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

by Lindsay Townsend

  His shoulder exploded, his arms white-hot in agony as his right side felt to be ripping apart.

  “Elfrida!” he roared, out of himself with dread.

  “My lord! Let the men break it down with hammers! God Almighty, Magnus, you kill yourself with this—”

  Magnus hurled Mark off into the tumbling snow and slammed into the door again.

  The hinge cracked and broke, splinters of wood spearing into Magnus’s beard and hair and into his arm as he drove on, a human battering ram. The door fell in with a shuddering crash, and he was at the ladder, running up as nimbly and eagerly as he had done in a crusader siege, his sword belt clashing at his waist.

  She was gone. In a state of bewildered, furious disbelief, he blazed through the topmost chamber, slamming walls, smashing the hideous clay figure. Roaring down into the second chamber, he overturned and kicked in every apple barrel, but she was not there, either.

  “My lord, there is no one,” Mark called cautiously from below.

  Magnus thrust his head through the trapdoor. “I told her to stay! I warned her, I told her!”

  * * * *

  Mark recoiled as Magnus swung down, straight through the trapdoor, landing heavily beside him. Anger was coiling off the huge knight like steam off a cauldron or fire off molten lava. He looked more than enraged, he looked mad, his eyes black slits in a twisted, mangled face of fury. “Told her to wait, told her—”

  Magnus stamped past, his leather cloak slapping against Mark’s forehead. He charged back out into the darkness and the snow, men scattering rather than face him. Out in the gray, cold murk, Mark heard him snarling, “Why do this? Why leave unless you want to leave? But I will find you, Elfrida, and when I do, when I do...”

  Mark shivered. The poor lass will need all her charm and beauty to appease him, he thought. Elfrida chatted like a magpie, but he could not fault her care for his lord. If she was gone indeed, there would be a good reason for her leaving. Let us hope my lord Magnus will listen, when we find her.

  He shivered again, saying nothing.

  * * * *

  Elfrida trembled as the men and horses galloped by the holly tree. She had barely managed to leave behind the leather cloak as a lure before they had reached it. She would never outrun this hunt, so she must outwit it.

  She should be shuddering with cold, but shock had left her numb. Had Magnus truly set Denzil’s men after her? Was it possible he had changed to her so much, in less than a day? Was this the work of the necromancer, her enemy?

  No, I do not believe any of that.

  Or had Magnus always been a dissembler, using his scars as a shield for lies? What a magical device if that is so—his battle wounds are his badge of truth, honesty, and courage! He said he loved me, too...

  She scrambled onto a low-growing holly branch, thick as a man’s thigh and bare of snow, and looked out. Using patches of bare, frozen earth and low-growing branches, she had crossed the woodland from where she had dropped the weighted leather cloak and come safely into the prickly heart of the holly. The snow about the holly was undisturbed, which was what she wanted, and by sheer good fortune the Denzils’ dogs were poor tonight and no use on any scent.

  There was another holly, growing in a deep hollow. She could not reach that without leaving a trail, but perhaps that did not matter. The yapping, unhappy hounds and grumbling, snorting men seemed to be moving deeper into the mistletoe woods. Gregory Denzil shouted a few orders that the piercing breeze blew away from her, and the whole troop vanished between the trees.

  Elfrida compelled her limbs to stir. Part of her wanted to lie down in the snow and weep, but she kept going, walking from one holly tree to the next. Her heart ached continuously within her chest, which dimly surprised her—she had always considered heartache a poetic fancy. It was not, nor was the heaviness of her legs, the feeling of smoke and distance inside her mind.

  She did not want to believe that Magnus had betrayed her. With every shuffling step she wrestled with that idea, pushing the thought aside as she shoved and buffeted through reams of snow. Why lie? Why say you love me? I cannot believe you would betray me, and yet where are you?

  “Magnus could ask the same of you,” her mother whispered in her mind. “He begged you to stay safe within the tower.”

