5146 words

I need no map to reach the Sisterhood of Solace. The stories I've heard in Grauland are true. After a journey of three days north, I reach the base of their mountain, where a squat brick tavern greets me like the last remaining pumpkin in a patch. Beyond it, a dark road snakes up to the mountaintop. The Devil's Tail.

The publican greets me warmly; perhaps I am the first monk he's seen in a long time. But I decline his offer of a brew. I'm sure it's come from up there, from the mountain, from the Sisterhood. People say their beer makes princes cry.

People say their beer can do a lot of things.

"I'm looking for a girl," I tell the publican instead. "Barely fifteen. Dark hair, pale skin, dark eyes. She would have been alone. Have you seen her?"

He shakes his head, brown forehead creasing. "I'd remember her if I had. Not a lot of young women alone around here. But up on the mountain..."

"Yes." I cut him off, already heading for the door. "Up on the mountain."

He opens his mouth as if to warn me, but I'm already stepping out into the crisp fall air. It smells of granite, of oncoming snow. I'm reminded of the warm fire, the simple cider that awaits me at the abbey when this mission is done.

And perhaps more. Find her, complete this duty, and you shall be rewarded. Those are the words the Abbot gave me when I received notice from the villagers that my uncle had died. Visions of promotion at last fill my mind. A nearby abbey, eleven leagues to the south, needs a new Abbot.

I've waited so long for this. I've given up so much.

I expect my horse to complain as I nudge him up the Devil's Tail, but he plows forward courageously, and I take heart from that. We are not all in awe of the Sisterhood.

Halfway up the road, I meet a woman dressed in gray. She almost fades into the black, scabby trees of the landscape. The horse notices her before I do, pulling up short. I'm jolted from my memories of Grauland, of the blood on the stile.

"Brother," says the woman. Her hair is graying at the edges, like an icon leeched of color by the sun.

I swing off my horse, and she flinches back. Odd. Most unaccompanied women are pleased to meet a monk on the road, aware that we offer a sort of protection, and—I like to think—a sense of peace. "Greetings, mistress. Are you going up the mountain?" She nods warily. Not much for speech, these northerners. "I can offer you a ride."

"No, thank you, Brother."

"Very well. I shall walk beside you for a while."

She neither agrees nor disagrees, setting off at a clipped pace. I can see I've displeased her, but I'm not sure exactly why. All the while, the reminder of my duty sits on my shoulders like a gargoyle on the abbey's edge, ever watchful. The horse's head bobs up and down behind me, bumping my shoulder from time to time as I lead him along. A good animal, steadfast, they said, when I took him from my uncle's house. His snorting breath is the only sound, for a while.

Then, splitting the air: the bells. Peals like laughter, like honey, like jumping in the cold water of a stream. I think of the quiet peace of the cloisters, and my heart aches to be done with this, to be back there. The bells take my longing and magnify it tenfold. What a strange, aching sound.

When I look over at the woman, her eyes dart to the road, and I have the feeling she was watching me a moment before. I sniff as the bells fade. The air smells of woodsmoke, now. "We must be close," I say, as lightly as I can.

She nods. After a while, she says, "My husband made those bells."

I'm surprised. "Here?" I regret the question. God looks on all the kingdom and smiles.

If she's offended, she reveals nothing of it. "It's the one good thing," she says.

I'm still puzzling out what that means when we come upon the Sisterhood.

A sharp turn in the road, and it's there: gray brick built into the mountain, save for the belltower, which juts as if to penetrate the sky. The Sisterhood has no gate, no defense. Only the tall black pines on either side of a curved arch, standing like sentinels as we pass beneath.

The woman walks ahead of me as I tie the horse to a waiting post. She skirts the main entrance, going instead to a small wooden door near the corner. Three knocks. She glances over her shoulder. "Good luck, Brother."

There's that gargoyle again, shifting restlessly. I take no pleasure in this particular mission, but I must do as I have always done. As my Abbot commands. Life will be simple, he promised, when first he inducted me into the ranks of my order all those years ago. Lead where you are chosen to lead, obey where you must obey.

