Monday, 14 August 2023

The Snow Bride. A Medieval Beauty And The Beast



The Snow Bride

 

She is Beauty, but is he the Beast?

 

Book One of The Knight and the Witch

 

 

England, winter, 1131

 

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.

 

 

Excerpt                                                             

 

 

Elfrida stirred sluggishly, unable to remember where she was. Her back ached, and the rest of her body burned. She opened her eyes and sat up with a jerk, thinking of Christina.

 

 

Her head felt to be bobbing like an acorn cup in a stream, and her vision swam. As she tried to swing her legs, her sense of dizzy falling increased, becoming worse as she closed her eyes. She lashed out in the darkness, her flailing hands and feet connecting with straw, dusty hay, and ancient pelts.

 

“Christina?” she hissed, listening intently and praying now that the monster had brought her to the same place it had taken her sister.

 

She heard nothing but her own breath, and when she held that, nothing at all.

 

“Christina?” Fearing to reach out in this blackness that was more than night and dreading what she might find, Elfrida forced herself to stretch her arms. She trailed her fingers out into the ghastly void, tracing the unseen world with trembling hands.

 

Her body shook more than her hands, but she ignored the shuddering of her limbs, closed her eyes like a blind man, and searched.

 

She lay on a pallet, she realized, full of crackling, dry grass. When she scented and tasted the air, there was no blood. She did not share the space with grisly corpses.

 

I am alone and unfettered. Now her heart had stopped thudding in her ears, she listened again, hearing no one else. Chanting a charm to see in the dark, she tried again to shift her feet.

 

Light spilled into her eyes like scalding milk as a door opened and a massive figure lurched across the threshold. Elfrida launched herself at freedom, hurling a fistful of straw at the looming beast and ducking out for the light.

 

She fell instead, her legs buckling, her last sight that of softly falling snow.

 

 

 She is Beauty, but is he the Beast?

THE SNOW BRIDE (THE KNIGHT AND THE WITCH 1) USA https://amzn.to/2MZZan0    

UK  https://amzn.to/2H1tYzY                                    

EXCERPT https://bit.ly/2yV95Cb

REVIEW https://bit.ly/38ynFzh



Lindsay Townsend 

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