Townsend, Lindsay - The Snow Bride (BookStrand Publishing Romance) (6 page)

“Do you sense anything?” he asked softly.

“The night you came, I felt something approach.” She frowned, trying to put into words feelings and impressions that were as elusive as smoke. “A great purpose,” she said. “A need and urgent desire.”

Now Magnus was frowning. “Have you a charm or magic that will help?”

“Do you think I have not tried magic, charms, and incantations? My craft is not like a sword fight, where the blades are always true. If God does not will it—”

“I have been in enough fights where swords break.”

“Are your men good trackers?”

“They would not be with me, else.” If Magnus was startled by her determination to talk only of the beast, he gave no sign. “Tell me of your sister and her habits. Did she keep to the same paths and same tasks each day?”

“Yes and yes, but what else did Walter say? The old men have told me nothing!”

“No, they do not want the womenfolk to know anything, even you, I fear.” His kind eyes gleamed, as if he enjoyed her discomfiture. He had a small golden cross in his right eye, she noticed, shining amidst the warm brown.

A sparkle for the lasses, eh, Magnus?

To her further discomfiture, she realized he had asked her something. “Say again, please?”

“Would you like some food to go with your mead? There are the remains of mutton, dates and ginger, wine and mead and honey.” His brown eyes gleamed. “My men found it in the clearing where I found you. The mutton has been a bit chewed, but the rest is palatable, I think.”

“It is drugged!” Elfrida burst out. “I put”—she could not think of the old word and used her own language instead—“I put a sleeping draft in the wedding cakes and all.” She seized his arm, not caring that it was the one with the missing hand. “Do not eat it!”

“Sleeping draft?” He used her own words.

She yawned and feigned sleep, startled when he started to laugh.

“A wedding feast to send the groom to sleep! I like it!” He chuckled again and opened his left hand, where, to Elfrida’s horror, there was one of her own small wedding cakes.

“Do not eat it!” she cried.

With surprising speed, Magnus rose and flung the cake straight into the forest. Elfrida watched it tumbling through the trees, going leagues and leagues, it seemed to her.

“Now we must shift with what I have.” Magnus settled back again, rumbles of laughter still shaking in his huge chest. “Do not look so troubled, Elfrida. I am too greedy to put anything on my food but salt, when there is some.”

With Christina still missing, Elfrida could not smile at the irony, but her belly growled, reminding her that she had not eaten for days.

“I am hungry, too,” she admitted. “Thank you.” They could still talk while they ate.

Sharing roasted chestnuts, acorns, toasted bread from the stores of Magnus’s men, cheese and apples and dates, she and Magnus shared their knowledge, too.

“Walter called him a spider?” Magnus repeated when she had told her sorry tale. “One who comes and goes without sound?”

“And without breaking twigs. You say he has struck at all three villages? A maid from each one, perhaps?”

Magnus nodded. “I was told that the orphan lass was taken from Great Yarr and another maid from Selton, with your Christina being carried off from Top Yarr.”

“So it may be that the beast knows the area well.” Elfrida chewed on a date, guiltily enjoying its sweetness even as she wondered if Christina had eaten yet. “You think he will touch
Lower Yarr
?”

Magnus sighed and stretched, cracking the joints in his shoulders and his good hand one by one. “I have sent men to all these places, including
Lower Yarr
, to get the villagers digging out ditches round their homes and gathering thorns to put round their houses. I wish the menfolk would let the maids come to my manor, but they refuse.”

“They refuse?
They
?” Elfrida felt as if she had turned into a dragon and might breathe fire, she was so angry. Rage burst through her, and she clutched her wooden cup so fiercely she heard it crack. “By what right do they choose and not say a word?”

Magnus scratched at one of his deeper scars. “It is the way of the world. You are freer here than in Outremer, where women are kept indoors.”

“Thank you. That is such a comfort,” snapped Elfrida. She could feel mead trickling down between her fingers, and her anger tightened another notch. “Christina would be safe now, if they had told us!”

“Would she have left her betrothed, especially so close to her wedding?” Magnus asked patiently.

Elfrida closed her eyes and said nothing.

“Once my men begin work on the ditches, your villagers will have some explaining to do.”

“Good!” Elfrida ground the fingers of her free hand into her aching eyes. Her limbs itched and flamed, and she no longer had any appetite.

“Do you know anything of this orphan girl?”

“Why her particularly?”

“Because it was obvious from what the headman told me that she had no one to stand for her.”

Elfrida took a deep breath. “I would have spoken for her, but I knew nothing!” In a fury, she dashed her hand against her forehead, forgetting she was gripping the wooden cup, and immediately saw a host of green lights.

“I have something of hers,” Magnus remarked quietly. “Part of a blue veil found inside the lean-to. The place where she lived,” he added.

“The beast came inside her home? Did she let him in? Did he force the door?”

“From what I was told, I think the creature slipped in through the roof.”

