Townsend, Lindsay - The Snow Bride (BookStrand Publishing Romance) (34 page)

“Elfrida!” He rattled the door, fear clenching in his guts like poison. “Elfrida!”

He set his shoulder to the wood and gathered all his strength. He leaned into the door and punched as fiercely as he could, pushing and shoving. He felt a sweat break out over his body and redoubled his efforts, aiming his weight and force at the hinges. Panting, his head throbbing with the storm of his own blood, he heard a hinge creak a little. He stood back, panting, and before he regained all his breath, lunged hard.

His shoulder exploded, his arms white-hot in agony as his right side felt to be ripping apart.

“Elfrida!” he roared, out of himself with dread.

“My lord! Let the men break it down with hammers! God Almighty, Magnus, you kill yourself with this—”

Magnus hurled Mark off into the tumbling snow and slammed into the door again.

The hinge cracked and broke, splinters of wood spearing into Magnus’s beard and hair and into his arm as he drove on, a human battering ram. The door fell in with a shuddering crash, and he was at the ladder, running up as nimbly and eagerly as he had done in a crusader siege, his sword belt clashing at his waist.

She was gone. In a state of bewildered, furious disbelief, he blazed through the topmost chamber, slamming walls, smashing the hideous clay figure. Roaring down into the second chamber, he overturned and kicked in every apple barrel, but she was not there, either.

“My lord, there is no one,” Mark called cautiously from below.

Magnus thrust his head through the trapdoor. “I told her to stay! I warned her, I told her!”

* * * *

Mark recoiled as Magnus swung down, straight through the trapdoor, landing heavily beside him. Anger was coiling off the huge knight like steam off a cauldron or fire off molten lava. He looked more than enraged, he looked mad, his eyes black slits in a twisted, mangled face of fury. “Told her to wait, told her—”

Magnus stamped past, his leather cloak slapping against Mark’s forehead. He charged back out into the darkness and the snow, men scattering rather than face him. Out in the gray, cold murk, Mark heard him snarling, “Why do this? Why leave unless you want to leave? But I will find you, Elfrida, and when I do, when I do...”

Mark shivered. The poor lass will need all her charm and beauty to appease him, he thought. Elfrida chatted like a magpie, but he could not fault her care for his lord. If she was gone indeed, there would be a good reason for her leaving.
Let us hope my lord Magnus will listen, when we find her
.

He shivered again, saying nothing.

* * * *

Elfrida trembled as the men and horses galloped by the holly tree. She had barely managed to leave behind the leather cloak as a lure before they had reached it. She would never outrun this hunt, so she must outwit it.

She should be shuddering with cold, but shock had left her numb. Had Magnus truly set Denzil’s men after her? Was it possible he had changed to her so much, in less than a day? Was this the work of the necromancer, her enemy?

No, I do not believe any of that.

Or had Magnus always been a dissembler, using his scars as a shield for lies?
What a magical device if that is so—his battle wounds are his badge of truth, honesty, and courage! He said he loved me, too...

She scrambled onto a low-growing holly branch, thick as a man’s thigh and bare of snow, and looked out. Using patches of bare, frozen earth and low-growing branches, she had crossed the woodland from where she had dropped the weighted leather cloak and come safely into the prickly heart of the holly. The snow about the holly was undisturbed, which was what she wanted, and by sheer good fortune the Denzils’ dogs were poor tonight and no use on any scent.

There was another holly, growing in a deep hollow. She could not reach that without leaving a trail, but perhaps that did not matter. The yapping, unhappy hounds and grumbling, snorting men seemed to be moving deeper into the mistletoe woods. Gregory Denzil shouted a few orders that the piercing breeze blew away from her, and the whole troop vanished between the trees.

Elfrida compelled her limbs to stir. Part of her wanted to lie down in the snow and weep, but she kept going, walking from one holly tree to the next. Her heart ached continuously within her chest, which dimly surprised her—she had always considered heartache a poetic fancy. It was not, nor was the heaviness of her legs, the feeling of smoke and distance inside her mind.

She did not want to believe that Magnus had betrayed her. With every shuffling step she wrestled with that idea, pushing the thought aside as she shoved and buffeted through reams of snow.
Why lie? Why say you love me? I cannot believe you would betray me, and yet where are you?

“
Magnus could ask the same of you,
”
her mother whispered in her mind.
“
He begged you to stay safe within the tower.
”

Distracted, she lost her footing amidst a tangle of tree roots and sprawled, grabbing at a thick, wild-rose stem before she realized what it was. The rose stopped her fall at the cost of driving several long thorns into her hand. She pulled out those she could.

She never asked why she did not stop and give in. However matters were between Magnus and herself, Christina must be saved.

Tomorrow and the day after will be the last full days of my sister
’
s life. I must find her!

“
I must find her!
”

At first Elfrida thought she had shouted her own thought, and then she dropped to her knees, stunned with relief.

