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

by Lindsay Townsend

  Stephen talked of the chestnuts, which also came from the south. He was from that part of England and thought all things there superior to those in the wooded, primitive north.

  “Yet you remain,” Elfrida remarked. “Is your work appreciated?”

  Stephen spat a chestnut shell into a pot of bubbling pottage that Elfrida swore she would not eat from that evening. “What do you think? These northern lords have the manners of hogs and treat me no better than the laundress. But they pay well and on time.”

  “Do spinsters of the south stay out of sight, too?” Elfrida asked.

  “Spinsters? Oh, the solar girls! They stay within that chamber unless they are summoned, or leave.”

  That explained why she had not seen the slave women about the keep, Elfrida thought, feeling smothered at the idea of being trapped in that small, circular chamber full of cushions, with nothing to do. “Where do they go?”

  “Off to other men, I neither know nor care. Besides...” Stephen’s voice stopped, and he covered his mouth. “Must get on,” he said, through his fingers.

  “Finish what you were saying,” Elfrida suggested, putting a smile and force into her words as she willed him to answer.

  Stephen looked right through her as he said in a flat, lifeless voice, “When all the Denzils are in this keep, I wish I were locked in that chamber myself. There is one of the clan, a strange beast, not to be crossed.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “Thin, very thin, and tall, white as a birch tree.”

  Elfrida waited, but he said no more. Holding her breath, she lightly snapped her fingers, and Stephen blinked. “Must get on,” he repeated.

  Before he rose and stalked off, she asked quickly, “Where is the laundress? Could you summon her? I have some linen to wash.”

  Stephen grinned and nodded to the woman beside her, dozing in the warmth. “She is our laundress. Hedda from the blue tower.”

  Elfrida pointed to a roast of mutton, asking after the herbs and spices Stephen used in it, pretending an interest while she hoped her eyes or face gave nothing away of her excitement. A strange, tall, thin Denzil and a blue tower and a laundress from the blue tower...

  She smiled at Hedda the laundress. “I will help you today,” she promised. “I see you are alone and need a helper. I will do that.”

  * * * *

  Out in the forest, Magnus glanced so often at the sun’s position that Gregory Denzil chaffed him. “Eager for the night, Magnus? That luscious redhead is a trophy, before God, and we all envy you!”

  His men added more, which embarrassed even Mark and set Magnus’s guts grinding in slow fury. Keeping his countenance was easy. His scars meant most men had trouble guessing his mood. Except for Elfrida, of course, but she was unique.

  “I remember you with that blonde from Antioch,” Denzil added, “but this new one is better.”

  “Elfrida is not for sale,” Magnus repeated. He hated to sully her name by speaking it in such company, but Denzil and his men had to learn. He gripped his spear, a flash of memory returning him to Outremer as he saw in his mind’s eye a Templar screaming in agony as a spear passed through him. “Where is this rich game?” he demanded, snatching at any diversion and wishing only for the night. Elfrida in his arms again and him seducing her, kissing her in her most secret place...

  He heard a faint click and creak behind him and knew at once it was a bow and arrow being readied and aimed. There was no game in the wastes and thickets of hazel ahead, so he must be the target.

  Before he completed his conscious thought, he had reacted, dragging his left foot out of its stirrup and head-butting down into the snow, not considering the speed of his cantering horse or where he might land. Snow-crusted brambles snagged and broke his fall, and as he urged his flailing limbs to roll away, he felt the vane of the arrow score the top of his shoulder, where the middle of his back would have been.

  “Maaagnusss! Areee yeee weeeeelllll?”

  Gregory Denzil’s question crawled from his mouth as the world about Magnus slowed into thick honey. As his jaw crunched against a branch and threatened to loosen more teeth, he felt a trickle of blood run into his eye.

  He compelled his sluggish body to sit up, a devil caught in a thicket. He knew he would make that picture, and he grinned, raising an arm to his men and yelling, “Hola! What a ride!”

