Townsend, Lindsay - The Snow Bride (BookStrand Publishing Romance) (31 page)

“And now I am not.” Magnus smiled in a way guaranteed to make Bernard worry more. “I am going to relax a moment and try not to remember how you kicked me.”

“I was following orders, sir,” Bernard mumbled. If he had a cap he would have wrung it in his hands. “I have to do what my lord commands.”

“Of course, as a loyal follower.”
And a feckless coward, you miserable worm.
Bernard was armed, Bernard had the key, and he had already given way.

“Since it is close to Christmastime, I will ignore the kick.”

“Sorry.” Bernard tried a weak little grin.

Magnus crooked his finger and beckoned. The man did not shuffle forward, but he did not back away.

“When do the guards change round the keep, Bernard?” he asked now, adding provocatively, “Do you know?”

The bait proved too much for the vain bully. “O’course I know! An hour past
midnight
.”

So when I break out of here, which in a moment I will, the guards above will be slack and sleepy. Good.

“But not you, eh, Bernard? No relief for you.” Magnus raised a hand and spread his fingers, as if he commiserated with the man.

“
There never is,
”
Bernard agreed.

In another hour, I could have this two-faced sniveler exchanging war stories and ale with me,
Magnus thought. He listened, hearing the distant roars of drunken men, and knew it was time to move out.

He closed his eyes. He waited the space of one and thirty breaths and then opened them to find Bernard wandering about the cellar, not pacing or with purpose but in an idle meander. He cleared his throat, sucking in a huge lungful of the fetid air.

“
I feel amiss,
”
he began and choked, stopping his breath.

“
Sir?
”
Bernard cautiously shook his foot.
“
Sir? Teeth of hell!
”

A stool overturned, there was a crash as Bernard slipped on the greasy cellar floor, sprawling against a barrel in his haste to reach his stricken prisoner. He dropped to his knees and lurched forward, hands out, seeking a heartbeat, and Magnus walloped his skull hard with his fist.

Bernard toppled silently onto the cellar floor, and Magnus extracted the key from his tunic.

“
The sick prisoner is the oldest trick there is, Bernard,
”
he told the unconscious guard.
“
It is well known in Outremer, where the assassins are a force to be reckoned with. Your lord would have told you that, had he remembered more of our campaigns than booty and rutting.
”

He took Bernard
’
s rust-pitted dagger, vaulted over his scrawny figure, and strode for the door.

No one was on watch outside, nor on the stairs, nor on the landing. Locking Bernard inside the cellar, Magnus ran in a limping, lopsided lope back up the staircase to the great hall, missing his sword belt and blades with every swaying stride. He knew where they were, in the woodshed where he and Elfrida had spent a luscious night, but first he must retrieve his men and save the womenfolk.

He forced himself to halt outside the threshold to the hall and put his ear to the solid oak door. The shouts and laughter were more ragged and infrequent, and he caught several long snores. He thumped hard on the oak, bruising his knuckles, five fast strikes, then three, then one—his drumbeat signal from Outremer.

He stood behind where the door would swing and waited.

Mark burst out of the hall first, followed by Tancred, John and Edmund, then lanky Diarmit from
Dublin
and Simon the arrow maker, his men one and all and each one clear-eyed and grim.

“Simon, get to the woodshed and look for our gear behind a block of limewood.” Magnus ordered the swiftest, and he was off like a wolfhound after quarry. As his slapping footsteps echoed off into darkness, Magnus seized a torch, stamped into the hall, and set fire to the rushes and herbs strewn on the floor. These should have been packed down and hard to light, but the meadowsweet was old and overdry in parts, too soaked in ale in the rest. It smoked, then caught in a swirl of wicked-sounding crackling.

“Hola!” Through the tumbling flames, Magnus saw the rest of his men. Caught behind a wall of overturned trestles, they were fending off those Denzils who could still stand and hold a sword, with a haphazard mix of table legs and stools. He roared his approval of them, and they yelled back, the gleam of battle shining in their faces. The slave women were nowhere to be seen, and neither was Gregory Denzil.

“Hola!” Magnus struck out with the blazing torch, firing a man’s beard. He swung out again—

The blow came from behind. He heard and saw nothing of his assailant. There was a loud crack in his ears, and the world turned its back on him, turned black and empty, like the insides of a wolf’s belly.

Magnus fell, sprawling full length, and did not know he fell.

* * * *

He lay on top of a high wooden platform beneath a starry summer sky. Around him the air was warm and spicy. Far beneath him he heard a beggar sing, “Alms, alms in the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate, for I am in the beautiful city of
Damascus
, and I am blind.”

I never traveled to
Damascus
. This is a dream
.

