She is Beauty, but is he the Beast? A Medieval Romance. New excerpt

'The Snow Bride' - Medieval Historical Romance - New Excerpt

Here's a new excerpt from my medieval historical romance, The Snow Bride. The hero and heroine are in a tower belonging to their enemy, the necromancer.

Excerpt:

Making torches, lighting them, took some little time. Magnus could sense Elfrida’s tension and almost see her fears tearing at her like the harpies preyed on their hapless victims in the old tales that he had heard around campfires in Outremer. She stayed within the tower, calling encouragement to Christina and praying aloud, “To cleanse this space,” she told him. She did not attempt to move farther than the few steps they had come from the threshold, for which he was grateful.
“Your sister must be sleeping deeply,” he said when she fell silent and despondent after no replies. “It is the time of winter dark and solid slumber.”
“Or she is drugged,” Elfrida answered.
 Once he spotted her gazing at him, a cool, farsighted, assessing stare. Where he considered pits and traps, she concerned herself with magical dangers. He knew she felt responsible for his safety, a strange and queer reversal of nature to him, but one he accepted that he could not shake her from.
All will be better with more light, he told himself, fending off a vague feeling of being watched.
Baldwin finally brought two spitting torches. Magnus told the youth to keep up and took a torch from him. “Do you stay here?” he asked Elfrida.
She shook her head—he had not expected otherwise—and he put her between himself and Baldwin. Leading the way, Magnus began to pick a careful path across the nails and snares and wooden stakes, walking steadily and lifting his feet high. All the while, puffing like a small, furious dragon at his back, he could hear Elfrida and sense her taut, barely reined-in impatience. She fairly bristled with it. Not far and all will be well, he wanted to say to comfort her, but he said nothing, for they had reached the stairs, and it might not be true.
Gray, narrow, worn, and unlit, the stairs were also slimy on certain treads. Spilled oil or melted candle wax? he speculated, calling out softly in the old tongue and his own dialect, so Baldwin would know, “Grease, here, step over.” He did not lower his torch. Some things were best left as a mystery.
“Christina, you are safe, beloved. Walter is waiting for you, and all is prepared for your return.”
Elfrida was becoming more urgent and desperate in her wishes. He longed to shield her from this trial but knew it was impossible.
She is a warrior of magic, besides, and a warrior always faces things. She would never forgive me if I kept her out of this.
Yet it was so ponderous, step after step, climbing in the dark, with the stair walls and roof feeling to close in around them, pressing down and choking...
Unless that is just me. Since early youth he had loathed shut-in places, which was why in any siege he had always volunteered for any digging or mining. Now the disgusting, spineless fears of his boyhood shook down the backs of his legs.
If Christina is dead, will Elfrida blame me? No, she will not..
He trod on an object that cracked and slithered beneath his peg foot. He checked the cry bubbling in his throat and kicked the unknown thing away, down the stairs. He heard it flopping into the darkness and vowed to burn the whole tower with fire once they were done.
If Christina is dead or alive, will Elfrida return to her village? Will she want to stay there? Ask her, man, and find out!
He was wary of asking and at the same time eager to ask. As much as Elfrida wanted to see her sister, he wanted to know her mind.
It is my future. Have the stakes ever been so high?
He ran up three more steps and reached the first floor. The staircase continued higher, but now there was a tiny, cramped passageway, again unlit, and at its end, a door.
A blue door, he realized, hearing Elfrida’s gasp of recognition. He spun about and gripped her shoulder tightly, in a gesture of warning and support, then let her go.
He reached out and touched the door with his stump. Elfrida said nothing, did not try to stop him, but he glanced at her for confirmation.
She nodded, her own hands clenched in tight fists, her face unreadable.
“Baldwin.” He handed the lad his torch and set his shoulder to the door, drawing out his knife—better a knife than a sword in such close quarters.
Surprise was impossible, for if there was a guard, he must have heard their plodding trail, so Magnus called a final warning.
“Release your prisoners unharmed and you shall not be injured or killed. Yield now.”
He pushed on the stout wood, astonished to find the door unlocked, and entered.


