Dawn arrived like an unkept promise. The girl pressed her palms to the stone windowsill, savoring the sting of frost beneath her skin. Outside, the courtyard stirred—a chessboard of shadows where servants darted like pawns, preparing the stage for her final act. Snow clung to the world like a penitent’s shroud, and she found herself grateful for its indifference.
They’d called her a heretic. A disobedient daughter. A failed wife. But here, in this brittle hour between darkness and light, she felt neither fear nor regret—only a quiet fury that burned cleaner than any prayer.
The memories came as they always did: unbidden, relentless.
Her mother’s voice, sharp as a whetstone: “A woman’s virtue is silence.”
Her father’s scheming eyes across the supper table, bargaining her future for a sliver of political favor.
The gilded cage of marriage—a husband whose hands left bruises softer than his words.
And the books. Oh, the books. Hidden beneath floorboards, devoured by candlelight, their pages whispering secrets thicker than blood. That had been her true heresy: the audacity to think.
She traced the spine of her last stolen volume—Lucretius, cracked and dog-eared. Let them burn it after. Let them try.
Footsteps echoed in the corridor. Two shapes emerged: the priest with his moth-eaten stole, the guard smelling of rye and rust.
“Child,” the priest began, but she turned before he could finish.
Child. The word clung to her, ill-fitting. She’d ceased being a child when they sold her to a stranger’s bed. When they carved her open for sons she never bore. When they condemned her for quoting Erasmus at supper.
“I’m ready,” she said, though readiness had nothing to do with it.
The tower stairs unwound like a noose. Her maid’s weeping followed them—a raw, animal sound that somehow comforted. At least one heart remains unbroken, she thought. Or perhaps the girl merely feared sharing her fate. These days, loyalty and terror wore the same face.
Cold air slapped her as they emerged into the courtyard. The scaffold loomed, its timbers still weeping sap. How strange, to build a thing of death from something so alive.
A crowd had gathered. She searched the faces—no mother, no father, no hollow-eyed husband. Only strangers clutching crucifixes like daggers. Let them gawk. Let them remember.
Snow crunched beneath her slippers as she climbed. The executioner’s blade caught the dawn, winking.
This is how a world ends, she mused. Not with scripture or sacrament, but with the petty arithmetic of small men—a father’s ambition, a husband’s wounded pride, a priest’s fear of questions that outlive answers.
The priest raised his hand. A hush fell.
“Do you repent?” he demanded.
She studied the sky—a flawless, heartless blue. How many hours had she wasted begging forgiveness for sins that weren’t hers? For hungering after knowledge? For refusing to kneel?
“I repent nothing.” Her voice carried, clear as a bell.
A gasp rippled through the crowd. The priest paled.
“You would damn your soul?”
She almost laughed. You’ve already damned yours, she thought. Aloud: “I trust God to judge me kinder than men.”
They bound her hands. The rope chafed—a final, petty cruelty.
As the hood descended, she inhaled winter one last time: ice and woodsmoke and the faintest whisper of rosemary from some distant kitchen. Her mother’s garden had smelled of rosemary.
Funny, she thought. I’d forgotten.
The blade fell.
Epilogue
They burned her books at dusk, their pages curling like dying hands. But words have wings.
In the taverns, men muttered of the maid who vanished that night, clutching a charred Latin text.
In the cathedral, a young acolyte paused mid-prayer, haunted by a girl’s defiant smile.
And in the frozen earth, where her blood had seeped into the roots of an ancient oak, snowdrops bloomed come March—white as absolution, stubborn as truth.