“Your dream of love and learning, my lord.” Elfrida was sitting beside him, holding a golden astrolabe. “You once told me, or wished to tell me, that the finest medical and astrological instruments were made in
Damascus
. So we are here.”

Magnus sat up and looked out from the wooden platform, which was built like a siege engine, only it was bigger and higher. A scent of roses, mingling with the smell of freshly baked honey cakes, wafted from the mud-brick, flat-roofed houses below, but away to the north was a wildwood, tangled and dark.

Those trees are not cedars or pine. They are oaks and limes, the trees of
England
. And I see wolf shapes within the wood, and lurking thieves and brigands.

“Danger,” he said to Elfrida, pointing at the wood.

She smiled, her face gentle and luminous, like in a painting of the Magdalene. “There is always that.”

In the fluid way of dreams, he lay with his head in her lap. She stroked her fingers through his hair, teasing out the knots. She was robed in a long, white dress, white as a Templar tunic without the red cross. Somehow he knew it was her wedding gown.

Pray God she has chosen me and no other
.

He glanced at her hands, longing and hoping to discover his own family ring there, given to her as a pledge of love, but her fingers were bare.

Why am I surprised or disappointed? She can have anyone, so why would she choose you?

That was not his true thought, Magnus realized, as he touched her long, loose hair.
“
If not my bride now, you will be soon, my winter bride, my Snow Bride.
”

“
Not so, crusader. The woman is mine.
”

A tall, thin stranger appeared, looking out over the silent city. Elfrida vanished, the platform vanished,
Damascus
faded, and he and the stranger were inside the wildwood.

“
You pine in vain, knight.
”
The stranger had a dry, dusty voice and looked as narrow as a needle. His face was hidden in the manner of desert dwellers, by a turban of long, dark cloth and a veil, but Magnus wondered if he had a face. Undaunted, he leaped up and charged but never came nearer to the looming figure.

“
Your quest is lost. The Snow Bride is mine. See? Her token.
”

The stranger spread his arms, holding them aloft. Hanging between his scrawny hands fluttered Elfrida
’
s old dress, the one he had allowed Denzil to take from her.

“
You gave her to me by giving me this.
”

Magnus stopped running—it was like fighting through deep sand or snow, and he was going nowhere.
“
Tell me her name, then,
”
he said.

The stranger hesitated, and Magnus seized the moment. He reached within his tunic, finding the amulet Elfrida had given to him— her true token, which he wore above his heart.

“
Begone, you devil!
”
he ordered, and he broke the narrow chain and hurled the amulet at the faceless figure.

“
Magnus, Magnus! Sir!
”

Magnus opened his eyes. Light spitted his brains, and he flinched.

“
Sorry, sir.
”
Mark hastily withdrew the flaring torch.

“Ugh!” Magnus had sat up in the snow—a mistake as Mark’s unnaturally pallid, drawn face seemed to detach from his head and swing wildly from side to side. He squeezed his eyes shut, and the swinging lurched into his stomach.

“Slingshot, was it?” he demanded, mostly to stop the furtive glances and whispers of his men. “Splendor in Christendom, I am not yet on my deathbed!”

“Yes, sir!” Mark handed him a bucket of snow. Magnus almost asked if his second wanted him to be sick in it, then took the simpler option of silence and tipped the pail over his head. The icy, white cold eased the drilling in his eyes, at least.

“Who carried me out?” he asked, motioning for another bucket load.

“Ah, yes.” Mark tweaked his nose in embarrassment. “That would be me, and Tancred, and Diarmit, and the squires.” He scratched his throat. “You were out cold, you see, sir.”

“I know that, man! So what happened? Where are we? Did all the men get out?”

A squire offered him a second bucket, filled to the brim with snow. Magnus sank his throbbing face into it and piled more snow onto the back of his neck while Mark stumbled through an account.

It seemed that his being struck from behind by slingshot had driven his men into a perfect fighting fury. Fearing him dead, those behind the shields of trestles had broken out and taken a brutal hand-to-hand battle to the Denzils. Drunken and surprised, their hosts had been quickly overwhelmed, even before Magnus’s man Simon had returned to the fray with their swords.

“They broke like clay dolls and scarpered from the hall as soon as they could,” Mark recounted, smacking his lips in satisfaction.

“And the women?” Magnus asked.

“Weeping and wailing in the solar,” Mark replied. “We left them in there to carry you outside for some more wholesome air.”

“Gregory Denzil?”

“Aye, yes.” Mark shook his head, as if in wonder. “In the solar, too, can you believe it? Him alone, and all those girls!”

Had his head not been aching so much, Magnus would have bawled the man out, but Mark finally added, “When we broke down the door to the solar, Denzil smashed his way through the window glass. A shame, for the glass was fine.”