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

LINDSAY TOWNSEND

Copyright © 2011

Chapter 1

England, winter, 1131

Magnus forced his aching legs to move and dismounted stiffly from his horse. The still, freezing cold made his teeth ache, and as he tethered his mount, he wondered yet again what he was doing here. It was less than a month to Christmas, and he could have been with Peter and Alice at Castle Pleasant, preparing for feasting and singing and watching his godchildren.

And then a deep, abiding ache, bedding down in the great hall alone. He would never force a woman to lie with him—he had seen too much of that in the crusades.

He limped forward through the pristine snow. Peter had his Alice now, a clever, black-haired wench who feared nothing and no one, including him. Had his friend and fellow crusader not known her first, he might have had a chance with
Alice
. She saw through the outer armor and shell of a man to what lay beneath.

But she loves her crusader knight, Peter of the Mount, and I have no chance or right there.

As the palfrey snorted and jangled its harness behind him, he knelt in a white heap of pitted frost and reached out with his good arm to brush snow off the small, cracked statue of a saint. This was an old, wayside shrine on a track to nowhere of note, and the wooden figure huddled in its stone niche was old, its paint peeling. This battered saint would understand him, one ugly brute to another.

“Holy one, grant me my prayer.”

He stopped, aware of the chill silence around him—the bare trees, the white landscape, the empty road. He had nothing to offer the saint, no flower or trinket to sweeten his request.

As his knees began to smart, then burn, then freeze on the unyielding, icy ground, Magnus tried to marshal his thoughts. What did he want?

A woman of my own. Someone to return to
.

Alice
cared and had urged him most ardently to stay with her and Peter, but pride had made him refuse them both with a smile. He did not begrudge the handsome couple their joy, not after their many trials. But the dark of winter and Christmas especially brought his own desolation home to him most keenly, sharper than an assassin’s blade. He was nine and twenty, a grizzled warrior, battle-scarred and wounded.

Feeling sorry for yourself, Magnus? Brace up, man! Be a Viking, as your granddad was. You have your wits and your balls, all working. The lasses in the stews make no complaint and do not charge so much. You have land, a strong house, good fellowship, and two hearty godchildren.

“Splendor in Christendom, let me have my own family! A lass who loves me!”

His voice rang out, startling a lone magpie into taking flight from a solitary elm in a blur of wings, but the drab and well-worn saint gave no sign of hearing. Peering into the calm, carved face, Magnus wondered if the saint was smiling, and then he spotted his own reflection, clear in a frozen mirror of ice by the shrine.

He scowled, knowing very well what he looked like, and spat to the left for luck. With his knees creaking, he staggered to his feet and remounted his eager horse. When he passed this way again he would leave gold, he vowed, but for now he wished only to slink away. He needed to find the village before nightfall and speak to the council of old men—it was always old men—who had sent word to his manor of Norton Mayfield, begging for help, any help, to track and to defeat a monster.

* * * *

“Are you a witch?”

Elfrida, sewing on the sleeves to her younger sister’s best dress as they sat together on the bench outside her hut, felt fear coil in her belly like hunger pangs. Keeping her eyes fixed on her needle, she answered steadily, between stitches, “I am my own master, ’tis all, without a husband. Have any in the village been troubling you?”

“Oh no, Elfrida, but I was thinking.”

Elfrida tugged another stitch tight, her needle flashing like a small sword in the bright evening light. “Does your Walter call me so?” she asked carefully.

She glanced up. Christina was blushing very prettily, her light-blue eyes brighter than cornflowers when set against her pale-blue veil, white skin, and primrose hair. Lost in admiration, and quite still for a moment, she heard Christina admit, “We do not talk much. Well, I do not. Walter calls me kitten and we kiss.”

Christina and her betrothed could be found kissing all over the village, so that was no surprise.

“Yet still.” Christina pressed a well-bitten fingernail to her rose-petal lips. “Our dam was a witch.”

“She was a wisewoman, Christina.”

“Our father was a wizard.”

“A healer and dowser,” Elfrida patiently corrected.

“And you are all of that, of those things, I mean.”

Elfrida fastened the final stitch and knelt beside her sister, crouching back on her heels in the snow. Christina was not usually so fretful.

“Walter loves you very much,” she said after a space, “and you have a good dowry.”

A good dowry it was, of cloth she had spun and ale she had brewed, cheeses she had made, and silver pennies she had earned by her healing and dowsing. Since her earliest childhood, Christina had longed to be married, with a hearth and children of her own, and Elfrida had striven to keep her safe and happy. She was the eldest, so it was her duty, and she had promised their parents, on their deathbeds, that she would do so.

“But will the priest marry us?” Christina was biting another fingernail.

“Today is the very eve of your wedding, little one.” Elfrida tugged gently on her sister’s dress. “This is your wedding gown.”

“He has preached against redheads.”

