Townsend, Lindsay - The Snow Bride (BookStrand Publishing Romance) Read online

  * * * *

  Returning from the beehives at the end of her garden, Elfrida was about to walk through the village to the hut of the headman when she saw Walter stumbling toward her. His homely face was stark with horror, and as soon as he spotted her, he began to shout.

  “He has her! I cannot find them! I have looked everywhere!”

  He slumped to his knees in the slush and dropped further, his breath spurting in choking gasps. Elfrida reached him as he rolled onto his back, still wheezing. Her own breath stopped as she saw the claw marks on his arms and throat. She swung the lantern round but saw nothing that should not be there in the garden.

  “Christina?” she croaked, her throat closing with dread.

  “Alive, I swear it! I heard her crying as she was carried off.”

  Elfrida found she could breathe again. “Have you roused the men?” she demanded, hearing now, too late, the wail of horns and of many voices. Already in the nearby woodland she saw the bobbing flares of torches and prayed they did not search in vain.

  Let her be alive, oh Lord. Let her be safe!

  Walter clutched her, dragging her down into the snow with him. “He came from nowhere, like a great spider. I heard nothing.”

  Why did I not hear? Christina taken, and I heard nothing!

  “Had he a horse? Was he alone?”

  Walter shook his head. He had begun to shake. “He was dark as a spider...ugly... moved quicker than lightning. Had her snatched and gone.... I went after them.... He slashed at me.”

  Elfrida knocked off Walter’s trembling arms and sprinted to the house, leaving him prone in the snow.

  “Christina! Christina!” she shrieked, her voice higher than anyone’s, but her sister was not safe at home. Only a scrap of her blue veil remained in their hut, caught on one of the roof struts. She must have rushed out to greet Walter, as she thought, and run straight into—what?

  Elfrida dashed into the yard, screaming her sister’s name. She flung the lantern into a stack of hay and screamed again as the precious winter hay burned up in towering, crackling flames, giving much-needed light. “Christina!”

  The hay blazed, and she could see the other villagers, the other houses and gardens, the paths through the hamlet and the trees beyond, but there was no sign or shape of Christina.

  She was gone, as Walter said, carried off into the wilderness by a monster.

  * * * *

  Elfrida dropped the twigs she had been using as divining rods into the snow. This clearing was the place. Here was where she would make her stand.

  After two days without sleep or food, she was drained of all feeling, dry from crying. Day and night she had sought everywhere for Christina. Walter had been constantly at her side, calling, praying, and urging the dog he had meant to give Christina, to seek her out. At sunset on the second day, the village headman had compelled Walter to go to church, to leave offerings to the local saint for Christina’s safe recovery. He had tried to order Elfrida, but she had pleaded “woman’s trouble” as an excuse not to enter the church and finally she was alone. Her head ached and buzzed as if filled with bees, but the thudding panic was gone.

  Swiftly, as the sinking sun bled into darkness in the west, she began to search for Christina by witch ways. She had done this from the start, but now, without Walter’s anxious, hovering presence, she felt her power growing. She chanted to the wood elves, promising them a year and a day of ale if she they helped her. She tossed Christina’s veil high into the cold, still air, calling on the old gods Gog and Magog to point out the track of the beast. She thought of her sister, her long blonde hair, blue eyes, and sweet face and whispered, Where now, where now?

  She drew a picture in her mind of the great forest and the villages she knew: Great Yarr, Top Yarr, where she lived, Lower Yarr and Selton, the new place. She imagined the cat’s cradle of paths to and fro from settlement to settlement. Christina was light to carry, but even a child was too heavy to bear away on such narrow woodland tracks, and surely smashed twigs would have marked the beast’s passage?

  Had he flown away, then?

  “Be he a demon in flight, or be he as nimble as a squirrel in the treetops, I will have him!” she shouted, striking an oak tree to seal her promise. She found two branches beneath the tree and took them as the oak’s gift, using them to divine where in these woods Christina had been taken.

