Knight and the Witch 02 - A Summer Bewitchment Page 3

  He caught her to him before she sped off. “Let Mark and the cook deal with that, and the lady’s bath and anything else she requires. She has made it clear she wants a bath and food but no more of our company for this evening, so we should oblige her. Why not collect the things you need? We can walk to the woods now.”

  “Father Jerome—”

  He kissed the little frown between her eyebrows. “Mark and my men can entertain him, if need be, and he may speak more freely with them. As for the rest, you will fast before your magic-making, will you not? Well, so can I.” He planned to take food and drink with them for later. “Besides, do you feel like eating?”

  She shook her head.

  “Come, then. You can tell me of valerian and hare’s feet as we go.” He kissed and released her, half-smiling as she knelt instantly beside her wooden chest. She is busy, so I shall look to my book before we set out. “Meet me by the kitchen?”

  Elfrida, nimbly selecting items from the chest, muttered an agreement.

  Chapter 3

  Outside in the warm, still evening they walked arm in arm, both carrying panniers, and Elfrida shared what she knew of the stranger with Magnus. He in turn told her what he had learned of Rowena from the priest. It was, she thought, strangely companionable, but she wished they were speaking of less dark, mysterious matters.

  “Valerian is a magic plant,” she explained, skirting carefully around a flowering elder bush. “It has many uses. One is as a lure. To seduce.”

  “And the hare’s foot?” Magnus nodded to the elder bush as he stalked by, a grudging acknowledgement. “The rosemary I know from you is a guardian against evil spirits, so is that good?”

  “Because he protects himself from demons and the like does not mean he is not evil himself.”

  “Well spoken! The stranger’s mention of a Holy Mother?”

  “The hare protects him from all danger. It is a creature of magic. The mother he reveres may be the Virgin, but he worships her in older ways.”

  Magnus raised his black brows in silent inquiry.

  “The wreath he leaves in thanks and sacrifice, of valerian and elder blossom, marigold, wild thyme and daisy, is made of flowers pleasing to the older gods. I have seen such posies left at ancient standing stones and statues, at rock carvings of the horned god.”

  Her striding companion crossed himself. “Rowena is very pretty, so Father Jerome tells me.”

  Elfrida nodded, unsurprised. “And docile, too?”

  “Indeed. The priest claims they had no notion she might be in any way unhappy at being mewed up in a nunnery.” He scowled, his fingers tightening on his pannier.

  “I have heard she is a kind, easy child, but I do not like it, either,” Elfrida admitted. “Would you be more sanguine if she was ill-favored?”

  “Not a bit!” He glowered at her. “Do not think to test me, elfling, not this evening, at least. Even without your plan to go star-clad, I like these matters less and less. Do you know what family the Lady Astrid and Rowena are part of? The Gifford clan! Mighty and proud and wealthy.”

  “So why do they ask us for help? Why wait five days to ask?”

  “Indeed! The ride from Warren Bruer is less than a day, but with haste they could have raced here in hours.”

  “So why not come sooner and then we can begin a search? Laggardly, then,” Elfrida observed. “Contradictory.”

  “Snail slow, and I agree, contrary. And for the rest”—Magnus puffed out his cheeks—“to them I am a middling landowner and you, I am sorry to say, are utterly beneath notice, in their eyes. They should have far stronger allies than us to draw on.”

  “Unless they fear those allies.”

  “Do they seem frightened to you?”

  Elfrida pointed to a vigorous thicket of hazel coppice and considered as they closed on the straight and slender hazel poles. “The lady is irked, certainly, but I sense no dread from her, only displeasure.”

  “At the interruption onto her well-ordered life.”

  Trailing a hand across the bright green leaves of the nearest hazel, Elfrida felt a raw sadness, a sense of unrequited loss. “Rowena seems an agreeable child, yet for all that unmissed. Were any of these girls missed?”

  “Perhaps the Giffords do not want her found. Perhaps none of the families—” Magnus stopped and cursed, spitting to the right against ill-luck. “That is foul!”

