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One

Tate

1068

There was no grass greener than graveyard grass.

No matter the season, the weather, the biting wind or the burning sun, the grass in the large abbey graveyard remained a deep, soft emerald. Stubborn and lush. Edwin had always said the verdure was a sign of God’s love, a beautiful thing to gladden the hearts of the mourning.

Mother Ardith had said it was because so many corpses made for good soil.

Tate pressed her hand to Edwin’s name stone. Mother Ardith’s name stone was just to the side—the last name stone they’d been able to make before the mason had left to fight the Normans—and behind Tate was a row of fresh graves, marked with slabs of wood clumsily carved with crosses.

The graveyard would have very good soil indeed before this was through.

“Tate,” a familiar voice said. “There’s something you should see.”

Tate stood and brushed off her habit. She turned to see Wynflaed standing near the row of new graves, pale face drawn under her veil. Tate had already known it couldn’t be good news—there had been no good news since William the Bastard first arrived on their shores nearly two years ago—but if it was enough to upset the typically sweet-natured Wynflaed, it had to be bad even by their new standards.

“Of course,” she told her friend. She gave one last look at Edwin and Mother Ardith’s graves—their chaplain and their abbess, both in the ground far too soon—and took in a steadying breath. “Take me there.”

The smoke on the horizon was no more than a smudge when they climbed out of the valley that sheltered Far Hope Abbey, but it was undeniably smoke. It met a pale, cloudless sky and then faded into the blue. It came from some miles away; the village of Sutreworde if Tate had to guess.

Half a day’s ride away. Less with good horses.

The Normans were coming. And if Tate had prayed the abbey would be spared on account of its remoteness, its isolation from anything to do with politics or war, then her prayers hadn’t been answered.

“It’s because of Gytha’s rebellion in Exeter,” Wynflaed said. “It’s drawn the new king’s ire.”

Gytha Thorkelsdóttir was the mother of the defeated, and now very dead, King Harold, who’d been shot through the eye…or hacked to pieces…or some other manner of horrible death at the Battle of Hastings. The rumor was that Gytha had begun planning her rebellion the minute William had taken the field, sending her grandsons to Ireland to raise an army and then join her here in Devon to defeat the bastard king at last.

And so the Normans who’d been mostly preoccupied with establishing power around London and in the north had turned their gaze to the West Country. And it was a gaze without mercy or quarter.

Tate stood watching the smoke for a minute more, the cold spring wind whipping her veil around her shoulders. “It is death to stay in their path,” she said finally. She turned to Wynflaed. “You need to leave.”

Wynflaed’s pretty face set in a mulish expression. “No. I’m not leaving you. And I’m not leaving Far Hope.”

Tate looked down to the valley where their abbey nestled between the hills. At the site of their holy spring stood several stone buildings with arched windows filled with glass, their insides draped in gold cloth and vibrant hangings. Far Hope Abbey was a wealthy place and therefore a ripe target for plunder. Apparently a century or so of Christianity hadn’t been enough to shake the Normans of their ancestral urge to pillage. It had happened to churches and monasteries all over England since Hastings, and now it was going to happen to Far Hope.

Tate wasn’t giving up Far Hope without a fight. But she also wasn’t going to risk the lives of her sisters and the abbey’s pilgrims; she needed everyone who was physically capable of fleeing to do so.

“Wynflaed,” Tate said as gently as she could, because she wasn’t a gentle person by nature. “Take the rest of the sisters and the pilgrims to my brother’s house. You’re the only one here besides me who knows the way, and Thornchurch will be safe from raids—or suspicion.”

Tate’s brother, Heorot, had already sworn fealty to William, had done it the moment he saw the tide turn at Hastings. He’d gone to Sussex to fight for King Harold and had surrendered on the field instead, pledging his loyalty to William and then staying for the foreign duke’s disastrous coronation in London. William had rewarded Heorot by allowing him to keep his lands. Heorot was one of the few English thegns allowed to do so.

Wynflaed looked southeast, in the direction of Thornchurch and its small village of Thorncombe. “It’s a long way,” she said uncertainly, and Tate gave her a tight smile.

“And it’s a short way to heaven if you don’t leave,” she said. “Only the distance of a Norman arrow. Please, Wynflaed. I’ll lock the gates after you, and it will hold them out for some time. God willing, a few weeks. But I’ll last much longer with less mouths to feed.”

Wynflaed looked troubled but couldn’t argue with Tate. She knew Tate was right. “It just doesn’t seem fair,” she said softly, taking her friend’s hand. “That you have to stay while the rest of us flee to safety.”

“I’m the abbess,” Tate said, and after six months, it still felt strange to say. Wrong to say. Abbesses were supposed to be experienced, good of spirit, well past the bloom of youth. Tate was only twenty-five years old, and not a bit good of spirit. She’d come to Far Hope to atone, after all, to serve the penance she owed God. She hadn’t come to Far Hope because she wanted status or advancement.

