“He is to stand there all night, at guard,” Denzil repeated. “Make sure he does.”
“Yes, lord.” Rat-guard was scurrying with Denzil to the door, receiving the key from him, bowing and scraping like the little rat-arsed runt he was. “I will be vigilant, lord, have no fear.”
And the cellar key now in his grimy tunic. Magnus whimpered, swaying on his legs. “Sleep, must sleep,” he hissed, turning his plea to a choking gargle.
Denzil’s deep-set eyes glowed like mounds of treasure. “Oh, you will sleep, Sir Magnus. Sleep for good and all and beg for it, afore I am finished.”
As his captain left, Magnus heard rat-guard turn the key, grinding and clanking in the lock. When he could no longer hear Denzil’s footsteps, he stalked from the middle of the cellar, past some wine barrels, to the wall.
“Hey!” Rat-guard tried to kick him and failed, tried a shoulder barge and only deflected himself into a barrel of salted pork. “Come back! Stand! You stand!”
Magnus stood with his back to the wall and grinned down at the little sniveling snot. “Make me,” he suggested.
Rat-guard’s reddish eyes glinted, and he looked ready to explode with puffed-up rage. When his ears were as scarlet as his face, Magnus needled him more by adding, “I am going to sleep now, so what are you going to do? Call the real guards?”
“Get up!” The bully, impotent as are all confronted, faced-down bullies, actually stamped his foot. “Damn you, get up! Get up!” He looked ready to kick himself.
“When it suits me.” Magnus slid down the wall to settle in a crouch, with his eyes still fixed on the foot-stamping, twitching guard. “Let me know when the moon stands high.”
The guard jerked his shoulders as if stung and tried to out-stare Magnus. Magnus thought of the warrior who had slashed open his face, the warrior whom he had killed, and allowed the weight of the memory fill his own stare.
After a moment, the guard blinked and looked away.
“What is your name, soldier?” Magnus asked. He had established his authority, and now he gave a little.
“Bernard.”
He was certainly not as tough as a bear, as the meaning of his name implied, but that suited Magnus very well. “Do we understand each other, Bernard?” he asked softly, sitting down fully and crossing one leg over the other. “If you summon more guards to subdue me, you fail. If you try to force me to your will, you fail. Do you want to look soft to Gregory Denzil?”
Bernard colored like a girl. “You were drunk,” he said in a puzzled way, as if that explained everything.
“And now I am not.” Magnus smiled in a way guaranteed to make Bernard worry more. “I am going to relax a moment and try not to remember how you kicked me.”
“I was following orders, sir,” Bernard mumbled. If he had a cap he would have wrung it in his hands. “I have to do what my lord commands.”
“Of course, as a loyal follower.” And a feckless coward, you miserable worm. Bernard was armed, Bernard had the key, and he had already given way.
“Since it is close to Christmastime, I will ignore the kick.”
“Sorry.” Bernard tried a weak little grin.
Magnus crooked his finger and beckoned. The man did not shuffle forward, but he did not back away.
“When do the guards change round the keep, Bernard?” he asked now, adding provocatively, “Do you know?”
The bait proved too much for the vain bully. “O’course I know! An hour past midnight.”
So when I break out of here, which in a moment I will, the guards above will be slack and sleepy. Good.
“But not you, eh, Bernard? No relief for you.” Magnus raised a hand and spread his fingers, as if he commiserated with the man.
“There never is,” Bernard agreed.
In another hour, I could have this two-faced sniveler exchanging war stories and ale with me, Magnus thought. He listened, hearing the distant roars of drunken men, and knew it was time to move out.
He closed his eyes. He waited the space of one and thirty breaths and then opened them to find Bernard wandering about the cellar, not pacing or with purpose but in an idle meander. He cleared his throat, sucking in a huge lungful of the fetid air.
“I feel amiss,” he began and choked, stopping his breath.
“Sir?” Bernard cautiously shook his foot. “Sir? Teeth of hell!”
