But who is here to defend? Elfrida thought. Longing to yell out for Christina, she wanted to hurry up the inner stone staircase, but Magnus had taught her the folly of it. He is right, too, for war is his craft.
She stared at his broad back. He was shifting softly, his feet almost soundless on the stone flags. “Hola! We shall not harm you! Come out, and you will go free!” he called out. He said more, or possibly the same, in several languages and dialects, finishing with what to her sounded suspiciously like threats—certainly his shadowed profile by then was grim. Turning back to her, he beckoned.
“Christina? Sister, are you here?”
What if this is a final feint by Joseph and she is not here? That will be terrible, for if Christina is not here I do not know where she is! Will she yet be saved? Please, by all the good spirits, let it be so!
They paused, listening.
“I can hear breathing, very slow and quiet, as if there is a sleeper within,” Magnus remarked, after a space. “Do you sense anything?”
She wondered at his sharp hearing and tried to concentrate. It was hard, knowing Christina might be so close and still not safe. She hated the idea of her gentle sister being held hostage—Christina would almost die of fear. Finally, to still the tumult within her, she closed her eyes.
Let me see. Let me know if there is a soul or spirit here.
She caught it then, a sense of wickedness, creating a bad taste in her throat. She could hear the sleeper now, but there was something else hidden in this tower, and it was not wholesome. Still with her eyes closed, she stepped ahead of Magnus, feeling his start of surprise as she brushed past him.
She heard another faint sound, high in the tower, like the hiss of a loosened ribbon. In her mind she saw trees with threads slung between them, and she understood.
“This is surely the middle of the web, of those ropes and ribbons we found,” she murmured. “He must have used them to warn of approaching danger or strangers, but my cutting a thread, yes, it should have disturbed the others, although I was careful in my cutting. So did he not notice anything amiss?”
“Perhaps he knew and did not care.”
Elfrida, her eyes still closed, shook her head. “No, I am certain he did not know. Maybe he did not have the time or inclination to check these threads. He was too sure of his system, or of his power.”
“Typical cleric, typical Denzil,” observed Magnus laconically, but she pressed a hand against his shoulder, and he fell silent at once.
“Evil has been here, certainly,” she said softly. “Its taint surrounds us. I am not sure if it is still here.”
She opened her eyes, scanning the tower. It was midnight-dark inside, with empty wall sconces and no torches. Was that arrogance and idleness again, or could Joseph Denzil see in the night? The stone staircase was narrow and off to one side, with a heavy oak ceiling above hers and Magnus’s heads. From the dim light of the doorway she noticed sprays of mistletoe hung from the wall sconces, their berries glistening like distant, clouded moons. There seemed to be nothing else she could see, at least on the ground floor, no fireplace, no stacked weapons, no barrels of food or wine.
But a sleeper is here, so food is needed.
She almost edged forward before the sour taste in her mouth reminded her to take great care.
“Will you throw a pebble or something on the floor?” she whispered to Magnus.
“Nothing easier.” Magnus flipped a pebble from his tunic and began calling again. “Come down! There is food and drink and safety for you! Leave the womenfolk alive and whole and come! I swear by all the saints that if you do that, you shall not be harmed! Be a man with honor! Let your prisoners alone and come!”
His voice echoed in the tower, then, after the rattle of the pebble on the floor, she heard the deadly rasp of metal on metal issuing from the flagstones. Magnus, shouting still but with raised brows, struck a spark and lit a rough ball of cloth ripped from his tunic.
By the flare of that brief light, Elfrida could just make out the metal snares and scythes, blade and nails and sharp wooden stakes, all heaped before the staircase. Had she followed her yearning and rushed on, she would have run full tilt into them.
“We need torches,” Magnus said, and he retreated to the door.