  Denzil and his mob nudged their horses closer. Mark had already leapt from his own with his hunting spear aimed at Denzil's throat. Magnus stood up, cursing with all the oaths of Outremer he could remember, and looked around him. His own men were honestly puzzled, while Denzil's wore expressions of studied innocence.

  “Not a good time for archery practice,” he said. All good fun, all men together.

  Denzil smiled thinly. “A fool, too eager for sport.”

  “Indeed.” As an assassination attempt, Magnus rated it as poor to moderate, but Gregory Denzil had always been lazy. And in the clustered mass of hunters, he saw no skinny stranger with distinctive rings.

  “Time to go on?” he asked, knowing if he suggested it, Denzil would say the opposite, which he did.

  “We go back.”

  Chapter 14

  Elfrida knew things were going sour the instant Magnus limped into the hall. Sitting at her now-accustomed place on the dais, she started forward, then, at a tiny warning flick of his arm, she disguised her shock with a wide yawn.

  “She grows weary of you, man!” jeered Gregory Denzil, saying it twice so she understood.

  Elfrida pressed her tongue hard into the roof of her mouth to stop herself from cursing their vile host. Such actively evil magic—far worse than a wish of fleas—could rebound, and if the Denzil they were hunting came to this hall, he would sense it.

  “Not so, good sir,” she managed when she trusted herself to speak. “I merely wondered what has befallen my lord. He is much ripped about.”

  Her eyes met Magnus’s, sending him the silent, urgent message that she understood, that she recognized they were in increasing danger. It was heart-stoppingly obvious that Denzil had meant to harm him and pass all off as an accident.

  “Perhaps he was set upon,” remarked Gregory Denzil, his small eyes shining with malice, bright as the red wart on his forehead.

  “I see no heads of his enemies at his belt,” Elfrida replied, which Denzil obligingly translated, while Magnus bowed about the hall and there was much thin, high laughter. Taking his seat on her right, Mark was as gray as a corpse and, farther down the hall, her three squires frowned and put aside their trenchers.

  There was a scuffling, a thump of the bench, and Elfrida found Magnus pivoting dexterously into place on her left.

  “We must leave soon,” he remarked, beneath a scatter of ironic applause from the ranks of Denzil’s men. “My men and I have outstayed our welcome, and you, I fear, are too welcome.” He sat down on the bench and, under cover of the table, patted her knee. “We shall do well enough. The show will hold Denzil a while longer.”

  He caught a tress of her hair, wound it around his fist and, very deliberately, pulled her to him.

  Elfrida heard the stamping, yowling tumult in the hall fall away. She watched Magnus lowering his head to her, ugly-beautiful with his battle scars and bright, brown eyes. He winked at her, and she giggled then closed her eyes to steal a moment, to savor their kiss.

  “Little witch,” he murmured, his lips sweetly tormenting against hers.

  Her eyes flickered open, to capture him whole and close against her, and he netted his arms about her waist and back and jerked her ever more snugly against him.

  “If this were real,” she whispered, knowing they could not go on, that soon they must stop.

  “It is and will be. Unless you do not wish—”

  She scrambled onto his lap, desperate to prove to him that it was not show, not to her. His arms were like steel pincers about her.

  “Put her over the table and have her!”

  The coarse suggest
ion from Gregory Denzil made her shudder, and she felt the burn of Magnus’s rage. Distressed, she tried to draw back but could not even squirm. “Magnus!”

  His dazed look of love had hardened into possession. He dangled her like a doll as he rose and faced Gregory Denzil, saying a spurt of words, hard as a hailstorm, that struck the leering smile off the smaller man’s face and had him jerking back in his chair. Silence dropped into the hall like a pestilence, and men studied their plates and cups. A hawk baited wildly on a perch, and a dog yapped once then howled, sensing the dread atmosphere.

  Magnus cradled her back to her seat as if she was made of glass. His rage was white-hot, and he was white faced, and her sense of how to treat him vanished. “Magnus?”

  He smiled, a grimace, and ruffled her hair. “Not you, never you, my heart. All will be well.”

