32
As the first rays of morning sun were breaking across the sky, Joanna wrapped herself in her cloak and stepped into the darkness of the passages behind the panel door in her chamber.
She needed to go to the vault. She had to see it again.
In the past, she’d treated the crypt as a place of evil. To Joanna, it had been the unhallowed ground of fiends and their rituals. But now Joanna understood it to be a place of goodness, a sanctuary, a temple from which the women drew sustenance as well as peace.
She needed to go there and experience that herself, look at it with a new eye, feel it with an open heart. And she needed to go there to undo all she had prepared. After hearing the abbess’s story, a story in which her own grandfather had played the most horrible part, Joanna simply could
