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

by Lindsay Townsend

  “Your son is a small, thin boy, very handsome, with tears at the knees of his tunic.”

  The widow took her hands away from her face and gaped at her. “How did you know?”

  “What did you say to her?” Magnus asked.

  “A lucky guess and a description that would fit a thousand small boys,” Elfrida replied to Magnus, while to the woman she said, “I am a witch. Your witch and no stranger. I can help you, if you will tell me.”

  The widow closed her yellow eyes. “He will kill me.”

  Magnus hunched closer to the woman when Elfrida translated her despairing answer, and patted her shoulder with his injured hand. “Ask her if she has heard of the Trial of Outremer. There, a man or woman accused of spying is dragged up to the tallest tower in Jerusalem and flung off the battlements. Those who float to the ground are deemed guilty.”

  “And those who are innocent?”

  Magnus shrugged, granting the widow another evil smile. “They are with God.”

  Watching his grim, mangled face and the widow’s prey terror, Elfrida felt compelled to warn him. “Magnus, this woman is already at stretch. Would you break her completely?”

  “Why not? She took gold from him.”

  Moving with shocking speed, Magnus gripped the woman’s sleeves and ripped them, one after another, from her tunic.

  “Stop it!” Elfrida cried above the tearing cloth and the widow’s howl, but then she, too, yelled, startled and dazzled together. The widow still shrieked her indignation, but when her arms were revealed they were heavy with bracelets, shimmering bands of gold that sparkled and flashed in the bright winter air.

  “This is no poor widow.” Magnus seized the woman’s wrists, pinioning her tightly as she tried to writhe away. “She has done evil and been rewarded for it.”

  “Not force alone,” Elfrida whispered, feeling a clammy heat creep up her body as the widow cried and tried to hide her arms beneath her cloak. The gold sparkled insolently in the sun, and Magnus’s men stirred restively until a barked order from Magnus had them stepping back. “And I was sorry for her because of her fear for her son.” She wished she had not seen this. The betrayal by a fellow villager of the forest shamed her. “How did you know?”

  “I heard them clashing under her tunic. The women of the East do something similar. Now tell her what I said.”

  “Tell her yourself.” Elfrida bridled, unused to being spoken to in that brusque way.

  Magnus looked at her until she felt herself blush. “I am sorry, too,” he said quietly, “but time is against us, and we must do what we must.” He puckered his lips as if to kiss her, then yanked the widow toward him instead, licking his lips.

  The sight of his looming, scarred head and greedy tongue were too much. The widow confessed.

  Chapter 6

  Elfrida, to Magnus’s annoyance, would not immediately translate what the woman had said.

  “We must ride away from here,” she said twice. “It is bad luck for us to stay.” She refused to say more, but she had been surprisingly gentle with the widow, smiling at her, taking her hand, prompting her whenever she faltered. Magnus disliked such care of a traitor but tolerated it because it was a woman.

  “Very well.” He was indifferent to their leaving the village but did not like secrets of any kind, only indulging Elfrida because she was looking weary again. “We do not go far, though, madam.”

  Elfrida was stiff in the saddle before him, her back as straight as an arrow shaft. Her willpower amazed him, though, of course, she was a witch. He must remember to treat her as he would Peter, as a deadly peer. It was a disconcerting thought when she was so tiny, more slender even than Peter’s Alice.

  “How far, then?” she called back to him, and he grinned, glad that she did not hoard a grudge. He had been discourteous to her in the village, but now it seemed they were again allies.

  “Why not here?” he replied and drew rein, halting on the track in a huge swirl of snow, a snow dragon, spitting white. Leaving his men to stop as they would, he waited for the thin flakes to settle and for Elfrida to catch her breath to scold.

  When she did not, he knew that she was worried. Something in the widow’s flood of words had turned that churning anxiety that he glimpsed so often in her haunted face into outright alarm.

  “Is it very bad?” he asked against her ear.

  “Worse,” she replied, suppressing a shudder. “I would speak with you without other listening ears nearby, Magnus.”

