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Eleven

The Wolf

Adelais stared at Tate’s small form as she walked off, her heart like a fish on land, flapping and panicked.

She never felt panicked. Not in battle, not at court. This should be nothing—this should be easy. She had pleased her liege lord, and he’d rewarded her. Not only that, but he’d rewarded her with the one place on earth she’d like to own.

But here she was standing like a wounded rabbit, ready to spring away and hide, leaking blood everywhere as she went.

Hide!

Adelais of the Maine!

What had she come to?!

William came out of his tent, having to duck his tall frame under the flap.

“I want you in Exeter by tonight,” he said without preamble. “I need the fear you bring to a field to end this siege. And then you may return here to make any arrangements you see fit as the new owner of Far Hope.”

“Yes, my lord,” Adelais said, her mind still following Tate, still hearing those pained, bitter words. It is that bad. “Whatever you need.”

The duke studied her a moment. “It is no bad thing to go after what you want, Adelais. It’s what makes you unmatched in combat.”

It was indeed what made her a good warrior. But perhaps it had made her a bad lover too.

Except that wasn’t the entire truth, was it? Tate liked it when Adelais took – she liked it all too well. But this was different. This wasn’t taking something freely given. This was stealing, plain and simple, no matter which words she and William had used to make it sound more palatable.

The abbey had belonged to itself before Adelais; now it wouldn’t any longer. And whatever belonged to Adelais also belonged to the king of England.

The same king who’d burned hundreds of innocent farmsteads on his way to Exeter just to show his displeasure.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Adelais said, her panic solidifying into an urge to fix this, fix everything about it. “But is it possible that I could anchor Devonshire for you elsewhere? Maybe closer to the coast, like near the River Tamar?—”

He held up a hand. His men behind him were readying horses; she knew she’d have to give the order for hers to be readied too. He’d expect her in Exeter soon after he got there himself, even though she had an entire camp that needed packing up first. “I want you here, Adelais, and I won’t brook any further discussion on the topic.”

“But the abbey?—”

“We’ve been blessed by Stigand to do with it what we will. It’s a small abbey, Adelais. We’re not talking about Cluny here. If a few sisters have to find new nunneries to join, so be it.”

No matter how miserable she was, Adelais had always made it a point never to waste her time on a lost angle of attack. “You are set on this?” she asked William.

He gave her a curt nod. “I am. Far Hope is already yours. And I don’t care what you do with it, as long as you serve my crown above all else.” He lifted a brow as a groom handed him his reins. “That includes pretty abbesses.”

Adelais didn’t bother to hide her irritation at that. He knew her well enough to see if she hid it anyway.

“Or,” William said, mounting the horse with a strong, easy movement, “dissolve the abbey and she won’t be an abbess any more. And there’s part of that problem solved.”

Well, he wasn’t wrong—Adelais could do that. Tate would never forgive her for it though.

She might never forgive me now.

“Be at Exeter’s gates as fast as you can get there,” the duke said and turned his horse to face the far end of the valley, the one that led out to the road. “And forget about the nun, Adelais. Use the abbey however you see fit. Hell, make a house out of its buildings. I don’t care, so long as you obey me.”

She didn’t even enjoy the siege.

Adelais of the Maine sat bored on her horse for four days while William’s men flung arrows, dug tunnels, and died in ridiculous numbers from rebel English archers burrowed behind the walls. At one point, William blinded a hostage in full view of the city walls. At another, an Exeter guard pulled down his pants and farted at them.

War, blood, farting—it should have been paradise. She should have been in the fray, soaking it up, finding even more misadventures to plunge into, but she just…couldn’t. None of it seemed worthwhile. None of it seemed interesting.

Tate was the only worthwhile and interesting thing in the entire world, and all Adelais wanted to do was spend the next sixty years watching her dress and eat and sing and walk and be, and instead she had to be here at this stupid siege, which wasn’t even any fun, waiting for the dead king’s mother to realize her grandsons were never coming back with the long-promised mercenaries from Ireland.

On the fifth night, Adelais finally realized the truth.

