Returning from the beehives at the end of her garden, Elfrida was about to walk through the village to the hut of the headman when she saw Walter stumbling toward her. His homely face was stark with horror, and as soon as he spotted her, he began to shout.
“He has her! I cannot find them! I have looked everywhere!”
He slumped to his knees in the slush and dropped further, his breath spurting in choking gasps. Elfrida reached him as he rolled onto his back, still wheezing. Her own breath stopped as she saw the claw marks on his arms and throat. She swung the lantern round but saw nothing that should not be there in the garden.
“Christina?” she croaked, her throat closing with dread.
“Alive, I swear it! I heard her crying as she was carried off.”
Elfrida found she could breathe again. “Have you roused the men?” she demanded, hearing now, too late, the wail of horns and of many voices. Already in the nearby woodland she saw the bobbing flares of torches and prayed they did not search in vain.
Let her be alive, oh Lord. Let her be safe!
Walter clutched her, dragging her down into the snow with him. “He came from nowhere, like a great spider. I heard nothing.”
Why did I not hear? Christina taken, and I heard nothing! “Had he a horse? Was he alone?”
Walter shook his head. He had begun to shake. “He was dark as a spider…ugly… moved quicker than lightning. Had her snatched and gone…. I went after them…. He slashed at me.”
Elfrida knocked off Walter’s trembling arms and sprinted to the house, leaving him prone in the snow.
“Christina! Christina!” she shrieked, her voice higher than anyone’s, but her sister was not safe at home. Only a scrap of her blue veil remained in their hut, caught on one of the roof struts. She must have rushed out to greet Walter, as she thought, and run straight into—what?
Elfrida dashed into the yard, screaming her sister’s name. She flung the lantern into a stack of hay and screamed again as the precious winter hay burned up in towering, crackling flames, giving much-needed light. “Christina!”
The hay blazed, and she could see the other villagers, the other houses and gardens, the paths through the hamlet and the trees beyond, but there was no sign or shape of Christina.
She was gone, as Walter said, carried off into the wilderness by a monster.
Elfrida dropped the twigs she had been using as divining rods into the snow. This clearing was the place. Here was where she would make her stand.
After two days without sleep or food, she was drained of all feeling, dry from crying. Day and night she had sought everywhere for Christina. Walter had been constantly at her side, calling, praying, and urging the dog he had meant to give Christina, to seek her out. At sunset on the second day, the village headman had compelled Walter to go to church, to leave offerings to the local saint for Christina’s safe recovery. He had tried to order Elfrida, but she had pleaded “woman’s trouble” as an excuse not to enter the church and finally she was alone. Her head ached and buzzed as if filled with bees, but the thudding panic was gone.
Swiftly, as the sinking sun bled into darkness in the west, she began to search for Christina by witch ways. She had done this from the start, but now, without Walter’s anxious, hovering presence, she felt her power growing. She chanted to the wood elves, promising them a year and a day of ale if she they helped her. She tossed Christina’s veil high into the cold, still air, calling on the old gods Gog and Magog to point out the track of the beast. She thought of her sister, her long blonde hair, blue eyes, and sweet face and whispered, Where now, where now?
She drew a picture in her mind of the great forest and the villages she knew: Great Yarr, Top Yarr, where she lived, Lower Yarr and Selton, the new place. She imagined the cat’s cradle of paths to and fro from settlement to settlement. Christina was light to carry, but even a child was too heavy to bear away on such narrow woodland tracks, and surely smashed twigs would have marked the beast’s passage?
Had he flown away, then?
“Be he a demon in flight, or be he as nimble as a squirrel in the treetops, I will have him!” she shouted, striking an oak tree to seal her promise. She found two branches beneath the tree and took them as the oak’s gift, using them to divine where in these woods Christina had been taken.
Here in this clearing lay a clear sign, a long strand of blonde hair trailing across the snow in a golden thread. Gold but no red, praise God, so she could hope her sister still lived.
Elfrida turned slowly in this small circle, glimpsing the path of the sun and the rising new moon through a screen of holly and oak trees. About her the woods seemed deathly quiet, and yet she felt she was being watched by something with a mind—that, or something was coming. She knew it from the raised hairs on the back of her neck.
Coming, not watching. It cannot see me yet, I vow, so I have time.
Had she time enough? She must return to the village, to change her clothes, and to make ready.
She listened intently, reaching out with all her senses, but again her first instinct remained compelling. The beast was in this forest, and he would be drawn closer by the right inducements.
“And I know what those are,” she said aloud, turning to hurry back to the home that was not a home, now that Christina was gone.
Walter had not admitted anything to her, not directly, but from his muttered remarks and fractured exclamations as he feverishly searched alongside her for his betrothed, Elfrida had learned a great deal.
“She is the third!” Walter had cried out, beating his fists against the walls of their empty hut. “The third in her wedding garb, and the most beautiful: one black-haired, one brown, and my Christina!”
He had refused to say more, even when Elfrida had threatened to curse him, but his outburst told her what he and the elders had been hiding from the village women. The brute who had carried off Christina had kidnapped other pretty young girls, also dressed in their wedding gowns. He stole brides.
