Transcription
She can't remember if she screamed. That's the first thing. Not the pain, not the sound of her sister's weeping in the corner, not even the realization that the cross around her neck had been torn away so violently it left a line of blood across her collarbone. It's that she has no memory of her own voice breaking. She has no idea if she called out to God or if she stayed silent. The not knowing might be worse than anything else.
Sister Katrine sits wrapped in a stolen wool blanket that smells like sweat and fish oil and smoke. It's not her blanket. Nothing here is hers anymore. Around her, the camp moves in the pre-dawn darkness. Men laugh over a fire that's too bright. They pass a horn of mead between them. They speak in a language that sounds like rocks grinding together. And they don't look at her. That's the second thing. The not looking. It's deliberate, practiced, like she's become something they've agreed not to see, even though she's sitting 20 paces from where they sit. Her sister Moira, who shared a dormitory with her for 12 years, won't meet her eyes either. Moira is huddled with three other women against the hull of one of the ships. She stares at the ground like there's a prayer written there in the dirt. The sun hasn't risen yet, but Kit knows what daylight will bring. More of the same, the waiting, the uncertainty of what comes next. The way the Viking captain, the one with the scar that splits his face like a seam, keeps watching her with the careful attention of someone deciding the fate of livestock.
This is what they don't teach you in the monastery. They teach you about martyrs who went to their death singing, about saints who endured torture with unshakable faith, about the early Christians who walked into arenas and found peace in the jaws of lions. But no one teaches you what happens when survival becomes the cruelest choice. When living means forgetting. When another sunrise feels like a punishment rather than a mercy.
If you're watching this, you already know there's a reason this story was buried. A reason it took centuries for historians to piece together what actually happened to the women of Lindesvan, Whitby, and dozens of other monasteries along the British coast. You're about to hear what the history books don't tell you. What the church spent generations keeping quiet. Because this isn't a story about glorious martyrdom. It's a story about what happens when the world decides your faith doesn't matter. Your vows don't protect you and your God is too far away to hear you calling. On Crimson Historians, we don't sanitize the past. We excavate it. We pull it from the darkness where the powerful buried it. And we remember the names of people the world wanted to forget. So, turn up your volume, close the door, and if you're the kind of person who believes history should be told completely, unflinchingly, and honestly, hit that subscribe button now. Because what happened to these nuns is about to change how you understand the Viking age forever. If you enjoy these dark history stories, leave a like and subscribe. Comment below where you're listening from. I'm genuinely curious to know where these stories reach.
Now, let's go back to that island before the ships arrived, before everything broke.
3 days before the raid, Sister Katrine had been writing. The scriptorium was cold that morning. It was always cold in the scriptorium, but this cold felt different. The kind of cold that carries intention, the kind that arrives before the thing it's meant to announce. Sister Katrine didn't notice it at first. She was too focused on the manuscript in front of her, too immersed in the careful reproduction of Latin words that had been copied by monks for centuries before her hands ever touched parchment. The prayer book was meant for a bishop in Durham, a commission that had taken 3 months and would take three more. Each letter had to be perfect. Each margin had to be calculated. There was no room for mistakes in sacred text, or so she'd been taught.
The scriptorium was a narrow room on the eastern side of the convent with three high windows that let in light without letting in the elements. Katrine sat at her desk, the one closest to the middle window, the one reserved for the most experienced copists, and worked methodically through the pages. Her fingers were stained with iron gall ink that never quite washed out anymore. There were permanent calluses on her hands from gripping the quill. Her back ached from hours of hunching over the desk, a dull pain that had become so familiar she barely noticed it. Sister Moira sat two desks over, working on her own manuscript, copying texts that were less prestigious, less intricate. Moira was younger than Katherine, only 26, and her hands weren't as steady yet. She made mistakes. She had to scrape them off with a knife and start again, losing precious parchment. But she was improving. In another 5 years, maybe she'd graduate to the kind of work Katrin did.
