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

by Lindsay Townsend

  He said it and meant it but saw her stiffen and her eyes widen as if suddenly possessed. Before he could react, she turned and began hurrying back the way they had come, fitting her running feet exactly into the footprints left by the laundress. Magnus felt the hairs rise on his neck and back, and for an instant he did not know what to do.

  “Elfrida!” He was not even sure if her own name would reach her.

  She heard him and turned. “I need to go back,” she panted. “You are right—in this I am your captain. I have my own craft to match against this evil, and I can destroy his preparations.”

  Not caring what tracks he left in the snow, he lunged forward and gathered her close. She was limber in his arms and soft, but she was also breathless, her eyes overbright, while her heart was as steady as a nursing mother’s. “Elfrida?”

  She smiled and brushed a fleck of snow from his beard. “I will be quite safe. Are you and your men not returning tonight? And if I am not with you at the Denzil keep,” she continued, with the devastating logic of a lawyer from Bologna, “then Gregory Denzil cannot act against you. If he wants me for his kinsman, he cannot have me if I am not with you. You can say I am lost in the woods.”

  “Or run away from me.” Magnus grunted. “That would be more likely.”

  She shook her bright head. “Never. Not for all the spices of Outremer.” She leaned against him, drew in a long, deep breath. “But I must go back, Magnus. What if the Forest Grendel comes here early, with Christina?”

  “What would you do then?” he asked, dreading her answer.

  “My best.” She raised a hand to silence his protest. “I know magic, and you do not.”

  That was the crux, Magnus knew. For a selfish instant, he wished she was a woman only of the house, skilled in weaving, cooking, and gardening, sweetly submissive in bed, but she was that and more. She was a house woman and a woman of magic besides. At her core she was as much a warrior as he was, battling with spirits he did not understand and could not hope to best. If he loved her for what she was and as she was, which he did, then the choice here was hers, not his. If I do not show faith in her now, what chance for us? She wants to save her sister and will do anything. Will you then deny her? But I am the crusader!

  And she is the witch. My good witch.

  He kissed her softly and swept her high in his arms. “Come then.” He growled, feeling a treacherous tear run down his eye into his beard. “Let me take you back. No”—he frowned a warning—“you have your battle lines that none cross without you fighting them, and I have mine. I do not leave a woman alone in the wildwood, whatever her powers. We go back, you have the key and lock yourself in.” He longed to tell her to hide in the apple room but knew she would not.

  Her lips trembled then firmed. “You will not be long.” She spoke as if to cheer both of them. “You and your men, you will take care?”

  “We know how to creep and sneak upon a place, just as well as the Denzils.”

  He was glad to see her color up and with every step he felt a surge of hope. His redhead was safer here, in this odd wood, than in the rowdy court of the Denzils. That tall, thin creature would not return for three days—why should he? His brides were elsewhere, and they needed tending.

  He will want them perfect for a sacrifice.

  It was a gruesome thought, and he hid his face from Elfrida, glad she was nuzzling his shoulder as he walked steadily back up the hill.

  Chapter 20

  Returning in the late afternoon sunlight, Magnus knew at once that their ruse at the Denzil keep had been discovered. Slipping through the narrow postern gate, he sensed it from the very silence of the garden—a watchful quiet.

  He had given Elfrida the bits of food and a flask but still had one with him. He swilled a little round his mouth, spilled the rest over his cloak, and began to wail. “Gone! Gone!”

  He climbed the garden wall—an easy business with the snow piled deep against it—and swayed on its top, pretending to swig from his empty flask. “She’s gone! Run off!”

  Gregory Denzil grabbed his leather cloak before he pitched back headfirst over the wall. He and his foul-breathed second, whose name Magnus had never troubled to learn, hauled him into the grounds of the keep.

  “What, man?” Gregory Denzil was bawling in his ear, as men do when one of their company is blind drunk, “What is amiss?”

  “Gone!” Magnus dropped against the second and slobbered against him. “She is gone! My snowflake, run off while I was sleeping...”