I will dress myself as a bride and return here with my own wedding feast, with food and drink in abundance. Let him think me a bridal sacrifice, his red-haired bride, left for him by the village. And, by Christ and all his saints, this time I will be ready for him!
It is a blessing I am a healer and have so many potions ready prepared. If I put sleeping draughts in the wine, food, and sweets, surely I can tempt the beast to take some? I can smear tinctures of poppy on my skin and clothes, so any taste will induce sleep.
Sleep, not death, for she had to know where he had taken Christina.
I will coax the truth from the groggy monster, and then the village men can have him.
Part of her knew she was being wild, unreasonable, that she should talk to Walter, tell the villagers, but she did not care. Talk would waste more precious hours, and they might even try to stop her. For her sister she would do anything, risk anything. But she must hurry, she must do something, and she had little time.
It was full dark before Elfrida was finished, midnight on the day after the start of Advent, two days after Christina should have been married. She shivered in the glinting snow, her breath suspended between the frosted, white ground and the black, star-clad sky.
She glanced over the long boulder she had used as an offering table for her wine and food, not allowing herself to think too closely about what she had done. She had lit a small fire and banked it so that it would burn until morning, to stop her freezing and to keep wolves at bay, and now by its tumbling flames she saw her own small, tethered shadow writhing on the forest floor.
She would not dwell on what could go wrong, and she fought down her night terrors over Christina, lest they become real through her thoughts. She lifted up her head and stared above the webbing of treetops to the bright stars beyond, reciting a praise chant to herself. She was a warrior of magic, ready to ensnare and defeat the beast.
“I have loosened my hair as a virgin. I am dressed in a green gown, unworn before today. My shoes a
re made of the softest fur, my veil and sleeves are edged with gold, and my waist is belted in silver. There is mutton for my feast, and dates and ginger, wine and mead and honey. I am a willing sacrifice. I am the forest bride, waiting for my lord—”
Her voice broke. Advent was meant to be a time of fasting, and she had no lord. None of the menfolk of Yarr would dare to take Elfrida the wisewoman and witch to be his wife. She knew the rumors—men always gossiped more than women—and all were depressing in their petty spitefulness. They called her a scold because she answered back.
“I need no man,” she said aloud, but the hurt remained. Was she not young enough, fertile enough, pretty enough?
Keep to your task, Elfrida reminded herself. You are the forest bride, a willing virgin sacrifice.
She had tied herself between two tall lime trees, sometimes struggling against her loose bonds as if she could not break free. She could, of course, but any approaching monster would not know that, and she wanted to bait the creature to come close—close enough to drink her drugged flask of wine and eat her drugged “wedding” cakes. Let him come near so she could prick him with her knife and tell him, in exquisite detail, how she could bewitch him. He would fear her, oh yes, he would…
She heard a blackbird caroling alarms and knew that something was coming, closing steadily, with the stealth of a hunter. She strained on her false bonds, peering into the semidarkness, aware that the fire would keep wild creatures away. Her back chilled as she sensed an approach from downwind, behind her, and as she listened to a tumble of snow from a nearby birch tree, she heard a second fall of snow from a pine closer by. Whoever, whatever, was creeping up was somehow shaking the trees, using the snowfalls as cover to disguise its own movement.
A cunning brute, then, but she was bold. In one hand she clutched her small dagger, ready. In her other, she had the tiny packet of inflammables that she now hurled into the fire.
“Come, husband!” she challenged, as the fire erupted into white-hot dragon tongues of leaping flame, illuminating half the clearing like a noonday sun. “Come now!”
She thrust her breasts and then her hips forward, aping the actions that wives had sometimes described to her when they visited her to ask for a love philter. She shook her long, red hair and kissed the sooty, icy air. “Come to me!”
She saw it at the very edge of her sight—black, huge, a shadow against the flames, off to her side, and now a real form, swooping around from the tree line to her left to face her directly. She stared across the crackling fire at the shape and bit down on the shriek rising up her throat.
The beast stepped through the fire, and she saw its claw reaching for her. She heard a click, off to her right, but still kept watching the claw, even as the fire was suddenly gutted and dead, all light extinguished.
Darkness, absolute and terrifying, smothered her, and she was lost.
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A Summer Bewitchment
Sequel to “The Snow Bride.”
Can a knight and his witch save seven kidnapped maidens? Sir Magnus and Elfrida strive to find the girls, but at what cost to their marriage?
When a shadowy piper kidnaps seven beautiful girls, can a wounded knight and his witch save them? Will Sir Magnus and Elfrida find them in time, and at what cost to themselves?
Magnus, the battered crusader knight, and his witch-wife, Elfrida, are happily married but in secret turmoil. Elfrida dreads that her difference in rank with Magnus will undermine his love for her. Wounded and scarred, Magnus fears he will not be able to give Elfrida children.
Their fears are sharpened when high-born Lady Astrid appears at their manor and demands their help to find seven missing girls. The lady clearly regards peasant-born Elfrida as beneath her notice, but why has such a woman sought out Magnus, a country knight? Who does she really want to recover so badly?