  He liked the way she said his name, the ‘M’ mellow and the long ‘A’ and soft ‘NUS’, but this was not the moment for pleasure. Instructing his men to gather firewood and leaving them to dismount, grumbling, into the snow, he spurred his horse farther along the track.

  “Will this wait until we return to your village?” His wagons and more men were there, and Magnus sensed he would need both soon. Hearing her sigh, he answered himself. “No, it will not wait.”

  Behind him, he could hear the men with him now making a game of finding firewood, exactly like boys. They would be playing snowballs next. He judged it safe now to stop and dismount.

  Clinging to the horse’s mane, Elfrida also dismounted and turned southeast on the track, staring through the trees toward the hidden village of Lower Yarr.

  “The gold was for her old age. She will not keep it now.”

  Her pity for the widow amazed him, but he answered for her sake. “She will if she is quick enough, in wits and with her hands. If she buries it before the villagers creep from their houses, and she tells a good story of my beastliness, she should do well.”

  “Do you like to play the beast?”

  He disliked the question but knew she needed his reply. “No more than any man. I use what I have.”

  She turned to him then, her amber eyes puzzled. “How is it that you heard her bracelets and I and the villagers did not?”

  “Ah, that piques your pride! But I knew the sound well from my past and understood what it meant. Others may have heard it and dismissed all as a trick of the wind, or the forest, for such bracelets are rarely known here.” Magnus patted the horse’s neck so that his left hand was close to her right, still tightly clasping the brown mane. “I have good hearing, Elfrida. I know you wear two necklaces, at least, beneath your bodice. I hear them clash together as you walk.”

  Her free hand flew to her cloak strings as if defending her trinkets, but then she smiled. “No one knew before that I wear those. And you are right in other ways. The Forest Grendel gave the widow the bracelets, gave gold in golden bracelets.”

  Magnus felt his heart begin to race. “’Tis certain, that?”

  “From all the widow said, I would say yes. But Magnus, how did he come by them? Could he have been to Outremer?”

  “Stranger things have been known.” Magnus gently eased her hand from the horse’s mane. “Let us walk and talk. You are troubled, Elfrida, more troubled than I have yet seen you. Even when your sister was taken you were not so afraid.

  “Hush!” He shielded her from his men as she gasped and began to deny it. “I have seen fear many times. Tell me the rest, tell me all of it, and it will ease.”

  She inhaled sharply, as if swallowing an answer, and shook her head. “You cannot help me. There are few who could.”

  “Try me.” He did not deny or argue, merely offered and waited.

  She squeezed his fingers, and as one they began to walk. Magnus lengthened his stride to counter her “he-has-a-peg-leg pace” and listened to a halting then fluid tale, teased from the widow.

  “The widow is a bondswoman, did you know?”

  “I know she herds goats, from her smell, but no more than that. Is her lack of freedom important?”

  “Perhaps.” Elfrida frowned. “But that would mean he knew before he approached her, and how? Free and unfree mingle together in Lower Yarr and always have done.”

  “The monster is male, then?”

  “I knew that already, and so do you,” Elfrida
responded smartly. “But no more on that! He came last summer, a tall man, very thin, with his face covered by a hood or mask. He approached her at dusk, always at dusk, and always when she was alone.”

  “Was he always masked?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he buy her silence?” Magnus asked.

  “He warned her that others in the village watched for him, that he would know if she told anyone.”

  “She believed that?”

  “She was too afraid not to, Magnus! Her children were still with her then, and the monster knew them! He described them in detail and knew where each of them was working within the village forest and lands. He said he could take them on a whim.”

  Magnus cursed, loathing the creature more and more.

  “It was a neat snare, to say others were in his power,” Elfrida admitted grudgingly. “The woman dared do nothing. Me, I think he lied. In my experience in these villages, if more than two know anything, it is a secret no more, but it was a clever falsehood, very apt.”

  “As you say, apt. Those gold bracelets would have helped.” Magnus kicked a lump of ice with his boot, imagining it was the monster’s head. “They must have eased her terror.”