  Placing a palm over his heart, Elfrida found it beating hard with rage, the indignation that was absent from both Lady Astrid and Father Jerome. “The moon is rising. I must make ready.”

  He swept her against him in a rib-crushing embrace. “Prepare well. I shall keep watch.”

  “I know.” Wishing to offer words of hope and resolution, Elfrida found herself saying, “We should talk to the maids of your latest guests, the maids and their servants and grooms.”

  Magnus’s grin blazed in his tanned face. “Maybe they have brought a laundress with them after all.” He released her and stepped back with a bow, turning to face the way they had come.

  Keeping watch, as he promised.

  Satisfied, keeping a steady grip on her pannier, she wove through the close-growing hazels into the very heart of the stand.

  His wife’s magic was often secret. Magnus respected it, since only a fool would set out to deliberately anger a witch. Remembering their early, fierce quarrels, he strove to let her be, to work at whatever she must be doing behind that curtain of crisscrossed leaves and branches.

  But it was so hard! To let his woman step between the worlds as she did—it was brutal. What spirits and demons might she have to face? All he could do was guard her body and he would do that well, indeed, but to wait, only wait…

  I feel useless.

  She is the warrior of magic.

  So? Forbid her. Now Lady Astrid was whispering in his aching head. Get her with child.

  Using two leafy hazel twigs as divining rods, Elfrida knelt in the small, bluebell-filled knoll in the middle of the hazels. She was naked, her hair loosened, her feet bare. A slither of a breeze touched her belly like a hot tongue. Distracted, thinking of Magnus waiting just beyond the leafy curtain, imagining his tongue against her skin, she wished the breeze away.

  “Help me.” Praying to the Virgin, to the mother, she held the rods over Rowena’s headdress. Her eyes blurred as she stared at the simple hand-stitched daisies on the yellow cloth, willing herself to search.

  “Let these rods divine the treasure I seek,” she said aloud, rising to her feet and circling the pinned cloth, moving sun-wise and then widdershins. The twigs dipped and trembled in her numbing fingers but did not cross.

  “Show me!” she whispered, thinking of a dainty, pretty dark-haired girl. “I offer blood as payment.”

  She had a knife made of flint, an ancient blade, given to her by her mother. Tucking the twigs into her mass of hair, she slashed the sharp stone across her palm, clenching her fist to make the cut bleed fast.

  “I offer sweet as payment.” Magnus had brought a flask of mead for them to share and she had begged him for it. Dripping the liquor close to the yellow cloth, she felt a prickling between her shoulders.

  No mortal comes, but the wood elves are close.

  “I offer a wheat girl as payment.” She tucked the corn dolly, one she had made from her own lands while she was yet a maiden, between the lush grass stems. The tiny golden figure looked to be sleeping in a green bed.

  Green and gold, the colors of spring and summer, blended before her eyes, swirling and dancing in a wild spiral. She danced, too, following the spiral, beating the dry grasses with her heels, tossing her hair, lifting her arms.

  The tingle at her back feathered down her legs, and out in the wood she now saw the faces of the wood elves. Shining silver discs in the rising moon, they grinned at her from knots of trees, winked at her through the fluttering leaves. Laughing, they mouthed strange words and nodded to the divining rods roughly pinned in her hair.

  “Show me!” she
said again, this time a command. The instant she touched the hazel twigs, ripping them free, she almost screamed at the searing pain in her scalp but the images were building.

  Young hands, young eyes, young faces, laughing and leaning in toward her. They turned their heads, showing off new headdresses and earrings, and pouted their freshly painted lips. One girl, slim as a reed and wearing chains of daisies round her throat and wrists, wound a streamer of her dark hair around the hazel twigs, crossing and joining them.

  Here. Rowena spoke in Elfrida’s mind. We are right here. We are his hoard.

  The moon was still rising. Magnus glowered at it, and at the evening star. His plans of sharing a companionable meal with his wife in the wood, of discussing what Elfrida had learned, had changed. He knew very well what a delectable wench she was when she was naked. Why should he wait?

  If she has not done yet, she soon will be.