* * * *

The Snow Bride
She is Beauty, but is he the Beast?

From Amazon here
Amazon UK here
Free with Kindle Umlimited.
Part 1 of The Knight and the Witch Series.
Also a sequel, 'A Summer Bewitchment,' coming soon

Lindsay Townsend

Medieval Romance -THE SNOW BRIDE by Lindsay Townsend. New Excerpt

The Snow Bride

She is Beauty, but is he the Beast?

Elfrida, spirited, caring, and beautiful, is also alone. She is the "witch of the woods," and no man dares to ask for her hand in marriage until a beast comes stalking brides and steals away her sister. Desperate, the lovely Elfrida offers herself as a sacrifice, as bridal bait, and she is seized by a man with fearful scars. Is he the beast?

In the depths of a frozen midwinter, in the heart of the woodland, Sir Magnus, battle-hardened knight of the Crusades, searches ceaselessly for three missing brides, pitting his wits and weapons against a nameless stalker of the snowy forest. Disfigured and hideously scarred, Magnus has finished with love, he thinks, until he rescues a fourth "bride," the beautiful, red-haired Elfrida, whose innocent touch ignites in him a fierce passion that satisfies his deepest yearnings and darkest desires.

Genre: Historical
Length: 92,037 words

Chapter 5

As they rode within sight of the thatched roofs of Lower Yarr, Magnus squeezed Elfrida’s waist. “You know what to do?” he whispered against her ear.

“We have been over this plan a score of times,” Elfrida replied, quelling the waspish tone in her voice so that Mark, riding alongside, could not accuse her of scolding. “You are right, it should work.”

She and Magnus had talked at length at first light, over a breakfast of thick porridge that even now sat in her stomach like a stone. Magnus had seemed shy then, looking at the monster’s blue cup instead of her, but during the long ride over, he had put her before him on his horse and then clamped his body behind her like moss on a boulder.

Riding for her was strange and new, but she sensed that even with a missing hand and foot Magnus was an excellent horseman. Once she had asked if they need sit so closely, but he had merely grunted and said the saddle made it so. After that he had urged the bay to a burst of speed, plowing through the fresh snow and scattering great clouds of white chill flakes everywhere so that speech became impossible.

Now they were here, at a village she knew but had rarely visited. Those seeking her cures or help came to her, instead. Elfrida pulled the hood of her cloak over her hair so she could stare unchallenged, and she looked about.

It was not as pretty as Top Yarr, she decided, satisfied that the village’s great house, wells, homes and snow-covered gardens were no better than those of her village. As they galloped down the track, a few faces she knew peered out from window shutters, and several old men hobbled on sticks out of doors.

She and Magnus and a troop of other horsemen swept on to the village’s meeting house, home of the headman Adam de Shaghe, whose wife she had once helped in a matter of love magic.

And I have other spells and charms to set, other villagers to help, if not here, then at Selton and Great Yarr. But they must wait. Christina comes first.

“You understand their speech?” Magnus asked for the sixth time.

“Very well. And you know to back me, whatever I demand?”

His long thighs stroked briefly against hers as he hugged her. “To the hilts.”

Warmed by his vow, she touched his hand in return, then gave her full attention to Adam de Shaghe and his council, who were gathering by the village cross to meet them.

As they had agreed, Magnus and his men dismounted, but Elfrida remained on horseback. Sitting straight and proudly in the saddle, she tossed back the hood of her cloak. Her red hair was the brightest thing in the village clearing, and her itching spots had faded to red blemishes so that she seemed a thing of fury. She sounded it, too, her clear voice ringing to the treetops.

