Chapter One

Dublin, Ireland

May 1148

Day One

Godfrid

“I want every street, every house, every boat searched for the culprit. Question everyone! We must find out what happened here. With a wound this grave, Rikard can’t have gone far. I want him found! And if he went not of his own free will, someone will have seen something. Find that person!” Sturla, King Ottar’s steward, scribe, and skald, stood in the center of the floor near a broken loom, giving instructions and emphasizing every point with a stabbing finger. At the sight of Godfrid entering the warehouse, however, he arrested his arm in mid-stab—and held the position long enough for everyone present to understand that he was surprised and disappointed at Godfrid’s arrival.

Godfrid wasn’t exactly happy to see Sturla either, but he was even more displeased by the condition of the warehouse: trading items had been pulled from their shelves and scattered across the floor. Almost worse, two of the three looms, at which the weaver women should have been working, were upended, the racks, battens, and treadles broken into pieces. It was very much what he imagined a village would have looked like after his ancestors had sacked it.

Godfrid had included Rikard in the dangerous game he was playing against King Ottar, and now Rikard had been murdered and his possessions destroyed. Godfrid couldn’t help but think this was all his fault.

“My lord. What brings you here?” Sturla’s lips twisted, as if it irked him to have to use the honorific, and he very belatedly sketched a bow. His gray curly hair stuck up all over his head, adding height to his already lanky body, which appeared thinner than usual this morning. Sturla’s face also had a pallor that implied he was unwell.

In reply, Godfrid chose to call Sturla by his first name rather than use his title. “Hello, Sturla. King Ottar sent me.” It was a petty battle to fight, and Godfrid immediately modified his expression to something more accommodating. He could throw Ottar’s name around when it suited him to do so, and he knew better than to reveal in word or deed how much he despised the king. He’d been hiding his animosity for five long years—for so long, in fact, that his polite exterior had become something of a second nature to him.

In this instance, though, his words were actually the truth: he’d been woken by a messenger from the king, telling him of a pool of blood and a missing merchant—and giving him the commission to assist in the investigation.

It might even be that his obsequiousness was finally paying off, and Ottar was beginning to trust him.

“Of course. I give way to the king’s greater wisdom.” Sturla nodded sharply, and then turned to the man next to him. “I’m sure you and Holm can sort out an appropriate division of labor.”

Holm was the newly appointed Sheriff of Dublin and, at twenty-five, far too young for his exalted position. “Of course, my lord.” He bowed, but his eyes were on Godfrid, and they weren’t happy. “What did he hope for from you? Why exactly did he send you?”

That was the question of the hour, and Godfrid couldn’t blame Holm for asking it. “The messenger did not say other than to suggest that my presence would bring another pair of eyes to a difficult scene. It is the king’s understanding that you have a large amount of blood and no body. Nobody mentioned the rest.” He gestured to the destruction around him. “What can you tell me?”

Holm sniffed. “We are just beginning our investigation.”

In other words, nothing.

Godfrid let out a breath, striving for patience, knowing full well that Holm’s attitude was to be expected. So he said, in as mild a tone as he could manage, “Where’s the pool of blood?”

Holm sighed a little too elaborately. “This way.”

Sturla, meanwhile, headed for the exterior door behind Godfrid. As he passed Godfrid’s position, his shoulder came within a hair’s breadth of banging into Godfrid’s own, prompting Godfrid to swallow down laughter at the absurdity of the steward’s posturing, even as he understood it too. Godfrid was the son of a deceased co-ruler of Dublin, one who’d held a lesser station than his supposed partner. Such a son would find little respect among Ottar’s men.

Secretly, Godfrid believed they feared him, but they hated themselves for that fear, and so they disrespected him instead. Most of the time, Godfrid paid no heed to any of them, following a course set by his father long ago that he should at all times float above the petty sneers and opinions of others. He and Brodar, Godfrid’s elder brother, needed to keep their eyes on the main chance. Nothing was to interfere with their quest for the throne of Dublin.

In the early years of his father’s rivalry with Ottar, the division of loyalty had been more even, but with his father’s decline and then death, Dublin had confirmed Ottar as sole king. The decision had been disappointing to say the least, but understandable as well. These days, Dublin sat in a precarious—and subordinate—position in relationship to the Gaelic Kingdom of Leinster, which was their only real buffer against the other kingdoms of Ireland. Their backs were to the sea, as they always had been. But the days of Danish dominance were past, and the sea was no longer the haven it had once been. Godfrid couldn’t blame the leading men of Dublin for their fear of what the future held and their desperate attempts to hold on to what they had.

Godfrid left two members of his personal guard at the front door and followed Holm, who managed to swallow his disdain sufficiently not to delegate to one of his underlings the task of showing Godfrid the blood. As they walked past the three looms, their feet thudded on the highly polished boards that formed the floor of the warehouse, an example of the pride Rikard had taken in all of his holdings. The northern wall of the warehouse abutted the city’s defenses, and the River Liffey, which flowed to the north of the city, was close enough that Godfrid could hear the calls of dock men at their work and the lap of water against the ships.

