“Your lady? No lord, then?”
She did not answer his questions. It was time to go, more than time. A tumble in field might be a consolation, as a plucked flower may be a delight, but both would quickly fade.
And if we are all to die of the pestilence, what matter? Did you not hope and plan for exactly this kind of encounter? Stop this foolish shyness! Seize this brawny, beautiful brute and make him yours for the morning!
She shook her head against herself, her loins and lips tingling at the lascivious notion. That glimpse of his heart, and his kindness, made him real to her: a person, not a day-dream of desire, and she would not treat him so. Thus, when he rolled to his feet in a swift, powerful arc of movement, she skittered sideways, away from his likely approach. Plucking the heap of sheets off the beech mast, she gathered them tight and then pelted off, the sun burning on her head and face. Torn between going and staying, even as she fled, she made for the tall, multi-colored tent at the eastern side of the tourney ground, her mind in as much turmoil as a kicked beehive.
We could have this morning, and then? Do not look back!
Do you want to lie with him and then yearn after him for weeks? Do you want him to regret our union?
Do not look back! He may take it as a signal to follow!
Do you want to watch him flirt with others, and realize that grief of his, that seeming care, is as shallow as a dew pond? Worse, do you want to see him with another lady and know for sure our time meant nothing?
“I would be his equal and mean all of it,” she panted, her calves and thighs aching as she ran past a startled group of pages, who instantly began to point and to make lewd remarks on her bouncing breasts. “I am his equal.” Against the jeering of the tousle-headed, gawping lads, her voice sounded false in her ears, too light.
Ranulf knelt beneath the spreading branches of the beech tree where the maid had sheltered. Offa was still in the bushes somewhere, struggling with his bowels. His poor steward had been sweating with fear, though he had tried to convince the hapless Offa that it was likely nothing more than the sudden, unfortunate results of eating a bad meat pie, and not the pestilence.
He rose off his knees into a crouch. She had been about this height, as brown and nimble as a sparrow, with a mass and maze of hair. She had carefully hidden her face and eyes. Perhaps her mistress had not known she had ventured to the stream; perhaps she was playing truant, like a school-boy. A mystery maid, much as the Lady of Lilies was a mystery princess.
“I wonder who she belongs to?” he said, idly patting the narrow trunk of the beech where the lass had leaned and not really caring at that moment if he meant maid or princess.
“Offa!” he bawled, pitching his shout above the stirring camp, “Have you died in that hedge?”
There was a cracking of twigs and his steward burst out into the water-meadow from a stand of hawthorn and guelder rose, his mouth already busy with excuses.
“Peace, Master Steward, and lead on.” Ranulf waved off the rest, only half-listening as Offa apologized again. All of this—stream, maid and princess—were pretty diversions. They would pass the morning until it was time to fight again.
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The Snow Bride
She is Beauty, but is he the Beast?
Elfrida, spirited, caring and beautiful, is also alone. She is the witch of the woods and no man dares to ask for her hand in marriage until a beast comes stalking brides and steals away her sister. Desperate, the lovely Elfrida offers herself as a sacrifice, as bridal bait, and she is seized by a man with fearful scars. Is he the beast?
In the depths of a frozen midwinter, in the heart of the woodland, Sir Magnus, battle-hardened knight of the Crusades, searches ceaselessly for three missing brides, pitting his wits and weapons against a nameless stalker of the snowy forest. Disfigured and hideously scarred, Magnus has finished with love, he thinks, until he rescues a fourth ‘bride’, the beautiful, red-haired Elfrida, whose innocent touch ignites in him a fierce passion that satisfies his deepest yearnings and darkest desires.
Chapter One
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 with 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?”
“Oh no, Elfrida, but I was thinking.”
Elfrida tugged another stitch tight, her needle flashing like a small sword in the bright evening light. “Does your Walter call me so?” she asked carefully.
She glanced up. Christina was blushing very prettily, her light-blue eyes brighte
r than cornflowers when set against her pale-blue veil, white skin, and primrose hair. Lost in admiration, and quite still for a moment, she heard Christina admit, “We do not talk much. Well, I do not. Walter calls me kitten and we kiss.”
Christina and her betrothed could be found kissing all over the village, so that was no surprise.
