Townsend, Lindsay - The Snow Bride (BookStrand Publishing Romance) (41 page)

Snow blew against her legs and dropped chilly into her tunic. She flexed her toes within her borrowed shoes and vowed to keep still.

“Elfrida?”

She opened her eyes and with a mittened finger, drew the sign of the cross in the snow, so Magnus would know she thrived.

“How much longer?” he whispered.

She gave her hand a small warning shake, and to her relief he heeded her.

You have lost with that ploy, Joseph Denzil, so come out.

In truth, she did not know if Magnus had been inspired by Denzil or by his own warrior nature and concern, but with the evoking of her own will, her witch instincts were in play. She knew it would not be long.

The shadow of the tower struck across all of her now, cold as a bar of metal. She wanted to shiver and clapped her hands together, but forced herself to be unmoving. She heard a distant flutter of wings and knew the roosting birds were flying, whether for themselves or for some task of the necromancer’s, she could not tell.

Snow piled against her eyelids and mouth. She clenched her teeth and waited some more.

Off in the swirls of snow, she heard a soft rustle as Magnus shifted beneath his bramble cover.
Poor love, he must be so very cold.

At first she thought she had misheard it, the sound was so faint, but Magnus had stopped moving at once. She lifted her head a little and listened as hard as she could.

The wind, with a bite to it, gnawed her ears. Below that, she caught the snick and clatter of a large key within a lock. For an instant, like a flash of lightning, she thought she saw a gleam of metal deep within the bramble bush and guessed Magnus was preparing.

Would he allow her to deal with Joseph Denzil’s magic, or would he charge again as he had at the wooden tower?

He is learning, as he told you. Trust him
.

Behind her, making her back itch, she heard the great door creak, then a hiss of parting snow. She tried to stay loose limbed as she listened to the crunch of feet on snow, snow that was virgin, unmarked, because no one had left the stone tower before today.

One pair of feet, Elfrida reasoned, set within boots. Human, then, she thought, trying to make a jest of it, though when she tried to grin, her cold face hurt too much. An older human, from the steady, slightly rasping breaths.

A narrow, booted foot pushed at her, and she rolled, the better to face her tormentor. She did not make the mistake of trying to look at him, not yet.

Please Magnus, please be still, too.

The stranger spoke
.
“Be awake for me.”

It was the dialect of her own village, of Top Yarr, and Elfrida prayed that her eyelids had not flickered, that she had not given herself away.

He knows who I am! No, he may not, he is merely testing
.

“Are you the one I have been waiting for, my redhead?”

This was in the dialect of Great Yarr, and so one she easily understood. She also knew another, vital thing—if this was Joseph Denzil, the necromancer, the Forest Grendel, he did
not
know who she was or what she was.

A long, thin hand plucked at a handful of her hair. Elfrida endured the pawing, warning herself not to scream.

She felt the eddy of air as he straddled her, a foot on either side of her body. Was he about to stab her, urinate on her, drag her into the tower? Tensed so fiercely that she felt another notch of tension would shatter her body like a Roman-glass chalice flung against stone, she could no longer resist the compulsion to look.

Dark-blue eyes bored into hers. For the rest, it was a haze of impressions, like trying to catch and hold smoke: a long, hooked nose, gray hair and beard, domed, lined forehead, gaunt, pallid cheeks.

“Are you ill, Joseph?” she found herself asking, not questioning why she was right to speak.

He blinked once then grinned, his thin lips almost disappearing alongside the blackened stumps of his teeth. His breath was rank.

“You know my name.”

“I do.” Elfrida would not tell him hers and had no chance to. Joseph was already talking, victory ripe in his every word.

“I am dying, peasant, but you give me the means of life.”

“As your Snow Bride?”

Her question rocked him. His pallid cheeks colored as if she had struck them, but then his skinny mouth turned down at the corners.

“Red hair, yes, red for fire and desire, but I was promised beauty, red hair, blue eyes, a virgin lady born and bred.” He glared down at her, suspicion and distaste warring across his face. “You know so much. The spirit must have sent you, but you cannot be the one, although your voice...it is familiar. I was promised a virgin lady, a lady born and bred! Unless the spirit tricked me...”

His long complaint turned into a mutter, as if he talked only to himself, and Elfrida said nothing, sensing more pent-up words flying up behind those blackened stumps of teeth.

“The hair, the voice, the beauty, yes, but the eyes are wrong.”

He speaks of me as if I am a doll. In all our encounters in the world between the spirit world, he did not learn me at all. Even in his own wishes and desires, I was never his Snow Bride. And why am I a little sorry and hurt over that? I have been rejected by a necromancer who wants to suck out the lives of others to extend his own, who plans to sacrifice my sister.

But Joseph was still grumbling and casting explanations for himself.

