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 heyourChrist 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 mjölnir 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 thingright, 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 Idothat 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?—”
