Nancy had to be dragged from her father's body.

They took her away; they took everything, the rich tapestries dragged from the walls, the polished silver, and on the eve of her twentieth year she was handed the cloak of a penitent, the rough unforgiving cloth, to keep her chaste while she waited for the man who, now, at the moment her father died, had become her husband to be.

She had been free, once. While her father had lived, he had promised that she would marry only if and when she desired to do so, but her mate had been ordained for her at the moment of her birth, blessed by her mother before she had died, eight days after yielding a crying daughter to the world. She had washed her father's face with her tears, knowing all the while that whatever she had been, whatever she could have been, it was all lost to her now. Promised to a man she had never met.

The first night in her novitiate's cell, she wondered if God, in His bountiful mercy, was ever able to forgive a suicide.

--

The sisters flitted over her like quiet quick birds, silent all the while, and as she suffered their ministrations she saw him for the first time, his dark hair swept back from a square-jawed face, wide forehead, intelligent brown eyes. He cradled a book, turning the pages with painstaking care, and she saw the flash of the rosary beads dangling between his fingers.

The monastery was so quiet, the walls so high that she couldn't remember what had been on the other side. The trip here from her home had been a blur of tears and fast horses and gruff silent men, and countless sloping fields.

"He will be here in a month."

The Mother Abbess gave the news impassively enough, and Nancy folded her hands in her lap and sat quiet, keeping her lip from trembling only with supreme effort.

"You are well?"

She needed Hannah, their cook from the time she was born, who would have held her and cried with her and listened when she protested that she needed no husband. She needed her friends, who, though similarly powerless, would at least have understood.

Most of all, she needed her father. But the Mother Abbess, with her tight thin mouth and distant eyes, looked like she had never needed anything so frivolous in her life.

--

"Bless me, father, for I have sinned," she repeated in Latin, the words she had learned practically at birth stale and pale on her lips. She clenched the rosary in her fist while she waited for him to reply, wondering which voice of the many she'd heard here it would be. The church was spare and silent, the sunlight telling long shadows in the doorways, and from the stone, distantly, she could hear water falling. Every morning when she woke, the pillow was still wet and cool with her tears.

"My child."

This voice was new, warm. The diction nearly perfect, not sloppy and distracted like her own.

While he pondered the number of times she would need to say the Rosary and pray to the Holy Mother to save her immortal soul, she pressed her fingertip to the elaborate carved grate between them, and before he repeated his decision, she could feel the pressure of his fingertip against hers in return.

--

They called him Ned. The younger sisters blushed when they pronounced the name, all their worldliness not quite yet forgotten.

Her skin tingled when he was in sight, and that was only at dinner, in the cavernous hall. Across the cluttered scarred tables, she could only see him in flashes of brown and black, the quick beautiful quirk of his lips when he smiled. She never caught him staring, never caught so much as a glance in her direction, but after her third confession in his box, when she returned to her room, she found a note shoved under her door.

She slept with it under her pillow that night, and did not dream.

--

They met outside the walls the first time, and he was so nervous that he was telling the rosary over and over, his forefinger and thumb worrying the beads one by one.

Her world had changed the day her father had died. Before, she had never felt this utter annihilation of self, the desire to take the only control she had left in the few weeks before she was claimed, married, and became the property of someone else.

When the bells rang his mouth moved in a quick prayer against her skin, and only when the Angelus was silent did he move over her, brown against black, pale against pale. She closed her eyes and knew this was the last thing she would ever be able to feel, and she cried when he moved inside her for the first time.

--

"Come away with me."

Frank was to arrive the next morning in all pomp and circumstance, and the sisters had washed her skin with rose water until it gleamed, found the raiment her mother had worn at her own wedding, and she was to be trimmed in ivory and crimson to mark the last hours of her single life.

"What of this?" she breathed, searching his eyes.

"This life was mine only until it brought me to you."

--

They were married under names she had never heard before, in a small town three days' ride away, and when she asked if it was the place of his birth, he only looked to the west, his brown eyes unreadable.

On their wedding night he hung the rosary on a nail above their hard bed. She slipped her rings off one by one and whispered an apology to her father, whose grave she would never see again.

"Never cage me."

He nodded, his fingers tangling in her hair, and she closed her eyes when his mouth touched hers.

"We're free."