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

by Lindsay Townsend

  She spun about, deliberately awkwardly and heavily, spotting Magnus’s grin and nod of encouragement and, above his hiding place, the overarching trees, their snow-white branches dotted with roosting, dark birds, too far distant for her to recognize. She turned around again, the fallen snow clinging to her legs.

  I may perish of cold first, if Denzil lingers too long deciding.

  But she had done what she could to keep warm. Over her youth’s clothes she had Baldwin’s undertunic, shyly offered to her, and Magnus’s undertunic, dropped over her head with the rough words, “No dispute! Wear it!” She also wore other items, offered by Magnus’s men—shoes, extra leggings, mittens with the thumb missing—and looked sturdier than she had ever done, but still, she hoped, a woman wearing a boy’s costume for traveling.

  And I am afraid. Where is the necromancer? Will he know me as the one he calls his Snow Bride? Should I have warned Magnus of that? No, that is secret, witch business.

  She hoped Joseph Denzil had no wolf familiar, or any great beast. To counter devils, she had dried sprays of rosemary and an amulet that had been dipped in the holy tears of the Magdalene, given to her by her mother. She had wanted to pass the small copper trinket to Magnus, only her mother had told her only women could wear it. Now, with her crucifix and her moon sign, it would be part of her sacred shield.

  And I know I am fussing because I am afraid.

  The snow yielded a little more under her shuffling feet. She took it as a good omen and sank to the frozen ground, falling sideways so she came to rest on Magnus’s leather cloak. She lay in a patch of sunlight, feeling a light breeze stroke against her face, and prepared to wait.

  She closed her eyes but dared not sleep—those who fell asleep in snow rarely woke again. Instead, she strained her hearing to its utmost and clenched her hands within their mittens. She worked and twitched her toes within their alien shoes and tensed the muscles of her legs and arms, trying not to stiffen. Across the clearing, she wondered what Magnus could see and hear, if he was also keeping limber, and hoped it would not be long.

  She became aware of a dampness under her cheek where the snow was melting due to the warmth of her face. Soon the damp turned to a chill, then an ache, then a dull throbbing, worse than a toothache. She tried to divert herself by imagining huge fires and listing all the cures for bad teeth.

  Despite her movements, her limbs began to shiver. She felt a fierce itch in her nose and sneezed violently, setting a new ache flaring down her spine and ribs. The shadow of the stone tower loomed above her head, making her face and neck even colder.

  He will not emerge until the shadow envelopes me, she thought, in some despair. Her mind was growing as sluggish as her body. She could scarcely feel her feet, even with their brave borrowed shoes.

  But Joseph Denzil has not set dogs or devils on me yet, and he does not control the weather as I feared, or else it would surely be snowing again.

  She drummed her fingers against her thighs, rolling her head slightly so her face no longer rested on compacted snow. A cold point, wet as a dog’s nose, smeared onto her forehead. The shadow of the tower chilled her back, making her wish she had drunk more mead earlier. A sly breeze danced across her legs and made its home in her lap like an unwelcome pet. She began to crave noise and signs of life, true warmth like the hot deserts of Outremer that Magnus had spoken of so eloquently during their grim pilgrimage to this spot. Hoping to see him, she half opened her eyes, her eyelids feeling as if they were coated in dusty cobwebs.

  It was snowing again, large, powdery flakes that burst on her gloved hands and face and slowly, inexorably, drifted across her body.

  Will he wait until I am covered? Is he even here? Am I mistaken?

  She thought of the small bag of salt and wormwood leaves tied around her neck and wondered if she should have placed a salt and wormwood circle of protection around herself and Magnus. But Denzil, if he were watching, would have spotted that at once and recognized her as a witch.

  Magic lies in the will. Elfrida knew that, deep within her blood and bones, and that wisdom kept her still, pinned on the frozen ground like a trapped fly in resin on a pine tree, as she allowed her anger to build.