  Here in this clearing lay a clear sign, a long strand of blonde hair trailing across the snow in a golden thread. Gold but no red, praise God, so she could hope her sister still lived.

  Elfrida turned slowly in this small circle, glimpsing the path of the sun and the rising new moon through a screen of holly and oak trees. About her the woods seemed deathly quiet, and yet she felt she was being watched by something with a mind—that, or something was coming. She knew it from the raised hairs on the back of her neck.

  Coming, not watching. It cannot see me yet, I vow, so I have time.

  Had she time enough? She must return to the village, to change her clothes, and to make ready.

  She listened intently, reaching out with all her senses, but again her first instinct remained compelling. The beast was in this forest, and he would be drawn closer by the right inducements.

  “And I know what those are,” she said aloud, turning to hurry back to the home that was not a home, now that Christina was gone.

  Walter had not admitted anything to her, not directly, but from his muttered remarks and fractured exclamations as he feverishly searched alongside her for his betrothed, Elfrida had learned a great deal.

  “She is the third!” Walter had cried out, beating his fists against the walls of their empty hut. “The third in her wedding garb, and the most beautiful: one black-haired, one brown, and my Christina!”

  He had refused to say more, even when Elfrida had threatened to curse him, but his outburst told her what he and the elders had been hiding from the village women. The brute who had carried off Christina had kidnapped other pretty young girls, also dressed in their wedding gowns. He stole brides.

  I will dress myself as a bride and return here with my own wedding feast, with food and drink in abundance. Let him think me a bridal sacrifice, his red-haired bride, left for him by the village. And, by Christ and all his saints, this time I will be ready for him!

  It is a blessing I am a healer and have so many potions ready prepared. If I put sleeping draughts in the wine, food, and sweets, surely I can tempt the beast to take some? I can smear tinctures of poppy on my skin and clothes, so any taste will induce sleep.

  Sleep, not death, for she had to know where he had taken Christina.

  I will coax the truth from the groggy monster, and then the village men can have him.

  Part of her knew she was being wild, unreasonable, that she should talk to Walter, tell the villagers, but she did not care. Talk would waste more precious hours, and they might even try to stop her. For her sister she would do anything, risk anything. But she must hurry, she must do something, and she had little time.

  It was full dark before Elfrida was finished, midnight on the day after the start of Advent, two days after Christina should have been married. She shivered in the glinting snow, her breath suspended between the frosted, white ground and the black, star-clad sky.

  She glanced over the long boulder she had used as an offering table for her wine and food, not allowing herself to think too closely about what she had done. She had lit a small fire and banked it so that it would burn until morning, to stop her freezing and to keep wolves at bay, and now by its tumbling flames she saw her own small, tethered shadow writhing on the forest floor.

  She would not dwell on what could go wrong, and she fought down her night terrors over Christina, lest they become real through her thoughts. She lifted up her head and stared above the webbing of treetops to the bright stars beyond, reciting a praise chant to herself. She was a warrior of magic, ready to ensnare and defeat the beast.

  “I have loosened my hair a
s a virgin. I am dressed in a green gown, unworn before today. My shoes are made of the softest fur, my veil and sleeves are edged with gold, and my waist is belted in silver. There is mutton for my feast, and dates and ginger, wine and mead and honey. I am a willing sacrifice. I am the forest bride, waiting for my lord—”

  Her voice broke. Advent was meant to be a time of fasting, and she had no lord. None of the menfolk of Yarr would dare to take Elfrida the wisewoman and witch to be his wife. She knew the rumors—men always gossiped more than women—and all were depressing in their petty spitefulness. They called her a scold because she answered back.

  “I need no man,” she said aloud, but the hurt remained. Was she not young enough, fertile enough, pretty enough?

  Keep to your task, Elfrida reminded herself. You are the forest bride, a willing virgin sacrifice.

