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Seven

The Wolf

Adelais didn’t worry overmuch about her sins, but as she pulled her hand from Tate’s body, the weight of her own gluttony nearly flattened her. She wanted to make the naughty little abbess come again; she wanted to flip Tate over, get rid of her own hose, and straddle the nun’s wicked mouth until she peaked.

Mostly she just wanted to crush the limp, dazed Tate in her arms and smell her sweet-scented hair and ask her everything she was feeling and everything she’d ever felt and everything she wanted Adelais to feel, too, because Adelais would try for her; Adelais would try to feel anything she asked.

But first Adelais needed to come, because if she didn’t, she wasn’t entirely sure she wouldn’t end up fucking Tate into the road again, and she was certain Tate needed a chance to recover. So Adelais took care of herself like a soldier: with a blunt hand down her own hose and a few rough strokes. It didn’t take long, not after what she’d just done, and with Tate still underneath her. It had taken her longer to lace up her boots that morning than it did to culminate, and Adelais could have laughed at herself, at her own wastefulness. Here she was with a warm, sated nun underneath her, and she was masturbating like an adolescent watching a milkmaid undress. Ah, well. The night was young yet, and she had other things she wanted to do.

Though her sex was still pulsing out its release, Adelais withdrew her hand and then lay down right there on the road, rolling Tate into her arms.

Tate went easily, sweetly, her head fitting onto Adelais’s shoulder like it had been made to go there, her arm sliding over Adelais’s waist, and a little sigh escaping her lips as Adelais rearranged Tate’s habit so it covered her legs once again.

That sigh was a sound escaped from heaven, a note straight from David’s harp. It eased the demons inside her like it had done for King Saul, and Adelais felt full of light and peace. If the Wolf of Normandy was allowed to feel such a thing.

And even though the ground was hard and the night was chilly now that they weren’t wrestling or fucking, Adelais never wanted to move from this place. She would erect a castle right here on this very spot. She would fortify it and furnish it, and then they would never have to leave. They could live and die here, and hang the rest of the world. The world had gotten enough from the both of them—surely they were entitled to a little selfishness by now.

“Are you warm enough?” Adelais murmured.

Tate nodded, a sleepy arc of her head on Adelais’s shoulder. “You keep me warm.”

Why that made Adelais’s eyes burn, she didn’t know.

“Why are you a nun, little mouse?” Adelais said, her voice soft. It wasn’t a true question, not really. More of a lament.

But Tate answered anyway.

“I killed a man,” said the abbess quietly after a minute. “When I was fifteen.”

Adelais didn’t want to do anything to divert this unexpected openness; she couldn’t bear the idea of getting behind the veil of Tate’s innermost self only for it to draw closed again. But she did stroke the nun’s soft hair, hair as dark as a lake at midnight. “I’ve killed many, many men,” said Adelais. “Does that make you feel better?”

“It shouldn’t,” Tate said after a minute. “But it does. A little.”

“Why did you kill this person? Did you do it to protect yourself? Your home?” Adelais pictured a bandit, a raider, some disgruntled Dane after Edward succeeded the Danish Harthacnut to the throne.

Even though it happened years ago, a storm of heat coiled in her chest at the thought of someone trying to hurt Tate. It made her want to find this person’s grave just so she could kill them all over again.

“Yes, it was to protect myself, and someone else too. But my home?” Tate gave a bitter laugh. “I’m not sure anyone in my village would have ever forgiven me if they’d learned the truth. I certainly can’t forgive myself.”

Adelais didn’t respond to this other than to hold Tate tighter against herself, like if she held her close enough, she could soothe away the years-too-late fear she felt for Tate’s safety.

“He was my brother,” Tate said finally. Each word came out with an exhale, like speaking them required intention, force of will. “So you see the problem now. You have killed lots of men, but this wasn’t a battle and he wasn’t holding a sword. My own flesh and blood, and I killed him like a coward.”

“When you were fifteen,” Adelais stated. “Young people don’t kill unless they’re told to kill or unless they’re terrified. Which was it, little mouse? Did someone tell you to do it? Or were you so scared that you didn’t see any other way?”

Tate drew in a breath, and Adelais could hear the shaking in it.

The darkness, though getting colder and colder the longer they laid still, was like a blanket around them, a shroud of quiet, familiar safety. “He used to hit us,” she said after a long minute. “When he was in a temper. My parents died when I was ten, and Cafnoth was the oldest, so he inherited Thornchurch. Heorot was the middle child, and maybe Cafnoth thought he needed disciplining, I don’t know, but he was hardest on him. He only struck me a few times. But Heorot…” Tate paused, and Adelais wondered what she was seeing in her mind now, what she was reliving. “The day it happened, Cafnoth learned that the woman he’d wanted to marry had fallen in love with Heorot instead, and Cafnoth was…so angry. Beyond rage. He stormed into the house and grabbed Heorot and?—”

Tate sucked in a breath, a short one, like her body had forgotten it was here and not there during that day. “They fell to the ground and he was trying to bash Heorot’s head against the floor, and there was blood everywhere, and I grabbed a poker from the fire and I hit him. As hard as I could.”

