“We are not Cathars,” Adelia told him, struggling for calm, aware that she and Boggart had their hair bound up like any Cathar women and were wearing the black robes Aelith had lent them.

If she was distancing herself from Ermengarde, she was sorry, but so be it; she was only telling the truth, and there were the others to think of.

She said: “We are the servants of King Henry Plantagenet, and he’ll be mightily displeased if we’re harmed.”

“You’re fucking Cathars, that’s what you are,” he’d said, and spat. “And where we’re going ain’t Plantagenet land.”

At that point there’d been no sign of Mansur nor Ulf nor Rankin, and she was in terror in case they’d been killed. Then some more men came up the hill, and from their midst she heard the multilingual oaths of Mansur’s Arabic, Rankin’s Gaelic, and the good fenland English of Ulf—the latter cursing his captors and demanding in God’s name that his wooden cross be returned to him.

The captives’ hands were bound with ropes, each of which was tied to a saddle of a captor’s mule.

It was difficult to tell how many soldiers there had been during the assault because their leader immediately sent some of them off to pursue Aelith. Of the seven who were left when the others rode away, the torchlight showed rough, country faces and tunics bearing what looked like an ecclesiastical blazon. They addressed their leader, who, like them, spoke with a strong Occitan accent as Arnaud.

Adelia asked again and again where they were to be taken and why, but received no more reply than did Ulf’s threats that Henry II would spill their captors’ guts when they got there—the men didn’t understand them anyway

Arnaud gave a signal, the ropes around the prisoners’ hands tightened as the mules moved forward, and the march began.

The mountains were too rough even for mules to go at anything except walking pace, but every pull on the rope sent pain through Adelia’s broken collarbone. Also, she’d lost a shoe in the struggle and her right foot was being pierced by thorns.

An occasional reassuring whiff told her that Ward was sticking, unnoticed, to her heels. Yet who was there to follow the scent? Rowley had gone to Carcassonne.

“Are we going to Carcassonne?” she asked.

Nobody answered her; Arnaud had ordered silence.

Betrayed. Somebody had told the authorities where Ermengarde and Aelith were staying. It could have been anybody, a peasant looking for reward, a Cathar hater. And he or she had entangled the rest of them in the betrayal.

Whoever the mercenaries were, they knew these mountains well; they followed wide tracks mostly, but now and then diverged from them so that the prisoners’ legs were torn by prickly brush that sent up the smell of thyme and fennel as they went.

The sound of hoofbeats announced the arrival of the men who’d gone hunting the escapee. “Lost her,” Arnaud was told. Ermengarde uttered a shout of triumph and was hit across the mouth for it.

Progress became harder when the mercenaries threw away their spent torches and proceeded by moonlight.

Through it all, and despite more punches because she wouldn’t keep quiet, Ermengarde sent up long and confident Cathar prayers.

Adelia’s eyes were on Boggart, tied to the mule beside hers. When the going became too rough and the girl fell, Adelia shouted at its rider: “Damn you, mind that lady, she’s expecting a baby” To her surprise, the man dismounted and heaved Boggart onto the mule in his stead. Arnaud, who was in the lead, didn’t notice.

It was impossible to calculate in which direction they were going or even to keep track of time; everything reduced to the necessity not to stumble, to stay on one’s feet, not to surrender to thirst and fear.

When would it be day? When would this stop?

Suddenly Arnaud shouted that he was going ahead “to tell ’em we’re coming” and kicked his mule into a trot to disappear down a wide track into the darkness. After he’d gone, the man who’d shown care for Boggart proved his humanity once more by ordering a halt so that the captives could be given a drink. The water was warm and stale and the leather on the flasks it came in smelled foul but, oh, it was beautiful.

The march began again.

At last the mountains ahead became jagged shapes against a dim reflection of a dawn still down over the horizon. They funneled down on three sides of what was, so much as could be seen of it, a sizable town.

Figères? No. Rowley had said that Figères was little more than a village.

A hope reared that it was Carcassonne, one of Languedoc’s major cities, where Rowley was going. And yet she’d had the idea that Carcassonne was built on a plain.

She heard Ermengarde say, “Aveyron,” as if something had been extinguished in her, and one of the men laughed.

It was just waking up as they reached its outskirts. A woman emerging from one of the houses to empty a chamber pot shouted at her family to come and see. Shutters were flung back; questions, dogs, and children accompanied the prisoners up a winding, cobbled track toward a square formed by buildings of considerable size. Adelia glimpsed a tall tower and cupolas like graceful saucepan lids outlined against the rising sun.