“Yet still.” Christina pressed a well-bitten fingernail to her rose-petal lips. “Our dam was a witch.”
“She was a wisewoman, Christina.”
“Our father was a wizard.”
“A healer and dowser,” Elfrida patiently corrected.
“And you are all of that, of those things, I mean.”
Elfrida fastened the final stitch and knelt beside her sister, crouching back on her heels in the snow. Christina was not usually so fretful.
“Walter loves you very much,” she said after a space, “and you have a good dowry.”
A good dowry it was, of cloth she had spun and ale she had brewed, cheeses she had made, and silver pennies she had earned by her healing and dowsing. Since her earliest childhood, Christina had longed to be married, with a hearth and children of her own, and Elfrida had striven to keep her safe and happy. She was the eldest, so it was her duty, and she had promised their parents, on their deathbeds, that she would do so.
“But will the priest marry us?” Christina was biting another fingernail.
“Today is the very eve of your wedding, little one.” Elfrida tugged gently on her sister’s dress. “This is your wedding gown.”
“He has preached against redheads.”
“You are no redhead, and Father John’s sermon was on modesty for women,” Elfrida replied. Her sister was not a redhead, but she was, and redheads were rumored to be witches. “He said that for a girl to be unveiled was to be as brazen as a redhead. He took my healing ointment, too.” She tugged gently a second time on Christina’s dress. “Walter will be here to see you after sunset. Would you have him see you in your gown?”
Her sister ignored her question and pouted. “He will be late. He is coming here only after a meeting with his old men, and you know how they go on!”
“Did he say what the council was about?”
Christina shrugged. “He may have done, but I was not listening then.” She colored prettily. “Will you comb my hair again?”
Elfrida silently rose, kicking the snow from her faded, red gown—one that had belonged to their mother—and eased the wooden combs from Christina’s pale, shimmering hair. As she gently teased and tugged and Christina’s breathing slowed, Elfrida thought of the council. Yester evening, when he swept into their hut and whirled Christina into his meaty arms, Walter’s shrewd gray eyes had glanced everywhere. He had asked twice if their door was well secured and poked the roof-thatch as if seeking rats’ nests. He had promised them one of his dogs this very evening, as a gift, he claimed, then blushed when Christina clapped her hands and kissed him.
Elfrida frowned, worrying a comb over a small knot in her sister’s tresses. Walter and the rest of the village men knew something, and none of her gossips in the bakehouse or the wash rocks by the stream knew anything. Christina, dreaming of wedding flowers for her hair and of babies to come, was not concerned, but Elfrida was not satisfied. Why had Walter promised the gift of a dog—to warn and guard them from what? She had spotted no boar or wolf tracks in the nearby woods. Was a man-wolf—an outlaw—abroad and making havoc? Were disgruntled men-at-arms from a wretched Norman lord foraging close to their village? But why did the village men, her village men, not explain?
Granted, I would not say much to Christina, who is easily wary and will not linger even in the widest paths of the forest, but I am wisewoman here! These village elders turn to me when they have lost things and for cures when their bodies pain them. They should tell me everything. When Walter comes tonight I will leave the lovebirds in peace and safety together and call on the headman myself.
Magnus listened to the high, excited chatter of the council and watched the old men as they argued on their long bench in front of a poor, smoking fire. Their bread was moldy and their cheese worm-ridden, so under cover of the vast shadows in the great hut, he dropped both into the rushes for the rats to find. The ale was good, though. He took another drink, then asked idly, “Who brewed the ale?”
Silence greeted his question. In this council, only he and the headman understood each other as the village dialect was utterly incomprehensible to him. He waited as the old man translated his question to the group and waited again as the headman made a slow, careful reply.
“The drink was made by Elfrida, the herb-woman in the next village.”
The headman, a wrinkled fellow as gnarled and stubby as the old olive trees Magnus had seen while away on crusade, muttered something else. Magnus, sitting on a low stool that made his backside go numb and his long legs ache, leaned toward him.
“She is a witch, you say, as well as a healer?” Seizing a branch, he stirred the fire and studied his huddled companions by its brighter flames. “Is she a good witch, a pious one? Can she help us?”
