Virgin in the Ice by Ellis Peters

“Wait a moment for me. No, we need not turn off yet, this is not the place where the tracks divide. Something I noticed there. Wait!”
    Yves wondered, but waited obediently, as Cadfael turned back to the frozen brook. The pallor had been no illusion from some stray reflected gleam, it was there fixed and still, embedded in the ice. He went down on his knees to look more closely.
    The short hairs rose on his neck. Not a yearling lamb, as he had briefly believed it might be. Longer, more shapely, slender and white. Out of the encasing, glassy stillness a pale, pearly oval stared up at him with open eyes. Small, delicate hands had floated briefly before the frost took hold, and hovered open at her sides, a little upraised as if in appeal. The white of her body and the white of her torn shift which was all she wore seemed to Cadfael to be smirched by some soiling color at the breast, but so faintly that too intent staring caused the mark to shift and fade. The face was fragile, delicate, young.
    A lamb, after all. A lost ewe-lamb, a lamb of God, stripped and violated and slaughtered. Eighteen years old? It could well be so.
    By this token, Ermina Hugonin was at once found and lost.

 
     
    Chapter Four
     
    THERE WAS NOTHING TO BE DONE HERE at this hour, alone as he was, and if he lingered, the boy might come to see what kept him so long. He rose from his knees in haste, and went back to where the horse stamped and fidgeted, eager to get back to his stable. The boy was looking round for him curiously, rather than anxiously.
    “What was it? Is there something wrong?”
    “Nothing to fret you.” Not yet, he thought with a pang, not until you must know. At least let’s feed you, and warm you, and reassure you your own life is safe enough, before you need hear word of this. “I thought I saw a sheep caught in the ice, but I was mistaken.” He mounted, and reached round the boy to take the reins. “We’d best make haste. We’ll have full darkness on us before we reach Bromfield.”
    Where the track forked they bore right as they had been instructed, a straight traverse along the slope, easy to follow. The boy’s sturdy body grew heavier and softer in Cadfael’s arm, the brown head hung sleepy on his shoulder. You at least, thought Cadfael, mute in his anger and grief, we’ll put out of harm’s way, if we could not save your sister.
    “You have not told me your name,” said Yves, yawning. “I don’t know what to call you.”
    “My name is Cadfael, a Welshman from Trefriw, but now of Shrewsbury abbey. Where, I think, you were bound.”
    “Yes, so we were. But Ermina—my sister’s name is Ermina—she must always have her own way. I have far more sense than she has! If she’d listened to me we would never have got separated, and we should all have been safe in Shrewsbury by now. I wanted to come to Bromfield with Brother Elyas—you do know about Brother Elyas?—and so did Sister Hilaria, but not Ermina, she had other plans. This is all her fault!”
    And small doubt, by now, that that was true, Brother Cadfael reflected wretchedly, clasping the innocent judge who lay warm and confiding in his arm. But surely our little faults do not deserve so crushing a penalty. Without time to reconsider, to repent, to make reparation. Youth destroyed for a folly, when youth should be allowed its follies on the way to maturity and sense.
    They were coming down on to the good, trodden road between Ludlow and Bromfield. “Praise God!” said Cadfael, sighting the torches at the gatehouse, yellow terrestrial stars glowing through a fragile but thickening curtain of snow. “We are here!”
    They rode in at the gate, to be confronted by a scene of unexpected activity in the great court. The snow within was stamped into intricate patterns of hooves, and about the stables two or three grooms, certainly not of the household, were busy rubbing down horses and leading them to their stalls. Beside the door of the guest-hall Prior