Townsend, Lindsay - The Snow Bride (BookStrand Publishing Romance) (26 page)

“Magnus.” Her lost, young voice compelled him to turn back. “I am sorry.”

“So am I.”

“Please,” she stretched out a hand. “Do not be this way.”

“Affronted and injured, you mean? You have harmed me, madam.”

She moaned and ran to him. “I made a mistake. I was wrong. I am sorry.” She seized his hand in both of hers. “Please do not go.”

She reached for him, almost blindly. He let her in, and they clung to each other. For now, that was all that mattered.

Elfrida was ashamed, and shame made her sticky and hot. She imagined Magnus asking her if she would kill Hedda just to be rid of her and broke out in a prickling sweat afresh.

I love him. He is my noble lord, and still I pressed him
.

She dreaded his speaking to her, for fear he would say his farewells and leave. So she made a great bustle instead, checking each barrel of apples as if there would be treasure stowed inside.

She could not say for sure why the question had broken from her. Perhaps it was a curse of womankind. She had seen Christina act the same way with Walter, push and push and set traps and small tests, but never as large a question as hers.

“I am a fool,” she said aloud in her own tongue.

Magnus glanced at her, his cool stare warming a little as he scanned her face. Had they a month more together, a week together, even a day, she knew she could show him her love and make a full apology. But soon they must leave.

“The sun is sinking,” he remarked, an unwelcome reminder. “Never yet has Gregory Denzil returned from a hunt before sunset, but there is always a first time. And those lads watching our snow figures must be wondering why we never stir.”

Elfrida allowed the thin linen robe she had found in the final apple barrel to slide through her fingers, back into its hiding place. She knew, even without greater light, that the robe would be white and long, possibly marked with symbols of the heavens, the moon, or certain stars. Saying nothing to Magnus about it, she nodded toward the ladder. “Do you go first?”

He did, and she heard the shriek as Hedda encountered him anew. What must it be like, to have people react in that manner toward you? She stumbled quickly down the ladder and put herself between a perfectly rock-still Magnus and the gasping laundress.

“Do you understand her?” she asked him.

“She says I am a devil and as ugly as a toad.” Magnus shook his head. “I have been called worse.”

“Will you translate for me?”

“You trust me to do that?” The instant he spoke, Magnus smacked his fist against the stump of his right hand and then nodded, tight lipped.

Elfrida accepted his silent apology and took a step closer to the woman. “Hedda, look at me. Hedda, you are safe with me, so look.” She clicked her fingers to attract Hedda’s attention and waved her hands to and fro, swaying as if to music. She smiled and swayed and spoke, very quietly. Magnus’s translation of her words followed like a deep, soothing echo.

“There is a woman in my
village
of
Top Yarr
who is like you, a washer of linens and woolens. She has scarlet hands.”

Elfrida leaned forward and touched Hedda’s palm, no more than a light, comforting brush. “I give her salves for her fingers and soaps for her clothes.” She smiled into the startled, pale-blue eyes. “You are safe with me. Your work is done for today, so soon you will sleep.”

Hedda began to sway as she did. Beside her, Magnus yawned and said sleep twice. Elfrida stroked her own hair and then Hedda’s, sitting down on the gray bundle Magnus had carried. She edged along so that Hedda could sit with her, and the woman did, with a small sigh.

“Peaceful. At peace because your work is done. Rest your head on my shoulder.” Elfrida patted her shoulder, and Hedda nestled her head into the crook of her arm, her breathing very slow and steady.

She was ready. Elfrida glanced at Magnus, who nodded once, sharply, understanding that this next part was vital.

“Hedda, you are at peace because you have taken the clean washing to the blue tower in the mistletoe wood. You have finished your work and will now go back to the
castle
of
Gregory Denzil
.”

Magnus repeated all this in a low, mellow monotone, his eyebrows raised. His eyes narrowed as Hedda said very quietly, “Yes.”

Elfrida forced herself not to rush, to try to be calm. Hedda was in a place between waking and sleeping, an almost-dream state. She could suggest things to the woman but not compel her.

“All was safe and usual at the blue tower. Nothing there was strange.”

“No stranger than it ever is,” Hedda agreed, with half-closed eyes and a lisping voice.

“What is the name of the man who comes to this tower?”

“I do not know. I never see him.”

“There is never anyone at the blue tower?”

“No. It is always quiet.”

Magnus’s eyebrows were raised anew at this information, which he whispered to Elfrida in the old speech, adding, “What have you done to her?”

“I have used a charm I sometimes make when a woman is in childbirth, and frightened and weary. This calms her so she and the babe keep safe, and the child is born more easily.”

“Humph!”

Elfrida dared not break eye contact with Hedda now. “You saw no one today at the blue tower,” she suggested, making it a statement, a fact, and not a question.

“I saw no one.”

“You are leaving now. In a moment you will pick up the bundle of clothes that has been left here, ready to be washed, and return by the path you came. You have forgotten the key to the tower, because it will be returned to you.”

