Townsend, Lindsay - The Snow Bride (BookStrand Publishing Romance) (14 page)

He was talking to calm her, she realized, as the ground slid beneath his horse’s busy hooves like a dark stream of water.

“I—” She did not know the old speech for “applewood.” She looked ahead, relieved that the only shadows were those of beech and lime trees, stretching across the steep, winding track. She tapped Magnus’s peg leg with her foot and felt him grin in understanding.

“That wood,” he answered, pointing to an oak tree.

They swept beneath another oak, this one hung with icicles and the frosted beads of mistletoe berries. Staring up as the milky orbs flashed by, Elfrida thought of a tower surrounded by woods with mistletoe, the domain of the Forest Grendel.

She reached out, allowing her cold fingers to brush against the few remaining leaves of a hawthorn, a good forest tree, and whispered to its spirit to keep them safe as the horse plunged past.

Is the Grendel in truth a Denzil? Are we on the right path? What if we are wrong?

“We shall know, soon enough,” she murmured, ducking as the horse cantered beneath a crab apple with low, overhanging branches. Behind her she heard Magnus laugh, and a moment later a wizened apple dropped into her lap.

“For your breakfast,” he said.

“We are not all lovers of apples as you are,” she began in her own dialect. Then she spotted a twisted, gnarled face leering from the shaggy foliage of a yew. She threw the apple straight at the face.

“Hey!” Magnus exclaimed, grabbing for her, but when she followed her throw with a sign against evil, he twisted about and saw the face in the yew for himself.

“Ya!” he yelled, and he spurred his horse. The stallion exploded into a gallop, driving straight for the yew, and Magnus stood up in his stirrups, the reins caught in his teeth, and hurled a knife.

The green face in the yew vanished as the iron knife hit the tree and stuck, quivering, in the snow-spattered bark. Magnus now dragged on the reins with his hand, urging the horse into a plunging stop.

Mark yelled something, and the whole column halted in the snow.

“Let me.” Elfrida leaned to the yew and removed the blade, scraping a sign for peace into the bark before she returned it hilt first to Magnus.

“What was that?” Magnus murmured against her hair.

“A green man,” Elfrida replied in her own tongue. “A wood elf,” she said in the old speech. “We are being watched.”

Mark glanced at her, a swift look of admiration, she was sure. Then he shouted, jerking his head up.

A few heavy flakes of snow blurred Elfrida’s sight and, as she blinked, she saw the small track ahead of them misted by falling bands of white, dense as smoke.

The revenge of the green man, or was it the Forest Grendel?

* * * *

They plodded another mile, and then Magnus admitted they should stop. Even on the old west road, which they had stumbled onto at
midnight
, going was onerous. The horses were weary, heads down, stumbling, their hooves covered in snow. When the snow turned to a biting sleet, everyone had endured enough.

Before him Elfrida was silent, uncomplaining, though God knew she must be chilled and weary. It was she who noticed the forester’s hut, set back from the road behind a holly tree. He felt her tap his arm to alert him and he called orders to the others, his voice cracking in the cold.

The forester, whoever he had been, had abandoned the hut, but it was just big enough for them all. Magnus knocked out a panel of wattle to enlarge the door, and they brought the horses in.

While he made a fire just inside the doorway, Elfrida slipped off into the darkness. When she returned, the men had bedded down and were chewing whatever rations they had with them. Magnus patted a lump in the floor beside him, close to the fire, and she lay down without a sound.

“She does not complain,” Mark said, his sandy eyebrows raised in obvious surprise.

“No, Elfrida does not.” Magnus heard the grudging respect in his second’s voice.

He rose and put what remained of the door back across the threshold as a barrier and windbreak. Checking it was secure, he knocked the snow off his cloak and stretched out again beside Elfrida. As soon as he closed his eyes, he slept and dreamed.

It was summer, and he was in a pleasure garden. Protected by a stout stone wall, it was bordered by fruit trees and ripening vines and filled with small, sparkling fountains, the like of which he had not seen since his return from Outremer. One fountain played over a turf seat studded with marigolds and daises. Magnus ran his fingers through the damp flowers, and he heard a woman sigh with contentment, a welcome sound.

Elfrida always knew when she was dreaming, and this time was no different. It was midsummer, and she strolled in an orchard filled with fragrant apple blossoms. She carried a twig of mistletoe, its waxy berries still in impossibly fresh bloom. Above her head, finches darted and sang, and bees buzzed in lazy contentment, dusky with pollen. There was a haystack beneath an oak tree and a green man smiling at her through the heavy white-green pomanders of a guelder rose.

“You have a gentle, courteous touch, Sir Magnus.”

Elfrida sighed again and stretched out on the turf seat. Where she lay down, roses sprouted and burst into flower, their petals as soft and flawless as her skin. She smiled, and in the wonder of the moment, Magnus hardly cared if she was clothed or not. From a bower of white and pink rose petals she held out her hands to him and smiled a second time, trusting and warm, her bright eyes filled with admiration. “Come.”