I've done enough of the latter, to be sure. Perhaps, when I am Abbot, I might lead differently.

The thought surprises me, but I have no more time for imaginings. The main entrance to the Sisterhood creaks open. A woman waits there, unhabited, her hair falling in a long braid over her slim shoulder. Her eyes are pale brown, almost yellow, the frothy shade at the base of a beer's head, golden like her skin. "Greetings," she says to me, her voice light. "How may we help you, Brother?"

I will not let this woman unsettle me. After all, our orders are alike, at their core. "I'm looking for a girl. Barely fifteen. Dark hair, dark eyes. She would have come here recently, seeking asylum. Have you seen her?"

The Sister's lips curl in a smile that's not unfriendly. "I'm afraid you'll have to be more specific. Why don't you come in?"

The amusement, the lightest brush of sarcasm in her voicethese are not what I expected. "My horse needs food and water."

"Greta will see to that." She waves into the darkness behind her, and a girl emerges. At least I think she is a girl. She wears a squat leather cap of the kind worn by blacksmiths and executioners, her hair so short it cannot be seen beneath. A red, puckered scar overcuts her right eye, eyebrow to eye socket, and the lid is sewn shut. On her right hand, two fingers are missing.

For half a second, her eye crosses mine, and I suck in my breath. Could it be? Surely not. That scar looks mostly healed. I seek a girl with ten fingers, no scars, never a day of trouble in her life. My uncle's stepdaughter. She was a beauty, the villagers said, though I never saw her for myself. Only a drawing. A sketch. Her mother's last.

Greta's eye drops and the feeling passes. Impossible. She goes to my horse and reaches her three-fingered hand toward his head, careful to remain in his sight. He sniffs, whuffs. Her mangled hand caresses. She's smiling, very gently, as if the expression hurts. The horse noses into her shoulder. I feel a flash of pity for her, stronger now that she's smiling.

"Come," says the woman in the entrance. "Brother, what is your name?"

"I am called Johan."

"Brother Johan. Welcome to the Sisterhood."

She is Sister Lucia, and she is the Abbess here. Mother Lucia, the other Sisters call her when they pass us in the darkened halls. Torches burn as she takes me through the rectangular front room, outside again, across the square cloisters, into an outbuilding that she calls her office. I must admit, the word surprises me. Yet it is indeed much akin to my Abbot's quarters back home. Rich carpet warms the floor, a fire burning in the grate. Books and scrolls line the walls, not quite orderly, some of them pulled out and thumbed through and left behind on a nearby lectern, a ribbon marking their pages. Indeed, the books seem better used than those in the Abbot's library. More beloved, in the creases of their spines. "Please, sit," says Sister Lucia, indicating the cushioned chair closest to the fire. I obey.

"What is your brew of choice, Brother Johan? I will pour it for you." Still with that smile, as if something amuses her of which I'm unaware.

"Water will do fine."

"Ah. You do not partake. I fear our Sisterhood will disappoint you."

I like a good ale from time to time, and the cider we drink in the fall, after we pick the apples ourselves. The fruit of our labor. But I don't correct her. She moves to the corner of the room to pour me a cup of water from a ceramic jug. When she hands it to me, I quaff the cold liquid. It has been a long journey.

It is the sweetest thing I have ever tasted. The smell of pine and cedar lingers after it.

Lucia isn't smiling anymore. She tilts her head, inspecting me. "You're holding the secret of the Sisterhood in your hands, Brother."

I look down at the empty cup.

"Or rather, in your stomach," she corrects. "Good beer requires good water, first."

It's something I've heard before. My uncle. The brewer. I set the cup down on the floor by the fire and straighten, chastened. "The girl I'm seeking. She was called Helewise, though she may have taken another name. She would have arrived here more or less two weeks ago."

Lucia sits opposite me, turning her face toward the fire. "You think she would come to us?" she asks. "Why?"

"Her mother used to speak of this place."

Now her words come slowly, as if each of them has been weighed carefully first. "Do you know how many women come to us with their mother's stories in their hearts?"

