Brother Cadfael 06: A Virgin In The Ice

know of any other such couple gone astray in the night? Yes, I do think they have fallen into the hands of these rogues. Armed or unarmed, Hugh, I am coming with you to get them out."
    Hugh regarded him steadily, and said outright what was on his mind. "Would they bother to burden themselves with Elyas? The boy, yes, his very clothes mark him out as worthy prey. But a penniless monk, wandering in his wits? Once already they've battered him all but to death. You think they would hesitate the second time?"
    "If they had discarded him," said Cadfael firmly, "I should have found his body lying. I did not find it. There is no way, Hugh, of knowing what is truth, but to go out and exact it from those who know."
    "That we will do," said Hugh. "At first light tomorrow I go to the town, to order out on the king's business every man Josce de Dinan can muster, along with my own men. He owes allegiance, and he will pay it. He has no more use for anarchy in his own baileywick than King Stephan himself."
    "A pity," said Cadfael, "that we cannot take them at first dawn, but that would lose us a day. And we need the daylight more than they do, they knowing their ground so much better." His mind was away planning the assault, which was no business now of his, nor had been for many years, but the old enthusiasm still burned up at the scent of action. He caught Hugh's smiling eye, and was ashamed. "Pardon, I forgot myself, unregenerate as I am." He turned back to what was his concern, the matter of troubled souls. "There is more to show you, though it has no immediate link with this devils' castle."
    He had brought the roll of black clothing with him. He unrolled it upon the trestles, drawing aside the creased white wimple and the strand of creamy mane. "These I found in the hay, in that hut, buried well from sight, if Reyner had not kicked the pile apart. See for yourself what lay in that hiding-place. And this - this from without, snagged in the rough wood at the corner of the hut, and a pile of horse-droppings left at the spot."
    He told that tale with the same exactness, needing another mind to work upon these discoveries. Hugh watched and listened with frowning attention, quickened utterly from his weariness and alert to every implication.
    "Hers and his?" he said at the end of it. "Then they were there together."
    "So I read it, also."
    "Yet he was found some distance from this hut. Naked, stripped of his habit - but his cloak left behind where they sheltered. And if you are right, then Elyas sets off wildly back to this very place. By what compulsion? How drawn?"
    "This," said Cadfael, "I cannot yet read. But I doubt not it can be read, with God's help."
    "And hidden - well hidden, you say. They might have lain unnoticed well into the spring, and been an unreadable riddle when they did reappear. Cadfael, have these wolves hidden any part of their worst deeds? I think not. What they break, they let lie where it falls."
    "Devils do so," said Cadfael, "being without shame."
    "But perhaps not without fear? Yet there is no sense in it, take it all in all. I cannot see where this leads. I am none too happy," owned Hugh ruefully, "when I try."
    "Nor I," said Cadfael. "But I can wait. There will be sense in it, when we know more." And he added sturdily: "And it may not be so dismaying as we think for. I do not believe that evil and good can be so dismally plaited together that they cannot be disentangled."
    Neither of them had heard the door of the room open or close, the small anteroom of the guest-hall, where Hugh's supper had been laid. But when Cadfael went out with his bundle of clothing under his arm, she was there outside in the stone passage, the tall, dark girl with her sleepless, proud, anxious eyes huge in her pale face, and her black hair a great, swaying cloud round her shoulders, and he knew by the strained urgency of her face that she had come in innocence, hearing voices, and looked within, and drawn back in awe of what she saw. She had shrunk into the shadows, waiting and hoping for him. She was shivering when he took her firmly by the arm and led her away in haste to where the remnants of the day's fire still burned sullenly in the hall, banked to continue live until morning. But for the surly glow, it was in darkness there. He felt her draw breath and relax a little, being thus hidden. He leaned to stab at the fire, not too roughly, and get an answering red and gratifying warmth out of it.
    "Sit down here and warm