“Why not?” Carrie said then, adding, “You say that Jack really looks like this Denzil?”
Eric nodded.
“He could be a descendant, or something else? And after the same things as Joseph Denzil?” Carrie gave a tiny smile. “Given how you have materialized, I suppose that’s not impossible.”
He must have looked as stunned as he felt because she went on, “Jack liked secrets, getting one over people, knowing what others didn’t.”
Hidden knowledge such as that of the occult, Eric supplied. The idea was less than comforting.
“It took me a while to admit that about him, to stop making excuses for him being interested in New Age material when it was always a means to dominate others.” Carrie rubbed her forehead as if she had a headache, before stiffening and jerking her head up like a hunting hound. “He came to the cottage once before, so why is now different?”
Despite Jack’s interest in the occult, Eric hesitated to mention workings or dark enchantments, or the dreaded ley-lines, because despite the New Age, the modern world was overwhelmingly one of measures and science—and him being alive and not a statue was wild enough already. Even after all we have been through, all she has accepted, how can she believe me?
In the awkward silence, Carrie asked another tricky question. “Do you think the witch, Elfrida, spelled us to work together so well?” she demanded.
She echoed his own disquiet in this particular regard, but he would not say that. “I don’t know.” To cover his confusion, he topped up their teas from the pot.
Thanking him as he handed her mug back, Carrie aimed a scowl at the fire. “What happens if her spell fades?”
“We go on, as other couples do.” He risked a tease. “Am I so wicked you need magic to like me?”
“Pah! Am I a unicorn?” Carrie exclaimed, reminding him, in that instant, of Magnus from long ago. He told himself it was a lucky omen and sprawled more obviously on the rug, seeking to divert her from such gloomy thoughts.
“I think both of us are far from charming unicorns, lovely,” he replied, internally flinching as he realized his less-than-tactful response. Fool to remind her of her poor marriage!
Instead of hurt, he received a thrust-out tongue and a smart, “You’re no knight errant, for sure.”
But I am a guard. Eric regretfully put his tea and plate of bread and cheese in the hearth. Mirroring his actions, Carrie did the same.
“Search for whatever Jack deposited in here?” she suggested.
He nodded, unsure what they were looking for. “It will be small, for you not to have spotted it.”
“Or it could be I am a fool.”
Startled by her harsh statement, Eric turned back from where he had been running his fingers along the central roof beam in search of this mysterious object. Meeting Carrie’s bright blue eyes, he saw her turning paler than fresh snow. He stretched a hand to her. “You are no fool,” he stated quietly, wanting at that moment to take her in his arms, to soothe her troubles.
She shook her head, her blond locks bouncing on her narrow shoulders. “I should have thought of it earlier,” she replied, drawing back before he could embrace her. Quickly now, she slid across the tiles in that nimble way she had and plucked a large tin out from amidst her bottles of spices.
“After we parted, I kept it as a memento but put it out of sight.” She plunged her hand into the box and plucked out a sparkling necklace. Or rather, Eric thought, as he padded up for a closer look, a leather thong and a single, clumsy gem.
“Jack gave it to me as his first gift.”
One of only a few, Eric translated in his mind, as he studied the piece. It was of silver, large as the palm of his hand, and circular, with symbols embossed on its face.
“I took it off after we separated. I wore it because he wanted me to.”
But never liked it, Eric guessed, reluctant to touch the trinket. “May I?” Compelling his hand, he gripped the leather thong and brought the disc into the greater light of the fire.
“These symbols are runes,” he said, turning the silver and trying to read them. His memories of old Norse failed him, or rather the words made no sense.
“It reads, ‘Here my line to pull down sky,’ or possibly ‘heaven’. Is it a saying of his?”
“None I know of.”
“Line.” Eric drew one with his foot. A connection hovered, just out of reach. “I dreamed of this, of lines.” What had the witch told him? A meeting of ley-lines? How do I tell Carrie so she understands its import? “Something of Saint Michael?”
