Townsend, Lindsay - The Snow Bride (BookStrand Publishing Romance) (33 page)

Joseph had promised him there would be no trouble. Joseph, another clever devil, always so learned, always so secret, always so proud and demanding, had gawped into that filthy mirror of his and told him that Magnus of Norton Mayfield was his for the taking. Just give him the girl, was what he had said several times.

And now the redheaded wench was missing.

Gregory Denzil hawked and spat into the snow, aware of riding without a purpose, of riding simply to spur on his men, to sober them up and give them balls enough to storm his own keep.

It would be best, too, if he could find the girl. Joseph had been insistent about her, and surely she could not have got far in this filthy snowstorm?

Whatever his fool protestations, Magnus of Norton Mayfield would not be seeking her. He had what he wanted now, the keep, the loot. “The only things that ugly bastard has ever cared for are himself and his sword,” Gregory Denzil muttered, hot to the ears at how he had been duped. Why should it be otherwise? “For him, the wench can freeze to death. He has what he wants.”

But Joseph would not see it in that hard, practical, sensible way. If Joseph learned that the redhead was lost in the woods—and somehow Joseph always learned—he would demand a search. Joseph wanted that redhead, and Gregory knew there would be hell to pay if he did not get her.

“Find me that girl!” he yelled as a wave of icy sweat broke out of him. “A bag of gold to whoever spots her! Find her! Find her now!”

Chapter 24

Elfrida lay in a stream of warmth, smooth as the oils she used to help the old of Top Yarr with their winter aches and pains. For the first time in days, she was at peace. There was no need for haste or pain, no reason to struggle. She lay bathed in softness, surrounded by a soft, reflective light, milky as a pearl.

Her father strolled by in his holiday clothes of his best blue-and-scarlet tunic, blue shoes, and blue hat. He smiled and waved to her.

Her mother looked up to her from where she was kneeling in her garden plot, amidst lavender and sage and fat hen, and nodded.

Elfrida stroked the gold-coin amulet around her throat, the metal warm against her skin. She closed her eyes, feeling her breathing and her heartbeat slow. She was surprised she had not seen Magnus or Christina yet.

What am I dressed in
? she wondered, and opened her eyes.

She glanced down but could not see her body, only the same misty white. Her father and mother were gone and when she looked up, so was the vault of heaven and the pale, watery-looking sun.

No, that should be the stars. It is nighttime.

She heard a long, deep crack, like a rending fissure in ice. The clay figure from the blue tower lay broken at her feet. Even as she tried to cross herself, one of the three smashed-in heads of the figure became Magnus’s, his face contorted in overwhelming pain.

“No!” she cried, reaching out to comfort him.

His face changed, growing longer and narrower, with dark-blue eyes and a slash of pale lips.

“Get away!” she yelled as the figure re-formed before her.

“I see my rival now, Snow Bride,” said the three heads, all of them wearing the same long, narrow face, each head fixing her with cold, dark-blue eyes. “He broke what is mine, now I break him and take what is his.”

The figure grew a second time, long and lanky, with thin, attenuated limbs and a single head. A graybeard, older than she was, Elfrida realized fiercely as she scrambled to her feet.

“You are weak, old man,” she challenged, hurling scorn like a knife.

He chuckled in return, turning her words into dust. “Still ranting, Snow Bride? You are mistaken in me and in that clod you wish for as a husband.”

Elfrida tried not to think of Magnus but failed. His strapping, muscular frame rose between them, but he had his back to her and would not turn round, even when she tugged with all her weight on his arm.

“He wearies of you already,” the graybeard went on, smiling his contempt.

“He does not.” The denial was out before she could stop it.

“A hulking brute. He will expect his commands to be followed. He will demand you follow him. He will not forgive you, if you do not.”

Elfrida said nothing. Terror of Magnus’s reasonable demands, which she had already flouted, and of her own memories—of her times in bed with him and her own dazzled submission—had her biting the inside of her lip, desperate to use pain as a distraction.

This graybeard must not see us together! That is ours, not his, no part of it is his.

She
held her breath, raked her fingernails into her palms, stared at the sky without blinking. “I fear no evil,” she burst out, when her lungs were scalding in her chest.

“You should, Snow Bride.”

The graybeard put a hand onto her shoulder, and she could not stop him. Through a sickening haze of pain, she felt the bone beneath grate and grind as even her skin tried to escape.

“No more!” She chopped at his hand, throwing him off her, and punched through a blanket of snow.

“Ah! Ah.” Jolted by fresh pain out of her vision and into stark reality, she cradled her bleeding knuckles with her other hand. Her body felt stuck full of needles and pins. The icy cold rent at her, and it would have been easy, so comforting, to lie down again in the soft white snow and sleep.

Get up!
she told herself and swayed onto her knees.

Get up!
Magnus roared in her head, and she tottered to her feet.

Please do not be angry with me for disobeying you
, she begged as she blundered on a few paces. She could not believe how chilled she was, how hard it seemed to drag her feet on, step after step. And for what did she strive? In falling, she had lost the path back to Castle Denzil.

