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
http://www.bookstrand.com/the-snow-bride
Lindsay
Townsend
http://www.lindsaytownsend.net