* * * *
Making torches, lighting them, took some little time. Magnus could sense Elfrida’s tension and almost see her fears tearing at her like the harpies preyed on their hapless victims in the old tales that he had heard around campfires in Outremer. She stayed within the tower, calling encouragement to Christina and praying aloud, “To cleanse this space,” she told him. She did not attempt to move farther than the few steps they had come from the threshold, for which he was grateful.
“Your sister must be sleeping deeply,” he said when she fell silent and despondent after no replies. “It is the time of winter dark and solid slumber.”
“Or she is drugged,” Elfrida answered.
Once he spotted her gazing at him, a cool, farsighted, assessing stare. Where he considered pits and traps, she concerned herself with magical dangers. He knew she felt responsible for his safety, a strange and queer reversal of nature to him, but one he accepted that he could not shake her from.
All will be better with more light, he told himself, fending off a vague feeling of being watched.
Baldwin finally brought two spitting torches. Magnus told the youth to keep up and took a torch from him. “Do you stay here?” he asked Elfrida.
She shook her head—he had not expected otherwise—and he put her between himself and Baldwin. Leading the way, Magnus began to pick a careful path across the nails and snares and wooden stakes, walking steadily and lifting his feet high. All the while, puffing like a small, furious dragon at his back, he could hear Elfrida and sense her taut, barely reined-in impatience. She fairly bristled with it. Not far and all will be well, he wanted to say to comfort her, but he said nothing, for they had reached the stairs, and it might not be true.
Gray, narrow, worn, and unlit, the stairs were also slimy on certain treads. Spilled oil or melted candle wax? he speculated, calling out softly in the old tongue and his own dialect, so Baldwin would know, “Grease, here, step over.” He did not lower his torch. Some things were best left as a mystery.
“Christina, you are safe, beloved. Walter is waiting for you, and all is prepared for your return.”
Elfrida was becoming more urgent and desperate in her wishes. He longed to shield her from this trial but knew it was impossible.
She is a warrior of magic, besides, and a warrior always faces things. She would never forgive me if I kept her out of this.
Yet it was so ponderous, step after step, climbing in the dark, with the stair walls and roof feeling to close in around them, pressing down and choking...
Unless that is just me. Since early youth he had loathed shut-in places, which was why in any siege he had always volunteered for any digging or mining. Now the disgusting, spineless fears of his boyhood shook down the backs of his legs.
If Christina is dead, will Elfrida blame me? No, she will not..
He trod on an object that cracked and slithered beneath his peg foot. He checked the cry bubbling in his throat and kicked the unknown thing away, down the stairs. He heard it flopping into the darkness and vowed to burn the whole tower with fire once they were done.
If Christina is dead or alive, will Elfrida return to her village? Will she want to stay there? Ask her, man, and find out!
He was wary of asking and at the same time eager to ask. As much as Elfrida wanted to see her sister, he wanted to know her mind.
It is my future. Have the stakes ever been so high?
He ran up three more steps and reached the first floor. The staircase continued higher, but now there was a tiny, cramped passageway, again unlit, and at its end, a door.
A blue door, he realized, hearing Elfrida’s gasp of recognition. He spun about and gripped her shoulder tightly, in a gesture of war
ning and support, then let her go.
He reached out and touched the door with his stump. Elfrida said nothing, did not try to stop him, but he glanced at her for confirmation.
She nodded, her own hands clenched in tight fists, her face unreadable.
“Baldwin.” He handed the lad his torch and set his shoulder to the door, drawing out his knife—better a knife than a sword in such close quarters.
Surprise was impossible, for if there was a guard, he must have heard their plodding trail, so Magnus called a final warning.
“Release your prisoners unharmed and you shall not be injured or killed. Yield now.”
He pushed on the stout wood, astonished to find the door unlocked, and entered.
* * * *
Magnus’s vast form blocked the threshold. She could not pass and could see nothing. “What is it?” Elfrida hissed, fear clawing in her throat like a mass of iron-tipped feathers.
“Baldwin, torch please,” Magnus said. The burning mass was passed above her head, and she waited another moment, watching his face, listening to his breathing, trying to see over his shoulder.
