Bishop Jan paces the nave of Sint-Salvator Cathedral, troubled by the city-wide obsession with Aleys. He concludes that he can’t arrest her while the people revere her, but he can’t ignore her either. His plan is to stage a public test. Whether she succeeds or fails, he wins. Success means presenting a saint to the pope; failure means arresting her for fraud and shutting down the begijnhof.

At dawn, the bishop’s carriage arrives at the begijnhof carrying Jan, his agent Willems, and Friar Lukas. Jan orders guards to sweep the bread offerings off the bridge. Inside, Katrijn meets them with barely concealed contempt. Jan hints at his knowledge of illegal Latin translations to intimidate Sophia, but Lukas quickly signals that the translations aren’t the immediate threat. Jan dismisses Sophia’s offer of a hospital visit and announces a large-scale test in the Markt that very evening. When Aleys appears, she denies claiming miraculous powers; Jan is intrigued by her reluctance. He threatens arrest and closure of the begijnhof—for harboring a fraud and conducting unauthorized scripture translation—if she refuses or fails the test. Aleys recognizes Willems as the man she encountered in the market; he acknowledges her with a flourished bow.

After the men leave, Sophia embraces Aleys and urges her to spend the day in prayer. Aleys tries, but she can’t surrender to God’s will—she wants too urgently to save the begijnhof and the women inside it. She also confronts an uncomfortable truth: She asked for a powerful gift and can’t claim that she was chosen against her will. At noon, she abandons her prayers, too angry with God to continue. She opens her psalter to the image of Saint Ursula, surrounded by her slaughtered maidens, and wonders how any person accepts such suffering as God’s will. Her prayer becomes a raw demand to be shown where to find God. A vision follows—on a desolate, sandy plain with a lone tree, she finds an absolute solitude where she feels she has found Christ. She begs to remain. The Lakenhalle bell tolls and pulls her back.

At the evening bell, Aleys walks to the bishop’s carriage alone. Inside are Lukas, Friar Hervé, and another friar. The carriage inches through torch-lit streets to the Markt, where the bishop drapes his official azure cloak around her. At that moment, Cecilia breaks through the crowd: Sophia has collapsed. She is paralyzed and unable to see. Katrijn sent Cecilia to fetch Aleys. As Aleys tries to go back, the crowd begins to chant. The bishop refuses to release her, threatening to arrest both Aleys and Sophia if she abandons the test. Aleys sends Lukas and Cecilia to Sophia and mounts the stage.

Before the assembled clergy, guilds, and citizens of Brugge, the bishop delivers a formal speech invoking apostolic miracles. On the platform are a dying old man, a “lame” boy (194), and a woman cradling an infant. The old man rises before Aleys finishes a single prayer, and the boy’s leg straightens the instant he touches her robe. Aleys feels nothing during either event and realizes with horror that all three are paid actors in the bishop’s staged fraud. When she turns to the last patient, however, a genuine sensation rises in her hands. She lays them on the woman, who forgets her role, arrested by whatever passes between them. Willems snatches the healthy infant and raises it to the crowd. Aleys tells the woman to go in peace and runs for the carriage.

Aleys races back to the begijnhof, where lamps burn in every window. Upstairs in Sophia’s candlelit bedchamber, Lukas has already administered last rites. Sophia lies motionless, her eyes open but unfocused. Katrijn cradles her head and turns to Aleys in wordless desperation. Aleys leans close and prays quietly, repeating the word “Abba”—Father—and pouring all her desire into the syllable. For a moment, she feels certain that a miracle is coming, but then the sensation dissolves. She has failed.

Sophia’s wandering eyes find Katrijn. The two women hold each other’s gaze, and Sophia exhales and dies. The other beguines file into the room, singing the Ave Maria. Katrijn turns on Aleys, calls her a “fraud” who never “deserve[d]” Sophia’s love, and orders her out.

Aleys flees across the courtyard and onto the bridge as the death bell begins to toll. A small child recognizes her; the mother forces Aleys’s hand onto the child’s head, drawing the mob’s attention. The crowd surges forward chanting “Sint,” tearing strips from her robe for relics. Her shoulder is dislocated in the crush. The crowd lifts her off the ground; someone slips, and Aleys falls from the bridge into the canal and loses consciousness.

