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Nine

The Wolf

Adelais had been too noble last night on the road, and she knew it for sure the moment she sat on Tate’s pretty face. The abbess didn’t protest as Adelais started riding her mouth, and her slender hands stayed open and slack in their bonds above her head, as if she wanted to make it eminently clear to Adelais that she wasn’t going to snap her fingers and call a stop to this.

Adelais was glad, because even though she would stop the moment the abbess asked, fucking her mouth felt so good . Adelais couldn’t regret how overwhelmingly stirring it had been to fuck Tate, to work that knife hilt inside that soft, wet place until Tate came, but she did almost regret how riled up she was because she couldn’t last. Only a few moments working her sex against Tate’s mouth, and she peaked, culminating with a grunt and then making Tate lick every last wave of pleasure from Adelais’s sex until she was satisfied.

She moved off the well-used nun and cut her bonds, and then sat on the edge of the cot to catch her breath, feeling like she’d just fought off twenty men.

The abbess sat up behind her, preternaturally quiet. She would have made an excellent thief—or killer.

Adelais supposed when it came down to it, Tate had made an excellent killer. Adelais only wished it wouldn’t haunt her so. The thought of Tate miserable, guilty, sad—it tormented Adelais almost as much as the idea of Tate being in actual danger. Looking over at the abbess’s bare feet next to hers—small, delicate, fastidiously clean—Adelais abruptly knew she would do anything to make sure Tate never felt like that again.

What that meant, she didn’t know yet. And what that meant for the second reason she’d come to Far Hope…she also didn’t know.

“You found a way into the abbey,” Tate said. Her voice was quiet. Adelais knew from her earlier scouting of the dormitory that there were only two other nuns here, and that one of them was currently with the sick visitors. The other was at the far end of the structure and had been snoring loudly enough to wake all the sheep in Devonshire when Adelais found her.

“Last night, I followed you,” responded Adelais. “I didn’t like the idea of you walking alone after the game we played.”

Tate’s mouth moved, and Adelais couldn’t tell if she was holding back a smile or a frown. “I am glad you came into my room tonight,” the abbess said. “It would be a gift from God if I could spend every night in bed with you. But you shouldn’t be here, Adelais. The whole point of our arrangement was for you to stay on the other side of the wall.”

Adelais reached for her hose and started drawing them on. “About our arrangement,” she said, not knowing how to feel. The only thing in her life she wanted more than knowing the secret of Far Hope was this nun in front of her, and she had the uneasy feeling that one would come at the price of the other. But she could not be other than what she was. She was Adelais of the Maine, and she was at Far Hope at last. “I have something to show you. You should get dressed.”

Twenty minutes later, they were padding silently through the abbey’s grounds, past a stone church with stained glass windows—a rarity and a luxury this far into the wilderness—and past the abbey’s stables and storehouse and kitchens. All the way to the very end of the valley, where a low stone wall and something like a lichgate guarded access to the abbey’s sacred spring, which was also the source of the Hope River.

But Adelais didn’t take Tate through the gate to the spring. Instead, she led Tate to the sheer face of the hill beyond. A curtain of rock and moss and stubborn gorse, and, like a curtain, it had drapes and bends and folds. And in one of those corrugations was an opening.

Tate stopped as they approached, which did not surprise Adelais. In the dark, with her homespun habit and white wimple and veil, she seemed bled entirely of color, much like this lonely landscape under the cold light of the moon.

“How did you know this was here?” asked Tate. That mask of cool composure was back, as impenetrable as the rock walls around them, and Adelais hated it as much as she respected it. Tate was protecting herself and her home, and that composure was her defense, her bulwark, and her fortress walls.

Alas, walls had never stopped Adelais.

“When I followed you last night, I stopped at the top there,” Adelais said, indicating the place where the path spilled over the lip of the hills and down into the valley. It was a good path, cleverly hidden, because if she had not seen someone else take it, she would have guessed these hills to be impassable. “But tonight, when I crept down, I saw a glimmer of light coming from a cleft in the rock. I followed it here.”

Tate’s breathing was so even, so controlled that Adelais knew she must be deeply afraid. “Did you go inside?”

There was no point in lying. “Yes. And I want to go inside again, with you.” Because what Adelais had found seemed to have very little to do with heavy psalters and dry, old prayers.

Tate closed her eyes. There was the faintest twitch around her mouth; Adelais realized she was praying. That shamed her a little.

