Of all the many places one could expect the strange and terrifying, the peaceful rolling hills of Mercia were among the last. Least of all, a nunnery girded by a town, sat upon a lazy river that brought goods from Liverpool. This sceptred sanctuary, this former manor played host to the nuns of Weston Abbey, a congregation as industrious and harmonious as the bees of their hives. As temperate and soothing as the wine of their vineyard. Yet as these pastoral vistas passed into dark earth and bleak stone, the truth of the abbey was revealed.

Sybil had been making her rounds, sojourning through the halls with a leisurely pace and simple smile affixed to her features. Along the cloister had been the sympathetic stares, the cloying condemnation of her sisters. Her fair hands absently rubbed at her wrists where the rope burns remained clearly visible to all who dared to seek evidence of their most recent scandal. A woman of her younger years, Sybil was possessed of angelic beauty, if her father were to be believed. She had kind, round features and bright blue eyes. Her hair was a blonde so pure it was as if it had been spun by the very sun itself. Though much of her tempting form, as Rebecca had condemned it, remained hidden beneath habit and robe, she’d still fallen afoul of desire. Though the sympathy of her sisters told her the abbess had dispensed an altogether different tale at breakfast that day.

Here, behind a heavy wooden door and the wrought iron of its hinges, lay her sanctuary. In her arms she carried a cask, teasing every step with caution as she chanced down the spiral stairwell. Through the low arches of the crypts where saints and kings slept, over the dank earthen floors and into the bare bedrock itself, Sybil travelled. She came upon her weeping walled quarry in the form of the winery. It had long been used to ferment their foodstuffs, given its humidity and darkened environs. Sybil took special care to step over the carvings that predated even the abbey above. A place so sacred even the druids afore them knew it to be so.

She met with Rebecca, a similarly pale woman with green eyes and dark brown hair. Her nose sported freckles and her cheeks were creased with a perpetual frown. A grimace that vanished upon noticing Sybil’s arrival with the wine. Eagerly, she took the cask and set it upon the stands against the walls, wasting no time in applying a label before noting the various conditions in her notebook.

“Sister you must try my newest vintage! I adjusted the type of wood it is aged in!” Rebecca excitedly reported, taking a cup from one of her tables. Sybil craned her neck to see the abject mess the other woman had left, observing strewn papers and various roots and herbs she would add to the recipe. Her reticence must have shown upon her face for the other nun soon took a brass cup to her hand. “If you do, I shall let you take some to Sister Judith,” she cajoled, bringing a bright flash of embarrassment to the younger woman’s face. She shook her head almost automatically before blue eyes slid once more to the deeper parts of the cave. Those that lay beyond even where the druids had braved. None but the builders and craftsmen dared that darkened hole. The thoughts of Judith in that pall, alone and afraid, strengthened both her mind and her palate.

She took a cautious sip, recalling the foul liquorice taste of Rebecca’s previous offering. To her surprise, it was floral. Sweet and mildly infatuating. Sybil’s eyes lit up, drinking the whole cup in seconds.

“It’s wondrous Rebecca,” Sybil smiled, taking the other nun’s hand for an appreciative grip. She whipped it away, shaking her head firmly before seeming to calm herself.

“Thank you for saying so,” she responded through lips taut as a lyre. “I pray Judith enjoys it too. I shall keep watch,” Rebecca indicated to the depths behind her with a nod, pouring a third cup. Sybil took it with gusto, pattering toward the cells with barely restrained enthusiasm. The other nun looked on forlornly, a distinct unease dancing on her gaze.

Sybil only paused in her journey to light a candle with her flint, gently covering her sole protection from the dark about her. Throughout her time above, she had known only the grace of a world imagined in the mind of a loving creator. Down here, she felt something distinctly crueller. To be fettered within, surrounded by such maddening blackness, was a step further from mercy than she would have asked. But her pleas for clemency, for a stay of punishment had fallen upon the abbess’ deaf ears. Judith had escaped the gallows or stake or sheriff’s lash by the mercy of abbess Margaret’s sense of scandal. Even admission had not brought preferential treatment, as it so often had.