“The way of the spirits is not ours. Perhaps the eyes will change after the ritual, for the spirit promised blue eyes for my Snow Bride. The blonde I have, she has blue eyes.”

Elfrida stifled her exclamation of relief that Christina was still alive. “Is she with you?” she asked, making her voice very gentle.

“She sleeps within,” he answered to her prompt, looking round to the stone tower. He glanced down at her again. “But how do you know her?” His blue eyes sharpened and narrowed. “Who are you, peasant?”

Without waiting for her reply he lunged for her with his thin, attenuated hands, aiming for her throat as he chanted a charm in Latin, the language of clerics. Elfrida flung up her arm to block his reaching fingers and answered in her own tongue, “By salt and wormwood and the rood, begone! None of yours shall harm me or mine!”

Her spell stopped his chant, and his mouth changed to a snarl. He struck at her again, his fist closing on her face. She saw the clenched fingers and the sparkle of the rings on his hand and was mute and numb, her body frozen as if already buried in the falling snow.

Closer the bright glare of rings approached, and she tried to move her head that suddenly felt as heavy as a catapult ball. Unable to stir, she watched her fate come and determined not to close her eyes.

The glare spun and fell away. Joseph Denzil collapsed on top of her, and she scrambled desperately to be free of him, kicking out and yelling. In a sprawl of arms and legs he was dragged off her and then thrown into the snow, splaying across the white like a huge spider.

“Did he touch you?” Magnus was wrapping her in his own cloak and lifting her clear. “Elfrida, did that creature hurt you?”

“No, not at all,” she mumbled, events moving so fast that even her foresight could not keep pace. “Magnus, are you hurt?”

She began to pat him, to check he was real and whole.

“Never fret!” Magnus caught her hand and kissed it. “Let us get you away.”

“You do not need to keep carrying me,” Elfrida protested, trying to see past Magnus’s shoulder. “What happened?”

“I might ask the same of you, my girl, especially when you and he began talking.”

* * * *

Magnus resisted the strong impulse to keep striding off with her. More than anything, he longed to find a secret shelter for them both and tend her until she stopped shivering. Her eyes were dark with shock and pain, and she looked to have aged twenty years, with new lines on her forehead. She clung to him quite unconsciously, and he was glad to let her, though his heart stung at the way her knuckles were so white.

“He called me peasant.”

“Aye, I thought I recognized that, and he did it a second time,” Magnus said gruffly. That was when he had decided things had gone on for long enough and he must act.

“How did you stop him?”

Magnus sighed and shook his head. “We stopped him, Elfrida. You fought your way, and I fought with mine.” He had kept out of the magic in case his earthy intervention put his witch off her battle stroke, but when the fellow had gone for her like a brawler in an alehouse, he had reacted at once.

To try to strike a woman! What a hideous thing he was!

He felt her shudder again.
“
Is he dead?
”

Who cares?
No,
Magnus thought. She deserves an honest answer.
“
I checked the throw. He is stunned.
”
If need be, we can question Joseph further.

She raised her head from the crook of his shoulder.
“
Throw?
”

He smiled. He always had some pebbles somewhere about him, tucked in corner of a robe or tunic, and since boyhood he
’
d had a good arm.
“
A stone, my heart. It was the fastest way.
”

She began to kick slightly in his arms.
“
We have to find Christina and the others.
”

He released her, and before he guessed what she would do, she sprinted straight for the gaping door. His “Wait!” fell on unhearing ears. Elfrida’s passionate blood was roused, and she was careless of anything but her sister.

But he was not—

“Guard that!” he bawled to his men and set off himself, blundering and slipping in his haste. He ignored the snow kicked in his face by Elfrida’s racing feet, and the falling snow prickling along his eyes. He fixed on the open entrance and charged.

Reach her before she gets to the doorway! You must!

But his redhead was quick and heartsore for her sister. She sped along the snow where he sank in it, and she had a start on him of a longsword’s length. He kept his mouth shut and sprinted as fast as he could, his breath searing his lungs.

Once his hand almost closed on her arm, but she snarled at him, thinking he was trying to go first, which he was, but not for the reasons she might think.

“Stop!” he rasped, leaping forward again with all his muscles straining, his legs blazing with the effort.

Splendor in Christendom, give her a cramp!

Perhaps a saint heard his desperate inward plea, for she stumbled on the threshold, and he hauled her back just as her right foot hammered onto the space beyond the doorway.

The “floor,” which Elfrida had assumed was nothing but ice and snow, snapped away. She was left hanging above a hidden trapdoor, her feet kicking in empty space. He clung on as she plummeted, his good arm coiled about her middle, and pivoted his weight back. For an instant they seesawed wildly as the power of her sprint spent itself through his already aching back and thighs, and then the dragging on his arms eased, and he could draw her back.