* * * *

THE SNOW BRIDE  http://amzn.to/15GhvMX         

UK http://amzn.to/1GiJtta

EXCERPT http://www.bookstrand.com/the-snow-bride

ChapterOne http://bit.ly/2tfJq5c

Also in print, nook, and Audio

Summer Magic for Halloween - New Excerpt for 'A Summer Bewitchment' by Lindsay Townsend

For Halloween, here is a new excerpt from my medieval historical romance, "A Summer Bewitchment". The heroine, Elfrida, is a witch. She is about to try a magic ritual to discover the whereabouts of 7 kidnapped maidens and the mysterious stranger who took them. Her husband, Sir Magnus, is also in the woods to protect her...

Excerpt

                                                                                  Chapter 3


Outside in the warm, still evening they walked arm in arm, both carrying panniers, and Elfrida shared what she knew of the stranger with Magnus. He in turn told her what he had learned of Rowena from the priest. It was, she thought, strangely companionable, but she wished they were speaking of less dark, mysterious matters.
“Valerian is a magic plant,” she explained, skirting carefully around a flowering elder bush. “It has many uses. One is as a lure. To seduce.”
“And the hare’s foot?” Magnus nodded to the elder bush as he stalked by, a grudging acknowledgement. “The rosemary I know from you is a guardian against evil spirits, so is that good?”
“Because he protects himself from demons and the like does not mean he is not evil himself.”
“Well spoken! The stranger’s mention of a Holy Mother?”
“The hare protects him from all danger. It is a creature of magic. The mother he reveres may be the Virgin, but he worships her in older ways.”
Magnus raised his black brows in silent inquiry.
“The wreath he leaves in thanks and sacrifice, of valerian and elder blossom, marigold, wild thyme and daisy, is made of flowers pleasing to the older gods. I have seen such posies left at ancient standing stones and statues, at rock carvings of the horned god.”
Her striding companion crossed himself. “Rowena is very pretty, so Father Jerome tells me.”
Elfrida nodded, unsurprised. “And docile, too?”
“Indeed. The priest claims they had no notion she might be in any way unhappy at being mewed up in a nunnery.” He scowled, his fingers tightening on his pannier.
“I have heard she is a kind, easy child, but I do not like it, either,” Elfrida admitted. “Would you be more sanguine if she was ill-favored?”
“Not a bit!” He glowered at her. “Do not think to test me, elfling, not this evening, at least. Even without your plan to go star-clad, I like these matters less and less. Do you know what family the Lady Astrid and Rowena are part of? The Gifford clan! Mighty and proud and wealthy.”
“So why do they ask us for help? Why wait five days to ask?”
“Indeed! The ride from Warren Bruer is less than a day, but with haste they could have raced here in hours.”
“So why not come sooner and then we can begin a search? Laggardly, then,” Elfrida observed. “Contradictory.”
“Snail slow, and I agree, contrary. And for the rest”—Magnus puffed out his cheeks—“to them I am a middling landowner and you, I am sorry to say, are utterly beneath notice, in their eyes. They should have far stronger allies than us to draw on.”
“Unless they fear those allies.”
“Do they seem frightened to you?”
Elfrida pointed to a vigorous thicket of hazel coppice and considered as they closed on the straight and slender hazel poles. “The lady is irked, certainly, but I sense no dread from her, only displeasure.”
“At the interruption onto her well-ordered life.”
Trailing a hand across the bright green leaves of the nearest hazel, Elfrida felt a raw sadness, a sense of unrequited loss. “Rowena seems an agreeable child, yet for all that unmissed. Were any of these girls missed?”
“Perhaps the Giffords do not want her found. Perhaps none of the families—” Magnus stopped and cursed, spitting to the right against ill-luck. “That is foul!”
Placing a palm over his heart, Elfrida found it beating hard with rage, the indignation that was absent from both Lady Astrid and Father Jerome. “The moon is rising. I must make ready.”
He swept her against him in a rib-crushing embrace. “Prepare well. I shall keep watch.”
“I know.” Wishing to offer words of hope and resolution, Elfrida found herself saying, “We should talk to the maids of your latest guests, the maids and their servants and grooms.”
Magnus’s grin blazed in his tanned face. “Maybe they have brought a laundress with them after all.” He released her and stepped back with a bow, turning to face the way they had come.
Keeping watch, as he promised.
Satisfied, keeping a steady grip on her pannier, she wove through the close-growing hazels into the very heart of the stand.