Which explained Walter’s prodding of the thatch when he had last visited Christina, Elfrida thought, abruptly chilled as she imagined a shadowy, hulking form bursting into a hut from above.

Was the monster as big as Magnus?

She glanced at him, her fingers absently scratching at the spots in her hair. He looked at her steadily.

“I am not him,” he said, “and you should not do that.”

Elfrida’s hand flew down to her lap. “Blue veil, you say?” she croaked, snatching at the first thing she could to cover her embarrassment. “My sister’s wedding veil is blue.”

“One of the doors in my dream of the creature was blue.”

Elfrida’s interest sharpened, even as she realized that Magnus had mentioned his dream to purposely divert her. But then, she worked in dreams. Dreams were important. “Tell me all.”

She listened carefully to Magnus’s halting account, not shaming him by asking what he was leaving out in his tale of the river and the doors. Men did not feel easy discussing dreams.

“Who are Alice and Peter?”

“The true friends of my heart and hearth. Hellsbane—Peter of the Mount—was a fellow crusader, fighting with me in Outremer. He has carried me off the field of battle more than once.”

“And you him,” Elfrida guessed.

Magnus waved this off. “His fight name is Hellsbane.
Alice
gave him that name.”

“And what is she?”

“His wife.” Magnus puffed out his cheeks, making himself an ugly, jolly demon. “Like you, she is a healer, a maker of potions. But a lady.”

Shrugging off the
but
, Elfrida wondered what
Alice
the lady looked like, then found her thought answered.

“She is small, like you, and pretty, with long, black hair and bright, blue eyes. She wears blue, also. The Forest Grendel would have stolen her away had she lived hereabouts and Peter been dead and in his grave.”

“The monster has his dark-haired bride,” Elfrida reminded him, feeling a pang of envy at the warm way Magnus described the lady Alice, “but no auburn yet.”

“You cannot put yourself up as bait again.”

“No one will stop me.”

Magnus shook his head. “You have some days before you can even entertain such foolishness.”

“Men like the outward show. I know that all too well. I have never seen a handsome man with an ugly wife.”

Magnus’s brown eyes twinkled. “You would at court and in kingly circles. A handsome dowry can work marvels for a plain girl.”

“Plain yes, but no worse than that.”
Why do I pursue this? I know men are shallow as dew ponds!

Anger at herself and mankind made her blaze out with another fresh rage of itching, all over her body. She glanced longingly at the snow and then at the necklace of bear’s teeth and claws slung around Magnus’s thick neck.

“Those are the claws I saw the night you found me!” she burst out, reaching out to touch the necklace. Pleased to have one mystery understood, she smiled in turn and bent her head eagerly as he dropped a small parcel onto her lap. “What is this?”

“His token, dropped into the girl’s rush pallet when he stole away with the orphan. I am most interested to know what you make of it.” He cleared his throat. “What you sense from it,” he added, glancing at the charms around
her
neck.

Why did he not show me this earlier?
Elfrida unwrapped the rough cloth with trembling fingers. She did not want to think of the girl, waking in her bed and finding a monster where she should have been safe within her home.

She did not want to touch the object, not at first, and studied it a moment. “Have you handled this?”

“I did exactly as you did, Elfrida. I untied it and looked. I cannot say for the village headman or the rest.”

She lifted it, still wrapped in the cloth, and sniffed.

“I did that, too,” Magnus said quietly. “The scent is cloves and frankincense.”

“Cloves, frankincense with a whiff of pepper and ginger. All foreign and expensive. So the monster has money and servants.”

“Ah, to buy them for him! Unless he steals those, too, from peddlers and the like, as they pass through the forest.”

“It has a blue base,” Elfrida observed, turning the cloth on which the object was laid.

“Ancient glass, Roman, I think, cut to shape and set into the wood. Is it a cup, as seems? Or was it fashioned for other uses?” As he spoke, Magnus lifted his left hand and made the sign to ward away the evil eye.

“There are no runes or magic signs cut into the goblet, no gems or magic stones inset within it.” Elfrida closed her eyes and breathed in deeply through her nose. “It is old, made in the time of our grandfathers. It has held hot things.”

“Blood?”

“Tisane.” Elfrida smiled at Magnus’s wary question, amused and saddened in equal parts at the way nonwitches thought all magic dark and terrible. “See where the inside is stained dark? That is with tisane. I would say a blackberry tisane.”

“Not blood and not beer either, like your own good ale.”

“No.” Absurdly touched by Magnus’s praise, she found herself wishing, for a moment, that she could give him more ale.

“What?” Magnus asked, altogether too sharp and all seeing.

“Nothing, eager one! Now let me work.” Confident of her own magic, she took another deep breath and lifted the small bowl-shaped cup with both hands.

Images rose out of the snow and played across her startled eyes. There was Christina, laughing with her head thrown back, and a dark-haired girl dancing on the spot, blowing into a small pipe. A shadow fell across them both, but they did not shrink back. Rather they stepped forward eagerly, their hands outstretched like beggars at a fair.