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

by Lindsay Townsend

“Please,” she stretched out a hand. “Do not be this way.”

  “Affronted and injured, you mean? You have harmed me, madam.”

  She moaned and ran to him. “I made a mistake. I was wrong. I am sorry.” She seized his hand in both of hers. “Please do not go.”

  She reached for him, almost blindly. He let her in, and they clung to each other. For now, that was all that mattered.

  Elfrida was ashamed, and shame made her sticky and hot. She imagined Magnus asking her if she would kill Hedda just to be rid of her and broke out in a prickling sweat afresh.

  I love him. He is my noble lord, and still I pressed him.

  She dreaded his speaking to her, for fear he would say his farewells and leave. So she made a great bustle instead, checking each barrel of apples as if there would be treasure stowed inside.

  She could not say for sure why the question had broken from her. Perhaps it was a curse of womankind. She had seen Christina act the same way with Walter, push and push and set traps and small tests, but never as large a question as hers.

  “I am a fool,” she said aloud in her own tongue.

  Magnus glanced at her, his cool stare warming a little as he scanned her face. Had they a month more together, a week together, even a day, she knew she could show him her love and make a full apology. But soon they must leave.

  “The sun is sinking,” he remarked, an unwelcome reminder. “Never yet has Gregory Denzil returned from a hunt before sunset, but there is always a first time. And those lads watching our snow figures must be wondering why we never stir.”

  Elfrida allowed the thin linen robe she had found in the final apple barrel to slide through her fingers, back into its hiding place. She knew, even without greater light, that the robe would be white and long, possibly marked with symbols of the heavens, the moon, or certain stars. Saying nothing to Magnus about it, she nodded toward the ladder. “Do you go first?”

  He did, and she heard the shriek as Hedda encountered him anew. What must it be like, to have people react in that manner toward you? She stumbled quickly down the ladder and put herself between a perfectly rock-still Magnus and the gasping laundress.

  “Do you understand her?” she asked him.

  “She says I am a devil and as ugly as a toad.” Magnus shook his head. “I have been called worse.”

  “Will you translate for me?”

  “You trust me to do that?” The instant he spoke, Magnus smacked his fist against the stump of his right hand and then nodded, tight lipped.

  Elfrida accepted his silent apology and took a step closer to the woman. “Hedda, look at me. Hedda, you are safe with me, so look.” She clicked her fingers to attract Hedda’s attention and waved her hands to and fro, swaying as if to music. She smiled and swayed and spoke, very quietly. Magnus’s translation of her words followed like a deep, soothing echo.

  “There is a woman in my village of Top Yarr who is like you, a washer of linens and woolens. She has scarlet hands.”

  Elfrida leaned forward and touched Hedda’s palm, no more than a light, comforting brush. “I give her salves for her fingers and soaps for her clothes.” She smiled into the startled, pale-blue eyes. “You are safe with me. Your work is done for today, so soon you will sleep.”

  Hedda began to sway as she did. Beside her, Magnus yawned and said sleep twice. Elfrida stroked her own hair and then Hedda’s, sitting down on the gray bundle Magnus had carried. She edged along so that Hedda could sit with her, and the woman did, with a small sigh.

  “Peaceful. At peace because your work is done. Rest your head on my shoulder.” Elfrida patted her shoulder, and Hedda nestled her head into the crook of her arm, her breathing very slow and steady.

  She was ready. Elfrida glanced at Magnus, who nodded once, sharply, understanding that this next part was vital.

  “Hedda, you are at peace because you have taken the clean washing to the blue tower in the mistletoe wood. You have finished your work and will now go back to the castle of Gregory Denzil.”

  Magnus repeated all this in a low, mellow monotone, his eyebrows raised. His eyes narrowed as Hedda said very quietly, “Yes.”

  Elfrida forced herself not to rush, to try to be calm. Hedda was in a place between waking and sleeping, an almost-dream state. She could suggest things to the woman but not compel her.

  “All was safe and usual at the blue tower. Nothing there was strange.”