I shake my head. I don't know anything about mothers, nor stories. I lost my own long ago. Indeed, the Abbot once told me that fiction was a sin. I was but a boy then. I haven't thought back to those days in a long while.

As if she sees this in me, Lucia shakes her head. "Do you think people tell stories of your order, Brother Johan?"

"I'm certain they do not. We operate in the real world," I say, "where stories do not matter so much as the truth." Indeed, that is why I'm here. To discover the truth. To find a murderess and hold her to justice. We all must face reality, in the end.

"Who says a story cannot be the truth?" asks Lucia, that smile lingering again. It's condescending now, and my skin prickles at it.

"I'm not here to speak riddles with you," I say. "Besides, I don't believe the stories about the Sisterhood. I am sure we have much in common. We both serve God."

She looks at me with those amber-drenched eyes and sees all of me, all the lies I've ever told. I hold myself firm, staring back. "I think we have different ways of doing that, Brother Johan," she says at last, soft.

This offends me, though I can't say why. It's worse to think we might worship God the same, myself and this irreverent Sister. But her words sting nonetheless. "I would like to see the brewery," I manage, after a while.

Her eyes slip back to me. She knows exactly why I'm asking. But she rises from the chair and flicks her braid behind her back. "I will show you gladly. You may be surprised at what you see."

We walk back across the cloisters, into the rectangular entrance hall. The mountain air is sharp as obsidian. Lucia crosses to the left once inside and opens a set of wooden doors. "After you," she says.

At the bottom of dank stairs, I pass through a narrow arch and a wall of cool, wet air. Ahead of me stretches a wide, skewed shape like a gibbous moon, clustered with the familiar instruments of brewing: a hand-quern for milling the malt into mash and, beyond that, a little platform where a huge copper cauldron heats water over a roaring fire. I can smell the damp oak of wide-mouthed barrels and the sharp hay scent of yeast on the air.

At each of the instruments, a Sister bends to her task. One here with her sleeves pushed up to her elbows, forearms cording as she winds the quern to grind the malt. She doesn't even glance our way. One there with her hair all bound up in a kerchief—again, unhabited, her coarse skirts tied below her knees—wiping away sweat as she stirs the liquid in an open-mouthed barrel.

"Sister Bogdana is one of our master brewers," says Sister Lucia. We draw closer to the woman she indicates. From the pot before her, I smell vanilla, chicory root, anise. Beneath them all, the sour scent of fermenting wort—the liquid left over after boiling the grain to release its sugars.

Sister Bogdana's eyes are closed, her face long and thin like a greyhound's and splintered with purple shadows. As she inhales deeply over her brew, some of her black, straight hair slips off her shoulders and touches into the liquid, floating there like a paintbrush soaking up color.

What a fanciful thought. Far too much so, for a man like me. Sister Lucia must notice, for her heady, amused smile returns. "This is one of our rarest brews. We keep it in barrels until the darkest part of the winter." Her gaze says, you want to taste it, don't you?

And I do. I do. I'd like to know what kind of beer turns black as tar, like a man's soul. I'd like to know why the princes cry.

What did they see when they sipped?

I manage to say, "Water is sufficient for the likes of me." And I almost believe it.

Lucia takes me around the rest of the brewery. There are Sisters everywhere. Some of them wear kerchiefs or dark hoods, ducking their faces out of sight. The scent of beer lingers in the back of my throat, but I'm able to remember my mission.

Helewise might be any of these.

When we climb back up the stairs and into the entrance hall, Lucia stops in the light from a torch. I reach into the small pouch I keep tied on the belt of my cassock, a simple, leather thing to show my poverty. The coarse paper smells of mildew now, but the charcoal sketched upon it remains intact. "This is the girl I'm looking for."

She takes the page, inspects the quick dark eyes, the pointed chin, the narrow lips. There's something clever, stubborn, in the way Helewise's gaze reaches out from that sketch. Her mother was a good artist. I'm surprised by the sadness that pinches my throat at the thought. She was a good woman.

Lucia's gaze lifts up to mine as she hands back the drawing. "What is it she's supposed to have done?"