  He turned and stamped through the hazel thicket, meeting Elfrida a few paces in, belting her gown and finger-combing her hair. Lust surged up in him like a thousand Arabian fountains…

  And below that throbbing delight and desire there was a fresh, cool calculation, his new knowledge of the crisp, no-nonsense advice on human coupling contained within the bestiary, his book.

  “No need for that, madam.” He bore her to the ground.

  Magnus was not possessed but he was not himself. His face was grim, his mouth set, his brown eyes hard. Even the small gold cross in his right eye seemed to glitter. Dangerous, her witch-senses sparkled, but was she not dangerous, too? He kissed her and she took his kiss, embracing his crooked, warm lips with greedy fervor.

  I have things to tell him, many things, but this moment is ours and we should take it.

  “Naughty,” he warned, as she tongued and nipped his ear and throat, her fingers tracing his mouth, gliding over his body. So big he was, so strong and magnificent, so long-limbed, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, lean-thighed.

  “I cannot taste enough of you,” she moaned, trembling beneath his answering caress.

  His eyes darkened more and her breath stopped. She heard a ripping of cloth as he hauled off his tunic, flinging it into the growing shadows. At the back of her mind she caught the silvery whisper of the wood-elves’ approving laughter, then it was Magnus, only Magnus. She reached for him but he scooped her over, flung up her skirt and entered her.

  She was ready for him. Feeling him hard and hot and thick within her, she sheathing him completely, Elfrida wanted only more. That filling, stretching rampaging. Magnus, crusading into her so she felt weak and strong at the same time. Pinned as she was, she could not move and her helplessness was strangely arousing.

  “Elf, lovely elf,” he whispered against her ear, his scarred, bristly chin rasping deliciously against her cheek as he battered over and over into her.

  “Goddess!” she hissed, as his pleasure met her sweet, sweet yielding.

  Moonlight fell into his eyes, shimmered through her body and she was lost. Dimly, blindly, she snuggled as Magnus finally released her. Curling against his white-hot-iron heated body, she heard him mutter, “That should do it.”

  Do what? she wondered, then asked, “Are you asleep?”

  A long snore answered her. She said, a little louder than before, “Magnus? We have to talk.”

  She felt him start against her and sigh. “You are right. Pah, my mouth is a furnace! Have we any mead left or did you use it?”

  Both sorry and glad they were out of their own world, their snatched time together, Elfrida needed no reminders of the missing girls, or her responsibility to Rowena and the others. She shook the flask attached to her belt. “There is a little.”

  “Good.” Magnus sat up on the woodland floor, shaking crushed bluebells off himself like water off a dripping hound, and reached for his tunic. “We talk and eat. We need a plan to rescue the girls, all of them.”

  “It is not going to be easy,” Elfrida remarked quietly.

  “I do not know,” Magnus admitted. “I fear you are right.” He crossed himself.

  Elfrida shivered.

  Chapter 4

  “He keeps the girls and keeps them well, according to his own perverted lights. He treasures them.”

  Magnus nodded his agreement to Elfrida’s statement, marking his wife’s bright eyes and high color as she settled on the grass beside him. She looked gentle and happy, very well used.

  She seeks a noble quest and so do I, but I also plan another seduction. Yet why not? ’Tis for our mutual pleasure and unites us body and soul. Making a child is only part of it.

  “Magnus?”

  To his instant relief, she was offering him food and had not posed a question, so he did not have to ask her to repeat it. Taking the trencher from her, he bit into the cheese and herb-filled manchet roll. Elfrida had brought his favorite cold food, he noted, feeling the back of his neck prickle with shame.

  Attend her, man! She deserves it.

  He picked up a peeled hard-boiled egg, garnished with snipped chives. “How did you persuade our baker and cook to produce such dainties? I was not able to sweep up these fine foods in my raid on the kitchen.”

  If Elfrida was surprised at his change of subject she did not show it. She dimpled a grin at him. “I threatened both with a pox,” she replied, and laughed. “Truth is, Magnus, I asked them and said it was for you.”

  “Indeed.” That is my Elfrida, for sure. Still, she is a witch, a wise-woman, skilled in spells and potions.

