Page 20 of The Conquering of Tate the Pious
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.
“Butsometimes I hate that there can only be a single Adelais in one place.I am many Adelaises, and Ilikebeing 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 feelright.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.”
Eight
TATE
THE RESTof the night was a blur of skin and sighs in Adelais’s tent.And when Tate crept back to the abbey at dawn, sore between her legs and her heart feeling like it was too big to fit inside the mew of her ribs, Adelais went part of the way with her, walking Tate to the footpath she’d take up the hills and then around to the backside of the valley.
“Do you have to go?”Adelais asked.Her hair was all the way undone now, and she wore only a thin undershirt over her hose.In the gradually brightening gloom, Tate could see the lean shape of Adelais’s body through the fabric.
“I wish I could stay,” Tate said, meaning it.“With you.”
“Would that be strange for you?”Adelais asked.“Staying with me?”
“Because you’re not a man?Because I’m a nun?”She thought for a moment.“Or because you’re a Norman?”
Adelais let out a low laugh.“All three, I suppose.”
That was fair.This was hardly the usual way things happened, but then again, they were hardly the usual people.“Things are different where I grew up,” Tate explained.“At Thornchurch.There weren’t any limits as to who you shared a bed or a life with, at least not in the valley.And as for being a Norman, well.No one’s perfect.”
Adelais grinned.But the grin came with a pinning stare.“You didn’t address the part about being a nun.”
“And I won’t,” Tate replied.“Unless you do the impossible and win your bet.”
“My bet that I’ll learn the secrets of this place?”Adelais smiled, her hands tucked behind her back.“Hmmm.”
“Good night, Adelais.Or good morning, I suppose.I’ll see you tonight.”
And so Tate left the smiling soldier behind and trudged back to her abbey, her home, and her responsibility.
Her prison.
Leofgifu took one look at Tate and demanded she spend the day catching up on sleep, but Tate refused, joining her and Judith for lauds, and then helping care for the sick pilgrims.But as she prayed, carried water, and cleaned bed linens, her mind was still on the road with Adelais.Her body was still trembling with a release so powerful it unraveled everything she knew about herself, and her heart was still in her throat, remembering how Adelais’s voice sounded as she’d asked,Do you have to go?
But mostly, there was thisthingthat followed her, that was like a halo coming from inside her, but it came from her chest and her gut as well as her head, and it was this one simple revelation.
Absolution.