Earlier that day, she’d sat behind William as emissaries from Exeter came out with the city’s surrender. “Well, my wolf?” He’d turned and asked Adelais in Norman. “Shall I be merciful and accept their surrender?”

Adelais had only been listening with half an ear; if she’d been bored by the siege this week, then she was certainly going to be bored by surrender negotiations, which didn’t have any blood or aggressive farting, but she had heard one word repeatedly.

Fair.

The people of Exeter hadn’t rebelled because they were particularly in love with Gytha Thorkelsdóttir or because they truly cared about seeing one of her grandsons on the throne. Instead, they’d rebelled because William’s war hadn’t been fair, because ransoming Anglo-Saxon lands and then making the nobles pay to get those lands back hadn’t been fair—and above all else, William’s eye-watering taxes were so unfair that the priest speaking to them actually started crying as he described them.

And honestly, Adelais had to agree about all the fairness, or lack thereof. She would have rebelled, too, in their shoes.

“I think,” she told the king, “that it is cheaper to buy their loyalty now than to pay with more men and gold later when they decide to rebel again. Unhappy people will always want to rebel if they get the chance. But unhappy people having their purses emptied by your soldiers every time you need to raise funds? They will make the time to cause you trouble.”

He’d looked at her. “I expected you to tell me to cut off the hands of their leaders and throw all the men in prison.”

She’d looked at the emissaries then—priests and burghers and barely blooded nobles. “There is no honor in that. We should play fair with them, as they have asked, and then maybe they will play fair with us.” She’d paused. “And if they don’t, you can cut off their hands then.”

William had laughed, a short, cold noise that visibly chilled the people from Exeter, but they left the tent happy. In exchange for their allegiance, he’d not only lowered the taxes to what they’d been before Harold Godwinson’s time, but had also forbidden his soldiers from doing any raiding or looting in the city. He’d even posted his best men as guards at the gates to catch any Normans sneaking in to do mischief.

And as Adelais lay in her tent that night, she thought about how she’d arrogantly told Tate she herself always fought fair. She’d proclaimed it with swagger, like it was the truest thing in the world—and it had felt like the truest thing in the world when she said it, because she was thinking of a particular kind of fighting. A sword and an axe, arrows and knives. When it came to war and terror, she’d made sure whoever she set her sights on was ready and able to fight her back. She took pride in it.

But conquering wasn’t just blood and fire, not if it was going to last. It was forcing fealty from the conquered; it was leveraging their assets or familial loyalties against them. It was replacing Anglo-Saxon nobles with Norman ones and changing the taxes and courts and laws that bound those nobles and all the people underneath them. If all of that was conquering , then it was rather stupid to say that Adelais always fought fair when half the battles were fought not with swords, but with writs and decrees and muttered commands from an impatient king.

And when it had come to Far Hope, Adelais had not fought fair at all. She’d hidden the truth—she’d lied. And something was very wrong with her if the woman she adored trusted Adelais to hunt her in the dark and take her on the road, but not to protect the one thing she cared about above all else.

She’d fucked this all up. She’d fucked it up and she had no idea how to fix it that wouldn’t get her own hands chopped off.

Or worse—Tate’s.

Adelais frowned at the sloping cloth roof of her tent, illuminated only by a small fire for the watchmen outside. Thinking of Tate being hurt made her miserable. Knowing that she’d hurt Tate was unbearable. It made her chest ache, like something large and sharp had gotten lodged in her throat. Only one other person had ever made her feel like this, and that was her son. From the moment he’d blinked up at her with dark, nearly unseeing eyes—his squished little face still glistening with blood and his mouth opening for a battle cry that would have made even seasoned Danes turn and run for cover—she’d known she would destroy anything that so much as touched a single hair on his head.

And though what she felt for Tate was far from maternal, she could recognize it now, however shocking it was.

She loved Tate, abbess of Far Hope Abbey. She loved the stubborn, composed, secretly wicked woman, and she had to make this right for her.

And maybe Tate would never love her back, not after this. But that wasn’t the point.

The point was that she was going to start playing fair. For Tate, for Far Hope. For everyone who’d ever found happiness under the starlike ceiling of its secret chambers.

And that would have to be enough.