  Gregory Denzil’s scrawny lips tweaked as he swallowed the story. “Your snowflake, eh?” He clapped Magnus hard on the shoulder. “No matter, old fellow! My men will get her back for you, and then we’ll see her melt for you, eh?”

  Not in your lifetime, Magnus thought, “accidentally” stamping his peg leg on Denzil’s foot. “Thank you, Gregory.” He drew himself up, as he had watched drunks do so when they try to prove they are not drunk. “Most gracious.”

  “You saved that horse for me in Outremer, so I repay the debt now by catching this loose filly. But tell me”—Gregory Denzil flinched as he extracted his foot—“why did you not tell the guards? How long has she been missing?”

  “Hours, hours, I think,” Magnus said at once, guessing their snow figures had long been rumbled and that he must make good an account. “She is gone!”

  He flung back his head and tilted the flask as if desperate to extract any final drops. “She must have...must have run away... because I am so ugly.”

  At the edge of his sight he glimpsed Gregory Denzil smirking and knew his lie held tight. That fellow had always gloried in the misfortunes of others. “Why tell anyone?” He turned away, hunching over like a begging cripple. “I am ashamed. She has gone!”

  “And we shall bring her back,” Gregory Denzil repeated, grinning openly now. “Ugly, eh? ’Tis true, Magnus, you are no beauty.”

  The guards about him laughed. Seizing their moment of idle malice, Magnus lurched away, toward the keep. Mark and his own men—these he needed to find, and quickly. I need to be out of here afore nightfall!

  “Where are you going, Magnus?” Gregory Denzil was sharp now, and the men who clustered around Magnus were all armed. He could take them but not without raising more alarms, and if his men were not ready they could be spitted like the roasting hogs in the hall.

  He swiveled round, smacking his stump into the belly of the closest guard. “Must ride out. Get horse.”

  “Later.” Denzil was smiling again, the bastard. “Take your ease in the hall for a while. I will send out riders to track the wench.” He jerked his head, and his guards jostled forward, “encouraging” Magnus to stir.

  “Who knows,” Denzil continued gleefully as he fell into step with Magnus’s carefully stumbling gait. “She may be glad to come back, or not. In which case the one that finds her is the one that keeps her. Fair enough, eh? I think so!”

  Denzil was still laughing as they entered the great hall.

  * * * *

  Elfrida, painfully cautious and slow, began her own working in the tower. This was not her space. It was his, the necromancer’s. She dared not act as she was desperate to act, lest the wizard sensed what she was about and harmed Christina in revenge.

  She wanted to burn the tower to the ground. She wanted to smash the evil clay figure with its heads and inscriptions, toss away the copper knife, place the hair and nail clippings in a bushel of salt, to keep her sister and the other maidens safe from further bewitchment. She could do none of that. She must move carefully, a little at a time, and such painstaking measures were hard, against her volatile nature and her circumstances.

  If only I knew for sure how Christina is! If I could but see her again, if only for an instant, and know she is well.

  It was a test of faith, she knew, but as she started on the third floor of the tower, she wondered over and over why God and all his saints were so unkind.

  She sought out the salt first. Magnus is like salt, strong,
incorruptible, and necessary, she thought, as she found a stash of small stoppered jars beneath a narrow window slit, a stash missed in her previous search because she had fixed her attention on the evil toys against the north wall. The window slit was on the southeast side of the tower, and beneath it was a small bench, with the jars arranged upon it.

  She brushed her fingers across the stoppers, feeling no jolt, no sense of any warning being sent. The contents were mostly innocent, she decided. She sat on the bench—her legs were rather unsteady—and opened each jar.

  “Cinnamon.” She laid a curl in the palm of her hand, thinking how its curls mirrored some of Magnus’s black hair. It was a costly spice, known to her only because her mother had once seen it and described it to her and Christina.

  The Forest Grendel would need to sell a maid like Christina to slavers in order to obtain these few strips.

  She shivered at the thought and moved on to the next jar.

  “Black and brown seeds.” She sniffed them. “Mustard.” She used it in her healing to fight toothache, the seeds crushed and mixed with water.