The cells were naught but reinforced doors built into alcoves set within the rock. Though efforts had been meagre, they had long served for the containment of the mad, the penitent, the criminal. Judith, according to others, had been all these things throughout her life. Yet as Sybil took her first faltering steps in flickering candlelight to the barred window that allowed her to see, she felt her breath seize. Shades of what had happened, what she’d failed to do, passed before her and the spectre of Judith’s fury leered menacingly before her.

“Sybil?” Judith’s voice drifted from within the cell. With a flurry of motion, she appeared at the opening with a disbelieving stare.

Judith was a woman similar in age to Sybil, possessing black hair and brown eyes. Her family hailed from the south of Francia, casting her complexion in a darker hue. She slipped her hand through the bars, fingers straining as if the wood might give way from tenacity alone. Seeing her broke the spell of doubt on Sybil, who staggered toward her with wine threatening to spill. Turning her body against the flame, that it might not illuminate the route back to Rebecca, the blonde woman interlaced her fingers with Judith’s.

“I would offer you communion, but I feel we’ve orchestrated enough sin for one month,” Sybil jested weakly, her face the picture of relief. Now that the candle had been brought close, the tribulations of Margaret’s judgement had been laid open. Her love’s eye had swollen, the switch’s bite marked in half-healed wounds upon her triceps and back. But her eyes wore a haunted affection that sent dread crawling throughout the other nun’s body. “For my sake, seek contrition. Even if it be false witness, I would rather you bear one more sin than rest another moment in this squalor,” Sybil pleaded. She took pains to brush her lips against the back of Judith’s hand, who scoffed at her attempts at reason. Not even physicality, which Sybil struggled with, swayed her reticence. Instead, there was only the offer of wine which Judith took gratefully, cup slipping through the bars.

“This dark has leant my thoughts a coherence and eloquence I dared not achieve squandered in the abbey above,” Judith purred, lifting her fingers to caress a lock of Sybil’s hair. It had sprung free in her enthusiasm. A careful admission of the double standard. While Judith, stripped of her habit, wore her hair short as custom, Sybil had been permitted a length her sisters considered absurd. Vain. “We are the unwanted, my star. My Polaris, don’t you see? They will never acquiesce to us. Never allow us even a hidden joy. They shall devour us, tear the very marrow of life from us. Rebecca is the shade of our future if we do not act,” her love confessed with a resigned expression. But Sybil had dwelt too long in Judith’s arms not to know the voice that issued from her lips. It was the voice of rebellion. A voice of cruellest vengeance.

“Rashness will not afford you release from this cell any more than these daydreams will,” Sybil snapped in the loudest whisper she dared. “Would you make war on the world itself? These are the truths of our age. Perhaps in some long-apart future we will know others,” she continued earnestly, attempting vainly to placate her love’s fury. But Judith’s temper had been hewn in pyroclastic rivers of rage. It had since hardened, it seemed, into tunnels that gave that most fatal magma direction. “I wish to see you again. To hold you. To tend the bees as we so love to,” she concluded with a defiant reminder of their shared joy. Of gardening, tending to all the creatures of the almighty. Learning of their secrets and strange fathomless knowledge.

“You have lingered here long enough, my love,” Judith hissed, hearing the voice of Rebecca carry through the caves behind them. “Attend me. Three days hence I will come to you in our bedchambers. I shall collect needed provisions and you shall collect our possessions. On the night of the third day, we will abscond to my aunt’s manor in Francia. There, my Eros and Aphrodite, you will never leave my arms again. I will always protect you,” Judith relayed urgently, her eyes flicking over her shoulder as a whisper of wind slithered from within her cell. In her frantic processing of her love’s intentions, Sybil failed to note that there were no windows nor openings within that cell. All potential for thoughts were extinguished as Judith’s hand brought her close. Their lips met, passion passing between them before Sybil was hurried away to her usual hiding place.

