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