  The next jar contained a root—not the lethal mandrake, but ginger. She thought of that and mustard and spearmint and the older men she had helped with potions and tinctures of such herbs and spices to increase manly vigor.

  Does the Grendel intend to deflower Christina and the others before he sacrifices them? Or are such mixtures for the demon he will summon?

  Unable to sit still any longer, she snatched up another two jars and strode about the chamber, curses ripe on her tongue and filling her mouth, curses she could not utter in case they rebounded on those she loved.

  “I must find salt here and go out into the woods to dig wild garlic. I know where the plant flourishes and where the bulbs are likely to be.”

  It was a plan, and she tugged on the rag stopper of the next jar eagerly, but instead of the white salt there was yellow sulfur, an evil substance. She crossed the room swiftly and returned it to the bench. The smaller, rounder jar had the salt she wanted, fine, white sea salt that rustled as she poured a little into her hand.

  It sparkled at her, and she laughed, feeling renewed and refreshed. Pouring some into a rag stopper and mixing it with strips of wormwood leaves, she fashioned the rag into a bag that she tied on a thong and hung about her neck. Then she was ready for more.

  She scampered down the ladder and out of the tower, rushing for the trees with the leather cloak held over her head so the green man and mistletoe would not spot her. It was the work of minutes, of the length of the creed and a few shorter prayers, to locate the slim, pungent bulbs beneath the crisp, white snow. Wiping her hands on the snow, tossing away her digging stick, she carried the garlic back to the tower and locked the door behind her.

  “Get a lantern first,” she admonished herself, tempted afresh to rush, to hurry and speed. Magnus’s calm, mellow voice whispered, “Never fret” in her mind as she carried both a lantern and a brazier up to the top of the tower and struck her fire flints to light them both.

  * * * *

  The torches in the great hall were burning brightly, and Magnus was sick of the Denzils. Courtesy would not have stopped him murdering his host at the supper table tonight, but the serving slave wenches did. Several new girls hurried from the solar, hustled on with slaps and pinches. Three were small and fair haired, almost blonde. None looked like Elfrida, but he could not be sure if any were her sister Christina.

  Because of the women, he endured the barbed sympathy of Gregory Denzil. The thought of accidentally sinking a blade into one of these frightened, cowering girls turned him sick to his stomach.

  Elfrida would sense my shame and what then? How could she trust me, knowing that I had killed a woman? What if one the new blondes is her sister?

  Food was impossible, although Denzil kept piling more on his trencher and urging him. “Eat! Drink! My riders will find the girl! Make merry! Soon it will be Christmas!”

  On the benches and tables below the high table and dais, his men were drinking but were not so far into their cups as to miss a signal. He had managed a swift whisper to Mark that they should pretend to feast but make ready to leave. He wanted to be out of the keep by midnight, sooner if possible.

  He stabbed his eating knife into a portion of goose and waved it about, pretending always to be drunk. As Gregory Denzil leaned close and insolently gobbled a bite, he was tempted to drive the knife right through to the back of that grinning head but instead lolled sideways and hissed at Mark, “Get a lad down to the stables and our horses ready. Bits, bridles—saddles if he can do it without Denzil’s men noticing.”

  Mark nodded and slouched off down the hall, seizing one of the pale girls on the way and giving her a smacking kiss.

  “Good, good!” Gregory Denzil slapped the high table in lusty approval, clearly relishing a chance to embarrass Magnus. “The only way to treat a woman! Oh, and where is your woman, Magnus? Your little snowflake?”

  “She preferred the snow and King Frost, to him!” bawled one of Denzil’s men from the lower tables, no doubt aware that he was safely hidden from the dais by the sooty light of the torches.

  “Gone, she is.” Magnus felt the anger in him building, becoming white-hot, then ice. The hot-ice of battle, where all the world seemed slow. “She is gone, my sweet snowflake.” He raised his voice above the jeers. “My lovely Christina.”

  “Hark at him!” roared Gregory Denzil. “The wench has changed her name since this morning! Or is Christina another girl of yours, eh?”