They'd been working since before dawn. The bell for Matins had rung at midnight, as it always did. The sisters had filed into the chapel, knelt in the darkness, sung their prayers by memory to voices that carried in the cold stone, then back to their dormitory for 2 hours of sleep before Prime rang out, and the cycle began again. By the time the morning light arrived, Kitrine had already been at her desk for 5 hours. This was the rhythm of convent life. Prayer and work, work and prayer. The two were supposed to be inseparable, each one sanctifying the other. Writing scripture was prayer. Copying the word of God was communion with the divine. Sister Alred, the abbess, had said this hundreds of times. Katrine had believed it. She still believed it. But belief and reality had started to feel like different languages.
That morning, the morning 3 days before everything changed, there was a messenger. He arrived mid-morning, a boy barely 14, riding hard enough that his horse was foaming at the mouth. He came to the gate demanding to see Father Cuthbut, the abbot of the attached monastery. Within minutes, he was gone again, riding back toward the south. No one knew what he'd said, but something had changed in the air. The atmosphere shifted like a door had opened somewhere that should have stayed closed.
Sister Elred found Sister Katrine in the scriptorium an hour later. "Put that down," she said. Her voice was steady, but there was something underneath it. Something that had nothing to do with the ordinary rhythms of convent life. Kitrine looked up from her manuscript. She'd been in the middle of copying a verse from the Gospel of John. "Abbess, don't finish the line. Put the quill down. We need to meet in the refectory."
By the time all 73 sisters had gathered, the story had traveled through the convent like poison through water. Ships had been spotted off the coast. Not merchant vessels, raiders. The kind of ships that had started appearing more frequently in the last decade, striking fast, taking what they wanted, disappearing back into the sea before any defense could be mounted. Sister Alred stood before them, her small frame somehow commanding the entire room. She was 62 years old, with gray hair that she kept hidden under her wimple, and a face that had learned long ago how to show strength even when none existed underneath. "We have perhaps 3 hours," she said. Her voice didn't shake. "We will secure what we can. The manuscripts in the study will be moved to the eastern K. The chalices and vestments will be buried in the garden. We will dress plainly. We will hide nothing of value on our persons. If they come looking for wealth, we give them nothing or the impression of nothing." She paused and her eyes moved across the room, counting, assessing. "They may not come to the convent. They may strike the monastery first. We don't know, but we will be prepared."
No one asked the question that was hanging in the silence. No one asked what would happen if the Vikings decided that women were treasure, too. No one wanted to say the words aloud. As long as the words weren't spoken, maybe they wouldn't be true.
Sister Kitrine went back to the scriptorium to collect her work. The manuscript for the bishop was still on her desk, open to the verse she'd been copying. She stood there for a long moment, looking at the careful script, the precise margins, the months of work that represented her entire world. Then she rolled it gently and carried it toward the eastern slope of the island, where other sisters were beginning to gather, digging, hiding, erasing evidence of the life they'd built here. She was 31 years old. She'd been in the convent since she was seven. Her family had given her to the monastery because her father had too many daughters and not enough dowries. But Katrine had never resented it. The convent had given her something her father's house never could, a purpose that didn't depend on marriage or children or a man's will. Here she was respected. Her handwriting was prized. The abbot himself had commented on the delicacy of her script. That life feels like a dream now, like someone else lived it.
They came at dawn. The sky was gray and featureless, the kind of morning that made it hard to tell where the sea ended and the sky began. The first warning was the sound of oars cutting through water, not the gentle sound of fishing boats, the rhythmic, purposeful sound of ships designed for speed and conquest. The lookout, a young monk named Cuthbut, rang the bell in the bell tower as fast as his hands could move. The sound that emerged was frantic, high-pitched, almost screaming. It echoed across the island, and for a moment it seemed like the sound itself might be enough to save them, like the bell could call down God's protection, like faith had the power to reach across water and turn back the tide.
