Marte carries a secret scrap of parchment in her apron pocket on which she has written three sentences declaring that she can read, write, and begin a new story. This is her first independent composition. She reflects that among the beguines, Ida is her favorite: She’s direct, unpretentious, and more aware of poverty than Katrijn. Crossing Maria Bridge to buy fish, she notes that Katrijn has forbidden the beguines from visiting Aleys and has placed limits on communal life in the begijnhof since Sophia’s death, stopping the communal readings.

Ida asks Marte to accompany her to the Lakenhalle to collect linen from Katrijn. The great cloth hall triggers a memory of Marte’s first night in Brugge. She had arrived distressed after the death of her daughter, Mathild, and has told no one in the city about the child. Inside the hall, Ida spots a slender man whom she identifies as the bishop’s spy speaking to Katrijn. They watch Katrijn redden, shake her head, and thrust coins at the man before he leaves. When confronted by Ida, a shaken Katrijn claims that the man wanted to buy altar cloth—a lie Marte sees through. That evening, Katrijn announces that she will stop translating scripture entirely.

Aleys watches Mass and receives communion from Friar Lukas. Afterward, she experiences a profound vision: She sees herself as the infant in the Nativity. The vision shifts to an appearance by the Virgin Mary, who isn’t gentle nor submissive but a powerful, naked figure with wild, radiating hair. Mary tells Aleys that the priests are “blind,” that the pillars are crumbling, and that joining her will require Aleys to bear the truth.

When Marte brings porridge the next morning and notices Aleys’s troubled appearance, Aleys describes the vision. Marte is skeptical but observes that Mary, having watched her son die, would know things scripture never recorded. Resolved to be fully transparent, Aleys confesses the visions to Lukas—describing God as all-encompassing love, Christ and Mary as one, and the experience as beyond language. Lukas sounds jealous and demands to see her face for physical evidence of God’s presence. She draws back the curtain. He recoils but then stares with evident longing, confirming that she’s radiant with spirit. She tells him her ultimate understanding: that all is God and that her own self is God.

Lukas is overwhelmed by envy. God speaks to Aleys, heals through her, and allows her to experience things that Lukas has prayed for his entire life without receiving. Back at the Franciscan friary, Friar Hervé notices that Lukas has stopped eating and sleeping, but Lukas can’t explain the demonic presences he perceives at night. He undertakes extreme penances—extended fasting and self-flagellation—but feels nothing. He returns to the glade where he took his vows, kneels in the mud, and begs God for a sign. He waits through a steady rain with no answer. When the downpour finally soaks him through, his mind turns to the memory of Aleys standing with her face tipped to the rain. He concludes that she is the sign—that she, the cause of his spiritual affliction, must also be the means of his healing.

Marte brings firewood to Aleys and notes that the bishop provides well for her, while the begijnhof manages on little. She complains that—without Katrijn’s translations—the beguines have no new stories. She asks Aleys to read something from the Latin Bible in Dutch. Marte requests the story of the woman turned into salt.

Aleys reads the story of the righteous Lot, who hosts two angels in Sodom, only to have the men of the city demand that he surrender his guests. Lot offers his daughters to the mob in their place, an act that appalls Marte. When Aleys reads that Lot’s wife is turned into a pillar of salt for looking back at the burning city, Marte is incredulous—any mother, she says, would turn back toward her children’s cries. She argues that the story asks whether God wants obedience or love and concludes that the male authors of the Bible must have omitted the full truth.

Unable to sleep while pondering Mary’s commands, Aleys is woken in the early hours by a man weeping outside her squint. She prays, drawing his anguish inward and releasing calm in return. When the man finally speaks, she recognizes Friar Lukas. The realization fills her with revulsion: Her confessor has come to her for comfort, inverting their relationship entirely. He confesses to being tormented by demons and begs her to warm him with prayer. He reaches his fingers through the squint opening, breaching her space, and pleads for her to take his hand. Compelled by her vow of obedience, she forces herself to clasp his cold hand. He asks why God favors her above him.

