The conversation with the abbess had changed everything, or at least plenty. The monastery in White Church, the very fact of being there, was actually much more dangerous to Jutta than her relationship with Reynevan. The theses of Joachim and the Spiritualists, the heresy (somehow he still couldn’t think about it otherwise, or find another word for it)—the Builders of the Third Church, the cult of Guglielma and Maifreda—all were considered by Rome and the Inquisition to be just as serious an apostasy as Hussitism. In any case, Rome made no distinctions between heresies and apostasies. Every heretic was the Devil’s lackey. It also applied—which was downright ridiculous—to the cult of the Great Mother, which was after all older than humanity. And the Devil, which Rome had only just invented.

But the fact remained: the cult of the Triple Goddess, the worship of Guglielma, the errors of Joachim, the Sisterhood of the Free Spirit, the Third Church—each of those things was enough to send her to prison, to the stake or to penitential imprisonment for life in the Dominican dungeons. Jutta should not remain in the convent.

Something had to be done.

Reynevan knew what. Or at least felt it instinctively.

“You asked me in the wintertime.” He turned over on his side and looked her in the eyes. “You asked if I was ready to abandon everything. If I was ready simply to flee, go with you to the end of the world. I answer ‘yes’ to that. I love you, Jutta, and want to join with you until death do us part. The world, it appears, is doing what it can to thwart us in that. So let’s drop everything and flee. If necessary, to Constantinople.”

She said nothing, stroking him pensively for a long time.

“And your mission?” she finally asked, weighing her words slowly. “You have a mission, don’t you? You have convictions. You have a genuinely urgent and sacred duty. You want to change the face of the world, improve it, make it better. What then? Will you abandon your mission? Give it up? Forget about the Grail?”

Danger, he thought. Caution. Danger.

“A mission,” she continued, speaking even slower. “Convictions. A vocation. Sacrifice. Ideals. The Kingdom of God and the desire for it to come about. A dream for it to come about. A fight for it to come about. Are they things that can be given up, Reinmar?”