A stool overturned, there was a crash as Bernard slipped on the greasy cellar floor, sprawling against a barrel in his haste to reach his stricken prisoner. He dropped to his knees and lurched forward, hands out, seeking a heartbeat, and Magnus walloped his skull hard with his fist.
Bernard toppled silently onto the cellar floor, and Magnus extracted the key from his tunic.
“The sick prisoner is the oldest trick there is, Bernard,” he told the unconscious guard. “It is well known in Outremer, where the assassins are a force to be reckoned with. Your lord would have told you that, had he remembered more of our campaigns than booty and rutting.”
He took Bernard’s rust-pitted dagger, vaulted over his scrawny figure, and strode for the door.
No one was on watch outside, nor on the stairs, nor on the landing. Locking Bernard inside the cellar, Magnus ran in a limping, lopsided lope back up the staircase to the great hall, missing his sword belt and blades with every swaying stride. He knew where they were, in the woodshed where he and Elfrida had spent a luscious night, but first he must retrieve his men and save the womenfolk.
He forced himself to halt outside the threshold to the hall and put his ear to the solid oak door. The shouts and laughter were more ragged and infrequent, and he caught several long snores. He thumped hard on the oak, bruising his knuckles, five fast strikes, then three, then one—his drumbeat signal from Outremer.
He stood behind where the door would swing and waited.
Mark burst out of the hall first, followed by Tancred, John and Edmund, then lanky Diarmit from Dublin and Simon the arrow maker, his men one and all and each one clear-eyed and grim.
“Simon, get to the woodshed and look for our gear behind a block of limewood.” Magnus ordered the swiftest, and he was off like a wolfhound after quarry. As his slapping footsteps echoed off into darkness, Magnus seized a torch, stamped into the hall, and set fire to the rushes and herbs strewn on the floor. These should have been packed down and hard to light, but the meadowsweet was old and overdry in parts, too soaked in ale in the rest. It smoked, then caught in a swirl of wicked-sounding crackling.
“Hola!” Through the tumbling flames, Magnus saw the rest of his men. Caught behind a wall of overturned trestles, they were fending off those Denzils who could still stand and hold a sword, with a haphazard mix of table legs and stools. He roared his approval of them, and they yelled back, the gleam of battle shining in their faces. The slave women were nowhere to be seen, and neither was Gregory Denzil.
“Hola!” Magnus struck out with the blazing torch, firing a man’s beard. He swung out again—
The blow came from behind. He heard and saw nothing of his assailant. There was a loud crack in his ears, and the world turned its back on him, turned black and empty, like the insides of a wolf’s belly.
Magnus fell, sprawling full length, and did not know he fell.
* * * *
He lay on top of a high wooden platform beneath a starry summer sky. Around him the air was warm and spicy. Far beneath him he heard a beggar sing, “Alms, alms in the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate, for I am in the beautiful city of Damascus, and I am blind.”
I never traveled to Damascus. This is a dream.
“Your dream of love and learning, my lord.” Elfrida was sitting beside him, holding a golden astrolabe. “You once told me, or wished to tell me, that the finest medical and astrological instruments were made in Damascus. So we are here.”
Magnus sat up and looked out from the wooden platform, which was built like a siege engine, only it was bigger and higher. A scent of roses, mingling with the smell
of freshly baked honey cakes, wafted from the mud-brick, flat-roofed houses below, but away to the north was a wildwood, tangled and dark.
Those trees are not cedars or pine. They are oaks and limes, the trees of England. And I see wolf shapes within the wood, and lurking thieves and brigands.
“Danger,” he said to Elfrida, pointing at the wood.
She smiled, her face gentle and luminous, like in a painting of the Magdalene. “There is always that.”
In the fluid way of dreams, he lay with his head in her lap. She stroked her fingers through his hair, teasing out the knots. She was robed in a long, white dress, white as a Templar tunic without the red cross. Somehow he knew it was her wedding gown.
Pray God she has chosen me and no other.
He glanced at her hands, longing and hoping to discover his own family ring there, given to her as a pledge of love, but her fingers were bare.