“
Magnus!
”

Her voice was harsh with the cold, little more than a croak, but incredibly, he heard her. His horse burst through a thicket of elders and thorns, towering over her head like a massive siege engine, and then Magnus was with her, his arms clamped around her, his mouth capturing hers.

He kissed her, wildly and deeply, saying words in his own tongue, saying more, kissing her again. He was shaking, and she was shaking.

“
I am sorry,
”
she started to say, before his clever, crooked lips caught hers again and she was lost in a flooding haze of heat and feeling. His arms were so tight around her she could not fully breathe. She tried again. “Magnus, I am sorry—”

“I have you now, no matter.” He shook her as if she was a doll. “I was hot and mad as fire, you hear? And look at you! No cloak, enough thorns in you to make a porcupine, one shoe missing!”

His mouth scowled, but the gold cross in his right, brown eye sparkled, and both eyes were bright with tears. “I could kill you for rushing out,” he said thickly. “I feared I might when I found you, and then you undo me without even a word, simply through your own suffering. Little wretch!” He hugged her again and cradled her face with his hand, tenderly brushing snow away from her cheeks.

Overwhelmed, Elfrida fought down tears of shame and relief, hating herself for causing such pain. “Christina has only two more days,” she began, when he interrupted her.

“I know that, woman, and I know I was late today.” He wrapped his cloak around both of them and called out to Mark who, with the rest of his men, was waiting close by but not too close. “If you broke your word to me, then I broke mine to you, so we are quits.”

His admission made it impossible for her to be angry or doubtful of him anymore.
How could I have ever thought you would betray me?
In her moment of weakness and respite, she almost confessed.

“I am sorry,” she said a third time, wishing he could understand, yet too exhilarated and uplifted by his presence to argue. Then, “What is a porcupine?”

“Ah, something you do not know! ’Tis a fantastic beast, more prickles than a hedgehog. I have a bestiary at home, and I shall show you.”

Elfrida nodded, comforted.

He drew his cloak off his shoulders and wrapped it round her alone, frowning as he chafed her white fingers. As if reminded afresh by her continuing plight of what she had done, he scowled in an awful manner and jerked his head at the dark and the steadily falling snow. “What possessed you to go out in this, Elfrida?”

So we have not made peace yet
. “We should talk about it later,” she said quickly.

Magnus’s face took on a stubborn set that reminded her piercingly of Christina, on those rare occasions when Walter had denied her sister something she wanted.

“We talk now,” he said.

“But Gregory Denzil is out in the woods tonight, and it is still snowing! And my sister—”

“I am glad you finally noticed the snow.”

“I have not demanded an account of you and why you were late.”

He rolled his muscular shoulders. “Mine does not matter.” What he did not say, but plainly meant, was
I am a man, so it is not for you to question.
He tied the strings of the leather cloak for her, as if she was a child. It hung about her ankles and felt warm enough, but she was too disconcerted to care.

“It does to me,” she said quietly.

He brushed aside her answer with a swift shake of his head. Still, because she loved him, because they had been lost to one another and Magnus had suffered, because he had snow in his hair and a new open gash from a low-hanging branch seeping down his already scarred cheek, she hugged him as tightly as she could. She bit back the questions.
If I am answerable to you, why are you not the same to me? You promised we should be equal out
of bed, did you not?
She closed her eyes and held on, reveling in the scent of him, the size of him, his beloved, tragic face, even his manly arrogance.

Magnus was less forbearing. “I am waiting. Why did you defy me?”

“Is that what you think it was? Do you consider me so petty? I never defied—” Elfrida broke off, forcing down her indignation. How could she help him to understand? And Christina was waiting somewhere...

“Your men,” she began again, a weak beginning, to which he robustly replied, “They are well clod and shod, unlike you, and they will wait. As for Denzil, finding him again will be my good fortune. Now, madam.”

There was no turning him. “I could wait no longer at the blue tower, sir.” She knew this next would wound but had to say it. “You were not coming. I had done all I could to thwart our enemy there.” Her breath hitched. “You might never have come.”

“So you set out to rescue me?”

“If need be.” She was heartened by the fact Magnus had not shared or even considered her darkest notion—that he was not coming because he had changed in his feelings to her, and worse, that he had set Denzil onto her. “Certainly I had to move for my sister, who is still in danger.” After that necessary reminder, she glanced up at him but could not read his expression. “I had to do something, Magnus. I am a witch! People come to me for help!”

“Aye, you are a warrior of magic, right enough.”

He smiled at her surprise. “Splendor in Christendom, woman, I am learning and trying! If I fall back at times, ’tis only nature.”

He caught something flung to him out of the darkness and shook out a rough cloth bag. “Shodding for your foot. You see, I like looking after you.”

“And I you,” Elfrida replied promptly, wanting to be clear on that.

Magnus nodded. “That is what takes some learning, but I will.” He knelt and bound her foot with the bag, grinning up at her. “What next for us, eh?”

* * * *