From looking as white as milk, Carrie flushed, her eyes showing even more startling in her rosy face. “Granddad always said that this cottage is on the ley-line that runs from Saint Michael’s mount in Cornwall, through Glastonbury, Avebury and Bury Saint Edmunds. That the line means strength and healing and protection.”
Eric glowered at the flashing disc. “And this thing is a circle, no line of any kind, a breaking of lines.” He wanted to explain how it felt wrong to him, sticky somehow. A gift given by a promise-breaker is no gift. There is some evil in these runes—and why is it fashioned of silver, when my Carrie deserves gold? “I do not like it.”
Ashamed he should be admitting such murky fears, he glowered inwardly as Carrie pitched him a glance of sympathy and then shot a scorching glare at the gem.
“Take it outside,” she said sharply, waving the disc away. She frowned, rubbing at her arms. “Even if it is innocent, even if Jack is innocent, why should we be inconvenienced? Having to listen for his knock when he could have asked for it sooner? Put it on the garden wall by the gate for him to collect. I don’t want it in here. Seeing it again reminds me...”
Reminded her of what she did not say. Eric’s grip tightened on the slippery leather. “I’ll go now,” he said. Before it’s fully dark. “Chain the door after I leave, okay?”
Sure she would act as he requested, he strode off into the garden, making not for the gate but for the stone wall bordering the edge of the cliff. I’ll chuck this thing into the sea, into the deeps, and there’s an end to it. He hoped.
Eric quickened his steps.
Chapter 6
The fog came first, before the darkness. Through a crack in the shutter Eric had made, Carrie watched it billow in from the sea, silent and grey as a gravestone. She leaned over the holly twigs, trying to spot her companion returning from the garden.
“He’s not coming back,” said a voice close to her ear.
Carrie whirled about, a holly branch in her hand to use as a club. The fire fluttered in the grate, the Christmas baubles twinkled—and the room was empty.
“Jack left you, so will this one.”
“Jack was never mine,” she replied, even as she looked at the clock. Eric had been gone for twenty minutes, no more. “Go away.”
She almost made the sign of the cross, but was too embarrassed to lift her arms.
An icy blast blew down the chimney and she rapidly added to the fire.
“He’s not returning,” crept the insidious tones, now sounding more and more like Jack’s. Or is that Joseph Denzil’s? “He’s free and gone. Why should he stay?”
Carrie picked the gold necklace from the window. She thought of Eric striving against the chains, of herself helping him. “If he’s free, then I’m glad,” she said aloud, unable to keep the slight wobble from her voice.
“You always were selfish,” scolded Jack, as the door rattled.
“Eric?” she wanted to call out, picturing him standing on the threshold, clad in her granddad’s pants, bare-footed and bare-chested, smiling that warm grin of his and so very dear. The chain jerked on the latch and the whole cottage seemed to shudder.
“Alone!” sang out the fog, as the last of the daylight drained away.
Something struck at the window-board, and the electric light over her head exploded in a shower of sparks and falling glass. The fuse-box is on the wall outside, where I cannot go. Carrie rushed to find matches, c
hecking her phone as she set several big lit candles on the kitchen worktops. As expected, there was no phone signal. She picked up the necklace again from close to the sink, gripping it for reassurance.
Leave and you’ll not be harmed. The words and sickly-sweet promise appeared in ashes in the hearth.
“Get out!” Carrie yelled, too furious to be afraid. “Out!”
She pointed to the door and the gold necklace flew from her fingers, landing on the floor. Carrie started after it when a dry, wheezing chuckle spun her about like a kite cut from its strings.
Impossible, but Jack was in the cottage with her, smirking in the way he always did when he considered he’d won. He held up an old brass key.
“You forgot the cellar and coal-hole,” he said, leering and smirking. “I spotted them on the old deeds, years ago.”
He remembered the old spaces where I had forgotten them. He planned to exploit even that. “You are not invited.” Carrie unbarred the cottage door and opened it to the night. “You did not cross the threshold. Leave.”