After commending Sophia’s soul, Lukas reflects on what he witnessed: In her final moments, Sophia appeared to regain sight long enough to meet Katrijn’s gaze, and a quality of grace surrounded Aleys as she prayed. It wasn’t the miracle they sought but something sacred, nonetheless. Outside, he finds Aleys collapsed in the shallow canal, her clothing in shreds, surrounded by swans. He wades in, lifts her unconscious body, and carries her back across the bridge. At the begijnhof doors, Ida meets him and refuses them entry: Katrijn, now magistra, has forbidden Aleys to return.

The bishop celebrates the evening’s staged miracle with his finest wine, though a dissenting Dominican warns that the pope’s men will want to test Aleys independently. His celebration is interrupted when Lukas arrives carrying the injured, unconscious Aleys: The begijnhof has expelled her, and the crowd attacked her outside. Watching his brother cradle Aleys’s hand, Jan decides he must separate them. His solution is to enclose Aleys for life in the empty anchorhold attached to Sint-Salvator. He will fund her keep, control whatever spiritual authority she accrues, and enhance his cathedral’s prestige—all without the risk of taking her to Rome. When Lukas protests that Aleys belongs to the Franciscan order, Jan asserts the Church’s overriding claim and offers Lukas the role of her confessor as a concession.

Aleys wakes in a canopied bed at the bishop’s manor, uncertain how she arrived. She finds her psalter intact. Then, Sophia’s death registers fully and she weeps, begging God to take back the gift that failed her. Feeling spent and certain that the crowd will kill her if she goes out again, she opens her psalter for direction. It falls open to the passage in which Christ warns his apostles that he has no fixed place to lay his head. She wrestles with what it requires of her and whether following Christ means going back out into the world or finding some other form of shelter.

When Aleys descends the stairs wearing a green gown from the bishop’s stores, the change in her appearance is jarring to Lukas. She greets the bishop with contempt. When the anchorhold is proposed, she laughs and asks if it means a fox’s den or a bird’s nest—a reference to the scripture she just read—and agrees immediately. Lukas warns her that enclosure is for life and that leaving the cell would mean excommunication and complete exile from the Church and society. She demonstrates full, calm understanding. Jan confirms that Lukas will serve as her confessor and that a cross-shaped squint in the wall will allow her to observe Mass. Lukas insists that she visit the cell before her consent can be considered valid, though he senses that she has already decided.

Afraid that seeing the open sky will erode her resolve, Aleys stays confined to her room until Lukas demands that she inspect the anchorhold. At Sint-Salvator, she examines the heavy oak door with its iron padlock, noting that there will be no handle on the inside. Lukas explains that the door has been opened only twice in 40 years: to admit the anchorite Gunther and later to remove his remains. Aleys steps inside alone and inventories the space: a narrow cot, a table and stool beneath a street window of translucent horn pane, a prie-dieu by the fireplace, and a curtained parlor window through which beguines will pass her meals. The cell is four paces by six. She closes the door from inside and finds the dim, sheltered space exactly what she has been seeking. She is home.

The day before the ceremony, Lukas brings Aleys’s father to the bishop’s manor. Father and daughter embrace; he then rounds on Lukas, accusing him of imprisoning her. Aleys insists that the choice is entirely her own and that she seeks the closeness with God that her mother once yearned for. Solitude, she says, is the only path available to her. He searches her face, believes her, and relents, telling her that he will not doubt her and that she will always be his daughter.

The enclosure is staged as a funeral Mass at Sint-Salvator, led by the bishop in full regalia before a packed congregation. Aleys processes up the aisle in a black dress, carrying two lit candles, escorted by Griete. Lukas is awed by her composure and feels a charged current between her and the crucifix. When the bishop moves to perform the last rites, Aleys quietly refuses his blessing and insists that Lukas must do it. Jan yields. Lukas anoints Aleys with holy water and oil at her eyes, ears, nostrils, lips, palms, and soles of her feet, pardoning each sense in turn. Griete weeps in the pews. The bishop throws a handful of soil over Aleys in a funerary manner and leads a small procession to the oak door. Lukas unlocks it. Aleys steps inside and turns to face him. Her eyes wordlessly tell him to close the door. He closes it, slides the bolt, and fastens the lock.

Sealed inside the anchorhold, Aleys mentally releases everything she has left behind—crowds, voices, children, sky. In the stillness, she listens to her breath and the faint sounds beyond the walls, testing the boundaries of her new life. She kneels, touches the stone, and offers up the silence itself. In the absence of the world outside, she feels profound liberation, as if the confined space opens onto a larger field within.