  Distracted, she lost her footing amidst a tangle of tree roots and sprawled, grabbing at a thick, wild-rose stem before she realized what it was. The rose stopped her fall at the cost of driving several long thorns into her hand. She pulled out those she could.

  She never asked why she did not stop and give in. However matters were between Magnus and herself, Christina must be saved.

  Tomorrow and the day after will be the last full days of my sister’s life. I must find her!

  “I must find her!”

  At first Elfrida thought she had shouted her own thought, and then she dropped to her knees, stunned with relief.

  “Magnus!”

  Her voice was harsh with the cold, little more than a croak, but incredibly, he heard her. His horse burst through a thicket of elders and thorns, towering over her head like a massive siege engine, and then Magnus was with her, his arms clamped around her, his mouth capturing hers.

  He kissed her, wildly and deeply, saying words in his own tongue, saying more, kissing her again. He was shaking, and she was shaking.

  “I am sorry,” she started to say, before his clever, crooked lips caught hers again and she was lost in a flooding haze of heat and feeling. His arms were so tight around her she could not fully breathe. She tried again. “Magnus, I am sorry—”

  “I have you now, no matter.” He shook her as if she was a doll. “I was hot and mad as fire, you hear? And look at you! No cloak, enough thorns in you to make a porcupine, one shoe missing!”

  His mouth scowled, but the gold cross in his right, brown eye sparkled, and both eyes were bright with tears. “I could kill you for rushing out,” he said thickly. “I feared I might when I found you, and then you undo me without even a word, simply through your own suffering. Little wretch!” He hugged her again and cradled her face with his hand, tenderly brushing snow away from her cheeks.

  Overwhelmed, Elfrida fought down tears of shame and relief, hating herself for causing such pain. “Christina has only two more days,” she began, when he interrupted her.

  “I know that, woman, and I know I was late today.” He wrapped his cloak around both of them and called out to Mark who, with the rest of his men, was waiting close by but not too close. “If you broke your word to me, then I broke mine to you, so we are quits.”

  His admission made it impossible for her to be angry or doubtful of him anymore. How could I have ever thought you would betray me? In her moment of weakness and respite, she almost confessed.

  “I am sorry,” she said a third time, wishing he could understand, yet too exhilarated and uplifted by his presence to argue. Then, “What is a porcupine?”

  “Ah, something you do not know! ’Tis a fantastic beast, more prickles than a hedgehog. I have a bestiary at home, and I shall show you.”

  Elfrida nodded, comforted.

  He drew his cloak off his shoulders and wrapped it round her alone, frowning as he chafed her white fingers. As if reminded afresh by her continuing plight of what she had done, he scowled in an awful manner and jerked his head at the dark and the steadily falling snow. “What possessed you to go out in this, Elfrida?”

  So we have not made peace yet. “We should talk about it later,” she said quickly.

  Magnus’s face took on a stubborn set that reminded her piercingly of Christina, on those rare occasions when Walter had denied her sister something she wanted.

  “We talk now,” he said.

  “But Gregory Denzil is out in the woods tonight, and it is still snowing! And my sister—”

  “I am glad you finally noticed the snow.”

  “I have not demanded an account of you and why you were late.”

  He rolled his muscular
shoulders. “Mine does not matter.” What he did not say, but plainly meant, was I am a man, so it is not for you to question. He tied the strings of the leather cloak for her, as if she was a child. It hung about her ankles and felt warm enough, but she was too disconcerted to care.

  “It does to me,” she said quietly.

  He brushed aside her answer with a swift shake of his head. Still, because she loved him, because they had been lost to one another and Magnus had suffered, because he had snow in his hair and a new open gash from a low-hanging branch seeping down his already scarred cheek, she hugged him as tightly as she could. She bit back the questions. If I am answerable to you, why are you not the same to me? You promised we should be equal out of bed, did you not? She closed her eyes and held on, reveling in the scent of him, the size of him, his beloved, tragic face, even his manly arrogance.