But there were only a handful of nuns left now at Far Hope, which had already been a small place before the war, and it had lost too many sisters since the Normans had come. Novices running back home to families that needed them, sickness claiming Mother Ardith, along with so many others…

So when it came time to select a new abbess, Tate was the only fully vowed nun who was also in good enough health for the job. And after being elected by her few remaining sisters, Tate had gone to her room and wept—but she’d also promised herself after her tears had dried that she would never curse her fate again. Her sisters deserved better. Far Hope deserved better.

She didn’t rail or cry now when it meant that she must stay to face the Normans. It was her responsibility, her duty.

And her penance would have to wait.

“Come,” Tate said, touching her friend’s shoulder. Wynflaed looked surprised; Tate wasn’t normally affectionate, hadn’t been since before she came to the abbey. In those earlier years, she had felt she didn’t deserve affection or comfort, and it had become a habit she couldn’t break. “I’ll help you prepare.”

They went down the hidden path from the hills into the sheltered valley below, and Tate dispatched Wynflaed to organize provisions. She would take the last of the asses and carts with her to Thornchurch, carrying the sisters and pilgrims who were too infirm to walk, and they would cache some of Far Hope’s treasures inside.

Heorot would keep them safe for as long as he could. He was a loyal brother and a good man, and anyone raised at Thornchurch understood the need for keeping old things safe and secret.

As they were packing the carts, a horse thundered through the gates, its rider covered in sweat despite the late winter day. It was Seamere, a beekeeper from two villages over.

“It’s the Wolf,” he panted, not bothering to get down from his horse. “At Sutreworde. I just heard from the miller of Ashburton, who heard from someone in Bovey. The Wolf is coming this way.”

Tate stopped packing the cart—mostly linens and wool blankets, along with several skins of water to last the caravan the half-day journey. She was surprised to see her hands were shaking.

She spoke softly to make sure that her voice didn’t tremble as well. “Are you sure?”

Seamere nodded. “The miller was certain it’s him. They’re saying that William the Bastard has given him free rein to sack as much as Devon as he pleases until the rebels at Exeter surrender.”

God damn Gytha and her stubbornness! It was one thing to bring the king’s attention to an already beleaguered land, but for the Wolf to be unleashed upon them merely for her stupid scheme to set one of her hapless grandsons at the opposite end of a battlefield from William…it was absurdity. Selfish absurdity. William might be cruel, tyrannical, a threat to Tate’s beloved English church, but one thing he was not was a bad commander. He would win this fight and he would keep on winning every fight after, because God had forsaken this land and the people in it.

All that was left to do was protect the few blessings remaining. Like Far Hope.

“Did you say the Wolf?” Leofgifu asked. She was a resident at the abbey, an earl’s widowed niece who hadn’t wanted to remarry and also hadn’t wanted to take the veil. She would stay with Tate to help with the few pilgrims and sisters who couldn’t make the journey to Thornchurch even by cart, and as much as Tate wanted her to go, Leofgifu was their most skilled healer. The remaining pilgrims couldn’t spare her. “But I thought he went back to Normandy. After…”

She didn’t have to finish for Tate and Seamere to take her meaning. They all knew what the after meant.

After the Wolf had cut a swath of burning, pillaging destruction from Hastings to Southwark, and then all the way to Oxford.

After his name had become a byword for Norman terror.

“There’s no way he won’t come here to the abbey,” Seamere said. He looked apologetic. “All of you should leave, as quickly as you can.”

If only it were that easy . Tate didn’t waste her time arguing with him, though. Only she and a few other people knew Far Hope’s secrets, and even now, about to face down a horde of Normans, she would die for those secrets. She would keep them safe.

“You have others to warn,” Tate said to Seamere. “We won’t keep you.”

He looked torn. “If I could stay to fight, I would?—”

“You’re better off telling everyone you can. Maybe there’s still time to bury their valuables. There’s certainly still time to flee.” Tate looked at the sky. Twilight crept in early, the last gloomy vestige of winter, and she estimated they had three or so hours of safety left, depending on how thoroughly the riders would ransack Ashburton and Houndtor on their way here. So long as she could get the sisters and pilgrims on their way to Thornchurch in the next hour, they’d be well off the road the Normans would take into the valley.

She hoped.

Seamere gave her and Leofgifu a reluctant nod. He was a pious man, and he wouldn’t like the thought of leaving nuns and pilgrims to face the Normans on their own. But Tate gave him her most serene smile, the one she’d seen Mother Ardith give well-meaning and ill-meaning men alike. On her, it probably looked more like a strained frown, but it seemed to do the job.

“God will keep you safe,” Seamere said, clearly believing it, and then he wheeled off.

Tate wanted to laugh. God hadn’t kept a single English person safe in two years.

There was no reason he would start now.