Page 6

Tate

Judith and Leofgifu had the abbey well in hand, but Tate still hesitated as she climbed up the knotty path to the moors. Her duty was to the abbey and everyone in it, and now that duty called her to the Wolf’s tent. But it still felt wrong to go tonight. Not because she worried that God would judge her for the deal she’d struck with the Norman warrior, not that at all.

It felt wrong because it didn’t feel wrong. Because there was a twisting excitement in her stomach as she crested the lip of the valley and came out onto the moor. Because her cunt was already wet thinking of Adelais.

It didn’t feel like penance or payment for her crimes. It didn’t feel anything like what atonement should feel like. And for that…for that, she wasn’t sure if God would forgive her. To begrudgingly save her abbey was one thing. But to think about their invader finding her in the dark, tearing off her clothes, marking her with a wolf’s bite…

To want that…

This time, she was spotted almost as soon as she left the shadows clinging to the hillside. The same two guards from last night—with grim expressions that made Tate wonder if they’d been censured for their lack of awareness the night before—led Tate silently to the Wolf’s tent, and they lifted the flap for her.

Adelais was inside, sitting on her cot with an apple in one hand and a dagger with an unornamented metal hilt in the other. Tate stepped through the opening, wondering if she should take off her clothes right away or drop to her knees to signal her willingness.

Adelais sliced off a paper-thin round of apple and ate it, regarding Tate with eyes made bronze by the light of the brazier. “Let’s go for a walk,” she said abruptly, standing.

Tate stared. “A walk? But?—”

Adelais was already pushing past her, apple and dagger still in hand. “Come on, abbess.”

Adelais looked unfairly beautiful in the dusk light filtering in from the open flap of the tent, her red hair hued violet by the encroaching night, freckles like spatters of blood on her face, shadows clinging to the underside of her full mouth. She was tall and lean, and she wore nothing under her tunic, so Tate could easily make out the high, firm curves of her breasts. The stiff tips of her nipples.

Maybe Adelais would make her suck them tonight.

“Very well,” Tate heard herself say in a faint voice. Who was she kidding? With the fire burning in her belly and with her own nipples pebbled and eager, she would have followed Adelais anywhere. All the way to the sea if it meant touching her again.

Adelais nodded, holding the flap of the tent so that Tate could duck out, and then Adelais followed. Together they walked to the edge of the camp and to the road leading down to the rest of the valley. They passed soldiers sitting in circles around fires and chattering; they passed the horses grazing quietly near the water, and soon they were alone in the near darkness, with only the moon for company.

As the Wolf walked, she cut off pieces of apple, her knife bright in the dark, and popped the pieces in her mouth, crunching the fruit with jaunty aplomb. Twice she offered a bite to Tate, and the second time, Tate relented and murmured, Yes, that would be nice .

Adelais stopped and held the slice between her fingers. “Open,” she said to Tate, and Tate did, parting her lips obediently.

Adelais put the apple on Tate’s tongue, and then watched as Tate closed her mouth and ate. It was as thin as a communion wafer, as sweet and tart as Adelais had tasted last night. Tate swallowed.

Adelais wiped her blade on her tunic and sheathed it. She licked her fingers clean of any remaining apple juice, her eyes full of glimmers from the moon overhead as she watched Tate watching her. Her tongue was a pale pink in the moonlight as it slid against the pads of her fingers and over her knuckles.

Tate couldn’t think a single thought for a moment, she was so entranced by that tongue. And then she wanted to shake herself until her teeth rattled. What was wrong with her? Why was it this one person—this Norman, murdering person —could make her feel like she was drowning? When even princesses and kings couldn’t do that?

She needed to get back to the way she’d been yesterday before she met Adelais—determined, emotionless. Penitential .

Because all of this, being the abbess and a nun in the first place, was supposed to be about penance.

She wouldn’t be unraveled by a horrible Norman, and she’d decided that she couldn’t allow herself to enjoy what was meant to be a duty. A sacrifice.

To do so meant?—

Well, she didn’t know what it meant exactly, but it still felt wrong.