“I stay, just for tonight.” Jack made the demand as if he was the reasonable one. “A single night and then I’m gone, no more trouble in the divorce, no more claims, no—”
“Are you deaf?” she interrupted, using Jack’s favourite sneer against him, feeling only yeah right as her ex appeared disbelieving. Her legs trembled, but she gripped the latch and did not back down. “Please leave now.”
He half-turned as if to comply and then charged, flailing and roaring. She struck back but his long, spiderish fingers were around her throat and he was squeezing, digging the breath from her. Carrie thrashed and struggled, her vision blackening like the darkness outside, hearing Jack’s hateful, giggling laughter. His looming face looked like a skull, his hair like tufts of ginger moss. Is he Jack still or Denzil, or have they become one?
“Bitch!” he crowed, twisting aside as she aimed a final desperate kick. “Dying alone!”
And then she was free, swept behind a strong, living body. Eric lunged again, yanking her with him as Jack hit out.
“Knife!” She gasped a warning, seeking Eric’s shield, not spotting it, catching the glint of gold on the threshold.
Obeying an impulse she did not question, Carrie seized the necklace and tossed it to Eric. The gold shimmered and shifted in mid-air, becoming massive, reverting to the chains that had once bound her Viking.
Eric flexed the heavy gold, cracking it like a whip. Jack-Denzil howled, though the chain did not touch him. Eric spun the chain a second time, the light of the necklace flaring in the night, and their adversary fled, racing into the mists, skulking off like a diseased shadow.
Eric dropped the chain and dropped to his knees, his blond head hanging. “Came,” he panted, “Fast as...could. Dumped disc...sea....Lost on return... cliff path...fog sudden...Sorry...not quicker...”
Carrie stepped close and enfolded him in her arms, feeling his chin pressed against her stomach, scenting his tang and sweat, hearing his great gasping breaths. She dropped a kiss on top of his tangled curls. “Doesn’t matter,” she said softly, cradling him, rocking them both. “It’s over, love. He’ll trouble us no more.”
She knew it. And she was glad.
Chapter 7
He ran his hands through her hair, loving how she leaned into his touch. In the cottage, the air was bright and Carrie’s new engagement ring—his betrothal gift to her—shone like a beacon.
The golden chain had remained, opulent and big as a dragon. Eric had sold two links and could now buy any number of Mercedes cars, plus any array of documents that were mysteriously needed for this modern life.
Tonight, on the eve of Christmas, he would doubtless dream of Magnus and Elfrida. He did not mind that. He was content to share the victory, the vanquishing of Jack-Denzil.
Tomorrow, he and Carrie were going to The Scone and Seagull, where she would introduce him to her work-mates and customers and he would accustom himself to not wearing a sword or axe and in moving in this cloth contraption Carrie called a three-piece suit, bought through some female called an Amazon. It would be a short café opening, but it would be enough.
Carrie lifted her head off his chest and tweaked a piece of holly from her spot on the bed. Their bed now, where she and he slept.
Tonight we shall do more than sleep, Eric thought, and smiled into her neck.
“Happy?” Carrie asked, and he kissed her throat. “Do you think it will snow for Christmas?”
Eric looked out of the unbarred window, across the shimmering waves. The day was amber bright, with no clouds in the sky. A foretelling of our future.
“I’m sure it will, for you,” he answered. How could it not? She was Carrie, and worth all that heaven and earth could grant her. The world was theirs, at Cliff Reach, within the sounds and sight of the sea. I was once a Viking chained. Now I am heart-bound but free.
He smiled, content in their love and safety. Everything was good.
He and Carrie would have a perfect Christmas.
I hope you enjoyed this story. If you would like to read more about crusader Magnus and the witch Elfrida, please see my medieval historical romance novels, The Snow Bride and A Summer Bewitchment, also my romance novella Sir Thomas and the Snow Troll as part of the One Winter Knight anthology.
