Townsend, Lindsay - The Snow Bride (BookStrand Publishing Romance) Read Online Free Page B

to his horse.
    “Even if I could, I would not leave,” he said.
    She backed away to the door and, rising, peered through a small gap between roof and doorway, her lips moving as she seemed to count the falling ribbons of snow. Suddenly, shockingly, she dropped to her knees and pleaded. He understood her name and thought he heard another name, but he shook his head at the rest.
    “I am no Forest Grendel,” he said, sounding as calm as the snow outside while within he boiled with shame. He had thought her anxious for him not of him, a rare indulgence, but now it seemed this scrap of a girl did think him a monster.
    But she tapped her chest. “Elfrida.” She pointed to the fire.
    “Are you cold?” He wrapped arms about himself and pretended to shiver.
    A single, powerful negative was her response.
    “Hot?”
    She replied with a name, “Christina.”
    “Is she your child?” Magnus picked up a branch and cradled it, as if rocking a baby.
    Elfrida frowned. “Magnus?” She too rocked a branch.
    “No,” he said and shook his head.
    “ Forest Grendel?” She ran the words together.
    “ No! ” His own shout shocked him, and her. She paled and wiped her eyes. He was shamed to have made her cry. “I am sorry.”

    * * * *

    Elfrida felt more tears trickle down her face and prayed that her strange companion, whoever, whatever, he was, would not see them. Dizzy again, she slid down the door of the hut and sat on the saddle, blinking to clear her blurred vision and wishing she was either hot or cold, not both at once. Questions pounded in her aching head. Where was Christina? What pox had struck her? Who was Magnus, a Viking without a ship?
    He was fussing with a small wooden cup and a pail—no, it was a metal helm of some kind, used as a pail—and drinking some kind of milky substance from within it. He showed her the cup, smacked his ragged lips, and offered her a drink.
    She accepted, deciding he had no need to drug or poison her, not with her limbs already feeling so heavy and the small of her back aching as it did usually only after harvest. The warm water was curiously soothing, and she sipped it gratefully, wondering for a wild instant if she should dash it into his eyes instead and flee the hut. But Magnus had very kind, crinkled eyes for a Viking, or a beast.
    And even if she could scald him and could escape him and lumber out into the woods, what then? She dared not travel in this snowstorm, and if her pox was the great one, she would soon be too sick to move.
    She drained the cup, surprised to find she had finished her water. Magnus gestured with his battered right arm. She nodded, allowing him to take the cup in his whole hand while she studied the stump of his right. No claws there, so had she imagined them? And those deep grooves across his face—surely those could not be the result of nature? So why had this man not died of his wounds?
    Elfrida remembered a tinker who had stayed at her house and spoken of distant lands beyond the forest, beyond even the sea. “ Jerusalem ?” she asked, jerking her eyes at his missing hand. The holy city was the one place she had heard of, outside England .
    Magnus grinned, turning his already ugly looks into a devil’s face, as she fought down a rush of fear.
    “Azaz,” he replied, waving his stump and his foot—a missing foot, replaced by a wooden stump, Elfrida realized with a jolt of pity. With his good hand he was tracing a deep groove from his jaw to his nose, where the tip of his nose was also missing, and now he drew a half-moon in the air, saying more.
    He had a deep, pleasing voice, and she guessed he was sensible, but she had no idea still what he was saying. He grinned again and moved.
    “Do not!” She snatched at his hand as he seemed about to hack at his face with his eating knife. She caught his wrist, and it was like gripping a bar of iron. She could not budge his arm. Again he said something, very slowly.
    “Wounds in battle, I understand,” she