Up and up into a square, where Boggart was lifted from her mule and the ropes binding the prisoners’ hands were replaced by manacles. They were ushered into a magnificent, arcaded hall, a where a line of liveried servants carrying food dishes into a room on the right paused to stare at the prisoners and were commanded to be about their business by a tap from the staff of a heavily robed steward. A line of people in a gallery above their heads goggled down at them.

In the middle of the hall, a man in the cassock of a priest sat at a table, a scribe beside him. There was an oath and a scuffle and, looking back, Adelia saw that one of the riders had taken Ward by the scruff of his neck and thrown him outside the doors that were then closed against him.

Ermengarde had recovered her courage. Pushed in front of the table, she addressed the priest politely in Latin: “Ave, Gerhardt,” and then, louder, in Occitan: “Ara roda l’abelha.” (“That bee is buzzing round again.”)

There was a laugh, quickly suppressed, that caused an echo making it impossible to tell where it had come from.

“Father Gerhardt to you, bitch,” the priest said in Latin.

“My father is in heaven. Are we to dispute again? Splendid.”

Father Gerhardt addressed his scribe. “Ermengarde of Montauban, a self-confessed Cathar. Write it down.” He raised his head. “Or have you repented, woman?”

“I repent of nothing.”

“You are charged with preaching heresy throughout this region in defiance of the edicts issued by His Holiness Pope Alexander the Third. The punishment is death by burning.”

“I do not recognize such edicts, nor your Satanic Pope. I have preached only true Christianity”

“We have the statements of witnesses.” Father Gerhardt pointed at a roll on his table.”

“Splendid.”

Stop it, stop it, Adelia wanted to shout at her. The statement of an ignorant man as he’d set fire to Ermengarde’s cottage—Like you fuching Cathars—she’d taken to be the threat of a bully; now it was being translated into something else. Here, they were enclosed in the efficiency of a powerful machine, in front of them was a man about serious business, a stone-faced man whose eyes—the only mobile thing about him—had flames in them.

They can’t, she thought. Not us. Henry’s anger would be terrible—don’t they know that? They must know.

But around her were the indifferent mountains of a landscape where the Plantagenet writ did not run. She’d wandered into somebody else’s story, not hers. It was a mistake, she was going to die by mistake. She willed Ermengarde to cower, plead, whisper repentance, instead of shouting for her own execution—and theirs.

One by one they were made to stand before their inquisitor and told to give their names, place of birth, and occupation.

Their explanations were cut short: “You are Cathars, you were found consorting with Cathars.”

For all that she was shaking, Adelia tried for indignation when her turn came. “It is disgraceful that we are treated like this. Who are you? Where is this place?”

“You are in the palace of the Bishop of Aveyron.” The priest had the thin, protuberant features of a dog and an expression that suggested he would be better for going muzzled.

“Then inform your bishop that we are under the protection of the Bishop of Winchester, who is with Princess Joanna at Figères, and the Bishop of Saint Albans of England, whom you can find at Carcassonne. We are servants of Henry Plantagenet, and we have been traveling with his daughter until ...”

“You are Cathars, you were found consorting with Cathars.” It was a mantra.

Mansur’s questioning was briefest of all: who he was or what he was doing in Languedoc was of no interest—his color and robes were those of a self-confessed, if different, heretic; he could burn with the rest.

Above, a flat ceiling glowed with Bible scenes painted by a master; below, the morning robe of the man at the table was no less inspired with autumn color and the skill of embroideresses.

The Bishop of Aveyron, a plump man with clever eyes, took one more honeyed fig, wiped his fingers on the linen napkin tucked into his neck, and looked up. “So the information was exact?”

“In every detail, my lord. I doubt we’d have found her hideout without it. Unfortunately, she managed to delay the men’s entry long enough for the daughter to escape. I’ve ordered a hunt for her.”

His bishop waved a hand in dismissal. “Do we care about the daughter? Ermengarde is the one we wanted.”

“And now we have her.”

For a moment these two very different men shared the same, searing memory—a black-clad woman standing in the town square making fools of them both: “Leave me alone, old men. Abandon either your luxury or your preaching.”

The townspeople had laughed at them. Them.

“Also,” said Father Gerhardt, “we have written proof against her. Our men searched the hovel before setting fire to it. There was a gospel written in the langue d’oc.”