  “She was very frightened, especially for her children.” A look of sick distaste crossed Elfrida’s face. “She knew from the first where his quarry lay, whom he selected as prey. That first evening meeting, when he stole out of the twilight with less sound than a cobweb to accost her, he admired her daughter—her blonde-haired daughter. He said that come midwinter, the girl would make a beautiful addition in his NorthernTower.”

  “A blonde? Like your Christina?” Magnus asked softly, understanding how hard this must be for her. So close, it seemed, had the widow come to losing someone dear, yet if she had, Elfrida would still have her sister.

  Elfrida nodded once, sharply. “The widow was very much alarmed. She told him that her daughter was marrying that very day.”

  “He would not have liked that.”

  “Perhaps he did not, but he moved on swiftly. He said to her, ‘So be it,’ and then he threatened her. He told her that he would return and that she must be ready, that if she did not give him the news he wanted, the knowledge he sought, then he would take her son Martin and sell him to slavers.”

  Splendor in Christendom! This is for certain a man!

  Beside him, Elfrida stopped abruptly on the track, almost losing her footing in the churned snow. Magnus steadied her, his thoughts a tumult within him. A man could be fought, a man could be bested. He feared no man alive.

  But first there was Elfrida. He could hear her rapid breathing as she struggled to steady herself.

  “See these tracks?” She pointed to the mass of foot- and hoofprints at their feet.

  Magnus nodded. “The widow helped the Forest Grendel in that, too. She has goats, and she and her goats would follow on after he had crept about, and cover his tracks. The goats would eat, too, even the broken twigs. And who would notice a bondswoman with her goats? By day, or close to nightfall, she would be an unremarkable sight, for grazing is held in common here for all the Yarrs, am I right? The villagers might not even stop to question her. Even you would not have noticed her. A woman with goats, what is remarkable about that? Yet she can listen and learn. What did our Forest Grendel want her to learn?”

  Elfrida looked for a moment as if she had been pelted with snowballs, chilly and shocked, and then she laughed. “Naughty warrior! You have spoiled my telling!”

  “I think, too, as well as fight,” Magnus replied, delighted to be called a naughty anything.

  She gave him a mischievous look. “What else do you know, Sir Scholar?”

  He hastened to reply, liking the way she was free of shadows and fear for the moment. “We know the Forest Grendel planned his abductions and communicated with the widow for her to cover his trace. We know she spied for him. We know he has many towers.”

  Elfrida nodded. “He spoke of a northern and a western tower.”

  Deep in thought, Magnus cracked his knuckles together, recalling too late that one hand was a stump, but the stab of discomfort did not stop him. “We know this is a man, only a man. Rich indeed, for he pays in gold and has land and spices and towers. Splendor in Christendom! If those towers are stone, then he is noble because no other could afford them. No matter, I have dealt with the high and lordly.”

  He broke off as Elfrida shook her head. “It is more,” she said quietly. “He asked the widow to seek out brides.”

  “So? We know that already. He steals brides, and the widow made it easy for him. Women talk to women, and there she went, to and fro, harvesting and laboring from place to place, village to village, and women talk. A girl to be married talks most.”

  Elfrida scowled, but she did not dispute it.

  “What else did the widow confess?”

  “No more for now.” Elfrida raised a hand as if in warning. “We have lingered too long. We must leave,” she murmured.

  “Never fret! The widow will not dare to tell him we have been here. She fears me as much as the Forest Grendel.”

  Elfrida closed her eyes. “Danger comes.” She stepped forward.

  She felt the threat closing and moved farther in front of Magnus to shield him. “Take me if you can!” she called within her mind, sensing the same dark, single purpose that she had on the night she had made herself a bride.

  She reached out with her mind, imagining a thin shadow sliding across the snow, slithering faster and faster between the trees. A scent of spices filled her head.

  “Go, by the power of the Mother in me!” Elfrida cried, making the sacred sign of Freya against the shadow.