  The brazen fool gave him his chance. “Elfrida is my girl!” he hollered, loud enough to make the dirty tapestries on the closest hall wall shake.

  Denzil, obviously delighted, elbowed Magnus in the ribs. “A two-wench man? But where is your first girl? Lost in the snow, poor thing!”

  As Denzil’s men took up the chorus, “Where is his girl, where is his girl?” carousing and knocking their wooden cups on the tables, Magnus elbowed his chief tormentor back, knocking the breath from Denzil’s mouth and tipping his ale onto him for good measure.

  He leaned close enough to smell the stink of Gregory Denzil and see the pits of his gawping eyes. “Do that again, and you will not see morning.”

  Denzil had no choice but to laugh—all friends and good fellows together—but he did not elbow Magnus again.

  Bully as he was, he tried to cover his rank fear. He tottered to his feet. “We need some games! Christmas games!”

  While he blustered and set pages and squires scampering, Magnus scanned the women. None had started or reacted to the names Elfrida or Christina, so he knew the sister was not here. So far, that was the only blessing of this endless feast—that and the obvious fact that Denzil’s mob was drinking more than his men.

  Another hour of this and I will get the men to slip out, one by one. Then we can be off. And later, once he had Elfrida safe and her sister recovered, he would return to this keep and demolish it, stone by stone.

  He bared his teeth, tensed his massive frame, and prepared to “enjoy” some more.

  * * * *

  Elfrida smeared garlic in a circle, then sprinkled salt and the herb wormwood on top, a triple barrier of protection for her. She had the lit lantern and the slowly smoldering brazier inside the circle, too, and her food and drink—she did not want those tainted.

  She sat down in the center of the room, within the circle she had made, far away from the ash pentagram. She chose not to look toward the shrouded clay figure with its three heads and crowns of mistletoe. She knew where it was, but she did not dare to touch it. The foul relic was at the core of the evil magic of this place, and she wanted none of its rot on her or near her.

  She had the salt jar with her and the other good herbs, too, gathered into her leather cloak. Inside the circle she also had the nail pairings and clippings, the strip of evil parchment and the devil herbs, vervain and parsley. Ready at last, she fanned the brazier into a brighter flame.

  She prayed
to the Virgin Mary and to the old Mother, remembering the ancient flint figure of the Mother that her own father had given her. It was buried under her threshold at home, a protector. Like Magnus, she thought, and again fell to wondering about him—a beguiling habit, she found. He was so strong, so brave, so stalwart and honorable. He would never lie. He had done nothing but protect and care for her, and she had turned on him, scolded him, tested him.

  I wish we had parted differently, in more harmony, she thought, although in truth she wished they had not parted at all. Yet they had parted friends, had they not?

  “Stop.” Her voice rang in the wooden tower, and she heard, almost as an echo, a low moan of wind outside. Was it snowing again? Was Magnus out in poor weather?

  She closed her eyes a moment and forced her mind away from Magnus. Magic needed a clear, calm heart, and hers was always racing these days. What had her mother told her? “There are maids who do magic and men who do magic, but few womenfolk. ’Tis a rarity, for a woman has a full heart and once children come, she has little time or clarity. I am rare, Elfrida, and you may be, too, but it will take work, believe me.”

  She had not understood her mother’s words until now.

  She had the dark mirror in the circle. She had washed it in snow and smeared it with garlic and salt and washed it a second time with the mead Magnus had left her. It was as pure as she could make it, and now she intended to use it.

  First she burned the nail clippings and hair, herbs, seeds and parchment in the brazier, saying a prayer for Christina and for the other girls. As the parchment writhed and burned, she thought she heard it hiss and spit, so she quickly made the sign of the cross above the brazier, and all was well again. Fire would purify, and the Forest Grendel would not be able to use these. Even if it did not defeat him, it should delay him.

  “And now I seek you,” she said aloud, making her words a vow. She knew it was a risk, using the Grendel’s own seeing glass, but she had to know more. And she was desperate to see Christina.