Townsend, Lindsay - The Snow Bride (BookStrand Publishing Romance)

by Lindsay Townsend

  In the dream, when she spoke to him, he understood.

  “Damsels live behind these doors, and a beast visits them.”

  “Where does he live?”

  She smiled. “You are a good student. That is for us to find out.”

  She reached across the ribs of the rowing boat and took his unblemished right hand in hers. “You are handsome. I like your curly black hair and beard.”

  She leaned forward, brushing her cheek against his beard. Her touch and the scent of her, spices and poppy, mingled with sweet, warm flesh, aroused him instantly.

  “What is your name?” she whispered, stealing a swift kiss from his whole, unscarred mouth.

  “Magnus,” he said aloud and woke, his head throbbing. Light glared into his eyes, and he shielded them with his arm, sighing as he saw the stump where his hand had once been. His missing foot itched and ached as he remembered afresh his old war wounds. In Outremer, his scars had been badges of honor and courage, but in England he was ugly, a beast.

  A monster to catch a monster. Is that not apt?

  He heard Elfrida’s breath, fast and hard, and knew she was awake. She had not screamed yet, which was a blessing.

  He flinched, surprised as she thrust a firebrand up to his face, then he held still, tormenting her and himself with his looks.

  A pair of bright, amber eyes scanned his ruined face. Elfrida crouched by the fire, glancing at him, the door, and the horse.

  “If you try riding him, he will kick you off into a snowdrift,” Magnus remarked. Keeping his voice low and even, he said, “Elfrida, my name is Magnus. I am here to help.”

  Her eyes narrowed at his use of her name, but she shook her head as he repeated what he had said in every language he knew. When he had finished, she held up her arm and pointed at his. Baffled, he raised his left hand, and she brought the burning brand close, studying the limb as if looking for cloven hooves.

  “I am a man,” he said quietly. “I know I may not look it.”

  She lifted her left hand, turning the palm to him. When he pointed at the red spots that now marred her previously flawless skin, she nodded to him, then to his horse.

  He was stunned when he realized what she was suggesting and violently shook his head. “So you have a pox, which is one reason why you have swooned. But I am still not leaving.” He shrugged and risked a smile. His missing teeth were no worse than those of many others. “I had poxes as a child, and in the East.”

  She jabbered something, tossing the brand onto the fire and snatching up the cross he had made. When he began to recite the creed, she joined in, then lifted her other arm, where faint spots were already beginning to emerge, and pointed a second time to his horse.

  “Even if I could, I would not leave,” he said.

  She backed away to the door and, rising, peered through a small gap between roof and doorway, her lips moving as she seemed to count the falling ribbons of snow. Suddenly, shockingly, she dropped to her knees and pleaded. He understood her name and thought he heard another name, but he shook his head at the rest.

  “I am no Forest Grendel,” he said, sounding as calm as the snow outside while within he boiled with shame. He had thought her anxious for him not of him, a rare indulgence, but now it seemed this scrap of a girl did think him a monster.

  But she tapped her chest. “Elfrida.” She pointed to the fire.

  “Are you cold?” He wrapped arms about himself and pretended to shiver.

  A single, powerful negative was her response.

  “Hot?”

  She replied with a name, “Christina.”

  “Is she your child?” Magnus picked up a branch and cradled it, as if rocking a baby.

  Elfrida frowned. “Magnus?” She too rocked a branch.

  “No,” he said and shook his head.

  “Forest Grendel?” She ran the words together.

  “No!” His own shout shocked him, and her. She paled and wiped her eyes. He was shamed to have made her cry. “I am sorry.”

  * * * *

  Elfrida felt more tears trickle down her face and prayed that her strange companion, whoever, whatever, he was, would not see them. Dizzy again, she slid down the door of the hut and sat on the saddle, blinking to clear her blurred vision and wishing she was either hot or cold, not both at once. Questions pounded in her aching head. Where was Christina? What pox had struck her? Who was Magnus, a Viking without a ship?