Another breath. Sharp, quick.

“You saved your brother,” said Adelais. She knew she didn’t always think like other people did, especially when it came to what was right and what was wrong, but she could not see the crime in this. Saint Aidan himself would have done the same in Tate’s shoes.

“I could have hit Cafnoth on the back or on the arm or anywhere but the head,” said the abbess bitterly. “I could have pulled him off, maybe, or tried to get between them. Or I could have hit Cafnoth hoping only to incapacitate him. But I didn’t, Adelais. When I lifted that poker, I was hoping I’d kill him. I was hoping he’d die. I’d been so scared and so angry for so long, and not just for myself, but for Heorot too, and I wanted it all to stop. Just. Stop. And so that’s what I can’t forgive myself for. Not what I did, but that I meant what I did. That my mind was filled with as much evil as Cafnoth’s.”

She stopped suddenly, as if she’d run out of air, out of words altogether. Adelais understood; she’d seen her share of soldiers after their first battles, mixed up and miserable. And there were plenty of things in her own mind that never seemed to weave themselves properly with words.

“And then what happened?” Adelais asked. “You came to Far Hope?”

Tate nodded, her hair sliding over Adelais’s shoulder. “Heorot and I lied and said Cafnoth had been attacked on the road and managed to stumble home before he died. Heorot inherited Thornchurch, and I entered the abbey as a novice the day after the funeral.”

“Is this why they call you Tate the Pious? You’ve been trying to atone?” It made sense now to Adelais—the cool reserve, the too-thin body. She’d been punishing herself for ten years for something most people wouldn’t lose a single night’s sleep over.

“Not only for the crime of killing my own flesh and blood, but for wanting to do it,” Tate whispered. “For not…for not feeling as guilty as I should.”

Adelais stroked her hair, tangled her legs closer to Tate’s. They would need to go soon. She didn’t want Tate to get cold. “I don’t feel guilty for the people I’ve killed,” said Adelais. “And there have been many. I don’t kill children, and I only kill people with a sword or axe in their hand. But they would not be dead if my king hadn’t decided he wanted the English crown.”

“And you don’t feel guilty for that?” Tate asked, her tone more curious than offended.

Adelais would have shrugged had Tate not been on her shoulder. “War is war, abbess. How many battles has England fought in the last fifty years? Your little island is always at war. Danes, Northmen, each other . It is the same on the Continent. There is always fighting, and there always will be.”

“I don’t think there should always be fighting,” Tate said. And then she exhaled. “But how can there not be, when even I had it in me to kill someone in cold blood?”

“Hardly cold blood,” Adelais said. “What did your abbess say about all this when you joined?”

Tate took a minute. “That God had a plan. That Far Hope wouldn’t be able to last forever as it was, and that it needed someone willing to do what others couldn’t. It needed someone who wasn’t afraid of death if it meant more life.”

“That is what your Christ was like, was it not? He paid death for more life.”

“Isn’t he your Christ too?”

Adelais made a noise. She’d been baptized, and, overall, she liked God a good deal—especially in the Old Testament, when he was capricious and interesting—but her father had not been particularly devout, and her grandparents had worn mjolnir pendants under their robes rather than crosses. Their family’s conversion after Rollo’s treaty had been a very gradual and halfhearted thing.

“And secondly,” Tate went on, “Christ paid his own life. That’s very different from paying someone else’s.”

“Someone else who would have paid Heorot’s life if he had the chance,” Adelais pointed out. “Besides, I’m sure your abbess was speaking metaphorically.” That was something all religious types had in common—English, Norman, or even Lombard, in the case of Lanfranc.

“I suppose she was, although I don’t think she felt like Far Hope’s end was a metaphor.” Tate sighed. “I fear our abbey’s days are numbered. Without the protection of an English king…”

Adelais shifted on the ground, a slow tide of guilt seeping up from the road to the curves of her cheeks and the tip of her nose. She was glad Tate couldn’t see her flushing in the dark. She wasn’t accustomed to feeling guilty over anything she did, much less anything William ordered her to do. But she was a different Adelais around Tate, maybe.

Tate sat up suddenly, Adelais’s arm still looped around her waist, and looked down at Adelais. The faint, faint wash of moonlight traced that enigmatic mouth, and Adelais’s body tightened. Why hadn’t she taken advantage of that mouth earlier? She couldn’t remember now.