THE SNOW BRIDE: The Knight and the Witch Book One
A SUMMER BEWITCHMENT: The Knight and the Witch Book Two
ONE WINTER KNIGHT
About the Author
Lindsay has been writing stories since she was six years old. History and the past have always intrigued her, and writing stories about heroes and heroines overcoming massive problems and finding love as they do so is a wonderful way to earn a living!
Lindsay is married and lives in England in the beautiful county of Yorkshire. When she's not writing or researching about the past, she enjoys reading, walking, swimming, and cooking.
For all titles by Lindsay Townsend, please visit
http://www.lindsaytownsend.co.uk
Excerpt of
THE SNOW BRIDE
The Knight and the Witch: Book One
by
LINDSAY TOWNSEND
Chapter 1
England, winter, 1131
Magnus forced his aching legs to move and dismounted stiffly from his horse. The still, freezing cold made his teeth ache, and as he tethered his mount, he wondered yet again what he was doing here. It was less than a month to Christmas, and he could have been with Peter and Alice at Castle Pleasant, preparing for feasting and singing and watching his godchildren.
And then a deep, abiding ache, bedding down in the great hall alone. He would never force a woman to lie with him—he had seen too much of that in the crusades.
He limped forward through the pristine snow. Peter had his Alice now, a clever, black-haired wench who feared nothing and no one, including him. Had his friend and fellow crusader not known her first, he might have had a chance with Alice. She saw through the outer armor and shell of a man to what lay beneath.
But she loves her crusader knight, Peter of the Mount, and I have no chance or right there.
As the palfrey snorted and jangled its harness behind him, he knelt in a white heap of pitted frost and reached out with his good arm to brush snow off the small, cracked statue of a saint. This was an old, wayside shrine on a track to nowhere of note, and the wooden figure huddled in its stone niche was old, its paint peeling. This battered saint would understand him, one ugly brute to another.
“Holy one, grant me my prayer.”
He stopped, aware of the chill silence around him—the bare trees, the white landscape, the empty road. He had nothing to offer the saint, no flower or trinket to sweeten his request.
As his knees began to smart, then burn, then freeze on the unyielding, icy ground, Magnus tried to marshal his thoughts. What did he want?
A woman of my own. Someone to return to.
Alice cared and had urged him most ardently to stay w
ith her and Peter, but pride had made him refuse them both with a smile. He did not begrudge the handsome couple their joy, not after their many trials. But the dark of winter and Christmas especially brought his own desolation home to him most keenly, sharper than an assassin’s blade. He was nine and twenty, a grizzled warrior, battle-scarred and wounded.
Feeling sorry for yourself, Magnus? Brace up, man! Be a Viking, as your granddad was. You have your wits and your balls, all working. The lasses in the stews make no complaint and do not charge so much. You have land, a strong house, good fellowship, and two hearty godchildren.
“Splendor in Christendom, let me have my own family! A lass who loves me!”
His voice rang out, startling a lone magpie into taking flight from a solitary elm in a blur of wings, but the drab and well-worn saint gave no sign of hearing. Peering into the calm, carved face, Magnus wondered if the saint was smiling, and then he spotted his own reflection, clear in a frozen mirror of ice by the shrine.
He scowled, knowing very well what he looked like, and spat to the left for luck. With his knees creaking, he staggered to his feet and remounted his eager horse. When he passed this way again he would leave gold, he vowed, but for now he wished only to slink away. He needed to find the village before nightfall and speak to the council of old men—it was always old men—who had sent word to his manor of Norton Mayfield, begging for help, any help, to track and to defeat a monster.
• ♥ •
“Are you a witch?”
Elfrida, sewing on the sleeves to her younger sister’s best dress as they sat together on the bench outside her hut, felt fear coil in her belly like hunger pangs. Keeping her eyes fixed on her needle, she answered steadily, between stitches, “I am my own master, ’tis all, without a husband. Have any in the village been troubling you?”
Carrie’s Christmas Viking Page 4