He turned and smiled at her. “Look for yourself.” He raised the torch and stood sideways.
Elfrida rushed into the chamber. There was no guard or guardian of any kind, no magical symbols, or pentagrams, or charms. The room was dominated by a deep bed, and in the bed, between covers of linen and fine wool, lay three young women, fast asleep.
Elfrida fell to her knees beside the blonde sleeping on the left-hand side of the bed and gazed until her eyes were blind with tears. She bit her hand to stop the sob escaping, and stared some more.
“Christina,” she tried to say but had no breath to speak.
A shadow fell across her head, and she leaned back against Magnus’s legs, feeling undone, yawning with relief. Magnus leaned down and kissed the top of her head. He had found a sconce for the torch and seemed quite at ease with events. “Your sister and the others look well,” he said. “She has a look of you, about the nose and chin.”
Elfrida nodded, dashing tears from her eyes. She could smell on Christina’s breath the heavy scent of the Eastern poppy, but no worse than that. It was over, Christina was safe, the other brides safe.
“Should we wake them?” Magnus asked.
She swallowed the knot of feeling. “They will stir in their own time.” We have done it. We have saved my sister and the others within a time of three, for it is not yet the third day of Denzil’s reckoning, the solstice day, and it is not yet the third hour of this afternoon, for the sun shines outside this tower. We have done it. So why am I not cheering?
She felt Magnus shift as he stretched for a flask of wine standing on a small table at the foot of the bed, beside a vase containing sprays of mistletoe—the mistletoe she had seen in her vision of this place.
“Do you think this will be drugged?” he went on, giving the flask a shake. She smelt a swirl of spices as he opened the tall container—spices and an elusive, bitter savor but no scent of poppy.
She inhaled, puzzled as to why she felt so numb, so distant.
“Give yourself time.” Magnus replaced the flask on the table and brushed her cheek with his fingertips. “A shock of wonder is still a shock.”
He picked up the wine again, and she caught the acrid savor again as he glanced about for cups. “We should drink to victory and a good Christmas to follow.”
“No!” Elfrida leaped to her feet and dashed the flask from his hand. It rolled across the floor, the liquid inside slashing in a dark, spreading stain.
“It is poison, wolfsbane poison,” she said, hoping Magnus would understand her.
She dragged a coverlet from the bed and flung it over the flask and stain, while Baldwin looked on, wide-eyed.
“Poison,” she repeated and made retching noises and clutched at her belly. Desperate to make Magnus understand, she went on, “I thought the wine smelled odd, almost acrid, and then I saw the flower head at the foot of the bed. She pointed to the dried and wrinkled faded-blue flower. “Do not touch it! Every part is deadly.”
“I have heard of wolfsbane,” Magnus said, after a moment. “I know it as monkshood, too, a clerical poison. Joseph Denzil must have meant it as a final piece of spite, should anyone reach his prizes.”
“Yes,” said Elfrida. She closed her eyes, feeling faintly sick.
It is over, she thought. Or is it?
Chapter 31
Elfrida swept another cobweb down from the rafters of her house and out of the open doorway. It was a day of bright sunshine, no wind and no falling snow. She was back in her village of Top Yarr, where she had spent the morning visiting the old and those she knew were sickly. Stopping a moment to catch her breath, she admitted that despite the sun and safety, she was no longer content.
Why am I not happy?
Her sister and Walter were reunited and together at Walter’s house, where Christina was being fussed over by her betrothed and his family. Christina could recall little of her capture or imprisonment beyond a few words, “It was very warm,” she said, her blue eyes constantly seeking out Walter as she spoke to Elfrida. “I was always thirsty.” And, “The ale was very sweet.”
She did not remember seeing Elfrida in her dreams, or any dreams at all. Her blue eyes filled with tears when Elfrida asked if she remembered anything of her captor, and Walter, ever-hovering, instantly intervened.