  He is no good host, like the rest of his wretched kindred. He leaves me out in a snowstorm for his own safety and comfort, because he is no true knight. What is he, this Joseph Denzil? A master of no craft. He dabbles at knighthood but is of so small renown that Sir Magnus does not remember him in Outremer. He is or was a cleric but a cleric without the core of faith. He has a power of magic but too much pride. He assumes he is safe, that I am nothing but a bride of snow for him and that his dark workings within the wooden tower with the blue door cannot be touched. I have fire I can use against the tower...

  Snow blew against her legs and dropped chilly into her tunic. She flexed her toes within her borrowed shoes and vowed to keep still.

  “Elfrida?”

  She opened her eyes and with a mittened finger, drew the sign of the cross in the snow, so Magnus would know she thrived.

  “How much longer?” he whispered.

  She gave her hand a small warning shake, and to her relief he heeded her.

  You have lost with that ploy, Joseph Denzil, so come out.

  In truth, she did not know if Magnus had been inspired by Denzil or by his own warrior nature and concern, but with the evoking of her own will, her witch instincts were in play. She knew it would not be long.

  The shadow of the tower struck across all of her now, cold as a bar of metal. She wanted to shiver and clapped her hands together, but forced herself to be unmoving. She heard a distant flutter of wings and knew the roosting birds were flying, whether for themselves or for some task of the necromancer’s, she could not tell.

  Snow piled against her eyelids and mouth. She clenched her teeth and waited some more.

  Off in the swirls of snow, she heard a soft rustle as Magnus shifted beneath his bramble cover. Poor love, he must be so very cold.

  At first she thought she had misheard it, the sound was so faint, but Magnus had stopped moving at once. She lifted her head a little and listened as hard as she could.

  The wind, with a bite to it, gnawed her ears. Below that, she caught the snick and clatter of a large key within a lock. For an instant, like a flash of lightning, she thought she saw a gleam of metal deep within the bramble bush and guessed Magnus was preparing.

  Would he allow her to deal with Joseph Denzil’s magic, or would he charge again as he had at the wooden tower?

  He is learning, as he told you. Trust him.

  Behind her, making her back itch, she heard the great door creak, then a hiss of parting snow. She tried to stay loose limbed as she listened to the crunch of feet on snow, snow that was virgin, unmarked, because no one had left the stone tower before today.

  One pair of feet, Elfrida reasoned, set within boots. Human, then, she thought, trying to make a jest of it, though when she tried to grin, her cold face hurt too much. An older human, from the steady, slightly rasping breaths.

  A narrow, booted foot pushed at her, and she rolled, the better to face her tormentor. She did not make the mistake of trying to look at him, not yet.

  Please Magnus, please be still, too.

  The stranger spoke. “Be awake for me.”

  It was the dialect of her own village, of Top Yarr, and Elfrida prayed that her eyelids had not flickered, that she had not given herself away.

  He knows who I am! No, he may not, he is merely testing.

  “Are you the one I have been waiting for, my redhead?”

  This was in the dialect of Great Yarr, and so one she easily understood. She also knew another, vital thing—if this was Joseph Denzil, the necromancer, the Forest Grendel, he did not know who she was or what she was.

  A long, thin hand plucked at a handful of her hair. Elfrida endured the pawing, warning herself not to scream.

  She felt the eddy of air as he straddled her, a foot on either side of her
body. Was he about to stab her, urinate on her, drag her into the tower? Tensed so fiercely that she felt another notch of tension would shatter her body like a Roman-glass chalice flung against stone, she could no longer resist the compulsion to look.

  Dark-blue eyes bored into hers. For the rest, it was a haze of impressions, like trying to catch and hold smoke: a long, hooked nose, gray hair and beard, domed, lined forehead, gaunt, pallid cheeks.

  “Are you ill, Joseph?” she found herself asking, not questioning why she was right to speak.

  He blinked once then grinned, his thin lips almost disappearing alongside the blackened stumps of his teeth. His breath was rank.

  “You know my name.”

  “I do.” Elfrida would not tell him hers and had no chance to. Joseph was already talking, victory ripe in his every word.

  “I am dying, peasant, but you give me the means of life.”

  “As your Snow Bride?”

  Her question rocked him. His pallid cheeks colored as if she had struck them, but then his skinny mouth turned down at the corners.