With a single look to the retreating arms of her dearest, Sybil ducked behind the rows of wooden frames the casks sat upon. Unbeknownst to many of the other nuns, a passage had been obscured by them since the manor had first become an abbey. Sybil knew of it only by virtue of this being her grandfather’s wine cellar. As she made her way through the spiderweb-strewn passage, the blonde nun’s mind thought little of its occupants. Her tempestuous considerations ruminated only on Judith and her cryptic instruction. She’d ever been resourceful, rebellious and bloody-minded but Sybil doubted the frailty of the cell locks. Particularly given her lack of tools even if she could reach them. She pushed aside the ivy she’d laid over the doorway during her novice days. Restoring it to its purpose, she looked about furtively for marauding tell-tales and gossips. Before her lay the beehives, haven of their affections and most careful projects. The only time she’d seen the embittered beauty she adored happy. Save perhaps when they chanced to sleep in each other’s embrace.

Sybil berated herself for suggesting the ropes. But for their inclusion, they could have cultivated all manner of excuses and lies. Shaking her head, she turned to constructing another fabrication. At this juncture, their weight would make her the greatest architect in history or its Minos. Regardless of her success, it crushed her all the same.

Her next test found her tending to the hives, ensuring that the birds hadn’t pecked away at their safety. Sister Elizabeth arrived with Prioress Lora in tow, rounding the corner of the abbey only to stop upon seeing Sybil. Elizabeth indicated this to Lora, who appeared off in her own daze. The blonde nun made her best attempt to stitch one of the protective suits as they approached. Not an ounce of her true emotion could be allowed to surface. Though her knuckles whitened on the spool regardless.

Elizabeth was the first to approach, eagerly arriving with clenched fists. Her habit had not kept her strawberry blonde hair from wending its tangles free, a mistake she fastidiously corrected before looking down expectantly. Sybil, though she did not look up, could already picture her judgemental green eyes and freckled, pointed nose. Her thin lips perpetually melted into a disapproving frown. Her rake-thin figure in her mind was testament to her restraint, her abstention from gluttony. To Sybil and a great many other nuns, it was simply a reflection of her pride. Though whether pious pride or lecherous vanity, none knew.

The prioress made her way quickly thereafter rifling through her leather satchel for some unguent or tincture to sooth her ailing lungs. Prioress Lora was of advanced age, devoutly pious and unfailingly kind. She sported a stooped posture and slow, pain-addled hands that Elizabeth and the other obedientiaries assisted with. Her hair hung in tangled twists, barely held within her habit. Her eyes bore the darkened rings of sleepless nights. Sybil could not help but sympathise with the woman’s plight, having been left to oversee forty-score nuns with aught but three underlings to aid her. She vowed to make her father write to the abbess for this oversight.

“Sister, weren’t you supposed to take the cask to Rebecca?” Elizabeth inquired with a barbed tone, having probably sent her lackeys Edith and Ethel to spy on her. Lora admonished her, though gave a curious look to Sybil all the same. Ever was it thus. Elizabeth the bloodhound, Lora the hunter. Following the nose of her lesser, allowing more dangerous game to escape.

“I did that some time ago,” Sybil replied evenly, continuing her work on the tear under her fingers. They had their suspicions, probably. But suspicions did not afford the abbess’ ire. Not even an audience, mostly. Sybil wondered whether she ever left the confines of her office in the dormitories. “Before you opine on my tasks for the day, I shall clean the refectory when I have attended to my hives. Else the honey cakes you enjoy so readily at night will not be all that sweet,” the blonde nun interrupted Elizabeth as she began to speak once again. Sister Juna was a font of information where the dietary erring of her fellows was concerned. All it took were flattering comments and gifts of wine from Rebecca.