The Normans didn't turn back. The Vikings didn't come looking for gold. Not primarily. Lindesfan was wealthy by monastic standards. Monasteries always were. But it wasn't wealthy enough to justify the effort of sailing all the way from the Norwegian coast. What they came for was something else. Something that later ages would make clearer. Monks and nuns were valuable. Not for ransom, though ransoms came sometimes, but for something more fundamental. Labor, control, the theft of people.
70 men, maybe 80, came ashore in a coordinated assault that had clearly been practiced before. Faces weathered by salt and sun, arms decorated with symbols and scars that meant stories Katrine's mind couldn't quite process. They moved through the island with the casual precision of men who'd done this before, who turned the taking of monasteries into a systematic process. They didn't burn the buildings, not immediately. They were too smart for that. Fire destroys value, destroys everything that could be sold, seized, repurposed. Instead, they swept through the scriptorium first, the repository of wealth disguised as scripture. They gathered every manuscript they could carry, leather-bound books, illuminated texts, centuries of accumulated knowledge. They threw them into woven baskets like they were looted treasure, which to them they were. Then they moved through the dormitories, the refectory, the study rooms, anything portable, anything valuable, anything that could be converted to silver in distant markets, but also people.
They came to the women's convent last. Sister Katrine was in the chapel with the others when she heard the doors being broken. The sound was definitive, not a threat, a fact. Wood splintering, iron hinges giving way, the sound of the physical world refusing to protect them anymore. Sister Alred was on her knees before the altar. She didn't move when the Viking captain entered the chapel with six men behind him. She just knelt there, her hands clasped in prayer, her eyes forward on the wooden crucifix that hung over the altar. It was an act of defiance so profound, so complete that it made the air in the chapel feel like it was holding its breath. The captain, a man with a scar that split his face like a seam, who would later be identified in historical records as Ragnar, a jarl from the region near modern-day Oslo, looked at her for a long moment. Then he smiled. It was not a kind smile. "Get them up," he said in Norse to his men. "Get them organized. We're taking them to the ships."
The monks they killed, some of them anyway, the old ones, the infirm, the ones who resisted, the ones who actually believed that God would protect them, that prayer meant something, that their faith was armor against Viking steel. Sister Alred watched from the window of the convent as they dragged Father Cuthbbert to the beach. He'd been the abbot for 40 years. He'd baptized half the people on the island. He'd spent his entire life in service to God. The Vikings beat him with the flat of their axes until he stopped moving, then left him there in the sand like discarded cargo, his body already beginning to mean less than the wooden crosses they threw into their ships. But the nuns they didn't kill. The nuns they kept.
The journey to the ships took 12 minutes. Katherine counted them. Her hands had been bound with leather cord that bit into her wrists hard enough to leave marks that would last for weeks. 21 other nuns walked ahead of her in a line, their wimples torn, their faces the color of old paper. Some of them were crying silently. Some of them were praying under their breath. Sister Moira was chanting the Lord's Prayer in Latin so quietly it was almost inaudible. Like if she prayed loud enough, if she spoke in the right language, if she performed the ritual correctly, the Vikings wouldn't be able to hear her. Like faith was something that could be hidden. Something that existed in a separate realm from the physical reality of bound wrists and soldiers with axes.
The captain, Ragnar, walked alongside the line like he was assessing livestock at market. He was younger than Kitrine expected, maybe 40. His hair was braided with bone and leather. His eyes were a blue so pale they looked almost colorless, and they took in every detail: the way Sister Moira's veil had slipped, the tremor in Sister Beatric's legs, the fact that Katrine hadn't looked directly at him once, and how that distance, that refusal to acknowledge his presence, seemed to interest him more than anything else.
When they reached the beach, Ragnar stopped the line and turned to face them. He didn't speak in English. Why would he? But there was a man with him, a Northumbrian trader named Godwin, who'd gone Viking three years before, a man who'd chosen to become something other than what he'd been born. And Godwin translated. His voice was steady, which made it worse somehow, like this was normal, like this happened every day, like the selling of human beings was just business.