“Yes,” Tate said finally, opening her eyes. Her voice was full of resignation, which also shamed Adelais and then irritated her. She was not accustomed to shame, and she didn’t like the way it felt. “Yes, I will go inside with you.”

The cleft in the rock was illuminated again tonight, but very faintly. But as they stepped through the cleft and down the man-made stone steps into the earth, it gradually grew brighter and brighter until they were in a chamber lit by three braziers.

“It is your job to keep these lit?” asked Adelais, knowing that it could not be an easy job.

Tate stopped beside Adelais. In the red-yellow glow, she was a luminous thing. What would this elfin creature have become had she not been haunted by her sins? Because beauty was commonplace, everywhere; Adelais had known this since she was a child and was fawned over for her loveliness. People had talked as if she’d end up marrying a count or a duke with looks like hers, but in the end, her oft-praised beauty had only been worth a castellan. There were too many other lovely girls, and with more land and larger dowries. And fewer murderous instincts.

But whatever Tate had, it was past what beauty was, what it could do. It consumed Adelais’s thoughts; it made her think stupid, foolish things. It would have captivated princes, kings. And here Tate was, the keeper of an odd little abbey in the middle of nowhere.

“Yes, although I don’t know how much longer,” answered Tate. “It was expensive and time-consuming enough before the invasion. But now it is nearly impossible to get the wood from farther down the valley. There’s been too much sickness, too much war. So many of the people we relied on are dead. I think in the next month, I will have to decide to keep the fires lit only during Michaelmas.”

“That seems…specific.”

Adelais knew Tate well enough by now to catch the faintest hint of a smile. “Our abbey is dedicated to St. Michael.”

“Interesting.” Adelais looked around the stone chamber again. It was as large as a church, and with the three braziers burning at different points in the space, it didn’t feel dark. In fact, the entire quartz-studded ceiling glittered like a sea of stars, bright and twinkling. There were piles of blankets and furs, cruets of oil, low platforms heaped high with cushions. There was a stool in the corner, as if for a harpist; there were drums, lamps, gleaming goblets stacked neatly and draped with linen. It could have been a scene from King David’s court after he got his army of wives and concubines. “You know,” Adelais said, the heretical thought too fascinating to let slide by, “most holy places named after St. Michael used to be sites of heathen worship. Pagan places.”

Tate dipped her head in a nod, her voice betraying nothing. “That is true.”

Adelais looked back at Tate. “When was your abbey founded?”

“Almost two hundred years ago, by King Alfred himself,” the abbess replied promptly.

“Was there a holy place here before then?”

Another prompt answer. “Yes.”

“A Christian one?”

The answer came slower this time. “No.”

“So this was one of the very last places in England to convert?”

Tate took a few steps deeper into the space. The firelight gilded her skin, brought out faint notes of gold in her brown hair. “That depends on what you mean by convert,” she said. She tilted her face up to the glittering, starlike ceiling. “The people in this valley were quick to welcome the priests when they came. But slower to forget the old ways.”

Adelais remembered sitting on her grandfather’s knee, tugging on the mjolnir pendant hanging from his robes. She’d loved the idea that they were holding on to something ancient, something almost lost, but not quite. She had the same feeling now. “How old were those ways?”

“In this valley?” Tate shook her head. “Even Mother Ardith didn’t know, but we think long before the Romans. Perhaps the people who erected the standing stone at the entrance to the valley. Whenever it started, it never stopped. And people knew this was a place of healing, and they came far and wide.”

“Because of the spring?”

“Partly,” Tate said. “It’s said that a drink from our holy spring will heal any ailment of the body. It’s also said that a night spent under the stars of Far Hope will heal any ailment of the soul.” She gestured at the ceiling so there could be no mistake as to which stars she meant.

Adelais thought of the sick pilgrims in the abbey. “Is that true? About the spring?”

“They get better here,” Tate said. “But sometimes I can’t be sure if that’s because here they are well tended, with lots of fresh air and good food, or because there is something special in the water.”

“And what about here in the star chamber? What happens to heal the ailments of the soul?”

Tate turned and looked at her, green eyes vivid in the firelight. “I think you can guess.”

Adelais had lots of guesses, and they were all filthy. There were only a few good reasons to have a warm, well-lit cave stocked with soft cushions and goblets for drinking, not to mention the oil , and put together with Tate’s fluency in sex and desire…

“If this room is for what I’m thinking, it’s hard for me to imagine Rome approving.”