“We should go back to your tent,” Tate said as Adelais started walking again. She had to take two strides for every one of the Wolf’s. “So we can honor our, um, arrangement.”

A smile flashed in the dark. “And we need a tent for that?”

Tate’s whole body felt blistered by fire, even though the night air was cool. She looked away, trying to gather herself. Trying not to think about Adelais on top of her, nothing but shadows and teeth in the moonlight.

About how wrong and thrilling it would feel to be held down in the dark…

They passed the menhir—the standing stone at the foot of the road leading to the abbey—and then turned. Soon they were on the moors, wild and undulating, a rough sea of grass and gorse and stone.

Adelais came to a stop, her eyes on the heath and the patchwork of fields carved out of its grasp. “It is beautiful here,” she murmured, seemingly more to herself than to Tate. “A naked, wicked land.”

It was the last thing Tate had expected the earthy soldier to say. It was almost…poetic. “What?”

Adelais’s mouth curved, though her eyes stayed on the landscape. “It’s what William’s pet abbot told me when I asked him if he’d ever heard of Far Hope. He told me it was wicked place in a naked, wicked land.”

Tate had a guess as to which abbot that was. “Lanfranc.”

Adelais’s eyebrows lifted. “You know him?”

She did, unfortunately. “There are rumors William will make him the next archbishop of Canterbury, in which case, he’ll want the English church to be reformed.” Again . Far Hope had managed to squeeze past the monastic reformations of Dunstan and Aethelwold a few generations ago, mostly because it had the protection of the king. But now the king of England was a Norman foreigner who’d never been to Far Hope and possibly didn’t know of its mission and its blessings. Could it survive another overzealous reformer with continental ideas?

The Wolf laughed. A short, bright laugh that sounded far too merry to come from the mouth of a murderer. It was lovelier than any hymn Tate had ever heard. “I don’t want to wound you, abbess, but if you’re an example of the English church right now, perhaps a little reformation wouldn’t hurt.”

Tate wasn’t wounded in the least. She knew how it all must seem; there was a reason Far Hope hid itself. “Far Hope stands apart,” she said. “We are the only abbey I know of like this.” And then she pressed her lips together. That was almost saying too much.

“Full of angel-faced nuns ready to tempt good Christians into lust?”

Tate didn’t answer. There wasn’t an answer she could give that wouldn’t result in a hundred more questions. Questions that she wasn’t supposed to answer, although she did wonder what Adelais would think of Far Hope. Maybe she’d be delighted. Maybe she’d laugh that bright, merry laugh again.

“No matter,” Adelais said. “If you are the flower of the English church, then I will pray that Lanfranc never attacks the beautiful, carnal root. Although I have to warn you that my prayers aren’t worth very much.”

“I could help you with that,” Tate offered, and Adelais’s smile widened.

“A sweet offer from a wicked girl.” A step closer, gold eyes nearly silver in the night. “Now tell me, abbess. When you were thinking about someone forcing you last night, what did that look like?”

The question was clear, direct. Abrupt enough that Tate could guess that Adelais had been wanting to ask it all day. Which meant she’d been thinking about Tate’s shameful admittance in the tent all day.

Humiliation ran down the inside of Tate’s chest like wine down the sides of a goblet. But it was followed by a hot rush of excitement, a thrill so twisted and dark that it brought even more shame sluicing down along with it.

Was this what forbidden things felt like to everyone else? Was this what a transgression felt like? Tate came from Thornchurch—Thornchurch, where Beltane was still marked with fire and flesh, where Imbolc and Lammas and Samhain meant bacchanals with the entire village participating. When she’d been accepted as a sister to Far Hope, she’d understood its unique blessings immediately, and unlike many other sisters and most of their pilgrims, she hadn’t had to unlearn shame about her body and its desires.

But Far Hope wasn’t some orgy of limitless hedonism. It was a holy place, a place of God, and chief of God’s laws was free will. Was choice . And so to fantasize about free will being taken away felt sinful beyond almost anything else. Not the chief of Tate’s sins, certainly, but close.