  She had tied herself between two tall lime trees, sometimes struggling against her loose bonds as if she could not break free. She could, of course, but any approaching monster would not know that, and she wanted to bait the creature to come close—close enough to drink her drugged flask of wine and eat her drugged “wedding” cakes. Let him come near so she could prick him with her knife and tell him, in exquisite detail, how she could bewitch him. He would fear her, oh yes, he would...

  She heard a blackbird caroling alarms and knew that something was coming, closing steadily, with the stealth of a hunter. She strained on her false bonds, peering into the semidarkness, aware that the fire would keep wild creatures away. Her back chilled as she sensed an approach from downwind, behind her, and as she listened to a tumble of snow from a nearby birch tree, she heard a second fall of snow from a pine closer by. Whoever, whatever, was creeping up was somehow shaking the trees, using the snowfalls as cover to disguise its own movement.

  A cunning brute, then, but she was bold. In one hand she clutched her small dagger, ready. In her other, she had the tiny packet of inflammables that she now hurled into the fire.

  “Come, husband!” she challenged, as the fire erupted into white-hot dragon tongues of leaping flame, illuminating half the clearing like a noonday sun. “Come now!”

  She thrust her breasts and then her hips forward, aping the actions that wives had sometimes described to her when they visited her to ask for a love philter. She shook her long, red hair and kissed the sooty, icy air. “Come to me!”

  She saw it at the very edge of her sight—black, huge, a shadow against the flames, off to her side, and now a real form, swooping around from the tree line to her left to face her directly. She stared across the crackling fire at the shape and bit down on the shriek rising up her throat.

  The beast stepped through the fire, and she saw its claw reaching for her. She heard a click, off to her right, but still kept watching the claw, even as the fire was suddenly gutted and dead, all light extinguished.

  Darkness, absolute and terrifying, smothered her, and she was lost.

  Chapter 2

  Elfrida stirred sluggishly, unable to remember where she was. Her back ached, and the rest of her body burned. She opened her eyes and sat up with a jerk, thinking of Christina.

  Her head felt to be bobbing like an acorn cup in a stream, and her vision swam. As she tried to swing her legs, her sense of dizzy falling increased, becoming worse as she closed her eyes. She lashed out in the darkness, her flailing hands and feet connecting with straw, dusty hay, and ancient pelts.

  “Christina?” she hissed, listening intently and praying now that the monster had brought her to the same place it had taken her sister.

  She heard nothing but her own breath, and when she held that, nothing at all.

  “Christina?” Fearing to reach out in this blackness that was more than night and dreading what she might find, Elfrida forced herself to stretch her arms. She trailed her fingers out into the ghastly void, tracing the unseen world with trembling hands.

  Her body shook more than her hands, but she ignored the shuddering of her limbs, closed her eyes like a blind man, and searched.

  She lay on a pallet, she realized, full of crackling, dry grass. When she scented and tasted the air, there was no blood. She did not share the space with grisly corpses.

  I am alone and unfettered. Now her heart had stopped thudding in her ears, she listened again, hearing no one else. Chanting a charm to see in the dark, she tried again to shift her feet.

  Light spilled into her eyes like scalding milk as a door opened and a massive figure lurched across the threshold. Elfrida launched herself at freedom, hurling a fistful of straw at the looming beast and ducking out for the light.

  She fell instead, her legs buckling, her last sight that of softly falling snow.

  * * * *

  Magnus gathered the woman before she pitched facedown into the snow, returning her swiftly to the rough bed within the hut. Her tiny, bird-boned form terrified him. Clutching her was like ripping a fragile wood anemone up from its roots.

  And she had fought him, wind-flower or not. She had charged at him.

  “I wish, lass, that you would listen to me. I am not the Forest Grendel, nor have wish to be, nor ever have been.”

  Just as earlier, in the clearing where he had first come upon her, a brilliant shock of life and color in a white, dead world, the woman gave no sign of hearing. She was cold again, freezing, while in his arms she had steamed with fever. He tugged off his cloak and bundled her into it, then piled his firewood and kindling onto the bare hearth.

  A few strikes of his flints and he had a fire. He set snow to melt in the helmet he was using as a cauldron. He swept more dusty hay up from the floor and, sneezing, packed it round the still little figure.