  “No stranger than it ever is,” Hedda agreed, with half-closed eyes and a lisping voice.

  “What is the name of the man who comes to this tower?”

  “I do not know. I never see him.”

  “There is never anyone at the blue tower?”

  “No. It is always quiet.”

  Magnus’s eyebrows were raised anew at this information, which he whispered to Elfrida in the old speech, adding, “What have you done to her?”

  “I have used a charm I sometimes make when a woman is in childbirth, and frightened and weary. This calms her so she and the babe keep safe, and the child is born more easily.”

  “Humph!”

  Elfrida dared not break eye contact with Hedda now. “You saw no one today at the blue tower,” she suggested, making it a statement, a fact, and not a question.

  “I saw no one.”

  “You are leaving now. In a moment you will pick up the bundle of clothes that has been left here, ready to be washed, and return by the path you came. You have forgotten the key to the tower, because it will be returned to you.”

  “Key. Returned.”

  “You will talk to no one at the castle until this evening, and then you will speak of the snow. It was very deep, so the walk took you longer.”

  “The snow, yes.”

  Elfrida touched the woman’s hands. “From this day, your fingers will give you less pain, I swear this before God and all his saints. Go now, in peace, and be safe.”

  Very gently, she touched Hedda’s worn face. Hedda blinked as if coming awake and calmly gathered together her things. Taking no notice of Magnus and looking through Elfrida as if through a mist, she picked up a heap of clothes and patted them slowly into her pack.

  Magnus, meanwhile, opened the door to the castle and spirited away the key into his tunic.

  Looking round, as must be her general habit, and seeing nothing alarming, Hedda sighed and slung the pack over her shoulder. She walked to the door, opened it, and went out into the snow, leaving the door ajar.

  Elfrida watched her go and smiled.

  * * * *

  Magnus watched the woman leave, glimpsed Elfrida’s small, self-satisfied smirk and was confounded. A thousand questions crowded, mob-like, into his mind, and none of them were good.

  She knew she could do this and yet said nothing. Was her question to me about Hedda only a test? Yet why did she not say what she was going to do? It would have saved us both grief. Am I a fool to think she would not use such magic against me, that she has not bewitched me? By all her actions and words I know her as a good witch, but even so, would she ever bewitch me?

  Has she done so already?

  It was not to be endured. “Splendor in Christendom!” he burst out as he gaped at her, seeing this part of her truly for the first time. “Why did you not say what you intended?”

  “Why did you not tell me you would charge the door? Or take the key?” she snapped back. “And since one of us must think of practical matters, let me pray now that more snow falls on our tracks, or the Grendel will know we were here.”

  “You do not have a witchcraft for that?” he demanded bitterly. “You seem to have for everything else.”

  She paled at his scorn and leaped up, stalking to the door.

  He launched himself after her, catching her wrist as she stretched for the door. Quick as a rushing waterfall, she kicked the door shut and stood on his foot, the better to stare into his face.

  “I do not walk out on quarrels,” she spat.

  She had not been leaving. Even as that relief
scorched through him, Magnus longed to shake her, and then he was kissing her, embracing her until she relaxed, as boneless as Hedda had been.

  I do not care if I am bewitched, he thought as his witch moaned and quivered against him. I can do the same to her.

  “We should stop,” she said at last, leaning back in his arms to give his beard a light tug. “We should be moving, too, not charging each other like wild boars.”

  She was delicate for a wild boar, he thought, amused by the image and finding himself quite disarmed. “Peace again?” he asked. “Friends?”

  He felt her shudder slightly, as if struck by a sudden chill. “I hope we are always that.”

  “We are. I would not let you go, else.”

  He anticipated a cuff round the ear for that, or a frown, instead she hugged him tightly, shivering suddenly as if in fever. “I am glad, so glad.”

  “Hey.” He wished he had her healing ways, to calm her as she had done the laundress. “Let us see the lie of the land, eh? Together, yes?”

  When she nodded, he swung toward the half-open door with her still balanced on his foot. A light fall of snow had shrouded their earlier tracks, and he whistled at the luck of it.