Why am I surprised or disappointed? She can have anyone, so why would she choose you?
That was not his true thought, Magnus realized, as he touched her long, loose hair. “If not my bride now, you will be soon, my winter bride, my Snow Bride.”
“Not so, crusader. The woman is mine.”
A tall, thin stranger appeared, looking out over the silent city. Elfrida vanished, the platform vanished, Damascus faded, and he and the stranger were inside the wildwood.
“You pine in vain, knight.” The stranger had a dry, dusty voice and looked as narrow as a needle. His face was hidden in the manner of desert dwellers, by a turban of long, dark cloth and a veil, but Magnus wondered if he had a face. Undaunted, he leaped up and charged but never came nearer to the looming figure.
“Your quest is lost. The Snow Bride is mine. See? Her token.”
The stranger spread his arms, holding them aloft. Hanging between his scrawny hands fluttered Elfrida’s old dress, the one he had allowed Denzil to take from her.
“You gave her to me by giving me this.”
Magnus stopped running—it was like fighting through deep sand or snow, and he was going nowhere. “Tell me her name, then,” he said.
The stranger hesitated, and Magnus seized the moment. He reached within his tunic, finding the amulet Elfrida had given to him— her true token, which he wore above his heart.
“Begone, you devil!” he ordered, and he broke the narrow chain and hurled the amulet at the faceless figure.
“Magnus, Magnus! Sir!”
Magnus opened his eyes. Light spitted his brains, and he flinched.
“Sorry, sir.” Mark hastily withdrew the flaring torch.
“Ugh!” Magnus had sat up in the snow—a mistake as Mark’s unnaturally pallid, drawn face seemed to detach from his head and swing wildly from side to side. He squeezed his eyes shut, and the swinging lurched into his stomach.
“Slingshot, was it?” he demanded, mostly to stop the furtive glances and whispers of his men. “Splendor in Christendom, I am not yet on my deathbed!”
“Yes, sir!” Mark handed him a bucket of snow. Magnus almost asked if his second wanted him to be sick in it, then took the simpler option of silence and tipped the pail over his head. The icy, white cold eased the drilling in his eyes, at least.
“Who carried me out?” he asked, motioning for another bucket load.
“Ah, yes.” Mark tweaked his nose in embarrassment. “That would be me, and Tancred, and Diarmit, and the squires.” He scratched his throat. “You were out cold, you see, sir.”
“I know that, man! So what happened? Where are we? Did all the men get out?”
A squire offered him a second bucket, filled to the brim with snow. Magnus sank his throbbing face into it and piled more snow onto the back of his neck while Mark stumbled through an account.
It seemed that his being struck from behind by slingshot had driven his men into a perfect fighting fury. Fearing him dead, those behind the shields of trestles had broken out and taken a brutal hand-to-hand battle to the Denzils. Drunken and surprised, their hosts had been quickly overwhelmed, even before Magnus’s man Simon had returned to the fray with their swords.
“They broke like clay dolls and scarpered from the hall as soon as they could,” Mark recounted, smacking his lips in satisfaction.
“And the women?” Magnus asked.
“Weeping and wailing in the solar,” Mark replied. “We left them in there to carry you outside for some more wholesome air.”
“Gregory Denzil?”
“Aye, yes.” Mark shook his head, as if in wonder. “In the solar, too, can you believe it? Him alone, and all those girls!”
Had his head not been aching so much, Magnus would have bawled the man out, but Mark finally added, “When we broke down the door to the solar, Denzil smashed his way through the window glass. A shame, for the glass was fine.”
“Expensive, for sure, but there will be other glaziers to replace it,” Magnus remarked dryly. “The larger pity was Denzil and his men escaping.” He raised his hand to stifle protest. “You have done well. The castle is ours?”
“Yes, sir! I mean, for the moment, sir.”
“Excellent,” said Magnus. “Let us keep it that way.”
My dream means nothing, he told himself as he calmly gave out familiar orders. The mystery Denzil may be no more of a threat than was Gregory.