  Elfrida doubted that, but she dared say nothing. She sat sweating, aware that the blue gown she now wore was the gift of the Denzils and wondering if Magnus remembered that, too. She wanted to rush from the chamber, escape into the snow, strip away all reminders of their vile hosts, and vanish into the dark. She longed to ask Magnus to hold her, to tell her again he was not angry with her. She felt ashamed of her own need.

  I am a witch! I should be beyond wishing for any man’s approval!

  In the deathly silence, Gregory Denzil rapped his knuckles hard on the high table. Instantly a page scurried to the door of the solar and unlocked it with a huge key. Pale and hurrying, the slave women streamed forth, and a harpist rapidly picked out a popular carol, men starting to sing the refrain in lusty, off-key voices.

  The tall, birch-slim, birch-pale girl who had helped Elfrida to dress knelt at the feet of Gregory Denzil. He growled an order, and she crawled between his legs, her head level with his loins.

  “And that is quite enough.”

  Hard on the heels of that incomprehensible remark, Magnus plucked her from her seat a second time and marched with her out of the hall. He stopped for nothing, neither stairs, nor lurking guards, nor a hapless squire, who glanced at his implacable face and flattened himself and his platter of meats to the wall.

  “What is it?” Elfrida began.

  “There are things you do not need to witness.”

  Still she could not struggle in his arms, but she scowled abundantly. “I am no infant.”

  She took it as a bad sign that he did not chuckle. “Have I done amiss, Magnus?” she demanded as he shouldered open the door and stamped down the outer steps of the keep. “If I have, please say.”

  “No, no, it is me and that bastard. I had forgotten how he enjoys taunting others. Well tonight, I will have none of it.”

  “But if the Forest Grendel comes?”

  “Then Mark will tell us in the morning.”

  “What if Denzil comes seeking you?”

  “Denzil never leaves his own dinner table. If he sends others, they shall not find me.”

  Magnus was still so blistered with rage that she could feel the heat rising off him like steam. As they passed the kitchen block and then the stables, Elfrida wondered where they were going. “What did you say to him?” she ventured. “And what happened while you were hunting? What harm did Denzil attempt?” She knew something had gone amiss. She could sense it, vividly.

  Magnus shook his head. “Leave it, Elfrida. Leave it all.”

  It was hard for her to be quiet. “But I have news!” She had so much to share with him, and he was making it impossible.

  Perhaps he spotted the sheen of tears in her eyes, for suddenly he stopped and shook his head. “Ach! I know I am a bear this evening.”

  She wanted to deny it, to make him kiss her, but pride made her respond. “Indeed you are. And when are you going to set me down?”

  “Right in here.” He stepped forward a few more paces and pushed at a series of wooden timbers leaned against one of the keep’s outer bailey walls. There was a rasping creak as the timbers were revealed as a door, and he ducked his head and walked through into a small storeroom with a raised platform as part of the floor.

  He swung her down lightly, and Elfrida stared at barrels and logs and timbers. A sweet smell of wood perfumed the space.

  “A wood store,” Magnus supplied, still a little grim. “Let me purloin some things, and then we may take our ease in here tonight.”

  “But your men, will they not be anxious?”

  He laughed and some of the iron left his face. “Mark knows I take care of myself and he has sense enough to see the men all right. I am sorry to say this, Elfrida, but not even the Denzils turn on guests under their own roof, not for a fallout over a lone woman, however beautiful she is.” He touched her cheek with his fingertips. “You are a prize, my darling, and Gregory Denzil wants you, but he will not fight for you.”

  She knew that he was not telling her everything, that the forest hunting had led to some kind of malice, but she sensed she would not get that out of him tonight, if ever. She asked instead after another, more urgent danger. “How can you be sure the Denzils will not betray us? They are not good or decent.”

  “They are a dangerous family,” Magnus agreed. “I cannot promise they will treat us forever as honored guests, but for now I think the pretence of chivalrous behavior holds Denzil back. He wants you certainly, and for a small time I think he will make some show of courtesy.”