“You are no redhead, and Father John’s sermon was on modesty for women,” Elfrida replied. Her sister was not a redhead, but she was, and redheads were rumored to be witches. “He said that for a girl to be unveiled was to be as brazen as a redhead. He took my healing ointment, too.” She tugged gently a second time on Christina’s dress. “Walter will be here to see you after sunset. Would you have him see you in your gown?”

Her sister ignored her question and pouted. “He will be late. He is coming here only after a meeting with his old men, and you know how they go on!”

“Did he say what the council was about?”

Christina shrugged. “He may have done, but I was not listening then.” She colored prettily. “Will you comb my hair again?”

Elfrida silently rose, kicking the snow from her faded, red gown—one that had belonged to their mother—and eased the wooden combs from Christina’s pale, shimmering hair. As she gently teased and tugged and Christina’s breathing slowed, Elfrida thought of the council. Yester evening, when he swept into their hut and whirled Christina into his meaty arms, Walter’s shrewd gray eyes had glanced everywhere. He had asked twice if their door was well secured and poked the roof-thatch as if seeking rats’ nests. He had promised them one of his dogs this very evening, as a gift, he claimed, then blushed when Christina clapped her hands and kissed him.

Elfrida frowned, worrying a comb over a small knot in her sister’s tresses. Walter and the rest of the village men knew something, and none of her gossips in the bakehouse or the wash rocks by the stream knew anything. Christina, dreaming of wedding flowers for her hair and of babies to come, was not concerned, but Elfrida was not satisfied. Why had Walter promised the gift of a dog—to warn and guard them from what? She had spotted no boar or wolf tracks in the nearby woods. Was a man-wolf—an outlaw—abroad and making havoc? Were disgruntled men-at-arms from a wretched Norman lord foraging close to their village? But why did the village men, her village men, not explain?

Granted, I would not say much to Christina, who is easily wary and will not linger even in the widest paths of the forest, but I am wisewoman here! These village elders turn to me when they have lost things and for cures when their bodies pain them. They should tell me everything. When Walter comes tonight I will leave the lovebirds in peace and safety together and call on the headman myself.

* * * *

Magnus listened to the high, excited chatter of the council and watched the old men as they argued on their long bench in front of a poor, smoking fire. Their bread was moldy and their cheese worm-ridden, so under cover of the vast shadows in the great hut, he dropped both into the rushes for the rats to find. The ale was good, though. He took another drink, then asked idly, “Who brewed the ale?”

Silence greeted his question. In this council, only he and the headman understood each other as the village dialect was utterly incomprehensible to him. He waited as the old man translated his question to the group and waited again as the headman made a slow, careful reply.

“The drink was made by Elfrida, the herb-woman in the next village.”

The headman, a wrinkled fellow as gnarled and stubby as the old olive trees Magnus had seen while away on crusade, muttered something else. Magnus, sitting on a low stool that made his backside go numb and his long legs ache, leaned toward him.

“She is a witch, you say, as well as a healer?” Seizing a branch, he stirred the fire and studied his huddled companions by its brighter flames. “Is she a good witch, a pious one? Can she help us?”

His questions, once translated, brought a mass shaking of heads and twitchy strokings of ragged beards. One or two elders said more, leading to a furious, whispered debate. Magnus finished his ale and thought about cutting thorns and scrub for defense and digging ditches and repairing and strengthening walls and roofs—all work which must wait until daylight.

“So you have not told your womenfolk of this threat, not even your wisewoman,” he said, once the whispers had died down.

“She is not
our
wisewoman! She is good, yes, pious, but of the next village!”

“But a woman, all the same. And why do your two villages not work together? Why not bring all your young women into this hut and have them sleep by the fire, with your men sleeping in a circle round them?”

He saw a look of shame flicker across the headman’s wrinkled face and added more gently, “Would that not keep them safe?”

“For how long? This month, one of our maids went missing. Last month, this monster struck in another neighbor village, snatched a maiden, and returned into the forest. No one can track him, no one. He may return tonight or tomorrow or at the next full moon, or in the next three months. He should return to the other village or our neighbors and leave ours in peace!”

“And that is your hope.” Magnus nodded at the spate of words, marking that the old man was too agitated to translate for his companions. Three villages, three settlements, made this search harder, for the beast had many targets.

“We need your help,” the headman continued doggedly. “Our women are not fine ladies. They work. They spin at home, or weave at home, or brew, or cook, or gather harvest or plant or weed, or wash, or make butter or cheese—all at home.”

“But in the evenings, can they not come here?” Magnus prompted.

“The Forest Grendel strikes at any time, night or day. We cannot guard them all the time. We have told them nothing.”

“That is what you call the beast?” Magnus was struck by the aptness. In the old tale of Beowulf, Grendel was the creature who preyed upon the warriors, striking in the night and carrying them away from the golden hall, unopposed and unstoppable until the hero fought him.

“How else should we name the creature? He is in very truth the monster of this woodland, a Forest Grendel!”

Magnus nodded agreement. “When the girls were kidnapped from here and the other village, how was this hidden from your womenfolk?”