Lindsay Townsend (13 page)

Magnus nodded, thinking of Alice’s likely response to
that statement as he smelled the man’s shame and frustration. In essence,
however, what the fellow admitted was the stark truth. The men had to work in
the fields or forest and the women at home. It was how they survived.

“Move from these villages—” he began, but the headman
interrupted.

“We will not be driven from our homes!”

“Move the young women,” Magnus continued steadily.
“They can come to my manor, and my people will guard them.”

“They will not go.”

You do not want them to go
, Magnus translated in his mind.

The headman glowered at him across the fire. “You said
you would find the beast! You are Sir Magnus, the famed warrior of the East! We
had heard of your exploits in arms even here, and when we sent the messenger we
could scarcely hope that you would come. I know we cannot offer much gold, but
for the renown of such a chase, we thought it would be enough.”

“Renown feeds no bellies,” Magnus answered dryly, “but
you need not fret. I have never yet turned away from helping a maid, be she
free or bond.”

“So you will find the beast?”

“I will, but it will take me time and many of my men.
You say the monster is hard to track.” Magnus stirred the fire again. He wanted
more light to give these old men heart. “I will catch it,” he vowed. “The more
you tell me, the better. Have you anything of the creature’s?”

A sturdy peasant, straighter and more lithe than the
huddled group by the fire, stepped from the wall shadows and tossed him a
bundle. Fumbling in the dark, Magnus accidentally dropped the rough cloth
parcel into the rushes and heard the peasant mutter something that the headman
chose not to translate. Magnus guessed it would be about his scars and missing
hand and ignored it, too. He did not have to justify his fighting skills to any
low-born farmer. He scrabbled for and retrieved the parcel as the old men burst
into squalls of chatter, hard and urgent as showers of hail. Guessing that he
was in for more long-winded exclamations, he shifted on the stool, then warned
himself sternly to listen.

I will look tonight, too. For as long as there is
light, and I can see any kind of trail, I will look. But for the trouble to
afflict this village and two more! It is worse than I realized.

Returning from the beehives at the end of her garden,
Elfrida was about to walk through the village to the hut of the headman when
she saw Walter stumbling toward her. His homely face was stark with horror, and
as soon as he spotted her, he began to shout.

“He has her! I cannot find them! I have looked
everywhere!”

He slumped to his knees in the slush and dropped
further, his breath spurting in choking gasps. Elfrida reached him as he rolled
onto his back, still wheezing. Her own breath stopped as she saw the claw marks
on his arms and throat. She swung the lantern round but saw nothing that should
not be there in the garden.

“Christina?” she croaked, her throat closing with
dread.

“Alive, I swear it! I heard her crying as she was
carried off.”

Elfrida found she could breathe again. “Have you
roused the men?” she demanded, hearing now, too late, the wail of horns and of
many voices. Already in the nearby woodland she saw the bobbing flares of
torches and prayed they did not search in vain.

Let her be alive, oh Lord. Let her be safe!

Walter clutched her, dragging her down into the snow
with him. “He came from nowhere, like a great spider. I heard nothing.”

Why did I not hear? Christina taken, and I heard
nothing!
“Had he a horse? Was he
alone?”

Walter shook his head. He had begun to shake. “He was
dark as a spider...ugly... moved quicker than lightning. Had her snatched and
gone.... I went after them.... He slashed at me.”

Elfrida knocked off Walter’s trembling arms and
sprinted to the house, leaving him prone in the snow.

“Christina! Christina!” she shrieked, her voice higher
than anyone’s, but her sister was not safe at home. Only a scrap of her blue
veil remained in their hut, caught on one of the roof struts. She must have
rushed out to greet Walter, as she thought, and run straight into—what?

Elfrida dashed into the yard, screaming her sister’s
name. She flung the lantern into a stack of hay and screamed again as the
precious winter hay burned up in towering, crackling flames, giving much-needed
light. “Christina!”

The hay blazed, and she could see the other villagers,
the other houses and gardens, the paths through the hamlet and the trees
beyond, but there was no sign or shape of Christina.

She was gone, as Walter said, carried off into the
wilderness by a monster.

Elfrida dropped the twigs she had been using as
divining rods into the snow. This clearing was the place. Here was where she
would make her stand.

After two days without sleep or food, she was drained
of all feeling, dry from crying. Day and night she had sought everywhere for
Christina. Walter had been constantly at her side, calling, praying, and urging
the dog he had meant to give Christina, to seek her out. At sunset on the
second day, the village headman had compelled Walter to go to church, to leave
offerings to the local saint for Christina’s safe recovery. He had tried to
order Elfrida, but she had pleaded “woman’s trouble” as an excuse not to enter
the church and finally she was alone. Her head ached and buzzed as if filled
with bees, but the thudding panic was gone.

Swiftly, as the sinking sun bled into darkness in the
west, she began to search for Christina by witch ways. She had done this from the
start, but now, without Walter’s anxious, hovering presence, she felt her power
growing. She chanted to the wood elves, promising them a year and a day of ale
if she they helped her. She tossed Christina’s veil high into the cold, still
air, calling on the old gods Gog and Magog to point out the track of the beast.
She thought of her sister, her long blonde hair, blue eyes, and sweet face and
whispered, Where now, where now?

She drew a picture in her mind of the great forest and
the villages she knew: Great Yarr, Top Yarr, where she lived, Lower Yarr and
Selton, the new place. She imagined the cat’s cradle of paths to and fro from
settlement to settlement. Christina was light to carry, but even a child was
too heavy to bear away on such narrow woodland tracks, and surely smashed twigs
would have marked the beast’s passage?