* * * *

His wife’s magic was often secret. Magnus respected it, since only a fool would set out to deliberately anger a witch. Remembering their early, fierce quarrels, he strove to let her be, to work at whatever she must be doing behind that curtain of crisscrossed leaves and branches.
But it was so hard! To let his woman step between the worlds as she did—it was brutal. What spirits and demons might she have to face? All he could do was guard her body and he would do that well, indeed, but to wait, only wait…
I feel useless.
She is the warrior of magic.
So? Forbid her. Now Lady Astrid was whispering in his aching head. Get her with child.

* * * *

Using two leafy hazel twigs as divining rods, Elfrida knelt in the small, bluebell-filled knoll in the middle of the hazels. She was naked, her hair loosened, her feet bare. A slither of a breeze touched her belly like a hot tongue. Distracted, thinking of Magnus waiting just beyond the leafy curtain, imagining his tongue against her skin, she wished the breeze away.
“Help me.” Praying to the Virgin, to the mother, she held the rods over Rowena’s headdress. Her eyes blurred as she stared at the simple hand-stitched daisies on the yellow cloth, willing herself to search.
“Let these rods divine the treasure I seek,” she said aloud, rising to her feet and circling the pinned cloth, moving sun-wise and then widdershins. The twigs dipped and trembled in her numbing fingers but did not cross.
“Show me!” she whispered, thinking of a dainty, pretty dark-haired girl. “I offer blood as payment.”
She had a knife made of flint, an ancient blade, given to her by her mother. Tucking the twigs into her mass of hair, she slashed the sharp stone across her palm, clenching her fist to make the cut bleed fast.
“I offer sweet as payment.” Magnus had brought a flask of mead for them to share and she had begged him for it. Dripping the liquor close to the yellow cloth, she felt a prickling between her shoulders.
No mortal comes, but the wood elves are close.
“I offer a wheat girl as payment.” She tucked the corn dolly, one she had made from her own lands while she was yet a maiden, between the lush grass stems. The tiny golden figure looked to be sleeping in a green bed.
Green and gold, the colors of spring and summer, blended before her eyes, swirling and dancing in a wild spiral. She danced, too, following the spiral, beating the dry grasses with her heels, tossing her hair, lifting her arms.

"A Summer Bewitchment" is available in print and ebook from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Bookstrand and many other sellers. It is the second novel in the "Knight and His Witch" series, the first novel being "The Snow Bride".

Lindsay Townsend

A Summer Bewitchment by Lindsay Townsend. New Excerpt

In A Summer Bewitchment, my sequel to The Snow Bride, the witch Elfrida and disfigured knight Magnus are seeking desperately for kidnapped, missing girls. They wish to rescue all of them, whereas the nobility, represented by Lady Astrid and Tancred, are concerned with recovering only one.

EXCERPT.

That afternoon, while Lady Astrid dined in the great hall, Elfrida sought out the squire Baldwin. He had been with her and Magnus the previous winter, during their dangerous search for her sister Christina and the other missing brides. He knew she had magic.

A tall, slim young man who enjoyed his food, Baldwin listened closely to her request. Too courtly to pull a face, he nonetheless made his feelings clear.

“To ride with you now to Warren Bruer? Why, my lady?” He did not say them, but the words our lord will not like it also hovered on his lips.

“It is necessary. I sense my lord has need of me.” She did not want to say more or admit to the storm cloud that seemed to have coiled itself in the middle of her chest.