The bishop shook his head sadly: “Gerhardt, Gerhardt, is there no end to Cathar evil? Where should we poor Latinate clergy be if the common herd were able to listen to the holy word in their own language?” He stretched out his hand to take one of the soft, white rolls nestling in a basket that his steward had just put in front of him. “You and I would have to go begging our bread.”

Gerhardt was put out; he never knew when his bishop was joking.

“A joke,” the bishop explained, seeing him puzzled. That was the trouble with priests who brought their zeal straight from the Vatican, no humor.

“Yes, my lord. And the foreigners captured with Ermengarde? Our bargain with the informant was to ensure that they suffer the same punishment, but I have to tell you”—Gerhardt said this with reluctance—“they persist in their story that they are all servants of Henry Plantagenet.”

“And they are? Tell me again.”

Father Gerhardt consulted his list. “A youth purporting to be a pilgrim—the cross he carried was of interest to our informant, if you remember, and as it was of no account our men let him have it. A female servant who is pregnant ...”

The bishop stopped using his butter knife in order to wave it. “Pregnancy does not absolve her. Root and branch, Gerhardt, root and branch. Remember that.”

“Yes, my lord. Then there is a mercenary speaking a language nobody can understand. Also a Saracen, and a woman who interprets for him.” Gerhardt looked up. “She is the woman our informant is eager to have destroyed—if the others die with her, so be it. Surely no Christian king would inflict wharf rats like that on his daughter?”

The bishop shrugged. “I wouldn’t put it past this one from what I’ve heard, not Henry Yes, I have no doubt they are who they say they are.”

Father Gerhardt was taken aback, not so much by fact, but that his bishop was making no bones about it. “Yet do we need to worry about his opinion?” he asked. “A priest killer?”

“Ah, but a priest killer who’s done penance for Becket and been accepted back into the fold.” The bishop poured himself another glass of wine while he considered. “I wonder. Can we afford to offend the King of England?”

“If we don’t, we lose a spy who can take us into the center of the king’s web. Moreover”—a flash of Father Gerhardt’s canines showed his happiness at imparting a nugget he’d been hugging—“my lord, I can tell you that the Bishop of Winchester and others in the princess’s party complain that the Saracen and his woman are witches. They say the two have brought bad luck on them. They would not be unhappy to lose them.”

“Witches, eh?” The bishop liked that.

“Yes, my lord. Apparently, the Saracen’s woman has fed a love potion to the other bishop, Rowley of Saint Albans, so that he lusts after her and will hear no word against her.”

“I thought she was supposed to be plain.”

“She is, my lord, which only emphasizes the strength of her magic.”

“A Jezebel,” mused the bishop. “‘And Jezebel was cast down, and the dogs did eat her, and no more of her was found than the skull, and the feet, and the palms of her hands.’ A gratifying image, I’ve always found. So wholesale, don’t you think?”

“Indeed, my lord.” Gerhardt refused to be diverted. “Nor does this harlot wear a cross. Both she and the maid are dressed as Cathars. In any case, they’ve spent time with Ermengarde and so will have been infected.”

The bishop smiled. He was fond of the principle of post hoc ergo propter hoc. So useful.

Father Gerhardt raised flailing arms in appeal to Heaven. “When, O Lord, when wilt thou grant us full crusade against this cancer?”

Whenindeed, the bishop thought. Increasingly severe anti-Cathar edicts had been issued by the Vatican for over thirty years without, so far, calling for a crusade against the heretics. Yet crusade was the only option, as the bishop knew; the infection was becoming a plague.

A new order was needed. A man to raise the Holy Cross against the Cathars in the teeth of the Pope, begin God’s righteous slaughter.

Lying in his bed at night, the Bishop of Aveyron sweated into his silk sheets. If it was successful it would take him high, perhaps to the throne of Rome itself. Failure ... ?

Tapping his teeth, the bishop looked up at the depiction of the Garden of Eden on his ceiling. He was particularly fond of it; the artist had let himself go as far as Eve’s naked body was concerned. “This informant, we’re certain of him, are we?” he asked.

“A valuable man, my lord. As I said, he is privy to what passes between the English bishops and their king; he will be in Sicily when Saint Albans arrives after negotiating with Barbarossa and the Lombards. What are a witch and a ragbag of nonentities to set against that?”

But the Bishop of Aveyron’s careful mind had made itself up; he hadn’t got where he was today by being rash.

“Nevertheless, we must be sure. The Plantagenet is soft toward heretics, yet his arm is long and on the end of it there is a hammer. There is no need to anger him at this stage. Feelers, Gerhardt, we shall put out feelers; nothing too definite on either side. All we need to know from the princess’s officials is: If we have found some heretics wandering in the hills and consequently disposed of them, shall they be missed? Will that fit the situation?”