She scrambled awkwardly up a slope, slithering back often and slipping, once pitching onto her already frozen hands. Slowly, painfully, she gained the summit, but once there, she moaned, choking on a fresh intake of flaying cold.

“I have gone backward!” She was no farther on and, worse, no wiser. She peered, half-blind, though the stunted trees and drizzling snow, a mean ice wind clawing at her face and breasts, and admitted she was lost.

Elfrida sank to her knees.
I have failed Christina. I have failed Magnus. I should never have left the wooden tower, and this is my punishment.

She licked her sore, chapped lips, her throat dry and aching. The raw cold nipped spitefully at her nose and ears, and the snow gleefully filled her shoes. Everywhere far away was dark, everywhere closer a glinting blue-white. Had she been snug within her house, safe, watching the snow while drinking a blackberry tisane, she would have called it pretty.

It was terrible now. A breeze rippled along the tip of a long mound of snow, spinning dancing flakes into the air, tormenting her with more cold. Her feet were numb, her legs throbbing.

She forced her reluctant, shivering body to turn. A spray of mistletoe bobbed before her, then the wind whipped it away.

I must go away from the mistletoe woods. That is where the necromancer dwells. To return there is to go back into evil
.

She turned again. At first she thought it was mist, then put out a hand and caught icy prickles along her arm. The snow was falling more steadily and was gaining on her, covering her tracks.

She saw a holly tree, recognized it by its shape and leaves and slogged a slow and wavering way toward it. The holly was a marker, and even those without magic knew it was a sacred tree. Bald Father John called it the crown of Christ.

She was partway across a bank, closing on the holly, when she heard the thumping of horses’ hooves along another forest track, and then the shouts of men.

They are hunting me!

Instinct compelled, and she obeyed it. Dropping to her belly, she coiled up tight like a hedgehog, dragging her cloak hood over her bright, revealing hair.

She knew, without questioning how she knew, that this was not Magnus who sought her. She lay in a lair of snow and broken branches, listening, praying these men had no dogs with them, or no scent of hers, and a terrifying question beat in her head like a moth around a lantern flame.

Has Magnus betrayed me in the end? Has he sent these hunters?

* * * *

Gregory Denzil spotted the fluttering shadow, shifting and flickering between the trees. He wheeled his horse round, prepared to spur it up the slope, then hesitated. Their search had brought them to the edge of the oak wood, which Joseph counted as part of
his
kingdom. Wanting to be sure, he batted the falling snow aside with his gloved hand and scowled up into the trees.

Yes, there it was, bunches of the filthy stuff. Seeing it, he drew rein, Joseph’s high, dark warning sparking along his veins and in his clearing head.

“The place of mistletoe is mine. No one enters those woods without my permission, or if they do go in, they will not come out.”

“Do we go on, sir?” called one of Gregory Denzil’s men, one of the clever grumblers, he noted.

“Go!” he bellowed, and why not? Joseph was not here, and that fluttering shape had a very womanly look. Better yet, it was a solitary flutter, a single, lost soul and certainly not Joseph, because it was small.

He dug his heels into his horse’s flanks, and the bay shied, rearing at some imagined danger in a flurry of snow and laying back its black-tipped ears. He smacked it hard across the neck and ignored its shiver, forcing it deeper into the woodland by force of will.

He pointed when he was sure the beast would not fling him into the fast-approaching holly tree. “Through there and past that ditch, over the bank! After her!”

“Ha!” yelled his men behind him as he cantered ahead, leaning low over his nag’s neck to encourage the beast to gallop. He saw a flash of red amidst the dribbling snow and the gray tree trunks and rode on harder, grinning at the thrill of the chase.

It was almost too easy...

A bough of mistletoe smacked against his forehead, berries bursting against the bridge of his nose and juice tricking down his face. Gregory Denzil howled and reined in a little and spat, spat until his mouth was almost dry. He wanted no part of those filthy, off-white berries inside him. Those were Joseph’s, part of Joseph’s undead tricks, and he wanted none near him. He furiously mopped his face, ducked under an upcoming branch of oak and stared at the mess of tracks in the snow. He should slow or dismount to understand them properly, but he wanted to be out of this wood now, away from where the gnarled oaks poked you in the back or ribs, and ravens and magpies roosted, all birds of ill omen, all creatures of Joseph’s.

He saw the scrap of brown flutter again between the trees, lower than the height of a man, and recognized it as cloth. Joy exulted in him, hot and dizzying as a stew whore. “I have you!” he cried and rode the rag down, letting the horse leap the quivering body. He dismounted in a snow-spurting strut of triumph, gleeful in victory. Smiling, he extended his hand.

“Come now, my dainty, for you are ours—”

He ripped back the brown cloak from the patch of snow and discovered only more snow. The hounds, lolling in late, loose-tongued and still unsteady, wandered uselessly over the patch. The redheaded wench, if she had ever been there, was gone.

Chapter 25

Magnus hammered on the faded, blue door to the old wooden tower. Behind him his men and horses shifted and stamped, trying to keep warm. It had been a hard slog through bitter, piling snow, but he was here.