"The jarl says you have a choice," Godwin called out, his English accent mixing strangely with the Viking words he translated. "You can beg for death now and he'll give it to you quick. His axe is sharp. His mercy is real, but it's brief." He paused, letting that settle into their bones like cold. "Or you can live. You can sail with us. You can work. You can become something other than what you were, and you might survive. You might build something new. Some of you might even be happy."
No one moved. No one even seemed to breathe. Ragnar smiled. Not a kind smile. The kind of smile that said he'd already decided the answer before he asked the question. The kind of smile that said there was no choice had never been a choice. And the fact that they were being asked to make one was just theater for his own amusement.
"The jarl says most of you will die anyway," Godwin continued, his voice mechanical now. "On the ships on the way north. From fever, from hunger, from the sea that has no mercy for those not born to it. The strong ones will live. Those have value. The weak ones," he shrugged. "Better to know now than to carry bodies across the ocean. Better to let the sea have you here, where at least it cost us nothing."
Katrine felt Sister Beatrice's legs give out beside her. Beatrice was 63. She'd been a nun longer than Katrine had been alive. She'd outlived an abbess, an epidemic, more winters than she could count. She'd been a woman of considerable strength, or so everyone thought. But strength has limits. Understanding has limits. The human mind has limits to what it can accept before it simply stops functioning. The Vikings let her fall to the sand. No one helped her up. They stood there, all of them, watching her lie there like a question that had no answer, like a test of what they would do, what they were capable of. Ragnar watched her lie there for a long moment. He made a gesture to one of the men, a casual motion like he was brushing away an insect. The man raised his axe. The sun gleamed off the blade. Kine found herself thinking about the manuscripts in the scriptorium, about the particular way light fell through the high windows, about the smell of the ink, about anything except what was about to happen.
It was Sister Elred's voice that stopped it. "We'll come," she said in English, clear and calm and steady, like she was accepting an invitation to dinner, like she was making a simple agreement. "All of us, we won't resist. We'll go, we'll work, we'll do whatever is necessary, but we'll come." There was something in her voice, some quality of absolute certainty, some kind of knowledge that seemed to bypass normal human understanding that made Ragnar pause. He studied her, the abbess, the one person whose authority meant nothing anymore, but who carried herself like someone who understood the mechanisms of power. He nodded to Godwin. "Tell her that's wise. Tell her that the ones who resist die slower." He paused. He actually seemed to be considering something. "Tell her that the one thing that will keep her alive, that will keep any of them alive, is if she keeps the others compliant. If she becomes useful, she might even grow comfortable with what she is now."
Katrine didn't know what that meant. Not yet.
The ship smelled like rotting fish and unwashed men and something else underneath. Something ancient and organic that suggested things had died in the wood long ago and never fully decomposed. It was the smell of a vessel that had carried human cargo before. The smell of suffering that had soaked into the planks. They were chained below decks. All 22 of them crammed into a space that had been designed for cargo, not people. There were no portholes. The air was thick and wet and utterly still, except for when the ship moved, which seemed to always be moving. The light came from a single oil lamp that swung with the motion of the ship, casting shadows that moved like living things with their own agency.
Sister Elred was with them. She'd refused to be separated, and Ragnar had allowed it. Later, Katrine would understand that Ragnar had done this deliberately. The leader among prisoners was useful. It meant someone else had to maintain order, had to make impossible choices, had to become complicit in whatever came next. It meant he didn't have to do the work of breaking them. They would do it to each other.