  “If we step in Hedda’s footfalls,” Elfrida suggested.

  “I know that, elf.”

  She gasped, though not because of his mild insult. “Magnus, the green man of the wood, the mistletoe hereabouts, we must beware of both.” She fixed him with her amber eyes. “Please, this is important.”

  He almost ignored her warning but recalled his earlier charge to the tower. They had bit at each other enough for one day, and he did not want her pale and stricken again. “I will take heed,” he promised gruffly. “On one condition.”

  She tilted her eyes at him.

  “That when we are away from this tower, you tell me everything and exactly why you are afraid.”

  Chapter 19

  Outside, the day was eye-achingly bright, with no breath of wind. The snow had stopped falling and drifting and lay as white and pristine as sun-bleached linen. Even the woods of oak and mistletoe seemed benign, empty of spirits, or else those spirits slept.

  Elfrida followed the tracks of Hedda, matching her footsteps and stepping into them. Striding steadily behind her, she heard Magnus do the same. He whistled, and when Elfrida came to a slope where the laundress had clearly put down her pack and slid on her backside down the hill, she found herself gathered against him.

  “Hey!”

  “It is as good a way to go down as any.” Magnus dropped into the snow, with her riding on his thighs. They tobogganed down the hillside, Magnus roaring with delight, while she stifled laughter. They pitched into more snow as Hedda had done at the bottom of their giddy slide.

  “You turnip!” Elfrida could suppress her giggles no longer. She scooped a handful of snow and smeared her laughing companion with it.

  “No harm.” Magnus snared her against him, tickling her through the rough, baggy tunic until she begged him to stop. “We have done no more than warriors,” he panted, blowing a rough “kiss” on the back of her neck. “I have seen soldiers play and laugh, before battle and in it.”

  Abruptly, as if reminded, he sobered down and glanced about the small clearing where they had landed. “There is Hedda’s track. We can join it easily.” He held out his hand to raise her up.

  She gripped his warm, strong fingers, wishing Christina knew him. She will, she thought, making her wish a promise. She half turned, still clasping Magnus’s hand. The tower and its blue door were hidden behind the hill. The mistletoe wood was lost behind a screen of snow-shrouded beeches, limes, and hollies. Here she could speak frankly, she decided.

  “I know dark magic through the work of my parents,” she began, wanting Magnus to trust her, despite her knowledge of the blackest arts. “They both trained me. From my father, I learned that to combat the old pagan ways you must first recognize them. My mother taught me curses to help me fight against them. Dark magic is so often secret, occult, unknown to any but the practicing wizard or witch. To defend against it, you must see it, know it, understand it.”

  Magnus squeezed her fingers. “You speak like someone would who makes war,” he said. To her relief, he seemed interested, almost admiring. “Combat, defend, attack.”

  “Perhaps I do.” She took a deep breath. “He is planning a great working in dark magic. I am sure of it.”

  “Our Forest Grendel? Hell take it, but I wish I could remember the man! I can put no face to any tall, thin Denzil from Outremer.”

  “Him,” Elfrida agreed, feeling her next words lodge tightly in her throat, half throttling her. Compelled to yet reluctant to speak, to admit the hovering panic, she checked the position of the sun. It was still high, but they must not linger. As Magnus said, even the youthful guards at the castle would grow suspicious if they were away too long.

  And at twilight and sunset, wolves may come. I do not know if the Grendel controls the wolves of this forest, and I do not want to find out.

  “He means to sacrifice my sister.”

  Elfrida tried to stop the rest, but now the harsh, swirling panic was with her and in her, rolling in her belly, forcing more words from her throat. “He is going to kill her. He will drug her and take that copper knife and kill her, slit her throat as a butcher does a pig’s.”

  Her eyes blackened, and then Magnus was holding her, supporting her, crooning as he stroked her hair. She fought him, and he took her stinging blows and kicks as if they were flea bites, holding her, reassuring her.

  “We will stop him.” She began to understand again what he was saying. “We shall stop him dead, Elfrida. He will not win. He will not win.”

