“I will be yours,” Constance says. “We will forget knights and swords and violences. I will bring you down to the stones and the waters and we will lay down the wizard’s sword with the other offerings. You will not die. I will not let you die. But there will be things you must shed, to be mine.”

This was not the plan. To give her a true choice. To lay out a road they both could walk.

“Name and title and sword, my bear. Cross and blood and chalice, my heart. They are the weights around your neck. If you cling to them, they will bring you to the end: a sinner who meets her fate. Your faith and your martyr need your guilt, your destruction. If you choose life, you will need to become a new thing. A champion of the old ways, shameless and free. And deathless I will keep us, far from famine and far from the King, until Adam’s kin fade from Britain and we all awake again.”

Humanity demands you be punished, Robena. That is the weight, the calculation: why do you hide from me, Adam? Why do you cover yourself, Eve? Because of what you have done, you will labor, you will struggle, and you will know pain, and you will die. But the land and the blood and the wheel are older than the garden, and there are stranger apples off Britain’s shores.

“Cast them all off and take my hand, Robena. If you do not, you will die, and there will be nothing I can do to save you.”