“From what I gather, the answer will be no, my lord.”

“I gather that, too. But hold off until we get it. As for our ‘perfect,’ you may proceed as planned.” He smiled again; this time his priest knew he wasn’t joking. “Bring the town in to witness it.”

“Where do you want the prisoners lodged, my lord? The dungeons?”

The bishop tapped his teeth. “No, let them have a view of what they may expect. Clear out the tower room and put them up there for now. Set trustworthy guards, mind. Sometimes I think the contagion has infected my own palace.”

When Gerhardt had gone, his lord poured himself another glass of the vintage from his vineyard near Carcassonne and sipped it while he engineered a new vision of Ermengarde, his black-clad tauntress, this time tied to a stake with faggots laid around her feet.

He saw himself thrusting a torch into the wood like a penis into her parts and sighed because, alas, that pleasure must be left to the executioner. One day, though, yes, yes, one day, the flames he’d light would consume them all ... men, women, and children.

This really was most excellent wine.

As he promised, he led the heretic hunters to the cowshed. He saw Mansur, Rankin, and Ulf go down fighting. He watched the capture of the women up the hill. Then he began looking for something. He found it—lying in one of the mangers where Ulf had left it. A rough, wooden cross.

Now, back at Figères, he is levering out some of the nails that hold together a rough-looking cross. He is doing it quietly, so that no sound escapes from the spartan monk’s cell in which he is lodged.

Ulf was pacing up and down, up and down, getting on everybody’s nerves. “There was some other bugger in the cowshed when they got us. He was looking for something while the bastards were tyin’ us up. I reckon it was my cross.”

“We know,” Mansur said wearily. “The one comfort is that he will be unaware of what’s inside it.”

Ulf turned on him. “But he did. I keep telling you, he asked for it particular. He knew. And he wasn’t one of them who took us over the mountains, he disappeared once they’d got us down.”

“Didn’t you recognize his voice?”

“No, kept his bloody cloak over his bloody mouth, didn’t he.”

“Leave it, laddie,” Rankin told him. “There’s nae thing we can do about it. For now, let’s save our breath to cool our parritch.”

What parritch was, Adelia had no idea, but she was grateful to him; the Scotsman was proving as firm a rock as Mansur.

A grizzled man with a face like a battered turnip. The march over the hills must have been hard for him who’d been so ill, harder for him than Ulf, who had youth on his side. All the way, he’d muttered strange and incomprehensible oaths to himself and his eyes under their curled, upsweeping gray brows suggested that, if his hands were free, his captors would be dispossessed of certain limbs, but, and this was strangely comforting to Adelia, he showed lack of surprise at the situation in which he found himself. Maybe life in the Scottish Highlands combining with that as one of King Henry’s mercenaries had weathered him against anything it could come up with.

When, just now, she’d felt obliged to apologize for it, he’d patted her hand and said: “Aye well, as we say back hame, a misty morning may yet become a guid clear day”

Ulf continued to chafe and pace. “There was something about him. Never saw his face, but the way he moved ... I swear I’d seen the cut of him before. Jesus Christ, where was it?”

It was a rhetorical question and one he’d put so many times that nobody bothered with it. He gave up and turned his attention to the turret room’s two unglazed windows. “Both big enough for us all to get out, despite the mullions,” he said, “iffen we had some rope.”

They didn’t have any rope, and one window overlooked the square some dizzying hundred feet below, while the drop from the other one was at least fifty feet onto some palace roofs.

Now he was looking out at the square and adding a commentary to the sound of hammering and sawing that the others could hear perfectly well.

“Building a bloody dais,” he said bitterly “That’s so the nobs won’t miss anything, I suppose. Gawd, they’re putting canvas over the top, ‘case the bastards get rained on. Why’n’t they hang out some bloody bunting while they’re about it?”

The boy was torturing himself—and them—for losing Excalibur. Adelia waited until Boggart had bound her foot with a piece of cloth torn from her petticoat, and then hopped over to where he was standing. She put her arm round his shoulders. “We’re all tired, let’s get some sleep.”

“Only one stake so far,” he said.

She looked out with him; the stake stood in the center of the square, commanding it like a maypole. The piles of wood around its base formed a platform. Five other stakes were stacked ominously against one of the walls.

“Not us, then,” Ulf said. “Not yet.”