“Rome doesn’t,” the abbess said, a small note of displeasure creeping into her otherwise neutral voice. “Which is rather hypocritical given the amount of sinning they get up to. But there are enough bishops—not to mention princes and dukes—who have been to Far Hope and believe in it. Until William, we could count on protection from the king himself, but now…”

She didn’t have to finish. Adelais would hesitate to call William a pious man given how much blood he routinely shed, but he was a rather devoted Christian, if one measured devotion in monasteries founded and money given to the church. He would not like anything as aberrant as Far Hope, and neither would Lanfranc, his presumed pick for the next archbishop of Canterbury.

“Do all the pilgrims come here?” Adelais asked. “Into the cave?”

“No,” Tate said. She adjusted a stoppered cruet of oil; it was as gleaming and clean as anything in a church. “Most come for the spring and have no idea the cave is here. Only the sisters can invite people here. Sometimes they are pilgrims, and sometimes they are known to us as guests we had before or people our guests vouch for.”

“So people come here to fuck, following in the footsteps of the pagans who fucked here before them, and somehow an abbey gets built to help it along?” Adelais had to give dead King Alfred credit: If she were going to shelter a pagan orgy site, that’s exactly how she would do it.

“The abbey was built because King Alfred recognized that this was a holy place,” Tate corrected. “That the way people left here after a night was a gift from God. Perhaps the pagans before the abbey didn’t know it as such, but that’s what it was. What it is.” She paused. “He also knew that Far Hope’s days were waning as a pagan site. But if it was a Christian one…an abbey…it could survive. Especially if the cave and what happens here stayed quiet. A truth known only to a chosen few.”

That was also smart of old Alfred. While it was common enough to find folk beliefs not much changed or liberally mingled with Christianity out in the countryside, eventually all the old practices would die out. Or be extinguished by overeager priests. But to cloak it anew, to hide it in plain sight…

It was maybe the only way a place like Far Hope could survive.

“But surely being an abbey presents some problems. For example, your body being consecrated to God. That makes it rather difficult to lead an orgy, doesn’t it?”

Tate gave Adelais a look like she knew Adelais was being deliberately reductive. “My body is God’s while I’m a nun, yes. That means I use it to bless people, and to heal.”

“I’m fairly certain that consecration means something is to be held apart. For God and for no one else.”

Tate lifted a shoulder. “At Thornchurch, we don’t make those kinds of distinctions. So when I came here, it made sense to me. Sacred things should be held apart, yes. That’s what makes them special and not ordinary. But I do not think it helps anyone to pretend away their bodies. They are what we live with, know God with.”

She wouldn’t get any disagreement from Adelais, who thought chastity was ridiculous. Only women were made to honor it—even in the clergy—and in any event, it seemed an unfair price to pay for someone who might want the other gifts a religious life had to offer: literacy, community, escape. God.

“But it’s not just sex,” Tate went on. “At Far Hope, everyone is welcome. To love how they wish and who they wish. Like how King Edward came here because it was the only place he could be with the man he loved.”

“I’m living proof that someone doesn’t have to go to an abbey to fuck who they want,” Adelais said bluntly. She had to be careful, yes, and creative, but if she wanted a woman and that woman wanted her back, then she made it happen.

“It’s not just about fucking,” Tate said, voice low. “It’s about being. You can be who you need to be at Far Hope. Any version of yourself. That is what blesses. That is what heals. Not the sex on its own, but the freedom of self that comes with it. The joy of seeing someone else in their freedom of self.” Her eyes met Adelais’s again, and they were softer than her voice. Shining with something that made Adelais’s throat hurt to look at. “You would not have to choose, Adelais, for any other reason than yourself. You could be any Adelais you wanted here. Every Adelais. Far Hope would welcome them all because God loves them all.”

Adelais’s eyelids stung. It was such a simple thing to hear, and yet in thirty years she’d never heard it. All of her—messy, restless, never happy as only one self—could be held in one place. Not only held, but loved.

If Tate believed God could do that, that it was the point of God’s people to love like that…well, then maybe Adelais could understand why Tate loved her god so much.

