At sunrise, Bishop Jan confronts Lukas at the manor. Jan is furious that Lukas broke into Aleys’s cell and fled carelessly, threatening to bring down the Franciscan order and destroy Jan’s plans. Willems reports that news of the empty anchorhold is spreading through the city. Jan brandishes the knotted belt that had been found on the cell floor and nailed to the cathedral door and demands to know why Lukas chose the anchoress. Lukas confesses that he believed she could save him because she was with God. Jan casts this as witchcraft, warns that one of them must be a demon, and prays it is not his brother.

That same morning, Marte finds Aleys shivering on the delivery dock. Marte had already roused the community to search, certain that Aleys would come there. Katrijn arrives and, despite her known dislike of Aleys, carries her to bed in Sophia’s former room. The beguines debate hiding or smuggling her out, knowing the Church will hunt her relentlessly. Meanwhile, the bishop orders Willems to surround the begijnhof with armed men, but none can be found since their wives are furious over the belt incident. Jan resolves to find men without wives and to publicly defend Lukas.

Lukas, locked in a room by his brother, spends the morning dismantling the knotted cord of his vows. When Aleys wakes, she washes and pours water over her head as a private baptism, chanting the words of Job. She reflects on her dream’s message and resolves that only her next choice matters. She anticipates excommunication but recalls what she learned from the late Sophia and her companion Ida: The opposite of shame is love.

Katrijn visits and explains that she gave Aleys shelter because Sophia would have done so. She reveals that the bishop also intends to posthumously charge Sophia with heresy for illegal Dutch scripture translations. Aleys assures her that Sophia is safe with God, and the two women, united by love for Sophia, arrive at a quiet truce. Katrijn offers to smuggle Aleys to a farm in Brabant, but Aleys refuses. She’s  determined to face her accusers.

Griete then bursts in and returns their mother’s psalter, rescued from the anchorhold. Aleys reads from it to Griete, who offers her a permanent home. Aleys declines so as to protect Griete’s family. Shortly before noon, a courier delivers a scroll inscribed with verses from the Canticle of Canticles and a marginal invitation to leave with the sender, written in a familiar, trained hand.

At midday, guards lead a barefoot Aleys through the streets to a narrow court building. Inside, three judges sit at a table: the pope’s legate, a sharp young Dominican friar, and an aged Benedictine abbot. Finn, appointed as clerk, records the proceedings. Bishop Jan prosecutes, and Friar Lukas slumps on a bench behind him. The bishop announces that Aleys is charged not with breaking her vow of enclosure but with heretical depravity. The possibility of death by burning shatters her composure, and she has a vivid vision of the stake. Calling inwardly for help, she feels steadied by what she understands as the presence of Mary, Marte, Ida, Sophia, and her mother. Knowing she may be made a martyr, she turns to face the judges.

The bishop is pleased by Aleys’s shock. He reflects that this prosecution is her own doing: Had she cooperated, he thinks, they would be celebrating a saint. He and Willems spent the morning editing Lukas’s records of her showings, stripping context to make her words appear heretical. He presents three charges: that she harbored Satan, allowed him to whisper to her, and disguised his words as divine showings. The legate notes that it’s strange for a renowned miracle-worker to be accused of collusion with the devil. Aleys pointedly swears to tell God’s truth, emphasizing God. The bishop submits the edited showings as evidence, and a miserable Lukas confirms under oath that Aleys reported them as showings from God.

Lukas endures the trial in deep spiritual suffering, still craving what Aleys possesses and unable to understand his own error. A bee enters the courtroom, circles Aleys, and lands beside her hand on the rail—a sign that Lukas can no longer read as miracle or folly. The Dominican interrogates Aleys on her claims that male and female are one and that God is nothing but love, with no devil and no hell. The legate asks whether she claimed to be God. Aleys answers that to truly understand God is to be united with God and cites the Canticle of Canticles. When the legate invites her to respond to comparisons of her words to the serpent’s temptation of Eve, she says that one becomes godly only through loving God and that God cannot be commanded. The words strike Lukas with clarity: He has always desired to be chosen by God more than he has actually loved God. This, he fears, is spiritual avarice. The legate defends Aleys by citing Thomas Aquinas, but the Dominican remains outraged. Lukas watches his brother go rigid with fury and call for the next prisoner.