Had he flown away, then?

“Be he a demon in flight, or be he as nimble as a
squirrel in the treetops, I will have him!” she shouted, striking an oak tree
to seal her promise. She found two branches beneath the tree and took them as
the oak’s gift, using them to divine where in these woods Christina had been
taken.

Here in this clearing lay a clear sign, a long strand
of blonde hair trailing across the snow in a golden thread. Gold but no red,
praise God, so she could hope her sister still lived.

Elfrida turned slowly in this small circle, glimpsing
the path of the sun and the rising new moon through a screen of holly and oak
trees. About her the woods seemed deathly quiet, and yet she felt she was being
watched by something with a mind—that, or something was coming. She knew it
from the raised hairs on the back of her neck.

Coming, not watching. It cannot see me yet, I vow, so
I have time.

Had she time enough? She must return to the village,
to change her clothes, and to make ready.

She listened intently, reaching out with all her
senses, but again her first instinct remained compelling. The beast was in this
forest, and he would be drawn closer by the right inducements.

“And I know what those are,” she said aloud, turning
to hurry back to the home that was not a home, now that Christina was gone.

Walter had not admitted anything to her, not directly,
but from his muttered remarks and fractured exclamations as he feverishly
searched alongside her for his betrothed, Elfrida had learned a great deal.

“She is the third!” Walter had cried out, beating his
fists against the walls of their empty hut. “The third in her wedding garb, and
the most beautiful: one black-haired, one brown, and my Christina!”

He had refused to say more, even when Elfrida had
threatened to curse him, but his outburst told her what he and the elders had
been hiding from the village women. The brute who had carried off Christina had
kidnapped other pretty young girls, also dressed in their wedding gowns. He
stole brides.

I will dress myself as a bride and return here with my
own wedding feast, with food and drink in abundance. Let him think me a bridal
sacrifice, his red-haired bride, left for him by the village. And, by Christ and
all his saints, this time I will be ready for him!

It is a blessing I am a healer and have so many
potions ready prepared. If I put sleeping draughts in the wine, food, and
sweets, surely I can tempt the beast to take some? I can smear tinctures of poppy
on my skin and clothes, so any taste will induce sleep.

Sleep, not death, for she had to know where he had
taken Christina.

I will coax the truth from the groggy monster, and
then the village men can have him.

Part of her knew she was being wild, unreasonable,
that she should talk to Walter, tell the villagers, but she did not care. Talk
would waste more precious hours, and they might even try to stop her. For her
sister she would do anything, risk anything. But she must hurry, she must do
something, and she had little time.

It was full dark before Elfrida was finished, midnight
on the day after the start of Advent, two days after Christina should have been
married. She shivered in the glinting snow, her breath suspended between the
frosted, white ground and the black, star-clad sky.

She glanced over the long boulder she had used as an
offering table for her wine and food, not allowing herself to think too closely
about what she had done. She had lit a small fire and banked it so that it
would burn until morning, to stop her freezing and to keep wolves at bay, and
now by its tumbling flames she saw her own small, tethered shadow writhing on
the forest floor.

She would not dwell on what could go wrong, and she
fought down her night terrors over Christina, lest they become real through her
thoughts. She lifted up her head and stared above the webbing of treetops to
the bright stars beyond, reciting a praise chant to herself. She was a warrior
of magic, ready to ensnare and defeat the beast.

“I have loosened my hair as a virgin. I am dressed in
a green gown, unworn before today. My shoes are made of the softest fur, my
veil and sleeves are edged with gold, and my waist is belted in silver. There
is mutton for my feast, and dates and ginger, wine and mead and honey. I am a
willing sacrifice. I am the forest bride, waiting for my lord—”

Her voice broke. Advent was meant to be a time of
fasting, and she had no lord. None of the menfolk of Yarr would dare to take
Elfrida the wisewoman and witch to be his wife. She knew the rumors—men always
gossiped more than women—and all were depressing in their petty spitefulness.
They called her a scold because she answered back.

“I need no man,” she said aloud, but the hurt
remained. Was she not young enough, fertile enough,
pretty
enough?

Keep to your task
, Elfrida reminded herself.
You are the forest bride, a willing
virgin sacrifice.

She had tied herself between two tall lime trees,
sometimes struggling against her loose bonds as if she could not break free.
She could, of course, but any approaching monster would not know that, and she
wanted to bait the creature to come close—close enough to drink her drugged
flask of wine and eat her drugged “wedding” cakes. Let him come near so she
could prick him with her knife and tell him, in exquisite detail, how she could
bewitch him. He would fear her, oh yes, he would...

She heard a blackbird caroling alarms and knew that
something was coming, closing steadily, with the stealth of a hunter. She
strained on her false bonds, peering into the semidarkness, aware that the fire
would keep wild creatures away. Her back chilled as she sensed an approach from
downwind, behind her, and as she listened to a tumble of snow from a nearby
birch tree, she heard a second fall of snow from a pine closer by. Whoever,
whatever, was creeping up was somehow shaking the trees, using the snowfalls as
cover to disguise its own movement.

A cunning brute, then, but she was bold. In one hand
she clutched her small dagger, ready. In her other, she had the tiny packet of
inflammables that she now hurled into the fire.

“Come, husband!” she challenged, as the fire erupted
into white-hot dragon tongues of leaping flame, illuminating half the clearing
like a noonday sun. “Come now!”

She thrust her breasts and then her hips forward,
aping the actions that wives had sometimes described to her when they visited
her to ask for a love philter. She shook her long, red hair and kissed the
sooty, icy air. “Come to me!”