“Key. Returned.”

“You will talk to no one at the castle until this evening, and then you will speak of the snow. It was very deep, so the walk took you longer.”

“The snow, yes.”

Elfrida touched the woman’s hands. “From this day, your fingers will give you less pain, I swear this before God and all his saints. Go now, in peace, and be safe.”

Very gently, she touched Hedda’s worn face. Hedda blinked as if coming awake and calmly gathered together her things. Taking no notice of Magnus and looking through Elfrida as if through a mist, she picked up a heap of clothes and patted them slowly into her pack.

Magnus, meanwhile, opened the door to the castle and spirited away the key into his tunic.

Looking round, as must be her general habit, and seeing nothing alarming, Hedda sighed and slung the pack over her shoulder. She walked to the door, opened it, and went out into the snow, leaving the door ajar.

Elfrida watched her go and smiled.

* * * *

Magnus watched the woman leave, glimpsed Elfrida’s small, self-satisfied smirk and was confounded. A thousand questions crowded, mob-like, into his mind, and none of them were good.

She knew she could do this and yet said nothing. Was her question to me about Hedda only a test? Yet why did she not say what she was going to do? It would have saved us both grief. Am I a fool to think she would not use such magic against me, that she has not bewitched me? By all her actions and words I know her as a good witch, but even so, would she ever bewitch me?

Has she done so already?

It was not to be endured. “Splendor in Christendom!” he burst out as he gaped at her, seeing this part of her truly for the first time. “Why did you not say what you intended?”

“Why did you not tell me you would charge the door? Or take the key?” she snapped back. “And since one of us must think of practical matters, let me pray now that more snow falls on our tracks, or the Grendel will know we were here.”

“You do not have a witchcraft for that?” he demanded bitterly. “You seem to have for everything else.”

She paled at his scorn and leaped up, stalking to the door.

He launched himself after her, catching her wrist as she stretched for the door. Quick as a rushing waterfall, she kicked the door shut and stood on his foot, the better to stare into his face.

“I do not walk out on quarrels,” she spat.

She had not been leaving. Even as that relief scorched through him, Magnus longed to shake her, and then he was kissing her, embracing her until she relaxed, as boneless as Hedda had been.

I do not care if I am bewitched
, he thought as his witch moaned and quivered against him.
I can do the same to her
.

“We should stop,” she said at last, leaning back in his arms to give his beard a light tug. “We should be moving, too, not charging each other like wild boars.”

She was delicate for a wild boar, he thought, amused by the image and finding himself quite disarmed. “Peace again?” he asked. “Friends?”

He felt her shudder slightly, as if struck by a sudden chill. “I hope we are always that.”

“We are. I would not let you go, else.”

He anticipated a cuff round the ear for that, or a frown, instead she hugged him tightly, shivering suddenly as if in fever. “I am glad, so glad.”

“Hey.” He wished he had her healing ways, to calm her as she had done the laundress. “Let us see the lie of the land, eh? Together, yes?”

When she nodded, he swung toward the half-open door with her still balanced on his foot. A light fall of snow had shrouded their earlier tracks, and he whistled at the luck of it.

“If we step in Hedda’s footfalls,” Elfrida suggested.

“I know that, elf.”

She gasped, though not because of his mild insult. “Magnus, the green man of the wood, the mistletoe hereabouts, we must beware of both.” She fixed him with her amber eyes. “Please, this is important.”

He almost ignored her warning but recalled his earlier charge to the tower. They had bit at each other enough for one day, and he did not want her pale and stricken again. “I will take heed,” he promised gruffly. “On one condition.”

She tilted her eyes at him.

“That when we are away from this tower, you tell me everything and exactly why you are afraid.”

Chapter 19

Outside, the day was eye-achingly bright, with no breath of wind. The snow had stopped falling and drifting and lay as white and pristine as sun-bleached linen. Even the woods of oak and mistletoe seemed benign, empty of spirits, or else those spirits slept.

Elfrida followed the tracks of Hedda, matching her footsteps and stepping into them. Striding steadily behind her, she heard Magnus do the same. He whistled, and when Elfrida came to a slope where the laundress had clearly put down her pack and slid on her backside down the hill, she found herself gathered against him.

“Hey!”

“It is as good a way to go down as any.” Magnus dropped into the snow, with her riding on his thighs. They tobogganed down the hillside, Magnus roaring with delight, while she stifled laughter. They pitched into more snow as Hedda had done at the bottom of their giddy slide.

“You
turnip!
”
Elfrida could suppress her giggles no longer. She scooped a handful of snow and smeared her laughing companion with it.

“
No harm.
”
Magnus snared her against him, tickling her through the rough, baggy tunic until she begged him to stop.
“
We have done no more than warriors,
”
he panted, blowing a rough
“
kiss
”
on the back of her neck.
“
I have seen soldiers play and laugh, before battle and in it.
”