His fingers closed on the amulet Elfrida had given him. Surely it was a good omen that he still had it? But what if his dream was true? What then?
Chapter 23
The brazier had taken a long time to light, and Elfrida was numb fingered by the time it was burning. She swept a small section of the salt circle aside and pushed the dark mirror out into the room, then tore at the lower parts of her rough braies with her knife, hacking off strips from both.
“Be blind to me,” she ordered the glass. To be sure, she dropped the linen strips over the mirror, covering its dark “eye.” Then she resealed her circle.
It was hard to stand and wait, but she knew she must. The room beyond the brazier was as dark as ship pitch, which meant it was also night, the time of her enemy’s greatest power. Again, she told herself not to think of Magnus, lest her anxiety alert the Forest Grendel and the monster turned on him.
But it was impossible, for she could not stop wondering and picturing Magnus, prone in the snow, with a great swelling bruise on the back of his head...
Was that true?
“Please, Holy Mother, let him be safe,” she chanted, the haste of her prayer drumming like hooves within her head. “Let Sir Magnus be safe. Send him guardian angels and spirits.” Elfrida thought of an angel as big as Magnus, as strong as Magnus, with hair as curling as Magnus’s but of burnished gold.
Gold is pure, she thought, and she drew the gold amulet her mother had given to her over her head. It was an ancient coin with some king’s head upon it. Her mother had soaked it for seven nights in holy water to strengthen its power.
Why did I not give this to Magnus earlier, along with the amulet, when I suspected what we faced? I could not give it to Christina because she was taken from me, and I cannot do it now or my enemy will know, but Magnus was with me! He was right beside me!
Horrified by her carelessness, she felt her breath hitch and her throat burn, both a prelude to weeping. But she could not cry—guilt and shame would do no good now, only action would help. She was a witch, and she must be a witch, not kneel on the floor and wail.
Elfrida straightened and clapped her hands together sharply.
“As my hands are sisters and twins, so this amulet is twinned,” she ordered, fixing on the gold coin twirling on its simple leather chain. There would be two gold coins, she knew, her own and the one of the future that was for Magnus. She was fetching it a little earlier from the future, that was all.
“This amulet is mine.” She raised her right hand and the gold coin spun like a tiny flashing star. “This amulet is its twin, for Magnus.” She raised her left hand, thinking of the gold spinning there, incorruptible, brilliant and r
ound, a perfect circle, symbolizing eternity.
“I give this amulet to Magnus,” she vowed, knowing she would make good her promise as soon as she could. “Also, I give seven gold coins to the spirit of the well in my home.”
The water spirit of the well at home was gentle and powerful together and would be well pleased by such a gift.
“I swear to do this before the next full moon.”
She lowered her hands and brought then tightly together with the gold-coin amulet embraced between them. She bowed her head and prayed in thankfulness to Mary the Virgin, the gold of heaven.
She had faith. When she next put on the amulet, its spirit twin would be put on Magnus. I have done all I can here. Next must be this room.
She hung the thin strip of leather around her neck and turned about. The dark mirror was where she had thrust it. The shadows on the north wall were unmoving. She took a clove of garlic and flicked that into the chamber, intently watching where it fell. Spirits of evil detested garlic, so if any lurked here, they would react.
But the flames of the brazier remained steady, and the hunched shadow on the north wall remained still.
Perhaps such dark spirits cluster about their masters like familiars.
Quickly, without any forewarning thought that would betray her intent, she stepped across and away from the salt circle. The brazier behind her spat a little, as if in warning, but no scaly or furry demon seized her, and no spirits crawled across her skin to possess her.
She clicked her tongue to prove her freedom, laughter pouring from her as she twirled on the spot. Still chuckling, she sped about the room, deliberately tracing the shape of an upright pentagram to counter the ashy remains of the inverted one. Each time she changed direction she prayed to the saints, praising their glory.
The white chamber remained empty, with no sense of impending thunderstorm or evil, and she began to feel foolish.
Townsend, Lindsay - The Snow Bride (BookStrand Publishing Romance) Page 20