  His very sureness soothed her, and her racing heart began to slow.

  “Why three days?” Magnus was asking now, forcing her to think.

  “You told me the meaning of the Arabic numbers, twenty and one. That is the date in three days’ time.” She remembered the spell she made in her own house, and suddenly understood there was still much to be hopeful for. “But we shall save her before the end of those three days, Magnus! We shall rescue her within a time of three, exactly as my magic foretold!”

  “Yes, but why can it not mean twenty-one years or twenty-one weeks? And we are lovers in each other’s arms, so why are talking about numbers and dates?”

  “For the sake of Christina and the others,” Elfrida explained, and poked him with a finger. “This is important, Magnus. It is winter and the dark time of the year, when the things of darkness hold sway.”

  As she spoke she recognized something else, something evil, that “a time of three” would mean a sinister outcome if they did not find Christina. “In three days, on the twenty-first, it will be the shortest day of the year, the midwinter solstice, when the sun and all things of light are weakest.”

  “So a dark sacrifice then will have more force.”

  “Yes.”

  “It cannot be another offering, less fatal? Perhaps a sacrifice of the nail parings and hair that we saw?”

  “Those only made the final end more sure.” Elfrida closed her eyes, fought the horror again, then looked at Magnus. His honest, ugly-handsome face, his scars, gave her reason to go on. His quiet courage gave her hope.

  “The parchment we found had the names of devils written upon it. The Greek inscription you understood was to the ‘dark beautiful one,’ surely another title of Lucifer. The clay image had three heads, and the devil has three heads. There were burnt ashes on the floor, ashes which made the sign of a pentagram.”

  “You cannot know that,” Magnus said quietly.

  “What else could it be? A circle of salt to protect the wizard, a pentagram in ash to call a demon. This man whom you cannot remember, Magnus, this Denzil who has an astrolabe, who understands the signs and symbols of the heavens, he is a necromancer! He is summoning devils, and to do that he must offer payment—hair and nails in one rite and blood in other rites, his own blood first, to
show his intent.”

  “And then?” Magnus demanded harshly. His arms tightened about her so much that she lost a breath, but again she was glad of his strength.

  “In the final rite he will use the blood of innocents, the blood of brides, the blood of virgins.”

  Magnus’s eyes glittered. “There we have him! Is he not missing a bride? One dark, one fair, one brown, but where is his redhead?” He kissed her smartly and let her down, stalking toward Hedda’s tracks. “That is the reason Gregory Denzil is so keen to have you, Elfrida. He wants to trade you with his kinsman!”

  “But I am no maiden now,” Elfrida stammered, hastening after him.

  “Gregory Denzil does not care, and I doubt if our Forest Grendel has told him his full intent!” Magnus tossed over his shoulder. “We must get back, get my men, ride out tonight and return to the blue-door tower.” He stopped and whipped round, glowering. “That is where the Forest Grendel will come? You are sure?”

  Elfrida caught up with him. “As certain as I can be. He needs a secret place for the work, and the tower is that. His sacred robe is there,” she added, thinking of the long, white gown she had discovered in the second chamber.

  “His other trash, too,” Magnus reminded her, “the spices, the names, the chalice, and copper knife. Why copper? That keeps no edge.”

  A chill crackled over Elfrida’s skin as she, a white witch, was forced to admit what she knew of darker arts. “No necromancer or evil wizard would dare use an iron blade in such rites. Iron is for Christ.”

  “True enough.” Magnus patted his dagger, his whole body tense with anticipation. Suddenly afraid of that lusty battle prowess, Elfrida tugged on his cloak before he could whirl away from her again.

  “Sir Magnus!” What if he did not heed her warning this time, either? “Please! We must not storm this tower.”

  To her relief, the bright battle gleam in his face faded as he looked at her. “I understand.” He sighed and scowled. “Never fret, my lass, I know I was wrong the first time we came to the tower. I will not batter my way in this second time, not with hostages at risk.” He gripped her chin gently. “You can be our captain.”