"She murdered her stepfather. My uncle."

"Is that so? Was he a good man, your uncle?"

He was an honest one. The words stick in my throat. Perhaps the brewery air has left it dry. "All citizens must have justice." I hate that I spoke. Better to have remained silent, for this sentence feels like a defense.

Lucia meets my gaze squarely. "I quite agree."

"Then you will look at this drawing once again and tell me—have you seen this girl?"

"I'm sorry, Brother." She sounds it. "But there are no murderers here."

At that moment, a door opens across from the brewery stairs. The woman who climbed up the mountain with me steps out, carrying a small barrel of beer. So that was what she climbed for? She nods deeply at Sister Lucia, who smiles in return. As if begrudging, the woman gives a much smaller nod to me. "Brother," she greets.

I nod back, and it's then that I see them: the bruises on her arm. Four of them in a row, like dark stars against a white sky. There's an order to those bruises. The footsteps of fingerprints.

Her gaze is forthright, challenging. So much like Helewise's stare in that drawing, I suck in my breath. But there's no way this is my uncle's stepdaughter. My mind is playing tricks.

"May your husband enjoy this batch," Lucia says.

"Thank you." The polite words clash with the look in the woman's eyes.

When she is gone, Lucia speaks in a quiet voice for the first time, a hushed murmur that whispers at the corners of the hall. "Petronella comes to us but once a month. It's the only time she's allowed to leave."

The bells return to me. Their sweet, sweet ring. The one good thing.

"And what of you, Brother Johan?" asks Lucia. "Will you leave us now? Or will you consent to a meal?"

I know what my answer should be. I know what the Abbot would scoffingly reply.

Lucia knows, too. It's in her expression as she waits. But she does not speak.

What harm would it be to break bread with the Sisterhood? For one meal, what harm?

Deep down, I'm certain of another truth: it would be delicious.

"I'll stay," I say, before I can stop the words from leaping out. "I want to stay."

#

Three long tables fill the dining hall. On the far end, a fourth stretches out perpendicular to the others, where the hierarchy of Sisters becomes clear. Lucia, Bogdana, another small Sister who looks like a toad, and two more I haven't seen before take their seats here. I am the sixth. Lucia gives me a place at the edge, beside the toady one, whose name, I discover, is Sister Agata. The rest of the room sits after we do.

Lucia must have known I would take advantage of this moment. I search the room, the many-colored bent heads with their brassy sheen and their dark curls and their tight, close-cut caps of hair. Some of these Sisters have come much farther than I to reach this place. They smile, they laugh, they sit quietly in their corners. Some have hands like the cream we skim off milk at the Abbey. Other hands are dark as wet earth, or burned red, cracked and coarse, well used to lye and hard labor. Yet none of them have the triangle face, the sharp gaze that I've journeyed for. And even though I'm the one at the head of the room, I'm the one with the lookout, their eyes pin me in place like a nail through parchment. The gentle feminine hum of speech fills the room, so different from the low murmur of male conversation I'm used to. I feel like a novice again, fresh-faced, looking around the greatroom of the Abbey for the first time. Small enough to be invisible.

Agata doesn't speak, and I suspect this is why I have been placed beside her. Novices in black habits bring out our meal of gamey stew and hot barley bread. Mushrooms, rich with the flavors of butter and earth. A sheen of fat from the stewed meat that reflects back candlelight like a glittering jewel. The tang of fresh dill sprinkled on top.

It is marvelous.

Then comes the pitcher of Solace brew.

Lucia carries it over to me herself. The simple clay pottery glistens with condensation like breath on glass. "Tell me, Brother Johan. You will leave empty-handed. Won't you at least try a sip of brew, while you're here?"

All the conversation drops away at once. A hush fills the space it left behind, loud enough to batter my ears.

I'm here for duty, I tell myself, not for pleasure. Indeed, to place myself ahead of my responsibilities and my God is to sin in the cruelest way possible. No matter how young Helewise is, or how vulnerable, or indeed how hopeless, she was not right to act as she did. And yet I find myself wondering how else she might have come here. Certainly my uncle would never have let her go.