The missing man, Rikard, had been a merchant of some wealth and repute, with a fleet of boats, this warehouse, and a large hall in the southwestern quadrant of the city. He had many servants too, one of whom, a woman in her later twenties with a slave collar around her neck, had been attempting to clean up some of the mess. As Godfrid and Holm passed by, she turned to face the wall, as was expected of her in the presence of a nobleman who was not her master.

Godfrid himself had never held slaves, following the tenets of the Church, which, once the Normans arrived in Britain, had seriously curtailed the Dublin slavers’ trade. While slave-taking in war still happened, most recently two years ago when one Irish clan had raided another, Godfrid found himself frowning to see that Rikard still supported the practice.

Holm halted at the back of the room in front of the rear door. A nearby flight of stairs led to a loft that ran all the way around the inside walls of the warehouse. The design was identical to that of Rikard’s home—and Godfrid’s own—except for the larger size of the building and the presence of an enclosed room in the southwestern corner of the loft. The door to that room was off its hinges, marking it as yet another casualty of the ransacking of the warehouse.

Like a steward introducing an entertainer for the evening, Holm gestured expansively to the floor and the pool of blood. “As you can see, robbery turned to murder.”

As far as Godfrid knew, Holm had investigated exactly one murder since he’d taken office, if a tavern brawl where one of the participants ended up dead counted as murder. He’d seen a handful of other similar incidents as undersheriff before that.

Were Godfrid in Holm’s shoes, he would have welcomed the help, but it was hard to blame the man for being offended at what appeared to be a lack of trust on the part of his king, and Godfrid could appreciate not wanting anyone looking over his shoulder, telling him what to do or what he was doing wrong. Holm might even be beginning to realize that his elevation to sheriff had more to do with his family’s wealth and personal loyalty to Ottar than his skill.

None of that explained why Ottar had asked Godfrid specifically to assist Holm, but now that he was here, he was interested enough to stay.

The blood had pooled across three floorboards and been smeared across several more, as if a large object—possibly a body—had been dragged across the scene. The smears didn’t go all the way to the door, implying that the body had been picked up eventually.

“What makes you think this blood is Rikard’s?”

“He’s missing.” Holm appeared to just catch himself before he rolled his eyes. “He never came home last night, and nobody has seen him.”

Godfrid snorted under his breath, wanting to protest that they shouldn’t assume Rikard was dead until they saw the body. When it came to murder, Godfrid had learned from his friend Gareth not to assume anything, particularly not this early in the investigation. But he saw the wisdom in not antagonizing Holm further. If he was going to continue to please Ottar, he had to work with Holm—and there really was a disconcerting amount of blood on the floor. There was so much, in fact, that Godfrid couldn’t see how its owner could be still alive.

Holm motioned jerkily with his head towards an overturned chair two feet from the pool. A length of finely woven rope—silk not hemp—was coiled on the floor underneath it, and the bottoms of the chair legs were stained with blood. Living in Dublin among seamen, Godfrid was used to seeing coarse hemp rope everywhere. This rope, however, appeared to be designed to be decorative, perhaps to hold back a curtain in a rich man’s house.

“I’d wager next month’s wages that Rikard was bound to that chair and tortured for the location of his silver and gold. When he wouldn’t give up his wealth, they killed him rather than allow him to identify them to me. Then they ransacked the warehouse to find the wealth themselves.” Holm declared this as if his conclusions should be obvious, even to a spoiled princeling such as Godfrid. “I’d say we are looking for rogue seamen, perhaps even Rikard’s own men.” Then his eyes widened. “They could have sailed on the morning tide, perhaps with Rikard in the hold!”

Godfrid put out a calming hand to him. “Why do you think a seaman is responsible?”

Holm gestured to the chair. “Those are seaman’s knots in that rope.”

“But not a seaman’s rope, Holm.” Godfrid was trying to speak gently. “If someone tied Rikard to that chair, he found the rope in the warehouse. He didn’t come prepared.”

Holm’s expression showed grudging acceptance, and he didn’t refute Godfrid’s logic. “Rikard was an old man and a merchant. Who knew he had it in him to resist an intruder?”

Godfrid again found himself objecting to Holm’s assumptions, and again had to say something. “You may be right, Holm, but I’m left wondering why whoever did this didn’t take more? There is wealth all around us. Why leave it behind?”

“As you say, the intruder didn’t come prepared. Perhaps Rikard interrupted him.”

Feeling that he was better off not continuing this back and forth with Holm, Godfrid didn’t answer. Instead, he returned his attention to the pool of blood, eyeing it with some trepidation. The fluid had covered several papers, as well as a polished-stone rosary, and he was glad he wouldn’t be assisting the slave girl in the cleaning of it.

On impulse, abandoning in an instant his resolve not to irk Holm, Godfrid crouched to the pool, reached out a finger to the puddle, and dabbed at it, pulling some of the blood onto his forefinger.

Inevitably, Holm sputtered a protest. “I already did that.”

Since he couldn’t take back what he’d done, Godfrid sniffed the blood and put it to his lips—and his surprise at the smell and taste had him jerking upright and stepping backwards away from the pool. “You can’t have, Holm, else you wouldn’t have told the king that Rikard had been murdered.”

“He was murdered, my lord. Nobody can lose that much blood and live.”

“That would be true, Holm, if this were blood. But what we have here is wine.”