  “Red hair, yes, red for fire and desire, but I was promised beauty, red hair, blue eyes, a virgin lady born and bred.” He glared down at her, suspicion and distaste warring across his face. “You know so much. The spirit must have sent you, but you cannot be the one, although your voice...it is familiar. I was promised a virgin lady, a lady born and bred! Unless the spirit tricked me...”

  His long complaint turned into a mutter, as if he talked only to himself, and Elfrida said nothing, sensing more pent-up words flying up behind those blackened stumps of teeth.

  “The hair, the voice, the beauty, yes, but the eyes are wrong.”

  He speaks of me as if I am a doll. In all our encounters in the world between the spirit world, he did not learn me at all. Even in his own wishes and desires, I was never his Snow Bride. And why am I a little sorry and hurt over that? I have been rejected by a necromancer who wants to suck out the lives of others to extend his own, who plans to sacrifice my sister.

  But Joseph was still grumbling and casting explanations for himself.

  “The way of the spirits is not ours. Perhaps the eyes will change after the ritual, for the spirit promised blue eyes for my Snow Bride. The blonde I have, she has blue eyes.”

  Elfrida stifled her exclamation of relief that Christina was still alive. “Is she with you?” she asked, making her voice very gentle.

  “She sleeps within,” he answered to her prompt, looking round to the stone tower. He glanced down at her again. “But how do you know her?” His blue eyes sharpened and narrowed. “Who are you, peasant?”

  Without waiting for her reply he lunged for her with his thin, attenuated hands, aiming for her throat as he chanted a charm in Latin, the language of clerics. Elfrida flung up her arm to block his reaching fingers and answered in her own tongue, “By salt and wormwood and the rood, begone! None of yours shall harm me or mine!”

  Her spell stopped his chant, and his mouth changed to a snarl. He struck at her again, his fist closing on her face. She saw the clenched fingers and the sparkle of the rings on his hand and was mute and numb, her body frozen as if already buried in the falling snow.

  Closer the bright glare of rings approached, and she tried to move her head that suddenly felt as heavy as a catapult ball. Unable to stir, she watched her fate come and determined not to close her eyes.

  The glare spun and fell away. Joseph Denzil collapsed on top of her, and she scrambled desperately to be free of him, kicking out and yelling. In a sprawl of arms and legs he was dragged off her and then thrown into the snow, splaying across the white like a huge spider.

  “Did he touch you?” Magnus was wrapping her in his own cloak and lifting her clear. “Elfrida, did that creature hurt you?”

  “No, not at all,” she mumbled, events moving so fast that even her foresight could not keep pace. “Magnus, are you hurt?”

  She began to pat him, to check he was real and whole.

  “Never fret!” Magnus caught her hand and kissed it. “Let us get you away.”

  “You do not need to keep carrying me,” Elfrida protested, trying to see past Magnus’s shoulder. “What happened?”

  “I might ask the same of you, my girl, especially when you and he began talking.”

  * * * *

  Magnus resisted the strong impulse to keep striding off with her. More than anything, he longed to find a secret shelter for them both and tend her until she stopped shivering. Her eyes were dark with shock and pain, and she looked to have aged twenty years, with new lines on her forehead. She clung to him quite unconsciously, and he was glad to let her, though his heart stung at the way her knuckles were so white.

  “He called me peasant.”

  “Aye, I thought I recognized that, and he did it a second time,” Magnus said gruffly. That was when he had decided things had gone on for long enough and he must act.

  “How did you stop him?”

  Magnus sighed and shook his head. “We stopped him, Elfrida. You fought your way, and I fought with mine.” He had kept out of the magic in case his earthy intervention put his witch off her battle stroke, but when the fellow had gone for her like a brawler in an alehouse, he had reacted at once.

  To try to strike a woman! What a hideous thing he was!

  He felt her shudder again. “Is he dead?”

  Who cares? No, Magnus thought. She deserves an honest answer. “I checked the throw. He is stunned.” If need be, we can question Joseph further.

  She raised her head from the crook of his shoulder. “Throw?”

