Townsend, Lindsay - The Snow Bride (BookStrand Publishing Romance) by Lindsay Townsend Read Free Book Online

wooden cup so fiercely she heard it crack. “By what right do they choose and not say a word?”
    Magnus scratched at one of his deeper scars. “It is the way of the world. You are freer here than in Outremer, where women are kept indoors.”
    “Thank you. That is such a comfort,” snapped Elfrida. She could feel mead trickling down between her fingers, and her anger tightened another notch. “Christina would be safe now, if they had told us!”
    “Would she have left her betrothed, especially so close to her wedding?” Magnus asked patiently.
    Elfrida closed her eyes and said nothing.
    “Once my men begin work on the ditches, your villagers will have some explaining to do.”
    “Good!” Elfrida ground the fingers of her free hand into her aching eyes. Her limbs itched and flamed, and she no longer had any appetite.
    “Do you know anything of this orphan girl?”
    “Why her particularly?”
    “Because it was obvious from what the headman told me that she had no one to stand for her.”
    Elfrida took a deep breath. “I would have spoken for her, but I knew nothing!” In a fury, she dashed her hand against her forehead, forgetting she was gripping the wooden cup, and immediately saw a host of green lights.
    “I have something of hers,” Magnus remarked quietly. “Part of a blue veil found inside the lean-to. The place where she lived,” he added.
    “The beast came inside her home? Did she let him in? Did he force the door?”
    “From what I was told, I think the creature slipped in through the roof.”
    Which explained Walter’s prodding of the thatch when he had last visited Christina, Elfrida thought, abruptly chilled as she imagined a shadowy, hulking form bursting into a hut from above.
    Was the monster as big as Magnus?
    She glanced at him, her fingers absently scratching at the spots in her hair. He looked at her steadily.
    “I am not him,” he said, “and you should not do that.”
    Elfrida’s hand flew down to her lap. “Blue veil, you say?” she croaked, snatching at the first thing she could to cover her embarrassment. “My sister’s wedding veil is blue.”
    “One of the doors in my dream of the creature was blue.”
    Elfrida’s interest sharpened, even as she realized that Magnus had mentioned his dream to purposely divert her. But then, she worked in dreams. Dreams were important. “Tell me all.”
    She listened carefully to Magnus’s halting account, not shaming him by asking what he was leaving out in his tale of the river and the doors. Men did not feel easy discussing dreams.
    “Who are Alice and Peter?”
    “The true friends of my heart and hearth. Hellsbane—Peter of the Mount—was a fellow crusader, fighting with me in Outremer. He has carried me off the field of battle more than once.”
    “And you him,” Elfrida guessed.
    Magnus waved this off. “His fight name is Hellsbane. Alice gave him that name.”
    “And what is she?”
    “His wife.” Magnus puffed out his cheeks, making himself an ugly, jolly demon. “Like you, she is a healer, a maker of potions. But a lady.”
    Shrugging off the but , Elfrida wondered what Alice the lady looked like, then found her thought answered.
    “She is small, like you, and pretty, with long, black hair and bright, blue eyes. She wears blue, also. The Forest Grendel would have stolen her away had she lived hereabouts and Peter been dead and in his grave.”
    “The monster has his dark-haired bride,” Elfrida reminded him, feeling a pang of envy at the warm way Magnus described the lady Alice, “but no auburn yet.”
    “You cannot put yourself up as bait again.”
    “No one will stop me.”
    Magnus shook his head. “You have some days before you can even entertain such foolishness.”
    “Men like the outward show. I know that all too well. I have never seen a handsome man with an ugly wife.”
    Magnus’s brown eyes twinkled. “You would at court and in kingly circles. A handsome dowry can work marvels for a plain