“It grieves me to hear of such things,” replied Constance without any indication this was news to her, “but I fear the ill-will of Sabella, for reasons you must know, and in any case I am loath to leave my people—” Here she gestured toward the city, which lay quiet in the midday sun. “—without my guidance, and without my presence to protect them.”
Agius had remained in the background, hidden by the robes of Antonia’s clerics. Now he stepped forward. The bleak dark stain of his frater’s robes stood out starkly against the brighter clothing of his more worldly brethren.
Constance’s expression brightened. She looked delighted. “Agius! You have surprised me.” She released Antonia’s hands and reached and drew Agius to her as if he were her brother. The show of familiarity astonished Alain. “I did not expect to find you in such company.”
Just barely Alain caught in Constance’s tone a muted disgust for the company Agius was keeping. If Antonia noticed it, she made no sign; she beamed as fondly on them as an elderly kinswoman might approve the reuniting of two feuding siblings.
“I travel where I must,” Agius said. He looked torn between his obvious pleasure in seeing Biscop Constance and the dilemma that hung over him as the executioner’s sword hangs over the neck of the condemned. “I follow the path which Our Lady has set before my feet.”
“And that path led you to Sabella’s camp?” asked Constance. If there was sarcasm in her utterance, Alain could not hear it.
“Worldly consideration led me to Sabella’s camp, Your Grace.”
“I thought you had turned your face away from worldly considerations, Frater Agius, when you refused marriage and took the brown robe of service instead.”
He smiled grimly. “The world is not yet done with me, Your Grace. Alas.”
“It is ever thus, that the world intrudes when we wish most devoutly only to contemplate God.” Constance folded her hands together and bowed her head slightly, as if in submission to God’s will. Then she raised her head to look at Agius directly again. “But God in kindness endowed humans with freedom equal to that of the angels. For is it not true that the sun and the moon and indeed even the stars are so fixed that they can only move in the path marked out for them? Yet it is not so with those born of human mothers. Thus must our behavior be reckoned with that of the angels. The praise or blame which a man’s conduct deserves is really his own.” She turned to Biscop Antonia. “Do you not agree, Your Grace?”