His questions, once translated, brought a mass shaking of heads and twitchy strokings of ragged beards. One or two elders said more, leading to a furious, whispered debate. Magnus finished his ale and thought about cutting thorns and scrub for defense and digging ditches and repairing and strengthening walls and roofs—all work which must wait until daylight.
“So you have not told your womenfolk of this threat, not even your wisewoman,” he said, once the whispers had died down.
“She is not our wisewoman! She is good, yes, pious, but of the next village!”
“But a woman, all the same. And why do your two villages not work together? Why not bring all your young women into this hut and have them sleep by the fire, with your men sleeping in a circle round them?”
He saw a look of shame flicker across the headman’s wrinkled face and added more gently, “Would that not keep them safe?”
“For how long? This month, one of our maids went missing. Last month, this monster struck in another neighbor village, snatched a maiden, and returned into the forest. No one can track him, no one. He may return tonight or tomorrow or at the next full moon, or in the next three months. He should return to the other village or our neighbors and leave ours in peace!”
“And that is your hope.” Magnus nodded at the spate of words, marking that the old man was too agitated to translate for his companions. Three villages, three settlements, made this search harder, for the beast had many targets.
“We need your help,” the headman continued doggedly. “Our women are not fine ladies. They work. They spin at home, or weave at home, or brew, or cook, or gather harvest or plant or weed, or wash, or make butter or cheese—all at home.”
“But in the evenings, can they not come here?” Magnus prompted.
“The Forest Grendel strikes at any time, night or day. We cannot guard them all the time. We have told them nothing.”
“That is what you call the beast?” Magnus was struck by the aptness. In the old tale of Beowulf, Grendel was the creature who preyed upon the warriors, striking in the night and carrying them away from the golden hall, unopposed and unstoppable until the hero fought him.
“How else should we name the creature? He is in very truth the monster of this woodland, a Forest Grendel!”
Magnus nodded agreement. “When the girls were kidnapped from here and the other village, how was this hidden from your womenfolk?”
“The one here was only an orphan and disliked by all but her lover. It was rumored she had run off to some town. We did not tell anything of the other maiden.”
Magnus said nothing, but the headman sensed his disapproval. “What else would you have us say? They are women, after all. If they knew the danger, their wits would not stand it.”
Magnus nodded, thinking of Alice’s likely response to that statement as he smelled the man’s shame and frustration. In essence, however, what the fellow a
dmitted was the stark truth. The men had to work in the fields or forest and the women at home. It was how they survived.
“Move from these villages—” he began, but the headman interrupted.
“We will not be driven from our homes!”
“Move the young women,” Magnus continued steadily. “They can come to my manor, and my people will guard them.”
“They will not go.”
You do not want them to go, Magnus translated in his mind.
The headman glowered at him across the fire. “You said you would find the beast! You are Sir Magnus, the famed warrior of the East! We had heard of your exploits in arms even here, and when we sent the messenger we could scarcely hope that you would come. I know we cannot offer much gold, but for the renown of such a chase, we thought it would be enough.”
“Renown feeds no bellies,” Magnus answered dryly, “but you need not fret. I have never yet turned away from helping a maid, be she free or bond.”
“So you will find the beast?”
“I will, but it will take me time and many of my men. You say the monster is hard to track.” Magnus stirred the fire again. He wanted more light to give these old men heart. “I will catch it,” he vowed. “The more you tell me, the better. Have you anything of the creature’s?”
A sturdy peasant, straighter and more lithe than the huddled group by the fire, stepped from the wall shadows and tossed him a bundle. Fumbling in the dark, Magnus accidentally dropped the rough cloth parcel into the rushes and heard the peasant mutter something that the headman chose not to translate. Magnus guessed it would be about his scars and missing hand and ignored it, too. He did not have to justify his fighting skills to any low-born farmer. He scrabbled for and retrieved the parcel as the old men burst into squalls of chatter, hard and urgent as showers of hail. Guessing that he was in for more long-winded exclamations, he shifted on the stool, then warned himself sternly to listen.
I will look tonight, too. For as long as there is light, and I can see any kind of trail, I will look. But for the trouble to afflict this village and two more! It is worse than I realized.
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