  Magnus was less forbearing. “I am waiting. Why did you defy me?”

  “Is that what you think it was? Do you consider me so petty? I never defied—” Elfrida broke off, forcing down her indignation. How could she help him to understand? And Christina was waiting somewhere...

  “Your men,” she began again, a weak beginning, to which he robustly replied, “They are well clod and shod, unlike you, and they will wait. As for Denzil, finding him again will be my good fortune. Now, madam.”

  There was no turning him. “I could wait no longer at the blue tower, sir.” She knew this next would wound but had to say it. “You were not coming. I had done all I could to thwart our enemy there.” Her breath hitched. “You might never have come.”

  “So you set out to rescue me?”

  “If need be.” She was heartened by the fact Magnus had not shared or even considered her darkest notion—that he was not coming because he had changed in his feelings to her, and worse, that he had set Denzil onto her. “Certainly I had to move for my sister, who is still in danger.” After that necessary reminder, she glanced up at him but could not read his expression. “I had to do something, Magnus. I am a witch! People come to me for help!”

  “Aye, you are a warrior of magic, right enough.”

  He smiled at her surprise. “Splendor in Christendom, woman, I am learning and trying! If I fall back at times, ’tis only nature.”

  He caught something flung to him out of the darkness and shook out a rough cloth bag. “Shodding for your foot. You see, I like looking after you.”

  “And I you,” Elfrida replied promptly, wanting to be clear on that.

  Magnus nodded. “That is what takes some learning, but I will.” He knelt and bound her foot with the bag, grinning up at her. “What next for us, eh?”

  * * * *

  Magnus meant it as a jest, for he was striving hard not to speak his worst fear—that Elfrida had left the tower because she wanted to be away from him. Now they were together and he felt her gripping him, kissing him, he was ashamed. I should not be so jealous, he thought.

  “There was a new blonde at the keep,” he said, “but not your sister, for she did not react when I said her name or yours.”

  Elfrida, warily shaking the “bag” shoe on her foot, flipped up her head. “Was she pretty?”

  She is jealous, too!

  Magnus shook his head, feeling more and more content. “Not so much.”

  Elfrida looked on the verge of speech, her own pretty face clouded, but then she made the sign against the evil eye and sighed.

  “Christina?” Magnus asked softly, knowing full well it was not her sister she was thinking of just then but the unknown blonde.

  Elfrida’s bright, amber eyes shone with gratitude then excitement. “I think I know where she is! In another tower, of stone, very old, near a Roman road and...”

  She gave a strangled cry and thrust herself at him. Caught by sheer surprise, Magnus was knocked off-balance. He dragged her down with him and above her yelp heard the familiar thock! of a crossbow bolt spending itself into a tree stump not a man’s length from them.

  “I felt it coming,” Elfrida panted, as he flung himself over her, covering her with his body as more crossbow bolts and arrows rained down. “Malice coming...sensed it.”

  And moved to meet it. Magnus grabbed his sword. Her courage inspired and appalled him, as he knew very well she had tossed herself into the path of the arrow to save him. Any more? he almost asked, but this was his world now. He dragged her over his shoulder and pelted in a rough, ungainly sprint for cover, any cover.

  “Stay!” he warned, dropping her by a holly tree. “I mean it.” He kissed her smartly, for love, for thankfulness, and ran out again into the snowy dark to meet the oncoming fray.

  Chapter 26

  Elfrida could not help Magnus. She was overcome by a compelling desire to pass water and had to shift deeper into the holly. Beneath its green canopy—black and glossy in the dark—she found the ground dry and covered by a soft leaf litter. She did what she must and backtracked, her heart hammering with anxiety.

  Lifting the final shielding branch, she discovered she had no clear sighting of Magnus. At the distance of a field, men fought on foot and horseback amid falling snow. Burly shapes clashed in the snowy murk. She heard a horse scream, whether in pain or anger she could not see. She was helpless and useless, for even a charm to sting the eyes of Magnus’s enemy was no good unless she knew for certain who that enemy was. She wished ill luck to Gregory Denzil, but her flesh crept as she did so—ill wishes could rebound.