In a scorching summer, Magnus and Elfrida search for the missing girls. Can they recover them in time? And will their own marriage be the same?
Chapter One (Excerpt)
England, summer, 1132
“I am the troll king of this land and you owe me a forfeit.”
Elfrida glanced behind the shadowed figure who barred her way. He was alone, but then so was she.
Do I turn and run along the track? Should I flee into the woods or back to the river? He is close, less than the distance of the cast of a spear. Can I make it hard for him to catch me? Yes.
But catch her he would.
Play for time.
“Indeed?” she asked, using one of her husband’s favorite expressions, then sharpened her tone. “Why must I pay anything?”
“You have trespassed in these woods. In my woods.”
The nagging ache in her shoulders and hands vanished in a tingling rush of anticipation. Elfrida dropped her basket of washed, dried clothes onto the dusty pathway, the better to fight. “King Henry is lord of England.”
“I am king here.”
A point to him. “I kept to the path, and then the river.”
“That may be so, but I claim a kiss.”
He had not moved yet, nor shown his face. The summer evening made his shadow huge, bloody. Her heart beating harder as she anticipated their final, delicious encounter, Elfrida asked, “Are you so bold? My husband is a mighty warrior, the greatest in all Christendom.”
“That is a large claim.” He sounded amused. “All Christendom? He must be a splendid fellow. The harpers should sing of him.”
Elfrida raised her chin, determined to have her say. “I am proud of my lord. He is a crusader. He has seen Jerusalem and he has learning. He can whistle any tune. He defends all those weaker than himself.” Should I say what I next want to say? Tease him as he has teased me? Why not? Are we are not playing? “Go back to your woods, troll king.”
She heard the crack of a pine cone as he shifted. In a haze of motion the troll king was out of the tree shade and into the bright sunset, dominating the path in front of her. Taller than a spear, broad as a door, he had a face as stark as granite, of weathered, broken stone. Heavily scarred—many would say grooved—he had the terrible beauty of a victor, a winner wounded but unbowed.
A ribbon of heat, like hot breath, flickered across her breasts. He was so magnificent , so handsome. She both loved and hated defying him, even in jest. Striving for calm, she said, “You will come no closer.”
“Or what, little laundress?”
That tease irked her. “The clothes and bedding do not wash themselves. Not even for you, troll king.”
He smiled, a daunting unfurling of that scarred, sword-cut face. The churning heat in her belly swept up into her cheeks and down to her loins.
“I am a witch, besides,” she added, though not as coolly as she would have liked. She saw the gleam in his large brown eyes pool into molten bronze.
“You would put a spell on me, elfling?” he challenged.
“Perhaps I already have.” Her tone and mouth were as dry as the summer. How much farther can we stretch this sweet foolishness?
He raised thick black eyebrows, while a breeze flicked and flirted with his shoulder-length curls. “Is that Christian?”
She wanted to cross her arms before herself, to shield her body from his bold stare. At the same time she longed to strip herself naked for him, unlace his tunic and caress him. Unsure how he might react, she armed herself with words instead. “I am a good witch, Magnus.”
“Indeed.” Again he looked her up and down, glanced at her buckets, basket, and clothes. “Should you not have an escort, wife?”
Do I tell him I sent Piers off to help? Are we still playing now or is he truly angry?
Looming over her, he was close enough for her to touch him. To caress his strong body will be like stroking sun-warmed stone. Distracted, she shook her head. “There is the sheep shearing…”
“Done.” He tossed a stack of rolled, lanolin-scented fleeces at her feet. “I did my share and more and, as I have s
aid already, I claim a reward.”
He winked at her and she found herself smiling in return. “Forfeit and reward, too, sire? Is that not greedy?”
“Are we in Lent, that I should fast?” He raised his hand, cupping her face with supple fingers. “But you are too dainty to linger alone, witch or no.”
He traced the curve of her lips with his thumb and, as she trembled, he gathered her firmly into his arms. “Any man will try to spirit you away.”
“Hush!” She made a sign against the evil eye and wood elves, but he shook his head at her caution.
“I have faith in your magic craft, Elfrida. But a passing knave or outlaw? He is quite another matter. He would see you as a tempting piece, my wife, my lovely.”
“I am not helpless,” she protested, but her heart soared at his loving words. His mouth, as crooked and scarred as the rest of his face, stole a kiss from hers.
He smelled of lanolin, salt, and summer green-stuff, and tasted of apples and himself. Elfrida closed her eyes under his tender onslaught, her thighs trembling.
“Troll King?” she murmured, when they broke apart slightly. “Is that how you wish me to address you in the future, husband?”
“‘Sire’ will do, or ‘greatest knight in Christendom.’ Those will do very well.” He kissed her again.
“You rob me, sire,” she murmured, a breathless space later.
“Of kisses?” He sounded delighted at the idea, the beast, and grinned when she pinched him.
“Even one-handed I can do that better than you.”
He demonstrated, squeezing and lightly slapping her bottom, chuckling as she thrust her hips back against his fondling fingers. A shred of modesty remained as her wits dissolved into a sweet blaze of need. “Magnus, what if someone comes?”
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Lindsay Townsend Page 14