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

a huge stack of firewood.
    His men sprinted forward, slithering and sliding in the snow, and the woman, already running hard for the huts, did not waste time looking round. Amazed she did not tumble in the ice, Magnus snatched a spear from Mark and hurled it.
    “N—” Elfrida’s cry was broken off, and the spear flew straight and true, driving into the log pile before the woman reached it. Now she fell, jerking sideways, away from the spear, sprawling into the snow and kicking out uselessly, like a cart with a broken, still-spinning wheel. At once his men were on her in a welter of arms and legs.
    He heard squeals and shrieks but turned to Elfrida first. “Thank you for trusting me,” he called out in the old speech. He knew that she had stopped her protest and so the spear had found its mark.
    “Help me down,” she replied. “We must question her quickly.”
    He caught her up, hooking round her narrow waist with his good arm, and lifted her off the bay as slowly as he could manage, savoring the feel of her. “Do not frighten her too much, or she may lie to us in fear,” he whispered against her ear.
    She smiled at him. “I will know if she does,” she said.
    Elfrida knew she was volatile and impatient, so she gripped one of the amulets around her throat to inspire calm and thrust her full attention at the woman.
    A widow, she swiftly amended, with covered hair, drooping breasts and belly from childbearing. The woman had disappointed, wary, yellow-tinged eyes and work-reddened hands. As Mark dragged her close, she was already half fainting and crying—a useful device that must have served her well in the past, thought Elfrida savagely.
    “We must talk to her away from the others, or she may inspire their pity,” she warned in the old speech.
    Magnus pinched the tip of his mangled nose and answered, with clear distaste, “Never fret, Elfrida! The good villagers are already abandoning her. We need do nothing.”
    He was right, Elfrida realized. The folk of Lower Yarr sighed and stretched and turned to go about their business, content, it seemed, to leave one of their own to her fate.
    “’Tis the way with widows everywhere, poor creatures.” Magnus’s mutter echoed her own thought, but Elfrida’s main concern was for Christina.
    “And if she is a spy, we owe her nothing.”
    His scowl at her reply etched the scars on his face into furrows of malice, causing the widow to yelp and wring her hands. Magnus noticed her reaction—even the oafish Mark raised his eyebrows—but Elfrida could only hope that her ugly, gentle, beast of a knight would have wit enough to exploit it, should the need arise.
    She stepped up to the widow and asked in the local speech, “Do you know me?”
    “Aye, mistress, aye.” The widow bowed as low as if Elfrida was the Queen of England. “You be the witch of the woodlands.”
    “So I will have helped one of your kin.”
    The widow looked disconcerted, then ashamed. Her mouth trembled, and when Mark released her, she sank down in the snow as if her legs would not support her. Elfrida knelt in the snow with her, aware of Magnus’s rocklike, patient presence.
    “Will you please give her some of your mead, my lord?” she asked in the old speech, adding in the local dialect, “Yes, you may drink it safely, mistress—?” Elfrida rippled the fingers of her left hand, inviting the widow to give her name.
    The widow clutched her fists into her dull gray gown and shook her head. “You pretend to be my friend to trick me!” she flared out.
    Elfrida laughed, liking her a little more for that. “Would you want me as your enemy?”
    “I wish to be left in peace!”
    “What does she squeak?” Magnus growled, frowning his two eyebrows into a solid black line across his forehead. The widow jumped at his voice.
    “I know nothing,” she gabbled, blushing as Magnus stared at her. “Make him stop looking at me!” she whimpered. “He is the devil!”
    “He is his own lord,”