Townsend, Lindsay - The Snow Bride (BookStrand Publishing Romance) (11 page)

Elfrida looked for a moment as if she had been pelted with snowballs, chilly and shocked, and then she laughed. “Naughty warrior! You have spoiled my telling!”

“I think, too, as well as fight,” Magnus replied, delighted to be called a naughty anything.

She gave him a mischievous look. “What else do you know, Sir Scholar?”

He hastened to reply, liking the way she was free of shadows and fear for the moment. “We know the Forest Grendel planned his abductions and communicated with the widow for her to cover his trace. We know she spied for him. We know he has many towers.”

Elfrida nodded. “He spoke of a northern and a western tower.”

Deep in thought, Magnus cracked his knuckles together, recalling too late that one hand was a stump, but the stab of discomfort did not stop him. “We know this is a man, only a man. Rich indeed, for he pays in gold and has land and spices and towers. Splendor in Christendom! If those towers are stone, then he is noble because no other could afford them. No matter, I have dealt with the high and lordly.”

He broke off as Elfrida shook her head. “It is more,” she said quietly. “He asked the widow to seek out brides.”

“So? We know that already. He steals brides, and the widow made it easy for him. Women talk to women, and there she went, to and fro, harvesting and laboring from place to place, village to village, and women talk. A girl to be married talks most.”

Elfrida scowled, but she did not dispute it.

“What else did the widow confess?”

“No more for now.” Elfrida raised a hand as if in warning. “We have lingered too long. We must leave,” she murmured.

“Never fret! The widow will not dare to tell him we have been here. She fears me as much as the Forest Grendel.”

Elfrida closed her eyes. “Danger comes.” She stepped forward.

She felt the threat closing and moved farther in front of Magnus to shield him.
“Take me if you can!” she called within her mind, sensing the same dark, single purpose that she had on the night she had made herself a bride.

She reached out with her mind, imagining a thin shadow sliding across the snow, slithering faster and faster between the trees. A scent of spices filled her head.

“Go, by the power of the Mother in me!” Elfrida cried, making the sacred sign of Freya against the shadow.

“We are not finished,” warned a cool, dark voice in her head.

“We are today,” she answered, plucking a pine cone from a tree and hurling it and her thought deep into the forest.

She opened her eyes, and the presence fled, but worse was to follow. Even before she drew in breath to make a prayer and cast a protective spell, the beast was on them, black-pelted, fast, and agile, growling as it leapt.

Elfrida flailed out at the wolf in return, howling herself and stamping her feet, making fists of her hands so the snapping jaws would not take her fingers. She wrestled in a white-and-black blur of disturbed snow and lunging wolf, then heard a yip.

The wolf toppled sideways, skewered on Magnus’s sword. He pulled the blade from the body, kicked the shaggy corpse toward to his running, cheering men, and fixed on her.

She did not recoil at his blazing eyes and hideous, leering face— the face of a stone demon—but it was a near matter.

“You do not fight my fights, Lady.”

His voice was as iron-cold as a mace, but Elfrida did not care. Determined to have her say, she caught his belt to drag him closer. “That was no ordinary wolf. It was more than a wolf, and sent by him.” She did not want to admit to her fear, the need for her own charms about them, so she said what he would understand. “We should leave and get to my home before nightfall.”

He did not seem to soften or thaw, but somehow she knew his anger had changed to amusement. “So the Forest Grendel is worried. Good!”

He glanced down at her fist upon his belt, grunted something else in his own tongue, and wound both his arms about her back and middle.

Dare he?
Elfrida wondered, then he lowered his dark, ugly head and kissed her.
O
h yes, he dares.

Her first thought was that she had never been kissed by anyone with a mangled bottom lip before, and the long scar felt like a raised cord against her tender flesh. Her second thought, if she had any, was lost in an explosion of feeling. A glow enveloped her body, tingling to the very tips of her fingers and toes. The yowls and hoots of his men fell away into a far distance as his mouth seduced hers, his tongue teasing her lips and teeth, his beard a mild prickle and tickle over her chin, his lips soft yet challenging. He smelt of horses and war, and he tasted of apples and ginger.

Of spices, like the monster
. Unabashed, she wrapped her arms around his neck and met his challenge, kiss for kiss. She had been imagining what his mouth would feel like for days.

“Sweet,” Magnus murmured as she closed her eyes again, giving herself this delicious moment. It was like flying, like being dipped in a warm bath, like a homecoming.

He stroked her hair, murmuring more, the old speech and his own mingled together, and she felt as pleasured as a cat by a fire.

Slowly, Elfrida forced herself to lean back. “We should move,” she whispered. She was aware of a humming in her head, a growing tension. She was afraid of what he might answer now. If he spoke of enchantment, or asked why, or worse, thanked her, she would know it was over before anything had begun.

If he cannot feel how it is different, how this is new, then we are not the same
. Would he grow in feeling to be the same? Could she hope for that?