The green man sprang down from the branches of the guelder rose and became Magnus. He bowed to her, a warm breeze ruffling his black hair curls. “My Lady.”

“Am I as much a lady as
Alice
?” she almost asked but was struck into breathless silence by the sight of Magnus’s robe. In place of his ripped and muddy tunic and leggings, he wore a flowing, long mantle, the robe of an angel, which molded to his figure closer than his shadow and shimmered like sun-kissed water. Her throat went dry.

“You are beautiful,” she said when she could speak. He was long legged, deep chested, slim flanked. The mantle showed so much yet not enough—

He swung her up easily into his arms and down into the tickling, soft hay, shrugging off the robe in a rustle of falling cloth. A golden haze of light embraced his naked body as he embraced her.

He rolled her into his arms on top of him and the softness of the gown she wore fell around him like snowflakes. To tempt her to divest, he brushed the sleeve of her gown with his hand and trailed kisses down her throat.

Her green dress vanished. It simply faded away like mist, perhaps as a trick of her magic. Stunned and delighted in equal measure, he gazed and looked. The pleasure of looking, of seeing, was absolute.

She was as pretty as an elf queen, wiry and fragile together, with lean lines and graceful, flawless curves, all haloed by her nimbus of bright, red hair. Awed, he felt his arms slide away. How could he touch such beauty?

“Ah, no, Sir Magnus.” Gently, she drew his hands back, placing them on either side of her dainty waist. “Stay with me.”

Delighted afresh, he stroked her slender, firm body, need and desire a roaring, building volcano within him. Her skin was whiter than the daisies, smoother than a pearl, and warm.

“More,” she hissed against his chest as he cradled her onto the springy grass and mounds of rose petals and fluttered his fingers across her glowing nether curls. “Touch me more, Sir Magnus.”

Her breasts were pink nippled, curving delectably into his cupped palm. She moaned and coiled her legs around his flanks, lifting herself up to him, jolting against him in a giddy yet urgent swinging motion.

She ran her hands over his chest with its mass of curls, feeling the jut of each rib, the rough scars on his thighs and belly. He tasted of musk and salt as she kissed his roving fingers and coaxed his busy mouth to her lips. They kissed, deeply, and she licked her tongue across the ridge of scar on his lower jaw and lip, desperate to keep him there, looming above her, while her fingers explored the harsh, strong riches of his body.

He ravished her mouth for kisses, his fingers plunging between her thighs. She moaned against him and opened her legs more widely.

What? What was that?

She wrapped her fingers about his proud, erect manhood, wanting him all, and all of him inside her.

What was that?

They started awake as one. Elfrida was faintly ashamed to discover that sometime in the night Magnus had rolled over and that she had rolled with him to cuddle against him. She sensed his wakefulness and was more embarrassed. What would he think of her, trailing after him in that way?

Magnus was pleased—no other lass ever cuddled him in the night, including those he had lain with in the stews. Ignoring the urgent ache in his loins and aroused state, he lifted her hand from his waist to his lips and nibbled her fingers.

“Magnus—” Whatever answer, protest, or encouragement Elfrida might have said died in her throat. She realized that she was listening, tense and listening.
“
Something woke us,
”
she hissed against his broad back.

“
I know.
”
Magnus shifted, and she could feel him checking his dagger.
“
I set no watch tonight,
”
he muttered, as if talking to himself.
“
I thought there was no need.
”

Elfrida reached out in the darkness with her mind, straining to hear more. She had set protection for them all, but was it enough? Had the Forest Grendel found them?

When she heard the thud and crump of sharply falling snow, she was relieved.
“
Men!
”
she whispered. Possible brigands, possibly armed, but only men.
“
Men outside!
”

“
I hear them.
”
Magnus was shaking those nearest to him, gesturing for quiet. Off in the darkness, Elfrida could sense others being prodded awake. She sighed, her dream still clinging to her, sweet and full of promise.

Is the dream a sign of things to come or of how I should act?

Magnus breathed in to the base of his lungs, glad to smell no fresh fires. Whoever was out there might be seeking shelter or be about sin, but they were not coming with blazing brands to torch the place. Their own fire was embers only, which in case of an attack was a good thing, one less danger.

Pressing his ear to the hut wall, he heard the faint rattle of swords in scabbards, the snorting of horses, the punctuated gasps of men trying to creep over snow and branches and be quiet about it.

Thieves for certain, he decided grimly, twisting back to Elfrida. “Keep safe and out of sight,” he warned, touching the pale disc of her face with his good hand. Feeling her soft skin against his callused palm, he wished he could have dreamed for just a little longer.

“Stand away from the walls,” he warned her, vividly aware that neither wattle and daub nor thatch would stop a blade. She nodded once, sharply, and vanished into the shadows.

“Armed, are we?” He growled to his men.

“Aye!”

He could just make them out in the gray gloom of the hut, crouched by the horses and beside the stouter timbers, fists on their weapon hilts. Pride in them surged through in a chest-filling, tunic-bursting moment and then he was ready, colder than ice.