On a February morning, Bishop Jan finds Lukas looking visibly unwell while preaching to beggars. Lukas admits to being tormented, but Jan is dismissive, attributing it to overwork. He reveals that Rome is sending a papal delegation to investigate Aleys’s miracles. Lukas reports that the miracles have stopped. Jan is unconcerned, saying that his agent Willems will find people to attest to past healings. When Lukas describes Aleys’s visions—including her claim that Christ is a mother and that all is God—Jan grows uneasy, fearing the content may strike the inquisitors as heretical. He suggests assigning a different confessor. Lukas frantically begs to remain in the role and Jan relents, warning his brother to hold himself together. The chapter ends with the pope’s legate and his delegation departing Rome.

In spring, Marte quietly tends to Aleys during her monthly menstruation. When Marte announces that a young monk has arrived, Aleys recognizes the voice as Finn. They speak through the curtain, exchanging a verse from the Canticle of Canticles as memories rush back. Finn reveals that he attended the bishop’s public demonstration and saw the moment Aleys recognized the fraud. He warns her that the bishop is exploiting her and that Rome is sending inquisitors. She tells him what her visions have shown: that everyone carries a heaven within. He warns her that such statements can get a person killed. Aleys draws back the curtain so that he can see the truth in her eyes, and they lean until their foreheads meet at the window, nearly kissing, before a knock interrupts them.

That night, Mary returns in a vision. This time, she is vast, protective, and tender. When Aleys reaches toward her, Mary pushes her away and smears bitter aloe on her lips, telling her that she has been sustained long enough and must now proceed without guidance. The vision ends, and Aleys immediately senses the complete withdrawal of God’s presence from her cell. She understands that she is being tested.

Since the visions stopped, Aleys has barely eaten, and Marte is at a loss. Marte reflects on her wariness of Friar Lukas; his restless neediness troubles her. During Lent, after the beguines’ confessions, Marte asks Katrijn for permission to read aloud to the women. Katrijn, surprised by Marte’s confidence, grants it. In the reading room, Marte reads the story of Sodom and Gomorrah from the Dutch translations, pausing at Lot’s offer of his daughters to the mob. Then, she announces that she will read the truth and shifts into her own retelling: Lot’s wife is named Irit, and she rescues all four daughters herself and weeps with compassion for the burning city. It is Lot—not Irit—whom God turns into salt.

Katrijn erupts, declaring the text corrupt and heretical. Ida claims that she purchased it in the Markt to protect Marte. The women push back, wanting new scripture in their own language. Katrijn, shaken and grief-stricken, snatches the parchment and burns it in the hearth. She then forbids all reading in the begijnhof. That night, Ida slips secretly to Marte with fresh parchment and a candle, telling her to write the story again.

While sitting alone in Sint-Salvator cathedral, Bishop Jan feels worn down by the demands of managing Aleys’s reputation. Word has arrived that the papal delegation will reach Brugge sooner than anticipated. He worries about Lukas’s deteriorating state and the fact that Aleys’s miracles have dried up. He recalls having Willems threaten Katrijn in the Lakenhalle, ordering her to stop the Dutch translations or he would retroactively excommunicate Sophia, condemning her to eternal damnation. Katrijn capitulated. Receiving no divine answer in prayer, Jan resolves to manage the situation himself. He plans to stage miracles for the inquisitors using actors trained by Willems and intends to present Lukas’s transcriptions of Aleys’s visions to the legate—editing them, if needed, to flatter Rome.

Weeks pass with no visions, and Aleys finds her psalter flat and lifeless. While reading Genesis, she lands on God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac and finds Abraham’s ready compliance wearying. In desperation, she throws her blanket and then her psalter out the parlor window as offerings. The thought enters her mind that God wants her most precious thing—her cat, Kat. She cannot tell if the impulse is divine or demonic. She picks up her knife, pins Kat to the cot, and raises the blade, waiting for an angel to intervene. Nothing happens. Looking at Kat’s face, she sees the vulnerable doe from her psalter and drops the knife.