Adelais touched Tate’s cheek, and Tate wondered if Adelais could feel the flush there. “I’d tell you there’s no need to be shy,” Adelais murmured, “but I’m enjoying your bashfulness immensely.”

“I’m not shy ,” Tate said, trying to sound firm. In control. “But I don’t know how to answer your question.”

“With the truth, of course,” Adelais said brightly and dropped her hand. “It’s not so hard. When you were thinking of someone grabbing you and taking you, what does that look like? What would you want it to feel like?”

“I—I don’t know. It’s too new.”

Adelais seemed to like that last part, her tongue going idly to her incisor as she studied Tate. “Too new. As in, last night was the first night you thought of such things?”

There didn’t seem to be any point in lying about it. “Yes.”

The Wolf’s eyes gleamed. “I don’t know if I should be honored or ashamed to bring out such thoughts in such a quiet little mouse, but there we are. Now, back to my question. There must have been something you thought of. Something that’s haunted your thoughts ever since.”

It had haunted more than her thoughts. Her body had been thrumming all day.

She couldn’t say that out loud though; she didn’t dare to—and then somehow she was. She was answering Adelais, even as she knew she shouldn’t. “Your hand.” Her voice was quiet. “Over my mouth.”

Adelais looked very much like a wolf then, eyes avid, body still. A stillness that lured prey into a false sense of safety.

“You on top of me, pushing my shift up to my hips.” Now that she’d started speaking, it was hard to stop. It was almost like a confession, really, this moment, laying a sin bare and having someone absolve her. Even if Adelais’s absolution was not prayer but hunger. “You going between my legs in the dark and telling me to be quiet.”

Adelais remained frozen, but Tate could see her swallowing. Could see the pulse pounding at the collar of her tunic.

“If this had been two hundred years ago…” Tate stopped; she couldn’t finish. Even after admitting the rest, it felt impossible to speak aloud.

But she didn’t have to. With her eerie prescience, Adelais already seemed to know. “You’d like to be carried off like a spoil? Carted off to my home, made into a concubine?”

“It’s not—it’s only—” Tate still couldn’t find the words, but panic was what was choking her now. It felt so awful to hear, to have it phrased so bluntly, when in her head it was not the bleak truth of what had happened to her religious sisters centuries ago, but something else. A smear of urgent images and feelings, a blur of quickened breaths and wet flesh that ended with everyone replete and pleased.

But again, Adelais seemed to sense Tate’s turmoil. “Shh, abbess, don’t fret. I know you don’t really want that. What you want is to play a game.”

A game. Tate hadn’t thought of it like that. “It doesn’t feel like a game in my mind,” she said slowly.

“Some of the best games don’t,” said Adelais. “But that doesn’t change what they are. Playing, but with a beginning and an end. Playing with rules. For instance”––she came closer, her fingers sliding up Tate’s neck to cup her jaw over her wimple––“a rule that you could stop the game whenever you wanted.”

“And how would I do that?” Tate whispered. Adelais’s hand was so warm through the thin linen, so illogically warm in the cool night.

“You’ll simply say stop ,” Adelais said. She said it in her Norman tongue, arestes , and then said it again in Tate’s English, as if to make it absolutely clear. “Stoppast.”

“And you would stop? Easy as that?”

Adelais nodded. “I fight fair, and I play fair. I swear both those things are true.”

Tate gave her a look. “You do not fight fair. I’m servicing you for three nights to keep you from pillaging my abbey.”

Adelais grinned. “We struck a bargain . What is not fair about that? Come, abbess, what do you say? Don’t you want to see what it feels like? To have what you thought about last night?”

Tate shifted on her feet. She did want it, more than she could express, because once her brain had conjured the image of Adelais’s hand over her mouth, she hadn’t been able to think of anything else. Like wine that could not be undrunk, the idea could not be unthought. The fantasy, however new, however blurry, could not be buried, and since last night, Tate’s mind had been full of every way it could happen. Every way Adelais could do those awful, forbidden things to her.