It had the desired effect of offending the red-haired woman’s pride. She made a noise of disgust, clearly reaching for her lowest insinuations and euphemisms. Fortunately, she was stopped by a firm hand from Lora who bade the obedientiary to attend her own salvation before that of others. The prioress then began inspecting Sybil’s hands, turning them over in her gnarled fingers with an expert, though aged eye. Improper ties were known to blacken the hands and sicken the body. But Sybil knew Judith better than that. It had only been an amusement, her careful hands ensuring that she’d been restrained yet the blood flowed readily. Though she would never admit it, Judith had a healer’s hands. If only she had a healer’s temperament.

“Though your body seems unaffected beyond a few welts, how fares your mind?” Lora asked with a tender voice, her hands still gripping Sybil’s own. The other nun squirmed for a moment, averting her eyes in shame.

“I hold no ill will toward her. I hope we will be friends again soon,” Sybil lied easily, her voice suffused with emotions she did not feel. A sprinkling of sorrow, an intimation of shame and a momentary anger at the fore. “Though I pray my sisters will stop regarding me with such dreadful stares,” she added with a meaningful look toward Elizabeth’s back as she inspected grain that had been brought by the local farmer.

“Like all things it will pass in time. Endure it as you would rain on a summer’s day,” Lora offered before standing up once more, brushing the pollen the bees had dropped from her robe. Sybil imitated her most grateful smile before that too collapsed in the shadow of the prioress’ retreating form. With an irritated glance at the pair as they resumed their rounds, she brushed the pollen from the ground and placed it next to the entry to the hive. How much the humble bumblebee had to teach them. Doing their work in secret, gratefully and without judgement. Surely, they would scorn those who merely opted for the appearance of labour.

It was approaching dusk when Sybil began to reluctantly make her way to the refectory with a spare broom from the garden shed. It had been an enticing thought to simply refuse a meal and sleep there, hidden under the workbench. Regardless, she was there when the other nuns began filing into the eating hall. She finished placing the last of the pewter plates and cups they all took their meagre repast with, noticing with a pang of sadness that she’d laid Judith’s place. The other nuns who’d been attending to the other long wooden tables looked to each other as Sybil ran her fingers over Judith’s plate. Her mind was elsewhere, recalling when she’d been made to laugh, consoled when she cried. When their fingers had first entwined one Christmas, sharing their first kiss while the others sang in choir.

Sybil spoke her prayers, ate quickly and refused all conversation that was offered. It bade ill as they only wished to admonish her or pour yet more unneeded compassion upon her. To hear those few who’d sat near her speak on it, they would have her believe herself a victim. A calamitous casualty of another woman’s fall from grace. It was only when Sister Edith deigned to rebuke the laxity of Judith’s punishment that the blonde stood up suddenly, spurning what remained of her food before restraining herself from flight. Her stride was so determined that if the door had not been where it was, she was sure to have made one.

She moved through the cloister, toward the manor building proper that sat above the wine cellar. Temptation called but fear of its pain drove Sybil toward the tower that sat on the western corner. What had once been her grandfather’s armoury now contained bags of grain, cloth and other supplies. A flight of stone stairs ran along the four walls of the tower, ascending past tall windows adorned in stained glass. Sybil took a key from beneath a vase, one of two that sat either side of her door. Strawberries, that they might always have something to eat during summer nights. She unlocked their bedroom door, berating herself for allowing the keys to fall into Elizabeth’s hands.

With that grim wild hunt of thoughts soaring through the vistas of her mind, Sybil collapsed onto her bed. Their room, which had been sparse but enough before, now felt desolate. The single window barely cast enough moonlight into the room to see by. There were two beds, positioned on opposite sides of the tower with Judith’s still unmade. There were Francian rugs strewn across the ground, slim comfort for both their owner and her lover now. They spoke of a land far away where a family member managed vast sums of wealth and land. Whose palatial manor hid many sins and secrets never spoken about by the widow who owned them. Sybil allowed herself to fantasize about what pleasures awaited them there. Where Judith’s aunt and her maids allowed them their privacy and indulgence. She did not spurn the almighty and his edicts as some of their congregation did, as the abbess was rumoured to. But the affection that burned in her breast as a warm glow when Judith was there and a tempestuous wildfire when not could not be abated. Why was she afflicted with such desires? A test? Then she was already lost, fallen. And all that remained to her was the house in Francia.