  He grinned. “A mort of treasure, now, that would be different. For gold he would break all laws of hospitality, even more than for you, my comely little auburn wench.”

  The gold-cross twinkle was back in his eye, she thought, or else she had noticed it again, as her insides seemed to quiver and melt, softened by the “auburn” compliment. “Do I cause you evil?”

  She blushed, not meaning to ask, but the question had burst out of her. She could not bear to think she had brought him trouble by coming, yet how could she stay away with Christina missing, the other brides missing?

  “Never fret! The Denzils are not nice hosts, but we shall muddle through and win. Now let me find some dainties, and we shall share our knowledge.”

  He slipped out into the starlit bailey, returning quickly with an armload of items—cloaks, flasks, a small brazier, a freshly baked pie.

  “That cook loaded me with these, without question,” he explained, giving her a knowing look. “He seems much taken with you.” Swiftly, he built two walls of logs on the platform and lit the brazier behind it before kicking and scraping snow and mud against the door.

  “It will cut down light to the outside and keep us snug,” he said.

  “It will,” Elfrida agreed, feeling an almost childlike pleasure in setting out the cloaks to sit on, with the flasks and meat pie within reach. She and Christina had done similar as youngsters, playing “house,” with mud as their pies.

  “Your sister lives,” Magnus said quietly, when she went still and quiet. “I feel it in my bones. We shall find her and the others and win them back.”

  “And the women here?” Elfrida asked.

  Magnus set his jaw, an instinctive response that made him look more demonic than ever, especially with the flames of the brazier casting deep shadows along every scar of his face. “I do not forget them,” he promised. “We shall have them all safe.”

  He unfurled one of the cloaks, revealing his own sword belt and sword and several others. “These are valuable, as weapons, as spoil,” he said, correctly interpreting her questioning glance. “Mark gathered them quietly for me from my men, and I shall hide them here, from now on.”

  “What really happened today in the forest, in the hunt?” Elfrida tried again, wondering this time if he might give an answer, but he only shook his head.

  “Enough of today’s hunt. I will not speak of it.”

  He was here with her now, and safe. She would question no more on it, Elfrida decided. She watched Magnus instead, for the joy of looking on him.

  He tucked the cloak around the swords and stowed them in the darkness. Then he ran his hand down th
e lean-to’s walls and door, frowned, and packed more mud into cracks in the timbers. He was softly whistling when he finished and more in his natural good humor as he turned to face her. “That will do us proud tonight. We shall be warm enough, especially together.”

  Elfrida felt herself blushing and told herself it was because of the bright heat of the brazier. “The cook, Stephen—”

  “Aye? I wondered when you would explain him.”

  She could read his face now and knew he was teasing. Relieved that he was more himself, Elfrida put aside the foolish, girlish question, Gregory Denzil would not fight for me, but would you, Magnus? and answered, telling him about Stephen and Hedda the laundress.

  “I helped her with her washing, and once she lost her fear of me, she allowed me to fold and stretch sheets with her.”

  Magnus sat cross-legged on a heap of cloaks, and she watched his long, clever fingers as he cut the pie for them both. Last night, those fingers had tickled and fondled her to delight and more, and his shaggy, black hair had curled and tingled against her throat and shoulders as he laved and caressed her nipples with his tongue.

  He glanced up and smiled, saying something in the old speech she had to ask him to repeat.

  “You distract me,” she admitted.

  He laid down his knife, left the pie where it was on the thick trencher, and reached for her.

  “I have not finished my tale!” she squeaked, sinking into his arms with as much pleasure as into a hot bath.

  “Be quick, then, wench.”

  She tapped his nose, and he caught and sucked her fingers. A lightning bolt of fiery desire burst between her thighs, and his eyes took on a deeper gleam. “Do not look so smug,” she protested.

  He chuckled, and she watched his chest vibrate, reveling in how strong he was. “There.” He squeezed his eyes tightly shut. “Tell me now, or we shall never be done with it.”