  No beast on two or four legs would hunt tonight, so that was one worry less. Finding this lean-to hut in the forest had been a godsend, but it would be cold.

  Magnus went back out into the snow and led his horse into the hut, spreading what feed he had brought with him. He kept the door shut with his saddle, rubbed the palfrey down with the bay’s own horse blanket, and looked about for a lantern.

  There was none, just as there were no buckets, nor wooden bowls hanging from the eaves. But, abandoned as it surely had been, the place was well roofed, and no snow swirled in through the wood and wattle walls. Whistling, Magnus dug through his pack and found a flask of ale, some hard cheese, two wizened apples, and a chunk of dark rye bread. He spoke softly to his horse, then looked again at the woman.

  She was breathing steadily now, and her lips and cheeks had more color. By the glittering, rising fire he saw her as he had first in the forest clearing, an elf-child of beauty and grace, a willing sacrifice to the monster. Kneeling beside her, he longed to stroke her vivid red hair and kiss the small dimple in her chin. In sleep she had the calm, flawless face of a Madonna of Outremer and the bright locks of a Magdalene.

  He had guessed who she was—the witch of the three villages, the good witch driven to desperation. Coming upon her in that snowfield, tied between two trees like a crucified child of fairy, his temper had been a black storm against the villagers for sparing their skins by flaying hers. Then he had seen her face, recognized that wild, stark, sunken-cheeked grief, seen the loose bonds and the terrible “feast,” and had understood.

  Another young woman has been taken by the beast, someone you love.

  She—Elfrida, that was her name, he remembered it now—Elfrida was either very foolish or very powerful, to offer herself as bait.

  Why work alone, though? Had Elfrida no one, no man to help her?

  Rage and a rush of hot protectiveness burst through him in a black wave, and he broke sticks for the fire to stop himself rushing out into the dark with his dagger, seeking a quarry who tonight at least would have wit enough to stay out of the snow. It was falling rapidly, the snow. He could tell it by the soft silence and by the way the door had begun to sag against his saddle.

  All tracks will be buried, but ours will be covered, too, so that is not all poor news.

  He un
clipped the small cup and spoon from his belt and dipped the cup into the murky water of his helmet. Taking a drink, he found it warm, putting a good heat in his belly, and that was the best that could be said for it. The girl, when she woke, would find it warming, too.

  “And when you stir again, my beauty, you will see me.”

  Swiftly he crossed himself and placed his rough wood crucifix beside her small, warm fingers. If she had learning, they might speak together in Latin, or he could try London speech, French, or Arabic. He would recite the creed as she came to, and she would see the cross, so, please God, she would know he was a Christian and that she was safe with him.

  He must be milder than a dove and as calm as the stone saint, because he knew very well what he looked like. If she was a Madonna, he was a gargoyle.

  His red-haired Madonna stretched out on the pallet like a basking grass snake, slowly, sinuously, and a tiny sigh escaped her mouth. Watching, staring, he was stunned again by her beauty, by the wonder of a woman sleeping in his presence.

  It was so wonderful he forgot to swallow a final sip of water. As he felt it trickling down his scars and mottled beard, he desperately smacked his good hand across his face, veiling himself in case the first thing she saw, looming in the firelight, was him, too close.

  But she did not wake. She turned on her side and curled into a ball, and he tracked her movement with helpless pleasure. Her languor and the gently snorting horse beguiled him. Telling himself he would rest for a moment, only a moment, he eased himself onto the pallet beside her. Facing the fire, he watched the whispering flames and daydreamed of summer in the heart of winter.

  Later he dreamed in truth. In the dream, as ever, he was hale and whole, unmarked by the blades that had hacked off his hand and foot and scarred his face so deeply. He and fair-haired Peter were boating on a river with Alice and Elfrida. Alice was learning how to scull from her husband, straining on her oar and calling to her children on the grassy bank. Elfrida dropped pine cones into the water, where each cone became a door.