Sybil defiantly rose to her feet, wiping her tears from her cheeks. She held back her sobbing, teeth gritted behind a stern frown. From under her bed, she withdrew her diaries, her horticulture notes and all other natural philosophy she had garnered in her time at the convent. She took up one of the rugs, tying it up into a makeshift satchel. A little string and a needle were all that were required, and Sybil’s swift fingers ensured the rest. She took Judith’s books and placed them into the satchel, retrieving her stuffed bear moments later. With a sad smile, she looked into the glass beads that were its eyes, thumbing one of its ears. She wouldn’t do without it.

Having placed the bear in her bag, she slipped a hand under the mattress of Judith’s bed. Groping with her fingers for a few moments she eventually came upon something hard and slim. Only when her fingers curled about the cruciform handle did she withdraw the dagger. She did not look at it for too long, slipping it behind the books with averted eyes. Two women travelling alone would likely have need of such a contrivance, though Sybil prayed it were otherwise.

Once her preparations were complete, she took the rug satchel to the cubby that existed beneath the cabinet that held the wash basin. She was unsure what her grandfather had need of this hidden space for and hoped that the rumours of her family’s heretical legacy were just that. Though in that moment she would have broken bread with the Devil himself if it meant their safe passage to Judith’s aunt. Maria of Gevaudan, for that was her name, had long been known as a wanton woman. She was however wealthy and financed the Francian king’s wars. Indispensable to the court, condemned by it all the same. A Janus of power that laid bare its hypocrisies. Though her part in entering that labyrinth was now complete, she mused as she laid a rug’s corner over the trapdoor that led to the cubby.

With a cautious grin she alighted to bed, ensuring that she locked the door to their room. She slipped under the covers, thoughts once again turning to that delightful fancy. They would have their hives, their herb garden and their moonlit nights. They would enjoy Maria’s antics, gossip about the court. Write and study nature as the educated nuns before them had. Perhaps she would even wear her hair openly just for Judith’s stare. She was drawn to sleep with these dreams, where they consumed her rest in blissful contentment. Though they were pleasant there were curious happenings within them. The wine poured thick and dark as blood, the women becoming ravenous beasts. She was offered an apple that became a human heart before her eyes. And she bit into it all the same.

Dawn came with a flushed warmth to Sybil’s cheeks and chest. She grumbled as she emerged from the covers, hissing as her foot touched a floor too comfortable with winter’s lingering embrace. How could they be so close to Easter yet so far from summer? As if to soothe her concerns regarding the weather, she stood on her bed and the balls of her feet, using the tower’s height to look for rain.

The rain clouds held her attention but a little for her window faced the western entrance to the convent. From the town beyond, sister Lora was guiding a dishevelled looking woman in a dark woollen dress. Her leather boots were finely crafted, their matching gloves of a similar make. Her brown hair was bound up in a taut bun and her face lined with middle age. Sybil found her alluring, strangely. There was a dark, enticing wisdom that played about her. Perhaps it was the staff she walked with or the heavily laden satchel at her hip. It was only when she lifted an arm to wave at the abbess that Sybil noticed who she was. Her arm was heavily tattooed with looping, interwoven designs.

Her name was Myfanwy. She was one of the heretical druids. A sect older than their faith by considerable margin, they’d long abided under the vassalage of Queen Eleanor and her ancestors. But with growing unease she remembered the role this woman played. She was far beyond Lora’s talents. A woman of medicine so potent that her name was spoken beyond their town. If such a woman was coming, someone was in dire need.

It was only when Sister Lydia knocked on her chamber door that she realised what had happened. A single name struck her as cold lightning, breath ceasing in her breast.

Judith.