“No need to bully her, Elfrida!” he scolded, strutting around her hut like a dragon guarding its hoard and making the sign against the evil eye against her. “My betrothed is safe, and that is what matters, nothing more. Leave my Christina in peace. It does more harm than good to rake over old troubles.”
Walter—to his credit, Elfrida reminded herself sourly—was delighted to have her sister back, with scarcely any questions and no rancor at all against Magnus for knocking him out. His leg was healing well, and he was already planning their marriage for the new year. He had fashioned Christina some new combs for her long, blonde hair—hair that Christina had insisted Elfrida help her to wash the first night they had returned to the village.
She wants a new gown, too, and I should be busy cutting and sewing that, not obsessing over towers and whatever Magnus is doing now.
Magnus had ridden with them back to the village as soon as Christina had stirred, asking what hour it was and declaring that she was hungry. He had been very gentle with her sister, Elfrida thought, even when she had longed to box Christina’s ears for shrieking when she first saw him.
“I am used to it,” he said when Elfrida tried to apologize on behalf of her sobbing sibling, who later did smile very prettily at him when Magnus brought her some ale and bread. And when Christina had eaten the bread and asked if they could not go home, he said at once, “Of course,” and set about ordering matters so they could do so.
He had ridden with them to Top Yarr on that same evening, stayed with the village’s elders that night, steadily answering their questions, and on the next morning he had ridden out with the brides from the other villages.
“If any are spurned, should I bring them to you?” he had asked Elfrida, and she had nodded, relieved he was returning to her.
That day, the shortest day, the terrible time of sacrifice, had passed without incident. Walter had gone off with Christina, Elfrida had tended a farmer who had a badly grazed leg, the priest had come in the evening and blessed her house. She had gone to church and left a whole honeycomb for the saint in thanks.
Magnus found her in church. “Neither was rejected,” he told her, with a long kiss, “even the orphan lass. Her bridegroom had quarreled with his family since her abduction, told her they either accepted her or he was leaving for the town. So all is better now, and the girl looked happy.”
He coughed. “I need to go back to the Denzils’ land. There are the other lasses that need help.”
Elfrida nodded. “I know.” She would have thought the less of him had he forgotten the female slaves so
quickly.
“Will you come with me?”
How she had been glad of his request! But she had been forced to say no, for Christina said she would sleep in their house that night, and she knew her sister would not be able to sleep alone.
In the event, the night and the following day had been long and lonely. Christina had changed her mind and slept at Walter’s, and Elfrida had tossed and turned on her own bed.
Elfrida sighed and rubbed at her aching back. Leaning on her broom, she knew she was not easy in her mind for two reasons, or rather two men, Sir Magnus and Joseph Denzil.
She knew that what she really wanted from Magnus was impossible. Whoever heard of a knight marrying a witch? He loved her, and she would be his mistress—what was amiss with that?
All this talk of brides and Christina’s marriage preparations have unsettled me, she told herself and glanced down at her old, red work gown. She had never noticed before how dull it was, how small Top Yarr was.
Will Magnus visit me here or ask me to live with him? Again, she was not certain.
There was also Joseph Denzil. The man had disappeared from the region of the stone tower. He had been stunned and bound hand and foot, but by nightfall of the day that she and Magnus had found Christina and the others, Denzil had vanished. Magnus had been coldly angry, demanding explanations from his men, but so far, there had been none.
What mischief is he about? His time of three is past, for we rescued Christina and the others before the solstice. The shortest day has come and gone, and his would-be victims are all free, but unless he is stopped for good, he has not finished yet. I know it.
“We should burn his towers and be done,” Magnus had said, but Elfrida said nothing. Magnus’s way was a warrior’s, direct and straight, the single stroke. Yet Joseph Denzil had escaped his bonds and disappeared. His tracks had gone north to an escarpment of bare rock, and after that, even Magnus had lost his trail.
Townsend, Lindsay - The Snow Bride (BookStrand Publishing Romance) Page 27