  He smiled. He always had some pebbles somewhere about him, tucked in corner of a robe or tunic, and since boyhood he’d had a good arm. “A stone, my heart. It was the fastest way.”

  She began to kick slightly in his arms. “We have to find Christina and the others.”

  He released her, and before he guessed what she would do, she sprinted straight for the gaping door. His “Wait!” fell on unhearing ears. Elfrida’s passionate blood was roused, and she was careless of anything but her sister.

  But he was not—

  “Guard that!” he bawled to his men and set off himself, blundering and slipping in his haste. He ignored the snow kicked in his face by Elfrida’s racing feet, and the falling snow prickling along his eyes. He fixed on the open entrance and charged.

  Reach her before she gets to the doorway! You must!

  But his redhead was quick and heartsore for her sister. She sped along the snow where he sank in it, and she had a start on him of a longsword’s length. He kept his mouth shut and sprinted as fast as he could, his breath searing his lungs.

  Once his hand almost closed on her arm, but she snarled at him, thinking he was trying to go first, which he was, but not for the reasons she might think.

  “Stop!” he rasped, leaping forward again with all his muscles straining, his legs blazing with the effort.

  Splendor in Christendom, give her a cramp!

  Perhaps a saint heard his desperate inward plea, for she stumbled on the threshold, and he hauled her back just as her right foot hammered onto the space beyond the doorway.

  The “floor,” which Elfrida had assumed was nothing but ice and snow, snapped away. She was left hanging above a hidden trapdoor, her feet kicking in empty space. He clung on as she plummeted, his good arm coiled about her middle, and pivoted his weight back. For an instant they seesawed wildly as the power of her sprint spent itself through his already aching back and thighs, and then the dragging on his arms eased, and he could draw her back.

  “Thank you,” she panted when she had breath enough to speak. “I charged then, did I not? And you warned—I am sorry, Magnus.”

  “We are quit.” He growled. She looked young again and very pretty, her color roused and her eyes bright. In contrast, he felt as if he had slogged a thousand miles in full armor. Nothing would have pleased him more than to keep his good witch in his arms and sleep.

  Elfri
da, steady on her feet by now, hooked a narrow but deceptively strong arm around his middle. “How did you know of the trap?”

  Trying to support me, he thought with amusement, but he answered her mildly, “War is one of my skills. And the Denzils had a love of traps and killing holes in the East. I have been watching out for something like this.”

  “Thank you,” Elfrida repeated. Standing on tiptoe, she gave him a kiss, soft as a kiss of peace, but warmer. “I am deep in your debt,” she whispered.

  He nodded, thinking of ways she might repay.

  Meanwhile, Joseph Denzil was stunned. Even a wretch like Joseph should stay supine for a good half day, but still Magnus wanted Elfrida to be outside the tower before nightfall. “We need to go on,” he said, “but carefully. I will go first, understand?”

  Why am I even taking her along? Because she is Elfrida, and I am learning.

  “Tread where I tread. Stop when I tell you. There can be snares.”

  “Yes, sir,” she replied, all meek and mild but with a gleam in her eyes. “Christina?” she prompted, serious again.

  “We shall find her safe! But Elfrida—” He stooped to stare directly into her eyes, hoping that his scarred face looked as brutal and ugly as she had yet seen it. “We must go softly. If there is a guard, I do not want that guard to panic. He must know that his survival depends on your sister being whole and well, that he will die, and die badly, if she is harmed. That is what I will say in the tower, in all the languages I know. You should call, too, call to your sister, but gently.”

  He kissed her softly and prepared to go on.

  Chapter 30

  When she watched Magnus staring up into the dark ceiling space of the tower before taking more than a step inside, Elfrida wondered what he was seeking.

  “Some gatehouses in castles have murder spots,” he explained, correctly interpreting her bewilderment.

  “Murder spots?”

  “No, that is the wrong word. I mean murder places, holes! Murder holes. Gaps in the roof where defenders can pelt attackers with missiles.” He shrugged and took another step into the tower, skirting the trapdoor. “I thought it unlikely that a tower as old and small as this would have such refinements, but it seemed wise to make sure.”