This is not my seething disappointment. It is Magnus’s, poor love.

“Our lord needs me, Pie,” she repeated, giving Baldwin the nickname she had made for him the previous winter.

“What of your guest?”

“Piers can attend her. Or if she wishes, Lady Astrid can ride on with Piers and join us. But we should leave now. The steward can give our excuses.”

Baldwin studied her a moment longer, drawing his brows together, then smiled, revealing the chipped tooth Elfrida found endearing.

“Do I try to protect you from my lord, or do you protect me from him, my lady?”

Relief flooded through Elfrida. “We ride and see.”

And pray we reach the place before whatever is troubling Magnus bursts like a pricked boil.

* * * *

Bundled in his cloak, with his saddle cloth as pallet and pillow, the girl slept, curled over like a fern frond. Magnus was glad to see her at peace but felt sick at heart. She had screamed herself hoarse when first spotting him, shrieked herself into utter helpless weariness before fleeing into sleep.

She was a redhead, too, which scraped his sense of shame even more rawly. He wanted to blame Tancred for cantering on ahead and hauling the girl to her feet to face him before any had troubled to tell her that he was maimed. He longed to rage at Mark, who had discovered her cowering in a thicket and done such a poor job of soothing her.

Most of all he wanted to be veiled like an eastern woman. Then he would not have inflicted his ruined, bestial looks on this terrified, confused lass.

Is she even one of the kidnapped girls? Tancred seems convinced of it, but we have no proof. We do not even have her name. How did she come here? Where did she escape from?

Questioning his second in command, he learned that Mark had come upon the girl without any warning, when the dogs had discovered her in the thicket and barked. The child would not or could not say how she had got there.

Magnus did what he could. He ordered Mark to set the hounds tracking again, using the girl’s scent. Tancred he sent off with another two of his men to the hamlets and villages, taking a lock of the girl’s red hair. He had made Tancred repeat to him what the girl looked like—small, slim, about fourteen, freckles, red hair, blue eyes—until he was certain the lad would remember.

Bad enough for the parents of these missing girls to have their hopes raised by a poor description. His men also knew what the lass looked like, and they would be tactful in speaking to the people.

Perhaps I should have kept Tancred with me, but he would keep jabbing the girl, wanting her to wake. The boy was anxious for his young kinswoman, well enough, but he seemed to think this harried, unconscious girl had no right to any finer feelings. “She is a peasant,” he answered, thrusting out his lower lip, when Magnus had warned him to go gently.

Was I ever such a thickheaded one as Tancred?

Giving orders, searching where the girl had first been found, those tasks he was glad to do. Returning to the stony roadway that skirted the little wood, Magnus spotted a new cartwheel groove in a seam of mud, but the cart or carriage had long vanished. Had she escaped from the cart? He could not tell.

Rising awkwardly from his crouch, Magnus turned on the road to check on his reluctant sleeper. The man guarding her nodded to him as she dozed still beneath the spreading branches of an oak tree. As he watched her, the flashing gilts of her hair pierced him. His heart ached and his missing foot hurt as he tried to recall what he should do next.

I am lost.

The worst of it was that he wanted Elfrida here. His caring, fighting warrior of magic was so much better than him at consoling the shy and suffering. He imagined her running along the road to meet him. Both would be united, striving, understanding each other, giving aid to one another.

He heard a drumming of hooves and guessed it was one of his men from the lack of shouts or challenges. Farther along the rutted road, into a faint shimmer of heat, pounded a gray horse with lanky Baldwin as rider.

“To me!” Magnus shouted, before he realized that his squire was galloping toward him anyway—and not just Baldwin.

Peeping from behind Baldwin’s back, her face clenched in concentration as she gripped the squire’s middle and clung on, was his Elfrida. Impossibly, she had known he needed her. She had known and come. She comes for me. Shame of his earlier fears concerning his wife, riding, and pregnancy scorched through him.