  “We are not finished,” warned a cool, dark voice in her head.

  “We are today,” she answered, plucking a pine cone from a tree and hurling it and her thought deep into the forest.

  She opened her eyes, and the presence fled, but worse was to follow. Even before she drew in breath to make a prayer and cast a protective spell, the beast was on them, black-pelted, fast, and agile, growling as it leapt.

  Elfrida flailed out at the wolf in return, howling herself and stamping her feet, making fists of her hands so the snapping jaws would not take her fingers. She wrestled in a white-and-black blur of disturbed snow and lunging wolf, then heard a yip.

  The wolf toppled sideways, skewered on Magnus’s sword. He pulled the blade from the body, kicked the shaggy corpse toward to his running, cheering men, and fixed on her.

  She did not recoil at his blazing eyes and hideous, leering face— the face of a stone demon—but it was a near matter.

  “You do not fight my fights, Lady.”

  His voice was as iron-cold as a mace, but Elfrida did not care. Determined to have her say, she caught his belt to drag him closer. “That was no ordinary wolf. It was more than a wolf, and sent by him.” She did not want to admit to her fear, the need for her own charms about them, so she said what he would understand. “We should leave and get to my home before nightfall.”

  He did not seem to soften or thaw, but somehow she knew his anger had changed to amusement. “So the Forest Grendel is worried. Good!”

  He glanced down at her fist upon his belt, grunted something else in his own tongue, and wound both his arms about her back and middle.

  Dare he? Elfrida wondered, then he lowered his dark, ugly head and kissed her. Oh yes, he dares.

  Her first thought was that she had never been kissed by anyone with a mangled bottom lip before, and the long scar felt like a raised cord against her tender flesh. Her second thought, if she had any, was lost in an explosion of feeling. A glow enveloped her body, tingling to the very tips of her fingers and toes. The yowls and hoots of his men fell away into a far distance as his mouth seduced hers, his tongue teasing her lips and teeth, his beard a mild prickle and tickle over her chin, his lips soft yet challenging. He smelt of horses and war, and he tasted of apples and ginger.

  Of spices, like the monst
er. Unabashed, she wrapped her arms around his neck and met his challenge, kiss for kiss. She had been imagining what his mouth would feel like for days.

  “Sweet,” Magnus murmured as she closed her eyes again, giving herself this delicious moment. It was like flying, like being dipped in a warm bath, like a homecoming.

  He stroked her hair, murmuring more, the old speech and his own mingled together, and she felt as pleasured as a cat by a fire.

  Slowly, Elfrida forced herself to lean back. “We should move,” she whispered. She was aware of a humming in her head, a growing tension. She was afraid of what he might answer now. If he spoke of enchantment, or asked why, or worse, thanked her, she would know it was over before anything had begun.

  If he cannot feel how it is different, how this is new, then we are not the same. Would he grow in feeling to be the same? Could she hope for that?

  She was not even ashamed at having forgotten Christina for a moment while she and Magnus embraced.

  He brushed a speck of snow from her cheek. “You are without peer.” He hugged her again, tightly, then set her down.

  The ride back might have been hard and cold, but Elfrida remembered it quite differently. The grind and weariness of the chase had dropped from her, and she looked at the world with new eyes.

  “The snow sparkles this evening.” Magnus sat behind her in the saddle, warm and strong like an ironsmith’s fire. He had insisted she wear his cloak, and to Elfrida his whole body felt like a smile. “I have seen kings’ jewels less bright.”

  The snow was quite beautiful, she agreed in her heart, but time was passing. Christina must not wait and hope in vain.

  “We must plan when we reach Top Yarr,” she called back, wishing in contrary fashion that they could ride forever.

  “I know,” said Magnus, “and we will. I know we must.”

  Chapter 7

  She returned to her house and found Walter sitting on the bench outside. He had a crutch propped against the bench, and his left leg was bound with a splint. He tried to stand as she and Magnus approached, the light in his face fading when he saw Christina was not with them.