The Maiden in the Ice
Her boots are stout, the winter ones, with tiny ridges of metal embedded in the soles to clutch at the slippery surface, and she moves quickly with the light cautious step of a fox approaching a henhouse. Her ears almost hurt from the effort of listening for the slow, dark moan that will tell her the floe is about to betray her. For a while she tries to keep her eyes firmly fixed on her destination, on the silver-ash clump of sedge not so far – yet so very far – away. But the panic she’s tamped down hard gets the better of her, and she looks to the sparkling, treacherous ground upon which she moves, seeking the cracks, the veins, the fissures that are surely forming there.
But what she sees is something entirely different.
An oval face; skin sallow – in the sun it will become olive; dark-flecked, large eyes; thick straight brows; an unbalanced mouth, the top lip thin, the bottom full; and hair as black as Rikke has ever seen. Black as nightmares, black as a cunning woman’s cat, black as the water she is trying to escape. Older than Rikke, caught between girl and woman, and suspended in the solid lake as if she’s a statue, standing; head titled back, one arm reaching up, the other pointing downward.
Rikke shrieks. She forgets the singing winter grass, her mother’s tisane, her mother’s disappointment; she forgets all her fears of a permafrost death, of cold and hoar. She spins about and runs, boots throwing shredded ribbons of rime behind, body moving faster, so much faster than her little legs it is a wonder she does not fall. She clatters into the house making such a noise that Aggi drags herself from bed and Rikke’s father, Gamli, comes running in from outside where he has been seeing to the chickens and the goats. When they decipher their daughter’s shouts, Gamli leaves the little cottage, yelling at the top of his lungs.
The cry goes up from house to house. ‘Someone’s in the lake!’
One of my favourite characters in the Sourdough collection was Ella, who started that 
collection in “The Shadow Tree” and threaded throughout several other tales as a kind of malign presence. I’d always wanted to write a story to show where she’d come from, how she came to be exiled from her home. I had the title, “The Maiden in the Ice”, long before the rest of the tale, and the vision of the girl seemingly suspended, but still moving inexorably up towards the surface. Other stories that influenced this one were “The Pied Piper of Hamlin”, Christina Rosetti’s “The Goblin Market”, and Angela Carter’s “The Erl-King”.
As Hepsibah Ballantyne floats through Bitterwood, so does Ella, though more subtly, with scattered mentions of the Plague Maiden. I wanted the idea of kindness rewarded and bad behaviour punished to be the beginning of her journey through this world. The main character, Rikke, is an analogue of the child who wasn’t taken by the Pied Piper because he was lame and couldn’t keep up; Rikke was distracted by her books.
Ella is a character that I’m exploring a lot more in the next collection, The Tallow-Wife and Other Tales.