  Including a potion to stop herself falling pregnant?

  The disturbing idea thrust through him, an alien dark spear of doubt that he instantly rejected. No! Why should she do such a thing? I cannot, I will not believe it.

  Quickly, mortified by his own horrible thoughts, he asked, “In this vision, did you see where Rowena and the others are held?”

  Any lack to make a child, if lack there is, remains with me.

  And now he had the remedy, from his book.

  “I saw Rowena as near as you are to me now and she spoke to me,” Elfrida replied, peeling a second boiled egg with her nimble fingers. “It was her. She had the daisy as her token. I could not tell where they were, but she and all the maids were dressed in new gowns and jewels. They were not tied, nor kept in a magical bondage.” She frowned. “Not as my Christina was held captive by the necromancer last winter.”

  Silently, Magnus watched her slice the egg in two with her eating dagger, neatly burying half in the ground as some kind of offering and holding out the other half to him.

  He took it. “My thanks. That is good to know,” he hazarded, praying they were not dealing with another dark wizard. “Can you sense if the lasses are close by?”

  “I want to say they are, because I heard Rowena so clearly in my head, because she said they were right here, but I cannot swear to it. He seeks to seduce them.”

  It had to be asked. “To what end?”

  She flushed and would not look at him. “To be his wives.”

  The hastily swallowed egg stuck like a stone in his throat. “Wives, now, as young as they are? Has the fellow older…wives?”

  “That is the question, is it not? I had no sense of any older, or more.”

  “But you sense he has kidnapped other girls before?”

  Elfrida raised her head. “He feels practiced.”

  So what happens to them when these maids grow older?

  Washing away the sickly taste in his mouth with a gulp of mead, Magnus speculated on the here and now. “Could he have a wagon or a boat? His place of hiding need not be a cottage or castle. Is he there with them every hour?”

  “Unless he is rich, he cannot be with them continuously—but then he must have wealth. Riches and a help-mate, as we have said before.”

  “The new gowns and gems,” Magnus agreed. “Another Gifford, perhaps? That might explain why Lady Astrid and her priest have not scoured the land for her ward, or seem less urgent than they should be. It may also be why they ask me to
search—because they are convinced I lack the means and skill to find Rowena. They may already suspect or know who has her. They act as they do for form’s sake only, or while they send out spies to find out more.”

  “Why do that?”

  “Rowena or her close family or both will have their supporters within Lady Astrid’s camp. It is prudent for the lady to be seen to be doing something.”

  It eased his heart to see Elfrida’s extravagant scowl on his behalf.

  “I do not care for such politics,” she spat. “Nor how these nobles seek to use you. But does no one care for these girls?”

  “We do.”

  Elfrida tapped his left foot and leaned toward him across their trenches. He mirrored her, then lurched to one side, pivoting round to grab the hovering black mass behind him.

  “Leggo!” bawled the crumpled shadow, flailing ineffectually. Magnus tightened his grip on the lad, brought him to his knees and pulled down his dark hood.

  “You did not come with the Lady Astrid.” Elfrida took in the youth in a single glance. “Will you have some food?”

  “How did you hear me?” came the sulky answer.

  Magnus gave the boy a shake to make him mind his manners. “I am an old campaigner.”

  “Your black cloak shows up too dark against the twilight,” Elfrida went on. “When you arrived a moment ago, I saw you and signaled to my lord.”

  The youth’s peevish expression changed to one of interest. “The single tap?”

  And thank God Almighty he did not come upon us any sooner as we were making the beast with the two backs, or one back in our case. Glad of that, Magnus decided to release him. “Aye. Now who are you?”

  He heard the lad suck in a great breath as moonlight exposed his ravaged face clearly for the first time but the newcomer did not scream.

  “I am Magnus, lord of Norton Mayfield,” Magnus went on, steady and calm as if speaking to an unbroken horse. “My wife is Elfrida.”

  Elfrida wrinkled her pretty nose at them both and he sensed the boy relaxing.

  Splendor in Christendom, we finally make progress.