Marte is brought into the courtroom. Aleys protests that she’s innocent, but the bishop claims that both are implicated in distributing illegal Dutch scripture translations. The bishop produces a parchment found among Marte’s belongings. Rather than forcing Marte to self-incriminate, Aleys volunteers to read it. In Marte’s handwriting, the text retells Genesis with God—not Satan—encouraging Eve to eat the apple, framing the act as obedience that set desire and redemption in motion, and concluding that God made Eve the mother of all seekers. Aleys understands that Marte composed this from memory after hearing Aleys read scripture aloud.

The Dominican calls for the begijnhof to be burned and the author executed. Aleys slaps the rail to command the room, claims the heresy as her own, and argues that Marte can’t be guilty of distributing a heresy she can’t read, as she’s not literate. Marte looks stricken at the betrayal of their shared literacy but understands that the lie will save her and the beguines. Aleys swears under oath that the work is hers and refuses to recant. The court excommunicates her and sets a deadline for her to reconsider before punishment is decided.

Aleys is held in a small, damp jail cell. Later, the bishop visits and warns that if she recants, he will charge Marte and shut down the begijnhof. Later still, Finn arrives to express genuine sorrow and say that he knew she wouldn’t yield. That night, Aleys enters a vision of a maze, seeking her beloved. In a divine exchange, she insists that she seeks not martyrdom but union with God and is called to accept suffering as a wounded doe. She assents, offers herself entirely, and wakes with a sealed wound in her side and newfound courage.

Finn returns and urges her to recant so that they can flee together to Assisi. Aleys nearly relents but understands that her escape would bring the bishop’s fury down on the begijnhof. She tells Finn that she was always intended for God and advises him to live simply. Finn returns to his room and, crying, writes the official record of her excommunication.

A violent storm batters the city all night. Aleys lies awake and stops struggling, accepting her fate. A divine reassurance comes: She will be kept. At dawn, she knows fear and faith are not incompatible. Two guards arrive and bind her hands. Marte forces her way into the jail, embraces Aleys, and then carefully braids her hair while reciting the alphabet as a prayer. Aleys asks her to take the psalter from Sophia’s room.

The guards lead Aleys through streets lined with a vast crowd. Her father and siblings break through; her father wraps her in her maroon cloak and says that he should never have let her go. Aleys tells him he had no choice. As she walks on, people drop to their knees, reaching to touch her and chanting for a saint. She smells burning parchment and understands that written words are also being destroyed. Then, she sees, in the faces around her, the presences of past and future women saints and visionaries. She sees Perpetua, Ursula, Christina Mirabilis, Catherine of Siena, and the anchoress Julian, among others. She understands that she is part of a lineage of women who sought and spoke the truth. She walks with them.

The bishop watches Aleys approach from an unstable dais in the Markt. The mayor stands nearby, visibly reluctant; he must give the signal to light the pyre, and he has warned Jan that the people consider Aleys their own. The crowd’s chanting for a saint grows into a frenzy that rocks the platform. The bishop stamps his crosier for silence but fails. The legate stops him from ordering arrests, saying that the people need something holy, and tells Jan that they have made a martyr. When Jan suggests reversing the verdict, the legate refuses, holding that the pope’s decisions are God’s design.

As Aleys is bound to the stake, she sees that its base is stacked with parchments holding the supposedly heretical writings. She is certain that these words will survive her. The beguines stand as a silent circle of witnesses around the pyre, each holding blank parchment. As the fire is lit, Katrijn begins singing the Ave Maria and holds Aleys’s gaze. Aleys lifts her face upward to meet her God.

The flames catch Aleys’s clothing. She makes no sound; her eyes lift to the sky. From this moment, the bishop’s account permanently diverges from others’. Weathervanes across the city spin erratically, and the clouds shift into branching formations. The bishop experiences only the smell of scorched flesh and a face distorted in agony. The legate, however, witnesses Aleys consuming the fire rather than being consumed. She becomes a radiant force, and the air fills with the scent of flowers. The beguines hold their vigil through the day and night, preventing guards from approaching. Afterward, no remains or relics are found. Some believe that she was burned entirely; others report seeing the flicker of a sky-blue cloak within the flames and believe that she survived.

At an unspecified later time, the beguines care for a blind woman in their community, always careful to keep fire from her. An orange cat keeps her company, and Marte is perpetually at her side, spending the quiet hours writing. The narrator states plainly that the blind woman’s identity is a matter of personal belief: She lives for those who choose it and is dead for those who do not. A new bishop keeps his distance; 30 years on, he will try and fail to destroy the beguines, who survive both in person and through their ideas—writings smuggled from convents and later revived. In the begijnhof, life continues with children’s laughter, the rhythm of work, and the beguines’ acceptance of every turning moment.