint Winifred. Why blame this killing on her?”
This forthright Welsh sense Cadfael translated into English for Robert’s benefit, who had caught the dissenting tone of it, but not the content. “And the young man’s right. This arrow never was shot from heaven. Look at the angle of it, up from under his ribs into the heart. Out of the earth, rather! A man with a short bow, on his knee among the bushes? True, the ground slopes, he may even have been lower than Rhisiart, but even so…”
“Avenging saints may make use of earthly instruments,” said Robert overbearingly.
“The instrument would still be a murderer,” said Cadfael. “There is law in Wales, too. We shall need to send word to the prince’s bailiff.”
Bened had stood all this time darkly gazing, at the body, at the very slight ooze of blood round the wound, at the jutting shaft with its trimmed feathers. Slowly he said: “I know this arrow. I know its owner, or at least the man whose mark it bears. Where young men are living close together in a household, they mark their own with a distinctive sign, so that there can be no argument. See the tip of the feathering on one side, dyed blue.” It was as he said, and at the mention of it several there drew breath hard, knowing the mark as well as he knew it.
“It’s Engelard’s,” said Bened outright, and three or four hushed voices bore him out.
Sioned raised her stricken face, shocked into a false, frozen calm that suddenly melted and crumbled into dread and anger. Rhisiart was dead, there was nothing she could do now for him but mourn and wait, but Engelard was alive and vulnerable, and an outlander, with no kinship to speak for him. She rose abruptly, slender and straight, turning her fierce eyes from face to face all round the circle.
“Engelard is the most trustworthy of all my father’s men, and would cut off his own drawing hand rather than loose against my father’s life. Who dares say this is his work?”
“I don’t say so,” said Bened reasonably. “I do say this is marked as his arrow. He is the best shot with the short bow in all this countryside.”
“And everybody in Gwytherin knows,” spoke up a voice from among the Welshmen, not accusing, only pointing out facts, “that he has quarrelled often and fiercely with Rhisiart, over a certain matter at issue between them.”
“Over me,” said Sioned harshly. “Say what you mean! I, of all people, know the truth best. Better than you all! Yes, they have had high words many times, on this one matter, and only this, and would have had more, but for all that, these two have understood each other, and neither one of them would ever have done the other harm. Do you think the prize fought over does not get to know the risks to herself and both the combatants? Fight they did, but they thought more highly of each other than either did of any of you, and with good reason.”
“Yet who can say,” said Peredur in a low voice, “how far a man may step aside even from his own nature, for love?”
She turned and looked at him with measuring scorn. “I thought you were his friend!”
“So I am his friend,” said Peredur, paling but steadfast. “I said what I believe of myself, no less than of him.”
“What is this matter of one Engelard?” demanded Prior Robert, left behind in this exchange. “Tell me what they are saying.” And when Cadfael had done so, as tersely as possible: “It would seem that at least this young man must be asked to account for his movements this day,” decreed Robert, appropriating an authority to which he had no direct right here. “It may be that others have been with him, and can vouch for him. But if not…”
“He set out this morning with your father,” said Huw, distressfully eyeing the girl’s fixed and defiant face. “You