All at once, I'm tired. I feel the reach of the growing shadows and the suspicion that something is being hidden from me. I'm the little boy in the Abbey again, the one who missed his mother and shrank from the hard stares of strangers. That boy, too, had to grow up fast.

What if I do taste this brew that makes princes cry, that women walk up mountains for? Surely one sip will not hurt me, I think. Surely I've earned at least that.

I hold out my cup.

My first sensation is of a cold so deep it burns. Like a kiss to ice, it traps my tongue, sharpening against me with flavors of copper and mountain water. Then my tongue grows wet, unfrozen from that sharpness. The brew itself curls into my mouth and across to the back of my throat, and I hold it there, despite the burn. So cold. But I taste stone, granite, and a hint of something sweet. Like the last remaining plums we used to pilfer from the storehouse at midwinter, Markus and I.

This is a memory I've not had in a long while. I've thought more often of what the Abbot said afterward, long afterward, when he caught us at more than stealing plums. Some things are best forgotten, he said, in a quiet murmur as if he were helping me, and in time, your duty will help with that. This place offers the burial of memory and the start of something new.

The longer this brew sits on my tongue, the more I taste of its luscious sweetness, its fullness of flavor. It awakens me like snowdrops from the frozen dirt in early March. Sharp. Bright. Full.

I remember how Markus looked as he stuffed his shirt with plums. He laughed in expression, not sound, as he took my hand and slid a plum into it. Feel, Johan. It's still warm.

Sister Lucia watches me with a politely curious expression. As if she doesn't know full well what she and her beer are doing to me. As if she hasn't planned for this.

"I've not tasted exactly this flavor before." I'm proud of how steady my voice comes out.

Sister Lucia smiles. "Is that so? I thought you had."

"No," I lie. "Nothing quite like this at all."

The plums burst so sweetly across our tongues.

#

I finish the meal as quickly as I can without appearing indecorous. It's too dark for me to descend the Devil's Tail. I tell Lucia I am tired. No, I say, I have blankets. I have water. No, I need nothing.

It is a lie.

The brew has brought something out in me, something I thought dead, and no amount of praying can put it back again. I try anyway. I'm absorbed in this prayer I once spoke easily—My God, give me fortitude, that I may repent my sin—when I almost walk into the girl Greta. She's coming from the stable where my horse is housed.

"Brother." Her eye is on the ground, hands clasped before her.

"Has he behaved himself?" She looks up, startled, then appears even more confused when she sees my face. "The horse," I clarify.

"Oh." A small smile. "Yes. He's very good."

"I think so, too." I keep my voice gentle, as I did when I first met the horse. There is something about this girl that requires it. "He is called Rabbit. A child named him."

This doesn't provoke the smile I thought it would. Then again, I have never had a way with children. They always frightened me, before. Her eye drifts beyond me. "I should go," she says.

I step out of her way. But before she is gone, I hear myself ask, "What happened to give you that scar?"

She pauses. Her back is to me. Before small shoulders, her capped head does not sink. She says, "A man."

It does not surprise me. I remember Petronella's bruises. I remember a day in the Abbey, the morning of my initiation, the look on Brother Benedict's shocked white face as he and the Abbot opened the door to me and Markus, intertwined. From the moment I made my choice not to leave, to continue in my duty, to obey, I have not thought of that day. Not until now. It makes me weary. "Your fingers, too?"

She turns back to look at me. That bright black eye is fierce, penetrating. "Not those," she says. "Those were from frostbite. When I climbed up the mountain."

I taste awe in the back of my throat. This girl carries something determined and true in her heart. Something hard.

Survival. The word lingers with me, the flavor, even after she is gone. I cannot stop turning it over across my tongue as I bed down in the stable.

I take out my aunt's drawing again. In the light of the moon, Helewise's gaze is solemn and direct, her face unmarred. When I first saw this, I thought she looked untouched. A soft child, said the Abbot when he saw. Now, I'm not so sure.