“You told me you were looking for a treasure here,” Tate went on, looking up at the starred ceiling and then back to Adelais. “And that’s it. That’s the treasure. That is the gift that King Alfred found among the people here and the gift he wanted to keep alive.” An exhale. “A gift that I think is dying, despite his efforts.”

Adelais understood. She understood now. The treasure wasn’t something that could be picked up and carried off, that could be owned . Whatever happened here under the sparkling ceiling of the cave could only happen here, and after it happened, it lived on inside you. She remembered King Henri’s voice when he’d talked about Far Hope, how he’d sounded haunted to her young ears.

But perhaps he hadn’t been haunted at all…but more alive , more incarnated, for remembering his time here.

Adelais looked down at her boots. The floor was level and smooth, although undoubtedly still the floor of a cave. “I don’t like the idea of Far Hope dying, now that I know what it means to you. Now that I’ve finally found it.”

“It would be easy to blame the Normans, but maybe it was always going to happen,” Tate said. She sounded tired. “It gets harder and harder to find new sisters every year, and every reformer with a shred of power has a mind to purge us from the church, either because they know what Far Hope is, or because they’ve heard warped versions of the truth and imagine us worshipping Bacchus and whipping each other with fresh goat hides. Even without William, this day would come.” She rubbed her forehead. “I think Mother Ardith was right about Far Hope not lasting. About needing someone to do what others couldn’t. Which is admit defeat.”

Defeat. This same woman who strode into a Norman camp with nothing but her wimple and her courage to gird her, this same woman who played the game in the dark with Adelais, a game that asked for nothing less than raw honesty and utter trust. This same woman who’d somehow held this war-battered abbey together with her teeth when all she wanted to do was pray away her imagined crime.

That woman was talking about defeat, and Adelais couldn’t stand it, couldn’t bear the idea of the quiet but unbending strength inside Tate yielding now.

Because that quiet strength— that was piety. That was holiness. Not fasting or flagellation with their visible dramas, not abnegation where everyone else could see, but holding fast and holding firm when nothing else felt certain, when the way was hard and cold and stark.

Standing anchored in belief like a rock in the sea while the tides swelled and crashed around you.

Adelais had wondered that first night if Tate was truly pious, and now she had her answer: Tate was pious, and more besides. She had courage like a soldier and calmness like a king. Passion like a saint, and humility like a martyr.

That piety made Adelais’s shame from earlier burn all the brighter, and it was mingled with sharp obsession, with memories of Tate arching so prettily underneath her, her thighs soft and silky as they parted for her. Memories of those green eyes, that fascinating mouth.

The nun had pricked Adelais’s curiosity at first, had intrigued her, but the more Adelais saw of Tate, the more her obsession had grown, grown into something that Adelais couldn’t…that she couldn’t name. She couldn’t even trace the far edges of that something , except to know that she wanted Tate in her future like she’d never wanted anything else. Not even Far Hope.

Adelais wanted to keep this strong, pious, fascinating nun; she wanted to be near her and with her and entangled with her for as long as she drew breath. But shimmering under that urge to have and to keep, to make sure that Tate was safe and strong and given everything she ever wanted, was the ugly, honest fear of Tate learning the truth of why Adelais was here.

Because once Tate learned that her abbey’s fate had already been decided…

Adelais didn’t know what to do with that fear, or even what it meant that the idea of hurting Tate, and of Tate knowing that it had been Adelais to hurt her, was the most frightening thing she’d faced since joining William’s war.

But Adelais had only ever reacted one way to fear, and so she stepped forward and touched the abbess’s hand.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” she said. “About why I came here.”

Tate looked at her expectantly, and Adelais braced herself, needing more courage than she’d ever needed before.

She took a breath. “William wants me to?—”

A clatter of footsteps on the stone stairs. Adelais looked up to see a sister with light bronze skin and flushed cheeks emerge into the chamber. “Someone’s pounding at the gates,” the nun said urgently. “Threatening to burn the walls down.”

Tate gave Adelais a sharp look. “Are these your men, oh Wolf?”

At the name, the other sister slid a gaze over to Adelais. There was shock in her face, bitterness around her mouth, as she seemed to realize who Adelais was. “It’s the Duke of Normandy himself,” the sister said to Tate, looking away from Adelais pointedly now. “And he says he’s here to see the new mistress of these lands.”

“Me?” Tate asked in a faint voice.

Adelais’s lungs filled with lead.

“He says,” the sister said slowly, “Far Hope belongs to the Wolf now.”