Brother Cadfael 06: A Virgin In The Ice

and well in the Bromfield you abandoned. True, believe me! Would I lie to you? I myself took her there to join you, only to find before ever we reached the gate that you were away again on a quest of your own."
    "I couldn't help it, I had to go ..."
    It was almost too much to take in, so suddenly. Yves gulped down wonder and grew coherent. Now that he need no longer worry and grieve over Ermina's fate, whatever the perils hanging over his own, he recoiled for support into resentment against her for ever bringing him and so many others to this pass. "You don't knew her! She won't be bidden," he warned indignantly. "When she finds I'm gone she may do anything! It was she who caused all this, and if the fit takes her she'll fly off again on some mad folly. You don't know her as I do!"
    He thought it an innocent stranger's over-confidence that Olivier laughed, however softly and amiably. "She'll be bidden! Never fret, she'll be waiting in Bromfield. But I think you have a story to tell me, before I tell mine. Heave it off your heart! You may, we had better not move from here yet. I hear someone stirring below." Yves had heard nothing. "You left Worcester a fugitive, that I know, and how your sister left you, and why, that I know, too. She has told me, and made no secret of it. And if it please you to know the best, no, she is not married, nor like to be yet, but thinks herself well out of a foolish mistake. And now what of you, after her going?"
    Yves nestled into the rough homespun shoulder, and poured out the whole of it, from his first wanderings in the forest to the remembered comfort and kindness of Father Leonard and Brother Cadfael at Bromfield, the tragedy of Sister Hilaria, and the desperate sally after poor, possessed Elyas.
    "And I left him there, never thinking ..." Yves shrank from remembering the words Brother Elyas had spoken, as they lay side by side in the night. That was something he could not share, even with this admirable being. "I'm afraid for him. But I did leave the door unbarred. Do you think they would find him? In good time?"
    "In God's time," said Olivier positively, "which is always good. Your God cares for the sick in mind, and will see to it the lost are found."
    Yves was quick to note the strangeness of the chosen words. "My God?" he said, looking up with sharp curiosity into the dark face so close above his own.
    "Oh, mine also, though I came to Christendom somewhat roundabout. My mother, Yves, was a Muslim woman of Syria, my father was a crusader of Robert of Normandy's following, from this same England, and sailed for home again before ever I was born. I took his faith and went to join his people in Jerusalem as soon as I came a man. That's where I found service with my lord your uncle, and when he returned here I came back with him. I am a Christian soul like you, though I chose it, where you were born to it. And I feel in my bones, Yves, that you will encounter your Brother Elyas again none the worse for the cold night you spent. We'd best be giving our minds rather to how you and I are to get safely out of here."
    "How did you ever get in?" wondered Yves. "How did you know I was here?"
    "I did not know it, until this rogue lord of yours hoisted you on the wall there with a knife at your throat. But I saw them pass by with their booty, at some distance, and thought it worth tracking such a company to its den. If they were harrying the countryside by night, and you lost by night ... It was possible they might take prisoners, if there was profit to be made out of them."
    "Then you saw, you know, that we have an army of our friends close at hand," said Yves, suddenly glowing with a new and wonderful idea.
    "Of your friends, surely. But mine? Friends better avoided, no blame to them. Have you not understood that I am your uncle's man, and your uncle is liegeman to the Empress Maud? I have no wish to fall into the sheriff's hands and sit drumming my heels in a Shropshire prison. Though I owe them a favour, too, for it was under cover of their onslaught that I made my way round and on to the rocks below unnoticed, while these vermin within rushed to slam the gates. I should never have succeeded but for the distraction they provided. And once round the stockade in the dark, what difference between one lumpish ruffian stalking the bailey and all the others? I knew where they had left you. I saw your guard relieved."
    "Then you saw that the only reason Hugh Beringar drew his men off was