He called me soft once, too. Your duty will make you stronger, he said. Thoughts of myself as an Abbot rise unbidden. Would I be able to tell a young monk the same?

Would it even be possible for me to create something different?

Late in the night, I cannot bear the restlessness any longer. I will look one more time, I think, and then I will go. I feel desperate in ways I can't explain. I want to believe I have tried, but since that sip of beer, I no longer know what, exactly, I hope to find.

Outside, the moon has risen, dressing the Sisterhood in silver. I blow on my hands. The air cuts up here, much colder than below. I no longer doubt the frostbite. In fact, it could happen to me tonight.

I will creep through the dormitory on silent feet, I think. I will peer in, no more. And then I will go.

But before I can even reach the door, I hear a song. Not like a bird. Like the bells. This is a peal, high and sweet, and it lures me away from the entrance, toward the back of the mountain. Beyond the brewery.

The black pines encircle me. The song pulls me on. I no longer feel the cold, which should frighten me, but it doesn't. I feel curiosity, madness, desire. I am drawn in.

The pines open up so suddenly I am almost caught out. Almost, but not quite. I hide behind the last one just in time, its thick frame keeping me in darkness. Ahead of me lies a clearing dripped in moonlight, crossed with threads of white. A stream. And in the stream are the Sisters.

Some are naked; some wear nightclothes that stick to their bodies, picking out shapes, here a roundness, here a sharp line. I don't see sensuality in this, but it unsettles me all the same. The abandon of it. The freedom. The starlight glinting off their smiles—it is impossible to look away from that. Like a garden of flowers that open only at night. Dew flicks from their hands as they kick up sprays of water. It's beautiful, but I feel the wrongness of my being here. It hurts my heart. This is not meant for me.

When was the last time I felt such pure, joyful unrestraint?

I know the answer before I've finished asking the question.

Markus was the polestar in the black inky depths of that dining hall. His smile, his crooked teeth poking out. The way he touched my arm, like a brush of wings, a bird alighting. Are you all right?

He taught me how to laugh among the toadstool circles and the deep pine shadows of the woods beyond the abbey. Beside him I learned how to dive headfirst, undaunted, into the cold, clear pool behind the prayerhouse. The water shocked us so much we gasped and clung and pulled the air from one another's lips. Limbs clinging close, sliding shocks of heat through the frigid water.

That was joy.

And yet I said to him, words faltering: The Abbot's right. I've repented my sin. I will stay.

A terrible realization unfurls in me, a tapestry with my faults stitched thereon: the truest crime was denying that I loved him.

The Sisters continue their dance. I will return to the stable, the horse, the hay. They are nothing less than I deserve. Yet one face catches my eyes before I go. A smile as wide as the crest of the mountain. Her short-cropped black hair feathered like the underside of a mushroom cap. No more leather holding it down. She spins in a circle, lifting her hands to the sky.

There's something about the smile. The fierceness of it, the life. It contains everything—grief, determination, heady effervescent joy.

I know it's her.

Gone is Greta. She is transformed. Though this is not Helewise, either. Not as she used to be.

The story tells itself so easily. I remember the way her mother used to draw, before her marriage to my uncle. The way that slowly faded. And the cheapness of her funeral pyre, so little spent on a beloved wife.

I remember other things, too. Things longed-for and aching. My last sight, stolen high from the belltower of the chapel, of Markus's lopsided shoulders as he marched away. I used to kiss those shoulders, right at their sharpest points. Prick-prick. My lips tingle with the memory of it.

Then Helewise-who-is-not-Helewise turns again, carried away into the night with her Sisters. Their songs waver, break, return. A new melody.

Somewhere beyond this mountain lives a man with a crooked smile, hunched shoulders, whose flesh knows kindness and whose heart knows love. Somewhere he tends to his plum tree and harvests the fruits when they are warm, touched by the sun. It is too much to hope that he still thinks of me. But I... I think of him.

I turn aside. I leave the Sisters to their song.

Yet as I cross the courtyard, wrapped in hope and moonlight, I don't hold myself back anymore.

I dance.

© 2025 Leanne Howard