  He was fussing with a small wooden cup and a pail—no, it was a metal helm of some kind, used as a pail—and drinking some kind of milky substance from within it. He showed her the cup, smacked his ragged lips, and offered her a drink.

  She accepted, deciding he had no need to drug or poison her, not with her limbs already feeling so heavy and the small of her back aching as it did usually only after harvest. The warm water was curiously soothing, and she sipped it gratefully, wondering for a wild instant if she should dash it into his eyes instead and flee the hut. But Magnus had very kind, crinkled eyes for a Viking, or a beast.

  And even if she could scald him and could escape him and lumber out into the woods, what then? She dared not travel in this snowstorm, and if her pox was the great one, she would soon be too sick to move.

  She drained the cup, surprised to find she had finished her water. Magnus gestured with his battered right arm. She nodded, allowing him to take the cup in his whole hand while she studied the stump of his right. No claws there, so had she imagined them? And those deep grooves across his face—surely those could not be the result of nature? So why had this man not died of his wounds?

  Elfrida remembered a tinker who had stayed at her house and spoken of distant lands beyond the forest, beyond even the sea. “Jerusalem?” she asked, jerking her eyes at his missing hand. The holy city was the one place she had heard of, outside England.

  Magnus grinned, turning his already ugly looks into a devil’s face, as she fought down a rush of fear.

  “Azaz,” he replied, waving his stump and his foot—a missing foot, replaced by a wooden stump, Elfrida realized with a jolt of pity. With his good hand he was tracing a deep groove from his jaw to his nose, where the tip of his nose was also missing, and now he drew a half-moon in the air, saying more.

  He had a deep, pleasing voice, and she guessed he was sensible, but she had no idea still what he was saying. He grinned again and moved.

  “Do not!” She snatched at his hand as he seemed about to hack at his face with his eating knife. She caught his wrist, and it was like gripping a bar of iron. She could not budge his arm. Again he said something, very slowly.

  “Wounds in battle, I understand,” she said, sagging with relief as he relaxed, holding the dagger out to her, hilt first. Trust me, his kind, crinkled eyes seem to plead.

  It was a good dagger, very finely wrought, well-balanced in her hand as she took it. She glanced again at his scars, his wide shoulders, the hard, well-developed muscles of his arms and thighs. Ploughmen had a wiry strength and blacksmiths the same, but this Magnus was different from those.

  “You are a knight?” she ventured, motioning to the horse. “Sir Magnus?”

  He said something with the name Magnus in it, adding “Elfrida, Christina?”

  “My sister, who is missing, taken by a monster.”

  Did he understand? Was he a knight or the monster she sought? Was he still a knight, with those wounds?

  He lay down again on the pallet and patted the sparse straw beside him, then rolled over. This took some time, and Elfrida contrasted his awkward, clumsy movement with the lethal grace of the monster, who had taken Christina and the other young women without being seen by any in the villages.

  She helped herself to more water, listening as Magnus’s breathing slowed. When she was certain he slept, she went through his pack.

  * * * *

  Naughty scrap! Feigning sleep, Magnus heard her soft, stealing ways and guessed what she was about. Had he been whole, unscarred, he might have snatched her up and rolled h
er in the snow, but he was uglier than sin and the little witch was sick. He could smell the sickness on her.

  He longed to have the words to reassure her that it was not the smallpox, which he had seen and endured in the East. He stifled a snort, recalling how proud he had been of surviving the pox, and so unmarked. A Saracen sword had marked him so much better...

  The door creaked as she tried it. Was she senseless enough to go out in a snowstorm? Why not? She had been wild enough to offer herself as bait, a tasty morsel for a monster.

  Scraping his peg leg on the wall, he caught her foot as she fell over his saddle, her head cracking against the door. She did not waste breath or effort shrieking but kicked out, squirming like a landed fish. When she lunged toward the fire, he wrestled her into his arms, desperate to stop her scorching them both.

