Virgin in the Ice by Ellis Peters

had little hope of finding any traces, even if some of the household had escaped the slaughter that way. We had better fortune that I expected, or maybe deserved. Look, this is what I found!”
    He drew it out from the breast of his cotte, and held it up over his fist, a net of fine gold filigree threads on a band of embroidered ribbon, made to pass round the head when the hair was netted, and tie over the brow. The bow in which it had been tied had been dragged askew, but not undone, for the band had torn apart a little aside from it.
    “Caught in thick woodland, well down the path. They were in haste, whoever rode that way, they cut through a dense thicket to come the quickest way down the slope, there were broken twigs hanging to bear witness. I say they, but I fancy one horse only, with two riders. A low branch caught and dragged this from her head. And since that gives us every hope that the wearer got away safely from that terror, we may very well show this to Yves, and say how it was found. If he knows it for hers, then I’m bound for Ledwyche, to see if luck’s still on our side.”
    There was no hesitation. The moment Yves set eyes on the handful of gold cobweb, his eyes opened wide and grew luminous with hope and eagerness.
    “That is my sister’s!” he said, shining. “It was too fine for the journey, but I know she had it with her. For him she might wear it! Where did you find it?”

 
     
    Chapter Six
     
    THIS TIME THEY TOOK YVES WITH THEM, partly because, though he might have accepted Hugh’s fiat gracefully if refused, he would have been restless and miserable all the time of waiting, and partly because, in addition to being the only one who could positively identify Ermina’s suitor when found, he was indeed the man of his blood here, the head of his household, and had every right to partake in the search for his lost sister, now they knew she should be well alive.
    “But this is the same way we came down from Thurstan’s assart,” he said, after they had turned off the highroad by the bridge over the Corve. “Must we continue so?”
    “We must, for some while. Well past the place where you and I would as soon not be,” said Cadfael simply, divining his unease. “But we need not turn our eyes away. There is nothing evil there. Neither earth nor water nor air have any part in man’s ill-doing.” And with an attentive but cautious eye on the boy’s grave face he said: “You may grieve, but you must not begrudge that she is gone. Her welcome is assured.”
    “She was, of all of us, the only best,” said Yves, abruptly eloquent. “You don’t know! Never out of temper, always patient and kind and very brave. She was much more beautiful than Ermina!”
    He was thirteen, but taught and gifted, perhaps, somewhat beyond his years, and he had gone afoot in Sister Hilaria’s gallant and gentle company many days, close and observant. And if he had glimpsed for the first time a mature kind of love, surely it had been a most innocent and auspicious kind, even now after the apparent mutilation of loss. Yves had come to no harm. In the past two days he seemed to have grown in stature, and taken several long strides away from his infancy.
    He did not avert his eyes when they came to the brook, but he was silent, and so remained until after they had crossed the second brook also; but from that point they veered to the right, and came into open woodland, and the new vistas revived his interest in the world about him, and brightened his eyes again. The brief winter sunlight, which had again drawn down slender icicles from eaves and branches, was already past, but the light was clear and the air still, and the patterns of black and white and dusky greens had their own somber beauty.
    They crossed the Hopton brook, still motionless as before, half a mile lower down its course than when they had come to Godstoke together. “But we must have been very near,” said Yves, marvelling that he might have