  Worse, this battle pinned them down when she wanted to be moving, seeking the Roman road and the ancient stone fort, finding Christina.

  Is this the doing of the Forest Grendel, the necromancer, or our own ill luck?

  Trying to see more, she reluctantly stripped off Magnus’s cloak and began to climb the branches of the holly, ignoring the scratches. She inched upward, protected by her youth’s clothes, wrapping an arm about the narrow trunk of the tree and hooking a leg over another branch. She forced herself to go up the length of a man and looked out.

  Snow blew into her face. She mopped her eyes and squinted through the thick sleet, listening to the fight somewhere out in the wood. She could tell from the slow, chopping sounds, like a weary peasant hacking at a branch for firewood, that the men were tiring. No one had breath to spare for cursing. She prayed that Magnus was safe and winning, and longed to fight hand-to-hand beside him, a warrior of arms as well as magic.

  She shouted incoherently, cries of support fierce enough to dislodge a roosting crow out of a nearby oak. She found her dagger and slashed it straight across her palm, making a fist to encourage the blood to flow, spattering across the holly leaves. “By the spirit of this tree, defeat to our enemies!”

  What was that?

  Shocked by a clammy touch on the side of her throat, she almost lost her footing and fell. Sweating, eyes tight shut, her breath coming in great gasping spurts as if she had sprinted the length of a field, she released her grip on a handful of branch and holly leaves. More throbbing pain shot through her fingers and up her arm, but she reached up and peeled the narrow cord away from her hair.

  It was as slim as a ribbon and made of a strange, soft, smooth material. Recalling what Magnus had said about silk, Elfrida decided it could be silk. It stretched off into the darkness and was attached to something—when she gave it a gentle tug, no end came free.

  So what was it and why was it here?

  Elfrida drew on the cord until it was taut and saw a branch on a nearby oak tree trembling. So the cord ran between these trees, but it was too high to be any kind of trap, at least a trap for men.

  She tweaked the cord and it hummed slightly, a dark note.

  “It is too thin to take any weight,” she remarked aloud, thinking of how the Forest Grendel had been able to move so stealthily in the forest near her village. Would a web of ropes slung from trees explain his swift and silent movement? How he attacked like a spider, as Walter had put it?

  Elfrida shook her head. This cord was too narrow to support even her,
and swinging between trees could never be silent in an English forest. Walter had thought of a spider because the man who had taken her sister was thin and long limbed. He had called Christina’s attacker silent because no doubt the Forest Grendel had moved with swift purpose, without shouting. Walter had been violently and unexpectedly attacked and his betrothed carried off. He had been in a tumult of panic and shock, yelling so much that he would have heard no other come or go.

  And I know already how the goat woman covered my enemy’s tracks as soon as she could with those of her animals. This cord is not for swinging on or moving between trees. So what is its use?

  Thoughtfully, carefully, she turned the cord over.

  “Elfrida!”

  Magnus’s indignant yell made her start, and she almost lost her footing and grip on the tree. Hastily, she stretched out and cut through the cord at the farthest reach of her arm, wrapping it round her wrist and securing it tightly. “Here!” she called back, slithering and crashing back down the holly tree, in any fashion. “Here, I am here!” She battled the holly branches aside, took a steadying breath, and stepped out of the twigs and berries, prepared to face up to him.

  “What happened to you?” they both asked at once.

  * * * *

  Magnus knew he did not look his finest, whatever that was, and cared not at all. “At least it is not my blood.” He growled. He took in Elfrida’s grubby, lichen-smeared hands and saw that his cloak not on her back but hung over her arm. Her improvised shoe was already ripped and threatening to fall off.

  “What were you doing in the tree?” he asked wearily, and before she could answer, “Why do you never stay where I put you?”