“It won’t be. We told them who we were. They’ll have sent word to Princess Joanna or Rowley—I told them he was at Carcassonne. The name of King Henry must carry some weight, even here.”

“Where’ve they put Ermengarde?”

“I don’t know.” The Cathar had been taken away immediately after questioning.

“What treacherous bastard gave away where she was?”

Adelia didn’t know that either.

“I liked her,” Ulf said.

“We all did.” Were talking of her in the past, she thought.

“You reckon as Aelith got away?”

“I think so. Dear God, I hope so.”

“What’d them women do to earn this? Apart from acting like Christians?”

“I don’t know.”

Eventually, Ulf was persuaded to lie down with the others on the floor.

It was cold up here. The five of them hadn’t even been provided with straw, let alone beds. There’d been no food, nor drink, either. The one convenience was a bucket that had been thrown in after them.

However, after that long and terrible march, the imperative was sleep; Mansur, Rankin, and Boggart were already succumbing to it. Watching Ulf’s dour young face relax, Adelia, agonized, thought of his grandmother and what she would say if she saw him now. And Boggart with the new life inside her ... And Allie, always Allie. Are you asleep, little one? Don’t miss me. Be happy.

How had they all come to this?

Ever prepared to assume guilt, Adelia went over the circumstances that had led them here ... back, back to accepting Henry Plantagenet’s commission in the first place ... but she hadn’t accepted it, he’d forced her into it ... back to the education and foster parents who had made her into a person ill-starred and at odds with everything the world demanded of womanhood ... back to being born at all into such a world.

Boggart’s ministrations had eased her foot, but Adelia’s shoulder was hurting.

She untied the cord from about her waist and made it into a sling in which to rest her arm. Then, wrapping her cloak around her against the cold, she shuffled to find a comfortable position on the boards of the floor, and lay down, using Boggart’s now-ample rump as a pillow ...

She was in a classroom back in the Salerno medical school and a high, pedantic voice from someone she couldn’t see was lecturing on the subject of burning at the stake.

It was a relief to be woken up by the grind of a turning key in the lock of the door. The only light in the room was from the star-sprinkled sky outside the window. Two of the men who’d dragged them over the mountains came in. One had a spear at the ready; the other—he was the one who’d been kind to Boggart and given them water—carried a tray on which were five bowls, some stale rye bread, and a container of surprisingly good lamb stew.

“Ask ’em when they’re going to let us go, the bastards,” Ulf told Adelia.

She repeated the question, without its embellishment.

“Only way you’re getting out is in flames,” the spear carrier said.

But the kindly one said: “When we gets word.”

“What’s your name?” Adelia asked him.

“Don’t tell’em, Raymond,” the spear carrier said. “Ah, shit.”

After the guards were gone, there was discussion in the darkness about what Raymond’s “when we gets word” meant.

“It means they’ve sent to get confirmation of who we are,” Adelia said firmly. “Or they’re contacting Rowley We’ll be out of here in no time.”

Appetite satisfied, still tired, the prisoners settled down to sleep again.

“If, on the other hand,” the dream lecturer persisted, “the faggots are merely laid at the victim’s feet, he or she will suffer maximum pain until he or she dies of shock and blood loss ...”

“No.” Adelia sat up. The lecturer’s voice had been her own. Digging her nails into her palms so that she shouldn’t hear it again, she stayed awake for the rest of the night.

Men-at-arms stood at each entrance to the square; townspeople were being ushered into it by others who made sure that dogs and goats did not wander in with them. Some of them had baskets on their arms as if they’d been interrupted in their marketing.

The prisoners were led to the dais and made to clamber up on it so that they could both see and be seen, though the men and women funneling in only glanced at them briefly, then looked away, almost without interest, almost as if tied and manacled beings were the usual people in the usual place.

Boggart was on one side of Mansur, Adelia on the other with Rankin next to her and Ulf next to him. Behind them was scaffolding where the frontage of an ancient church was being rebuilt with stonework that was already a marvel of carving.

Ahead and higher than the church stood the bishop’s palace, modern and pristine, with glazed windows in rounded arches, and the sculptures of its portal telling the story of Jesus’s life.

It was a beautiful square. With a stake at its center.

Adelia thought she could hear Ward barking somewhere and wondered where he could get food and if he would find water.

She wondered whether Allie was being allowed to fly her kestrel; she wondered if little Sister Aelith had got away; she wondered where Rowley was now.