“Maybe,” Tate said, closing her eyes. The Wolf’s hand on her jaw was warm, firm. She could feel the strength in it, the threat. She’d have to pray on her knees for years for it, but the danger inherent in that touch made her something both more and less than herself—a mixture of boldness, fear, shame, and hunger. She felt like she didn’t know herself.

And for the first time in ten years, she wanted to know herself.

“Yes,” Tate whispered. “Not maybe . The answer is yes.”

Adelais touched her forehead to Tate’s. She was tall enough and Tate was short enough that Tate had to tilt her face all the way up, and when Adelais’s mouth brushed over hers, she could almost imagine it was the night itself kissing her with its apple-sweet lips.

“What do you want, little mouse?” Adelais murmured against Tate’s mouth. Petite suriz . “Tell me what game you would play. Tell me what it could look like out here, in the dark.”

Tate could barely breathe, the words were that dangerous sliding around on her tongue. “You could be a stranger on the road,” she managed to say as she opened her eyes. “I could be returning to the abbey after running an errand.”

Adelais nipped at Tate’s lip. “I could offer to walk you back.”

“And then you could…”

Tate didn’t finish. It was speaking sin aloud. Laughing at God’s gift of free will to want such a thing.

Adelais lifted her face from Tate’s and looked down at her. “You have to tell me the game you want to play so I can make sure we play the same one. Do I demand payment for my protection? Or do I not even bother with a little nicety like asking?”

Tate flushed. It was a cruel gift of the Wolf’s, that she could see these stains in Tate’s mind. And yet once the stains were out in the open, they were no longer stains at all, but possibilities. Games. “You wouldn’t bother,” Tate said quietly. “You’d take what you wanted.”

“Mm. I would. Do you want to run? Would that be exciting for you?”

“I think—” Tate had to order her thoughts. She couldn’t believe they were just talking about this, about the things that were supposed to stay in the deepest reaches of the night. “I think I’d like to try.”

“Do you like pain?” Adelais asked the question like she was asking Tate if she wanted her wine watered or not—something that casual, that easy to do or not do. Gratitude twisted through Tate for that casualness. She sometimes suffered devotionally, like many monastics did, by striking her back with a knotted rope as she prayed, or wearing a leather cord beneath her knee, but suffering to creep closer to God was very different from…this.

“Some pain,” decided Tate after a moment. “Enough for it to feel real. Teeth, pulling my hair, wrestling. Some light bruises, maybe.”

“Good girl. Say stop if it gets to be too much.” Another quick grin, and then Adelais bounced on the balls of her feet. It was so youthful, almost boyish of her, like Tate had just agreed to spar outside before dinner. Like Tate had just agreed to sneak into the neighbor’s orchard to steal apples. Like what they were about to do was harmlessly naughty.

“And you will stop if I ask?” Tate checked.

Adelais gave her a sweeping, courtly bow. “Upon my honor, madam.”

“I can’t believe I’m trusting someone with a band of soldiers camped outside my abbey.”

Adelais lifted a shoulder. Under the tunic, Tate could see the firm muscles of her body. “I have kept my word about our arrangement, have I not? And you can share anything you like with me, because I won’t tell a soul. Think of me as a confessor of sorts.” Another quick grin. And then she took Tate’s shoulders and spun her around so that she was facing the road to the abbey. They were at least a mile or two away from the camp, and all around them was the great emptiness of the moors and hills. “Go. And your stranger shall catch up with you.”

Tate sucked in a breath. She wanted that. She wanted it so much that nothing else mattered. Not even that it was the Wolf, of all people, giving it to her.

And strangely, absurdly, she trusted Adelais. She shouldn’t—she knew she shouldn’t trust a murderer, a Norman, someone who wanted to crash through the gates of her abbey and violate its halls. But she also didn’t get the sense that Adelais was interested in hurting any of her sisters in the process, and maybe that mattered.

I fight fair.

In a war, that mattered a lot.

And more than anything else, Adelais was right: she hadn’t gone back on her word. Tate respected that, found comfort in it. She didn’t mind a villain so long as they were honest about their own villainy. It was how she felt about herself, after all.