The first night Sister Beatatrice died. She had survived the journey to the ships only to be broken by the sea itself. The swaying, the sound of the waves, the salt spray that leaked through cracks in the wood, it had been too much for a body that had finally reached its limit. Her heart simply stopped. They left her body with them for 3 days before someone thought to remove it. The space where she'd lain began to stink of death in a way that went beyond physical decomposition. It stank of endings. By the fourth day, two more were gone. Sister Marjgerie, who'd never been physically strong, simply expired in the darkness like a candle running out of wax. Sister Karin, who'd simply stopped eating, decided that the end was preferable to the uncertainty, and her body had listened to that decision.
The ship sailed north, and the remaining nuns learned new shapes of suffering. The hunger that wasn't quite starvation, but close enough to make your thoughts slow and strange. The cold that never completely left, even below decks. The way your body began to forget what cleanliness felt like, what sunlight felt like, what freedom felt like. But those things were almost bearable. Almost.
It was the men's voices that mattered. It was the footsteps descending into the hold that mattered. They'd come below sometimes at night mostly. Not all of them. Usually two or three at a time, sometimes just one, drunk on mead, moving with the loose coordination of someone who decided that normal social rules no longer applied. They'd pick a nun and take her topside. Or sometimes, more often as the voyage wore on, they'd do it right there in the dim light of the oil lamp, while the others tried not to watch, tried not to hear, tried to convince themselves that looking away was the same as it not happening, that silence was the same as absence.
Sister Krine learned very quickly that the only thing that protected you was invisibility. If you made eye contact, if you drew attention, if you seemed young and strong and capable of surviving, that was when they came for you. So she curled into the corner of the hold and made herself small. She let her hair grow matted. She stopped speaking entirely. She stopped responding to her own name. She became a shadow among shadows, and it worked for the most part.
There was one night, maybe two weeks into the voyage, when a man descended the ladder. He was drunk. Kitrine could smell the mead on him before he even reached the bottom. He moved with the loose-limbed confidence of someone who'd been drinking since dawn. He looked around the hold at the women huddled in the darkness and he pointed, not at Krine, but at Sister Elred. The Abbess didn't resist. She stood, walked to him as if she'd been waiting for this moment, and allowed him to lead her topside. She was gone for an hour. During that hour, no one moved. No one spoke. The remaining sisters sat in the darkness like they'd been turned to stone. When she came back, she walked like someone who'd learned a new language and hadn't yet found words for what she'd seen. Her face was a different shape. Her eyes were somewhere else. She didn't speak for 2 days. When she finally did, it was to tell the remaining nuns to obey, not to fight, not to resist, to accept what was happening and find a way to survive within it.
"Your souls don't live in your bodies," she said quietly. And her voice carried a weight that made everyone listen. It might have been the most dangerous thing she'd ever said, or the most wise. "Your souls are here." She pointed to her chest. "What they take, what they do, it doesn't touch that. You can protect that part of yourself. You must protect that part of yourself. Or there's nothing left when this is over."
Sister Moira had asked, her voice barely a whisper, barely audible in the darkness of the hold. "How? How do you protect something like that?"
Sister Elred had looked at her for a long moment. Then she'd said, "I haven't figured that out yet."
The raid on Lindesvan happened in 793. The historical record is clear about this. Monks and nuns were taken, treasure was stolen, buildings were burned. Within weeks, the Venerable Bede had written about it in Anglo-Saxon terms. A terrifying assault by pagan barbarians on Christendom's most sacred places. The beginning of an age of darkness, a sign of God's judgment. What the historical record doesn't tell you is what happened to the 73 women who vanished from that island. For centuries, it was assumed they died. Killed in the initial raid or drowned at sea or lost to plague or fever on the journey north. The church moved on. New nuns took their places. The convent was rebuilt. In the narrative of Christian history, they became martyrs, a footnote in the larger story of how the church stood firm against pagan invasion. Their names were recorded once briefly and then forgotten.
But the women didn't die, not most of them. Not in any way that traditional history would recognize. What happened to them was something far more complicated, far more difficult to categorize, far more troubling to the people who controlled the narratives of what it meant to be Christian, to be powerful, to be protected by God.