Magnus started, then began to run toward her. With every sprinting, skidding step, his heart expanded. She waved at him, her veil flapping like a sail, her long hair gleaming like flames, her mouth busy with an inevitable apology.

She smiles her love at me even as she calls sorry. She thinks I may be angry, the foolish, brave little wretch.

He caught her as Baldwin reined in and before she tumbled from the horse.

I am so very glad she is here but why has she come? What news is she bringing?

Lindsay Townsend

'A Summer Bewitchment,' Medieval Historical Romance by Lindsay Townsend. New Excerpt

Here's a new excerpt from my medieval historical romance, 'A Summer Bewitchment'. Elfrida, a good witch, has just completed a magic ritual while her husband Magnus has been waiting for her with plans of his own...

 Magnus was not possessed but he was not himself. His face was grim, his mouth set, his brown eyes hard. Even the small gold cross in his right eye seemed to glitter. Dangerous, her witch-senses sparkled, but was she not dangerous, too? He kissed her and she took his kiss, embracing his crooked, warm lips with greedy fervor.
I have things to tell him, many things, but this moment is ours and we should take it.
“Naughty,” he warned, as she tongued and nipped his ear and throat, her fingers tracing his mouth, gliding over his body. So big he was, so strong and magnificent, so long-limbed, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, lean-thighed.
“I cannot taste enough of you,” she moaned, trembling beneath his answering caress.
His eyes darkened more and her breath stopped. She heard a ripping of cloth as he hauled off his tunic, flinging it into the growing shadows. At the back of her mind she caught the silvery whisper of the wood-elves’ approving laughter, then it was Magnus, only Magnus. She reached for him but he scooped her over, flung up her skirt and entered her.
She was ready for him. Feeling him hard and hot and thick within her, she sheathing him completely, Elfrida wanted only more. That filling, stretching rampaging. Magnus, crusading into her so she felt weak and strong at the same time. Pinned as she was, she could not move and her helplessness was strangely arousing.
“Elf, lovely elf,” he whispered against her ear, his scarred, bristly chin rasping deliciously against her cheek as he battered over and over into her.
“Goddess!” she hissed, as his pleasure met her sweet, sweet yielding.
Moonlight fell into his eyes, shimmered through her body and she was lost. Dimly, blindly, she snuggled as Magnus finally released her. Curling against his white-hot-iron heated body, she heard him mutter, “That should do it.”
Do what? she wondered, then asked, “Are you asleep?”
A long snore answered her. She said, a little louder than before, “Magnus? We have to talk.”
She felt him start against her and sigh. “You are right. Pah, my mouth is a furnace! Have we any mead left or did you use it?”
Both sorry and glad they were out of their own world, their snatched time together, Elfrida needed no reminders of the missing girls, or her responsibility to Rowena and the others. She shook the flask attached to her belt. “There is a little.”
“Good.” Magnus sat up on the woodland floor, shaking crushed bluebells off himself like water off a dripping hound, and reached for his tunic. “We talk and eat. We need a plan to rescue the girls, all of them.”
“It is not going to be easy,” Elfrida remarked quietly.
“I do not know,” Magnus admitted. “I fear you are right.” He crossed himself.
Elfrida shivered.

 'A Summer Bewitchment,' my sequel to 'The Snow Bride'. 4.5 Blue Ribbons from Romance Junkies. Now also on Amazon with 5 Star Reviews.

http://www.amazon.com/Bewitchment-BookStrand-Publishing-Romance-ebook/dp/B00DZX3AEM/

  http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bewitchment-BookStrand-Publishing-Romance-ebook/dp/B00DZX3AEM/

NB. The first novel of this series, 'The Snow Bride' is half-price at Bookstrand here: http://www.bookstrand.com/the-snow-bride and less than $3 at Amazon. 


Best wishes, Lindsay Townsend