Her mind kept to these things, away from the here and now, which was a charade that would end with the stake and its woodpile remaining untouched and everybody being sent home. Human beings did not burn one another, not in these times; it was a threat from another age always held over the heads of heretics, Jews, witches, and other nonconformers but never actually performed now, not now, dear Lord, not now.

The abnormality of everything rushed at her, causing panic. Beyond these roofs and turrets was a pitiless landscape that was too high and too jagged. This square was full of people who were nothing to her, as she was less than nothing to them.

No, she told herself it won’t happen. Those churchmen over there on the bedraped dais opposite were commanded not to shed blood. Ergo, they wouldn’t, couldn’t let it shrivel in burning flesh. And the stake with its platform of bundled wood was there, there, in the center, and she wouldn’t witness it because it wasn’t happening ... and she could hear Ward’s bark again and she would die if somebody didn’t help him and keep him and Allie from being lonely which, of course, somebody would because there was kindness in this world, there had to be kindness or there was neither health nor purpose in it ...

The press of townspeople was now so large that the prisoners could look down on the caps of the men and the intricate weave of the women’s wide, straw hats just below them. There was none of the excitement with which crowds so often attended an execution; these people were sullen. Cathars or not, they didn’t want this.

A woman below Adelia spoke to the one next to her. “Ermengarde.” It was as if the word said everything that was to be said.

“I know,” her neighbor said.

“How’ll she bear the pain?”

“Let us pray God will take it on Himself.”

There was a clash of spears; men-at-arms were saluting the Bishop of Aveyron as he came out of his palace, wonderful in cope and miter. He had a dais of his own and was assisted onto it.

Adelia closed her eyes as he began speaking. It was a fine voice, rich in tone and sorrow, and the moment Adelia heard it she knew Ermengarde was going to die today

“My dear friends, you are assembled here as good people and good Christians to witness what must be done for the sake of all our souls....”

There was a sudden yell of “Persecution”—a man’s shout, brave and clear. Immediately, there was a tramp of boots as men-at-arms parted the crowd to try and find its owner. God bless him, Adelia thought, whoever he is. We are never quite alone.

“Persecution?” queried the lovely voice. “But not every persecution is blameworthy; rather it is reasonable for us to persecute heretics, just as Christ physically persecuted those whom He drove out of the Temple. To kill wicked men and women in order to save their souls for the sake of correction and justice is to serve God. And so we must do today.”

More tramping boots; they were bringing Ermengarde into the square. A phalanx of monks began chanting.

Adelia opened her eyes. The Cathar looked so small. She was bareheaded and the wind whipped her gray hair around her face. She was uttering her own battle cry, bless her, oh, bless her. It rose above the wind and the chanting monks: “‘Beware the false prophets who come to you in the guise of lambs wherein lurk voracious wolves.’ So says the gospel of Matthew. Their God is of the Old Testament, ignorant, cruel, bloodthirsty, and unjust....”

There was a crack, and she was silenced.

A murmur like a breeze ruffling corn ran through the crowd, and the bishop shouted over it: “You hear, good people? This woman’s blasphemy is proved out of her own throat.”

Adelia forced herself to keep looking; to hide one’s face from courage like this was to betray it; she was a witness.

Tiny and dowdy against the tapestry of the clergy, surrounded by men-at-arms, Ermengarde strode on bare feet toward the stake like a bride on her wedding day. She was led by a priest walking backward and holding a jeweled cross in front of her. There was blood on her mouth.

Boggart began to pant. Ulf and Rankin were swearing.

Adelia looked across at the churchmen, amazed. Are you blind? Don’t you see the bare feet, the simplicity, the loneliness? This is the Via Dolorosa.

Ermengarde was lifted onto her platform and tied to its stake. They were standing her on the pyre, not within it. One of her feet dislodged a faggot and a man-at-arms took time to replace it neatly

The chanting came louder. A bible was offered but Ermengarde turned her face away from it, one side of her damaged mouth moving in prayer.

A man in a hood that covered his face came forward holding a lit torch. He looked at the bishop, who nodded and dipped his plump, steepled hands.

There was a whoomph; they’d poured oil on the wood.

Adelia pushed her face into Mansur’s sleeve. She heard the crackle of flames and spitting wood that she’d heard a thousand times in comfortable kitchens where fire cooked meat on a spit. Her remorseless anatomist’s brain followed the sequence of burning feet, calves, thighs, hands, torso, and no death, no death until the conflagration reached the breath of the mouth and extinguished it.

Nor did God take the pain upon Himself. Long before the end, Ermengarde was screaming.