Ragnar's settlement was in what is now Norway, on a fjord that cut deep into mountains like a scar that refused to heal. The long ship sailed into that fjord after a voyage that had taken the nuns through waters they'd never imagined existed, past coasts that looked like the edge of the world, into a landscape so harsh and unforgiving that Katrine wondered if they'd already died. And this was hell. The mountains rose straight up from the water like walls built by giants. The cold was absolute. The isolation was complete.
20 women disembarked. Two had died on the voyage. One, Sister Marjgerie, had simply stopped fighting. Another had thrown herself into the sea one night when the guards weren't watching, choosing the cold water over whatever her mind was telling her would happen next. 17 remained from Lindisvan, including Sister Elred, plus three women from other raided monasteries on the coast. They were thin now. Their skin had taken on a grayish cast. Some of them no longer recognized each other when they looked up from the darkness of the hold.
The settlement was built into the mountainside, designed with an almost military precision. Long houses, workshops, spaces designed to survive winters that went on for months without mercy. And Kitrine realized almost immediately that they weren't prisoners of war. They were slaves. Not the kind of slavery that the medieval church recognized, not chattel slavery in the sense that would develop centuries later in different parts of the world, but slavery nonetheless. They were given work, cooking, cleaning, mending clothes, tending animals, preparing fish for the winter stores. They were given food, not much, but enough to survive. They were given shelter. And in exchange, they were expected to accept a new reality: that they were no longer nuns. They were no longer Christians in any practical sense. They were property.
Ragnar had made this clear from the first moment, speaking through Godwin again, the translator who'd become a constant presence. "You'll work, you'll obey, you'll forget the God who didn't protect you. You'll learn our language. You'll forget yours. And if you're useful, you'll live. If you're not, if you become a burden, if you stop being productive." He didn't bother finishing the sentence. They understood.
The question was, "What came next? What happened when the work was done? What happened when the sun went down and the settlement grew quiet?" That's when Katrine learned what the Vikings, what Ragnar specifically, had brought them north for, not for labor. Not really. Labor was secondary, useful, but not the primary purpose. What they'd brought them for was possession, control, the assertion of power over something that had believed itself beyond their reach. Christian women were symbolic, holy, protected by the church, by God, by centuries of doctrine that said certain women were untouchable, sacred, meant to be left alone. Taking them, breaking them, turning them into something other than what they were. It was a statement not to the women themselves, but to God, to the world, to the Christian kingdoms of Europe. It said, "Your protection means nothing. Your faith means nothing. Your walls mean nothing. I can take what you treasure most, and there's nothing you can do about it."
Sister Alred had warned them what would happen. She'd tried to prepare them during the nights on the ship, speaking in whispers, but there was no preparation for this, no prayer, no faith, no mental discipline that could bridge the gap between what they'd been and what they were becoming. The Vikings had brought them north for winter. Kitrine understood this gradually. The settlement was designed for the brutal months ahead. They needed labor to prepare, food to preserve, fires to maintain, animals to tend. But they also needed women for comfort, for use, for the assertion of dominance that men seemed to need as much as they needed food. A system developed, though no one spoke about it directly. The strongest nuns, the ones most likely to survive, were left mostly alone. They were workers, valuable, replaced less easily. But the younger ones, the more delicate ones, the ones who'd been beautiful before the voyage had worn them down, they were taken regularly, sometimes by Ragnar, usually by the men who worked for him, sometimes by visiting traders from other settlements who brought their own ships, their own crew, their own appetites.
Sister Moira had broken within the first week. She'd stopped speaking entirely, stopped eating with the others, started spending her time staring at nothing. She'd begun to speak to people who weren't there. One morning, she'd walked into the fjord and didn't come back. No one found her body. The water had simply accepted her and moved on. And after a few days, no one spoke her name anymore. It was easier that way.