  “Enough!” he roared, grappling for her, terrified she would be burnt. He scooped her away from the flames and rolled with her, striking the saddle, wrapping his good leg around hers to stop her writhing free. “By all that’s holy, I will not harm you!”

  Her fist rammed into his eye, and he saw green lights for an instant, then she said something in a hard, clear voice, and he froze, afraid she had put a curse on him.

  She lifted his arm off her and showed her own arm. There were more spots, some looking close to bursting. He saw her arm and her face clearly in the firelight and snorted, caught at that moment between amusement and pity.

  Her narrow, heart-shaped face, slender nose, and shapely chin were all smothered in spots.

  “Forgive me!” he said, as her eyes narrowed. “I do not mean to tease or mock, but it is funny. You are near as ugly as me, I vow, but it will pass.” He cupped her cheek tenderly, understanding her restlessness, relieved, too, that it was the childish itching pox and no worse. It would pass, and she would be beautiful again. “You itch, too, I should think, but you must not scratch.” He scratched his arm and shook his head, then touched an angry blister on her arm and said, “No.”

  She shrugged, her amber eyes showing more sparks than the fire, her whole body a denial. She said something, and he nodded.

  “I know you are no fool, Elfrida. Though to venture out in snow and give yourself as a sacrifice to a beast, is that not folly?”

  She did not answer, of course, but he guessed that had she understood his every word, she would have folded her arms as she did now and glower.

  “Did you annoy a fellow witch? Is that how you have been cursed with the itching pox?”

  Elfrida tossed her loose hair back over her shoulder and abruptly hammered on the door. When she turned to him her face was scarlet, and he swore against his own slow wits.

  “Here.” He hauled on the door, shoving the saddle out of the way and watched her pitch into a white world. The powdery drifts were still tumbling into the hut and the horse whickering with irritation when she stumbled back.

  She was shivering, and not because of him. Magnus pointed to the pallet, and she dropped onto it without a murmur, allowing him to pile his cloak and the horse’s saddle blanket on her. She refused the cheese he offered her but took another long drink of melted snow water.

  “Last winter I saw Alice tend her twins through the itching pox. She bathed them in water with oatmeal. Sadly, even with the horse’s meal bag, I have none here with me.”

  He was speaking to her quite easily, as he might to Peter or Alice, Magnus realized, and he was shamed to recognize the reason. She looked less like a tempting angel, a high damsel, and more like a molting hawk to be tended and pampered. He did not feel so ugly now she was in his care.

  * * * *

  Elfrida watched Magnus carefully moving firewood so that he could lie down on the floor. He had put the saddle back by the door, but only to stop the snow pushing in. He had already proved he would let her come and go as she pleased, nor had he abandoned her.

  If only we could understand each other, she thought, frustrated by that and the weakness of her body. She must return to her village, rouse the men again, threaten them all if need be, and find Christina.

  Tomorrow I will go. I cannot see in this snow and dark, but tomorrow I must set out and my ugly knight, or monster, or whatever Magnus is, will not stop me.

  Magnus was burning every scrap of dry moss, hay, wood, and cloth that he could find in or near the hut. Elfrida stirred to find herself and her pallet dragged out of the doors, with the horse tethered close beside her and both of them draped with blankets.

  In a sheltered hollow before the hut, standing in a puddle of melted slush and snow, Magnus worked furiously, in a sweat, wielding a small wood axe with determined ease. A bonfire blazed up in a huge column of flames, sparks, and smoke, setting fire to the branches overhead, but he was clearly delighted in the spectacle. As he limped briskly to the fire with another newly cut log, flinging it into the heart of the flames, Elfrida thought of devils in hell, and shivered. Her back, close to the snow, was chilled, but her breasts and face were hot.

  “Hola!” Magnus saw she was awake and waved. He was even more of a gargoyle in the bright sunlight and the glare of the snow, but she had learned not to flinch. He chopped wood by bracing a log with his good leg and hacking away, scooping up a “killed” branch with his handless arm and tossing it into the greedy flames.