She was not even ashamed at having forgotten Christina for a moment while she and Magnus embraced.

He brushed a speck of snow from her cheek. “You are without peer.” He hugged her again, tightly, then set her down.

The ride back might have been hard and cold, but Elfrida remembered it quite differently. The grind and weariness of the chase had dropped from her, and she looked at the world with new eyes.

“The snow sparkles this evening.” Magnus sat behind her in the saddle, warm and strong like an ironsmith’s fire. He had insisted she wear his cloak, and to Elfrida his whole body felt like a smile.
“
I have seen kings’ jewels less bright.
”

The snow was quite beautiful, she agreed in her heart, but time was passing. Christina must not wait and hope in vain.

“We must plan when we reach Top Yarr,” she called back, wishing in contrary fashion that they could ride forever.

“I know,” said Magnus, “and we will. I know we must.”

Chapter 7

She returned to her house and found Walter sitting on the bench outside. He had a crutch propped against the bench, and his left leg was bound with a splint. He tried to stand as she and Magnus approached, the light in his face fading when he saw Christina was not with them.

“The blacksmith set it for me, since you were not here,” Walter told her, sagging back heavily onto the bench. “I fell into a wolf pit when I was out searching. I would still be there, had a woodman not heard me yelling and the dog howling. What is the news? Do you know anything? Is Christina safe?”

“I see her safe,” Elfrida said, wishing she had more to tell him. Walter had lost weight, and he was as gray-skinned as an old man. His brown hair was lank and filthy, his gray eyes shadowed and hopeless, and he looked as if he had slept in his torn and grubby clothes. Under the bench crouched the big, crossbred wolfhound he would have given Christina, looking as woebegone as its master. It whimpered as Elfrida snapped her fingers, and it did not wag its tail.

“We will find her, Walter, I swear.” Smiling with a certainty she did not feel, Elfrida knelt and looked at the splint, sniffing discreetly. The injury smelled clean, she noted with relief. “Are you in pain?”

“It aches, but that is nothing. Tell me what is happening, what you have found.” He clenched his large, raw-knuckled hands into fists in his lap. “Where are you searching next? I will go with you.”

On horseback with a cracked bone? I think not. The smith is a good bone setter, but even he cannot do miracles if Walter will not be still. Yet how can he be?

“If he does not hold us up he can come,” said Magnus quietly beside her, in the old speech. “That is what he said, is it not?”

Elfrida nodded and turned to Walter. “I will tell you everything.”

First she set a fire going in the hut and made Walter a tisane while Magnus brought him dried fish and berries to eat, then turned his attention to his own men. Leaving Magnus calling orders and Walter tossing most of the fish to the dog beneath the bench, Elfrida set off to her bees to tell them the news, muttering protective charms as she ploughed through the snow.

She was hurrying back from her hives when Magnus appeared in her kitchen garden. He had the priest, Father John, with him.

“Hola, Elfrida! The priest here understands me. He will translate for Walter, because Walter trusts him.”

“I see,” said Elfrida, although she did not. It was not that she disliked the holy father, but she and the small, bald priest tended to avoid each other—in a perverse form of mutual respect, she now acknowledged.

“Walter trusts me as his priest,” Father John explained in her village dialect, as if he sensed her disquiet.

Magnus broke the awkward moment by slapping his good hand against her roof eaves, dislodging a flurry of snow onto his legs.
“
It saves the timbers cracking,
”
he said, straight-faced, kicking his way free.
“
Roofs can collapse with all this snow. Shall we go in? My cook is asking if he can use your fire, and some of your villagers are lurking ever closer, hopeful of a meal.
”

Elfrida made herself smile. At least this way she could cast a protective spell on everyone once they were inside her home.
“
Indeed. Why not?
”

They walked round the hut to the doorway, where Magnus called more orders. As Walter was being helped indoors, the cook hauled his cauldron off a wagon, and Magnus’s men brought firewood and water.

“I need to collect a pail from the garden.” Elfrida made the excuse and smoothly detached herself from Magnus and Father John and the milling folk around her threshold. She sped off smartly with a pocketful of salt, trailing it round the outside of the hut in a circle. Busy with her charms, she was glad when Magnus fell into step with her.

Will he kiss me again?
The thought flared through her head like a shooting star, then was gone.

“Do I intrude?” he asked.

“I have just finished. We should talk.” She felt safer in her own lands, her own space, and safe to admit more. “I have other things to tell you.”

“Things that you do not want to say to Walter or Father John?”

Magnus was shrewd, and Elfrida could not fault him. She touched his right arm—she could do so now without feeling strange about his missing hand. “Do you mean it about Walter joining us? He is much determined to keep searching.”

Magnus dipped and snatched a handful of snow, crushing it between his fingers. He did so to avoid looking at her, Elfrida realized.

“I am still thinking on that.”

“But you said he could—”

“That was before I watched him totter indoors.”