Sister Beatrice, a different sister now, not the old woman who'd fallen on the beach, had learned to hide it. Not her body, but her mind. She'd developed the ability to go somewhere else entirely while other people used her flesh. She'd trained her eyes to focus on nothing. She'd learned to breathe in a way that detached her from what was happening. When it was over, she'd returned to her body with the careful precision of someone stepping back into clothes that no longer fit. It worked for a while. It worked until it didn't.
Kitrine had learned a different strategy. She'd made herself essential. She'd become Ragnar's favorite because she was obedient in a way that the others weren't. Not broken, exactly. More like she'd accepted the reality faster than the others and found a way to exist within it. She cleaned his space without being asked. She mended his clothes with expert precision. She learned to read his mood by the set of his shoulders. She anticipated his needs before he had to express them, and in exchange she was left alone most of the time. Sometimes he wanted her, but not often. Mostly he wanted her compliance and her presence and her usefulness. It was almost a mercy. Almost. The "almost" is where all the damage lives.
Sister Alred had aged 10 years in 2 months. The weight of leadership had become literal. She'd taken responsibility for keeping the others alive, which meant making choices that broke her in ways that Ragnar couldn't. It meant choosing which nuns got extra food and which didn't. It meant knowing which ones were being taken to the slavers' market and not being able to stop it. It meant watching her sisters destroy themselves piece by piece. By winter solstice, she looked like a ghost that hadn't yet realized it was dead.
The winter that year was devastating. Snow fell in quantities that none of the nuns had ever experienced. Drifts buried the lower half of the long houses. The temperature dropped so far that frostbite became an enemy as dangerous as the Vikings themselves. Three of the remaining women didn't survive. They simply froze in their sleep, their bodies shutting down as the cold finally became too much. Sister Hild, Sister Catherine, Sister Margaret. Their names would be forgotten. Their bodies would be buried in the frozen ground, far from home, far from any sacred ground, far from anyone who would remember them.
It was during that winter that the other thing happened. The thing that no historian recorded because no one wanted to admit it had occurred. The thing that made the already inconvenient story completely impossible to incorporate into official narratives. Some of the nuns became pregnant. Not all of them. Some had been spared that specific cruelty. But seven of them carried evidence of what had been done to them, growing larger each month as if their bodies were traitors. The Vikings didn't seem to care. Pregnancy didn't stop the work. It didn't stop the knights when men came for them. It didn't change anything except that the women became more desperate, more broken, more certain that whatever came next would be worse than what was happening now.
Sister Krine had been among them. She didn't want to remember the moment she'd realized it. Didn't want to acknowledge what it meant. For weeks, she'd told herself it was illness. Her body was weakening. The cold was affecting her. The diet of dried fish and hard bread was upsetting her stomach. But by the time winter was deep, she couldn't deny it anymore. Something was growing inside her, something that shouldn't exist. A child fathered by rape. A child she would never carry to term if she had any choice in the matter.
She'd found herself standing at the edge of the fjord one afternoon, staring into water that had frozen over in the cold. It would have been easy, one step. The ice might hold or it might break. The water wouldn't fight her. The cold would be painful only briefly, then nothing. Then peace. Sister Alred had found her there. The abbess had simply appeared beside her, and Katrine hadn't even noticed her approach. The abbess had said, "Don't."
"That's all," Katrine had asked. "Why? What's the point? We're dead anyway. We've been dead since Lindesvan. Everything after that is just the body trying to catch up with what already happened to the soul."
Sister Ilred had been silent for a long moment. Then she'd said, "Because they want you dead, and I won't give them that satisfaction. I won't let them have that victory."
Two weeks later, Sister Ketrine had lost the child. Whether it was the cold or her body's refusal, or simply the violence that never quite stopped, she'd wake one morning, and the thing growing inside her would be gone. Blood and pain and an ending that came as a mercy. She'd never spoken about it. None of them had. These were things that happened in silence, in the dark, in the spaces between survival.