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she said candidly. “And if the abbey was standing I would be there now, the favored daughter of the abbess, the most beloved sister…” She trailed off, her eyes on the distant horizon as if she could still see the warm herb garden and the sunset over the quiet trees. “I know I have no rights over you,” she said, her voice very low. “But Tom, I have nowhere that I can turn. I have no one who will help me, I have not a friend in the world save you. If you will not help me then I am abandoned to Morach’s sin and dirt with no hope of escape.”
    Tom shook his head slowly, as if to clear it. “I can’t think straight!” he said. “Alys, tell me simply what you want me to do! You know I will do it. You know I always did what you wished.”
    “Find somewhere I can go,” she said rapidly. “Morach hears nothing and I dare not go further than Castleton. But you can travel and ask people. Find me a nunnery which is safe, and then take me there. Lord Hugo cannot rage around the whole of the north. There must be other abbeys safe from his spite: Hartlepool, Durham, or Whitby. Find where I can go, Tom, and take me.”
    “You cannot hope to find your abbess again?” Tom asked. “I thought that all the nuns died?”
    Alys shook her head. She could remember the heat in the smoke which had warned her that the flames were very close. She remembered the thin clear scream of pain she had heard as she dived through the garden door. “I will find a new order, and take a new name, and take my vows again,” she said.
    Tom blinked. “Are you allowed to do that?” he asked. “Won’t they wonder who you are and where you come from?”
    Alys slid a measuring sideways glance at him. “You would surely vouch for me, Tom. You could tell them I was your sister, could you not?”
    Tom shook his head again. “No! I don’t know! I suppose I would. Alys, I don’t know what I can do and what I can’t do! My head’s whirling!”
    Alys stretched out her soft white hand to him and touched him gently in the center of his forehead, between his eyes, with all her power in her fingertips. She felt her fingers warm as her power flowed through them. For a dizzying moment she thought she could do anything with Tom, make him believe anything, do anything. Tom closed his eyes at her touch and swayed toward her like a rowan sways in a breath of wind.
    “Alys,” he said, and his voice was filled with longing.
    She took her hand away and he slowly opened his eyes.
    “I must go,” she said. “Do you promise you will find somewhere for me?”
    He nodded. “Aye,” he said and hitched the plaid at his shoulder.
    “And take me there?”
    “I’ll do all I can,” he said. “I will ask what abbeys are safe. And when I find somewhere, I’ll get you to it, cost me what it will.”
    Alys raised her hand in farewell and watched him walk away. When he was too distant to hear she breathed out her will after him. “Do it, Tom,” she said. “Do it at once. Find me a place. Get me back to an abbey. I cannot stay here.”
    It grew colder. The winds got up for a week of gales in September and when they fell still the moors, the hills, and even the valley were shrouded in a thick mist which did not lift for days. Morach lay in bed later and later every morning.
    “I’ll get up when the fire’s lit and the porridge is hot,” she said, watching Alys from the sleeping platform. “There’s little point in us both getting chilled to death.”
    Alys kept her head down and said little. Every evening she would turn her hands to the light of the fire and inspect the palms for roughness. The skin had grown red and sore, and then blistered, and the blisters had broken and then healed. The plump heel of her thumb was toughened already, and at the base of each finger the skin was getting dry and hard. She rubbed the oil from sheep’s fleeces into the calluses, frowning in disgust at the rich, dirty smell, but nothing could stop her hands hardening and