“Does it truly not bother you?” Tate asked, the words filled with intensity and vulnerability both. “Being the Wolf? Having killed people?”

The guilt was joined by something else now, a kind of low-simmering panic. She didn’t want to say the wrong thing and have this little nun run away from her. She didn’t want Tate to look at her any differently than she was just now.

But there was no point in lying, and in any event, Tate already knew the worst of her, probably thought Adelais was even worse than she really was, given the way stories grew and changed as they got told. The truth was the only thing worth telling.

“I like being the Wolf,” Adelais said simply. “I like battle; I like war. I like those frostbitten mornings when the only thing keeping me warm is the anticipation. I like someone testing my sword, my axe, and making me work for a victory.” She paused, and then added, so there could be no mistake, no painting her as some reluctant warrior who’d learned to love their trade, “I wasn’t born otherwise. It is when I feel the most alive.”

Tate stared down at Adelais. Her eyes were nothing but shine in the shadows. “It does not haunt you? Killing people?”

“No, little mouse,” Adelais said softly. “And if I had done what you had done, I would have felt proud of myself for saving my brother. I would have been relieved that Cafnoth couldn’t hurt anyone else.”

“But you only know kills in battle. Those are different from what I did to Cafnoth. The pope even blessed William’s war?—”

Adelais rolled her eyes. “A pope’s blessing doesn’t make a thing right , and that’s something even a nun should know. No, I face what I’ve done on its own terms. I have killed, and many of the people I killed were not on a battlefield, but on the edges of some village as they tried to keep us from collecting taxes or supplies. Yes, I fight fair, but was it fair in the first place that I was there? I don’t know. William and the pope think so. The people who dug the graves likely don’t.”

“You’re very honest with yourself.”

“I have to be,” Adelais said. “Because the world is not honest with me.”

“Because people tell stories like you’re a monster?”

Adelais tucked an arm behind her head, still looking at the shadow-draped woman in front of her. She could look at Tate forever, she decided. For the rest of her life, and then she’d ask to be buried next to Tate after she died, propped on her side so she could keep looking even after she couldn’t see anything at all anymore.

“I like the stories,” Adelais said. “It’s the things I do that create the Wolf, not who I was married to, who was I born to. Not the lands I hold in my son’s name. Not the way people think Adelais of the Maine should be?—”

Adelais stopped. Not because she wanted to stop, but because she realized she’d never explained this to someone. She’d never had to weave her thoughts about this with words, and all the words she knew were as useless as a tangled skein of yarn in a bucket of cooling wax.

“Should be?” Tate asked. Her voice wasn’t gentle, necessarily, but it was open. Open like a doorway. Open like a tabernacle at Easter.

Adelais squeezed her eyes closed. Not because it was hard to talk about this so much as it took all her concentration to explain what she’d never had to explain before. “Abroad, I am William’s pet monster, and back home, I am the mother of Gérald’s son. And I’m lucky to have both things. I could be shut up in a bower embroidering dresses, desperate for any visitor no matter how boring, because I never get to go anywhere. Never get to travel or fight or do anything interesting at all.”

Adelais opened her eyes to see Tate watching her.

“ But sometimes I hate that there can only be a single Adelais in one place. I am many Adelaises, and I like being many Adelaises. And it’s not that any one version of me feels wrong or anything, it’s only that there are so many ways of being me that feel right . But I can’t choose every day who I am depending on what feels right. I have to be what other people expect.” Adelais thought a minute. “I suppose that’s why I choose to be the Wolf as often as I can. When you’re a story, then people expect you to be different, at least. And maybe that’s as close as I can get.”

Tate reached out and touched her arm. “You could tell me,” she said in that solemn way of hers that Adelais found so hypnotic. Like she was praying over Adelais; like she was whispering a verse from scripture that had been hidden until now. “You could tell me which Adelais you are, if you are a legend or a soldier or a mother or a stranger on the road.”

Adelais reached up and touched Tate’s jaw.

“If only I could tell you for longer than just tomorrow,” she murmured.

Tate’s eyes closed, and the breeze spilled around them, cold and restless. “I am grateful for the sake of Far Hope that you are keeping your promise,” she said. “But I will miss you when you go.”

The guilt was hot enough to catch the sky on fire. Adelais tried to ignore it, quash it, extinguish it with cold reason. She hadn’t come here expecting this little abbess, after all; she’d come here for herself and for William.

At the end of the day, she was his wolf.

“I’ll miss you too,” Adelais said, and it was so much the truth that it felt like a lie to speak. She sat up and took the nun’s cool hands in hers, and then stood, pulling Tate with her. “We should go before you freeze. Come on.”