  If he is not the monster—and all my wit and magic tell me he is not—then Magnus still does not fear the creature. The smoke alone here must be visible for miles and draw who knows what to us—king’s foresters, villagers, wandering tinkers, brigands—and he fears none.

  She feared none, either, but she was a witch.

  Fully awake, she fumbled in her green gown and clutched at one of the protective amulets around her neck, drawing on its power. “Christina,” she whispered, wishing her sister love, health, vigor, and life.

  She tried to rise, disgusted to find herself still weak, her body trembling as if she had a fever. She kicked at the snow, scowling as a tiny flurry of flakes tumbled away, though she had used all her strength. A second kick had her flopping sideways, sprawling like a rag doll. It seemed simpler to gather her cloak around her ears and listen.

  Who will come? she wondered, as her eyes closed and were too heavy to reopen. Who is Magnus hoping will come? Am I bait again?

  She yawned and dismissed the idea. Her instincts told her she was safe with Magnus, even if he was a Viking.

  But where was Christina?

  She thought of the forest and its many paths, all snow-covered and snowbound. Was her sister in another forest hut nearby? Where were the tracks of the beast, and what did they look like?

  Why was Magnus here in the forest?

  Elfrida imagined the village headman and Magnus together, a picture that came easily to her mind. Magnus was at ease in the forest—she saw that in how he gathered wood and checked for deer and boar droppings and set traps for birds. He knew where to sweep aside the snow to find paths and then fallen sweet chestnuts, crab apples, and frozen blackberries. Chestnuts were already roasting, and their savor reminded her that she had not eaten for days.

  Had the village men sent a messenger to Magnus, pleading for his help against the beast? Or was she mistaken? Was Magnus as evil as he looked?

  Again she tried to rise, but the slow spinning in her head increased. She turned onto her back and stared upwards. A yellow sun blinked at her through the branches, and her breath was the only cloud in a wide sky the shade of cornflowers. From her clothes she brought out a dried, fragile sprig of rosemary, an amulet that she had given to Christina last winter, when her sister had nightmares and she wanted to protect her from evil spirits. Tucking the sprig between her breasts, she covered her eyes with her cloak and willed herself to sleep.

  Dream of Christina. Dream of where she is. “See” where she is.

  Elfrida knew she was dreaming, in the place between spirits and earth, even before the lion came out of the forest and spoke to her. It was a gold beast with a shaggy coat like a wolfhound and kind, crinkled e
yes.

  “Do you remember the speech of your grandfather?” the lion asked.

  “I do.” And she knew what she would say to Magnus, once she was awake.

  * * * *

  Magnus was worried. The fire he had made should have brought his people. It was an old signal, well-known between them. His men should have reached the village by now—that had been the arrangement. They were bringing traps and provisions, in covered wagons, and hunting dogs and horses. He had been impatient to start his pursuit of the Forest Grendel and so rode ahead, returning with the messenger until that final stretch when the man turned off to his home. He had ridden on alone, finding the wayside shrine.

  But from then, all had gone awry. Instead of the monster, he had found an ailing witch, and the snowstorm had lost him more tracks and time.

  Magnus shook his head, turning indulgent eyes to the small, still figure on the rough pallet. At least the little witch had slept through the night and day, snug and safe, and he had been able to make her a litter from woven branches. He would give his fire signal a little longer and then return Elfrida to her village. There he might find someone who could translate between them.

  Perhaps she did have power, for even as he looked at her, she sat up, the hood of her cloak falling away, and stared at him in return. She said something, then repeated it, and he drew in a great gulp of cold air in sheer astonishment, then laughed.

  “I know what you said!” He wanted to kiss her, spots and all.

  He burst into a clumsy canter, dragging his peg leg a little and almost tumbling onto her bed. She caught him by the shoulders and tried to steady him but collapsed under his weight.

  They finished in an untidy heap on the pallet, with Elfrida hissing by his ear, “Why you have done such a foolish thing as to burn all our fuel?”

  He rolled off her, knocked snow off his front and beard and said in return, “How did you know I would know the old speech, the old English?”