The next morning, Marte returns her belongings without comment and flatly states that Abraham failed God’s test: Any good father would have chosen his child. The idea stops Aleys short. When Lukas visits and learns that the visions have ceased, he calls her a “spoiled child” and warns her of demons. Frightened and exhausted, Aleys swallows her resistance and begs Lukas to help her find God again.

After Aleys’s plea for help, Lukas sits alone in the empty parlor. He realizes that what he feels isn’t only proximity to her but also a desire to become her—to inhabit her direct access to God. He notices a basket that Marte left in the corner and lifts the cloth. Inside are coiled linen strips marked with Aleys’s menstrual blood. He views the blood as sacred matter from a holy vessel, smears some across both his palms, wraps two strips around his arms, and leaves with the cloth bound tightly beneath his robe.

Aleys’s sister, Griete, visits to announce her coming marriage to Pieter Mertens, the man whom Aleys rejected. The wedding will take place in the cathedral, where Aleys will be able to watch. Griete confesses anxiety about the wedding night, and Aleys offers stumbling, good-natured advice. On the wedding day, Marte pins the parlor door open so that Aleys can glimpse the procession. She sees her father and brothers on horseback and a flash of Griete’s embroidered sleeves. During the Mass, Aleys is overtaken by a desperate urge to break free of her cell. She presses her hands and forehead against the sealed door and considers the consequences of leaving: excommunication, ruin for her family, damnation, and permanent separation from God. Yet she wonders whether she has any of those things now. Ultimately, in the depths of her longing, she finds that she still wants God—that this unresolved pursuit is the only story that matters to her. She lifts her hands from the door.

During Griete’s wedding Mass, Lukas feels disoriented and faint beside Friar Hervé. His mind drifts to the previous day, when he went to the wooded glade, stripped naked, and wound Aleys’s bloodied cloths around his body in the shape of a cross, believing himself prepared for a sacred purpose. Back in the cathedral, the wedding’s liturgical symbols merge in his mind into a single overwhelming sign. He believes that he hears God speaking to him and concludes that bringing Aleys to God has been his task all along and that it remains unfinished.

After the wedding, Lukas visits Aleys at the parlor window. He tells her that there’s a hidden path to God, faster than obedience, revealed only to those chosen. Speaking in deliberate riddles, he suggests that venom cures snakebite—that to honor their vows, they must break them—and whispers the word “union.” Aleys immediately understands that he’s proposing a sexual act and that he’s framing it as holy sacrament. Her skin crawls. She tells him that she must pray, closes the shutter, and slides the bolt.

The papal delegation arrives in Brugge on Midsummer Day, and Bishop Jan welcomes them. That afternoon, Katrijn forces her way to his door. Pale and shaking, she insists that the new Dutch scriptures circulating in the Markt are not her work and begs Jan not to posthumously excommunicate Sophia. It’s the first Jan has heard of these rewritten scriptures. He dismisses Katrijn harshly and calls for Willems.

On Midsummer Eve, Aleys prays alone, feeling abandoned by God and longing for the company of women. A man carrying a torch enters her parlor, pounds on the shutter, and peers through her horn window before retreating. Then, she hears the cathedral doors open. Footsteps approach her sealed door, and the lock turns. The door swings open, flooding the cell with torchlight.

A hooded figure enters: Friar Lukas, smelling of spirits, his eyes frantic. He declares that they must celebrate a holy union and create a God between them. Blocking the open doorway, he gives her a stark choice: Leave and be damned, or stay and submit to him. Aleys feels her vows of enclosure, chastity, and obedience turn against one another. Lukas anoints her forehead with oil and forces her toward the cot. She stumbles, and her knife clatters to the floor. He pins her down. In that moment, she understands that she’s not Isaac waiting for an angel—she is the angel. She seizes the knife and drives it into Lukas’s side. He rolls away.

Aleys rises and exits through the open door into the cathedral. The building doesn’t fall. No punishment descends. From the threshold, a wounded Lukas accuses her of breaking her covenant. She recalls Mary’s words about the failure of the priesthood and understands that her covenant is with God, not with men. She runs.