The novel shifts back in time to the town of Damme in 1295. Thirteen-year-old Aleys, regarded as strikingly odd, falls behind a group of children to rescue a caterpillar from being trampled and then walks home alone. Bees follow her but don’t sting her. At home, she finds her mother, Mama, who is gardening while heavily pregnant. Aleys persuades Mama to read from the family psalter, an illustrated Latin prayer book inherited from a convent-dwelling aunt. Though not literate herself, Mama knows all the prayers and saint stories by heart. Aleys alone takes the saints entirely seriously, having already attempted fasting and having fashioned a hair shirt from dog fur.

Anxious about Mama’s impending labor, she asks for the story of Saint Perpetua. That night, the sounds of labor jolt Aleys awake. Too frightened to enter the room, she kneels outside her parents’ door, praying and surrendering all three of her future wishes—charmed events that a girl receives before marriage, or so her mother tells her—in exchange for Mama’s life. A final, inhuman moan gives way to terrible silence. The door opens, and Aleys sees bloodied linens on the floor. Mama is dead.

The household falls into grief. Papa burns the cradle. Aleys takes over Mama’s domestic and business duties; their dog, Farrago, now follows her. About a year after Mama’s death, Papa hires a tutor to teach all the children to read and write Dutch, acknowledging that the family business can’t survive without Mama’s management. However, the lessons cover only ledger work, and Aleys longs to read the psalter. A Latin teacher is beyond their means. Recognizing her devotion, Papa eventually gives her the psalter, though she can go only so far without a teacher.

At a dye yard, Aleys encounters Finn, a dyer’s son hunched over a Latin hornbook. A brief exchange reveals a perfect asymmetry: She can sound out written Latin but can’t understand it; he has memorized passages fluently but can’t decode the script. They agree to teach each other, and their learning accelerates. As his access to scripture grows, Finn becomes increasingly critical of the Church’s control over sacred texts.

After dreaming of Mama, Aleys prays alone and experiences a vision: The roof seems to dissolve into open sky, warmth descends, and an unseen presence communicates a single word—“Seek.” She takes it as a message from Mama, uncertain whether it was real.

Friar Lukas, leader of the Franciscan friars of Brugge, prays for a woman of exceptional faith and learning to help him establish a Franciscan sisterhood in Flanders, as Saint Clare had done for Francis of Assisi. He has searched widely—speaking with merchants’ daughters, nuns, and laywomen—without success. Even the beguines, for whom he serves as pastor, are too independent for the formal order he envisions. He believes that only such a woman can move a city as commercially hardened as Brugge toward genuine spiritual devotion.

A visiting Franciscan friar—later confirmed to be Friar Lukas—substitutes for Damme’s ailing priest and reads aloud from the Canticle of Canticles, growing visibly flustered at its openly sensual language. Aleys understands every word, and their eyes meet across the congregation. She rushes to find Finn, who obtains a copy of the text. Its imagery of longing and physical beauty awakens in Aleys a desire that blurs the boundary between sacred and sensual.

At age 16, she and Finn meet in an apple orchard, and the charged undercurrent between them intensifies. Emboldened by the text, Aleys leans in to kiss him. Finn stops her and reveals that he’s leaving for the monastery at Ter Doest. Devastated, she runs off in tears. Then, she hears a hawk’s cry and recalls the message to seek. She resolves that she is meant for God, who becomes her new beloved.

Shortly after, moths destroy the family’s vegetable garden and devour a large portion of their stored wool. The winter passes in poverty and hard labor. Then, a messenger brings word that Pieter Mertens, the drapers’ guild head, will grant the family a permanent Lakenhalle stall, but only on the condition that Aleys marry him. Papa has already given his consent. Aleys feels like she has been appraised and sold.

Mertens visits the family garden. He stands too close and speaks of his wealth and possessions, leaving Aleys cold and shaken. After he leaves, she becomes desperate. Her sister, Griete, hints that she would willingly take her place. Aleys briefly considers poisoning herself rather than submitting to Mertens but then concludes that marriage would violate her commitment to God and resolves to seek out Friar Lukas.

When the family travels to Brugge to set up their new stall, Aleys slips away to the Markt, where Lukas preaches at noon. She arrives as his sermon collapses—workmen mock his call for voluntary poverty, and his audience disperses. Lukas notices Aleys standing still in the lightly snowing plaza; her intensity strikes him as prophetic, and he wonders for the first time whether she is the woman he has been seeking. She approaches and asks to join his order. He recognizes her as the girl from Damme, and, impressed that she taught herself Latin from a psalter, agrees to speak further. She urges him to come the next day, as time is running out.

On the eve of her wedding, Aleys rises quietly, dresses in her plainest clothes, ignores the wedding finery laid out beside them, and takes Mama’s psalter. She whispers farewell to the dog at the back door and runs to the village church. Inside, she asks God for a sign. The single lit taper on the altar deepens in color, casting a radiant halo over the cloth and cross. The effect is so vivid that it seems to exceed ordinary flame. Convinced of God’s presence, she runs toward the altar.

Lukas waits in a side chapel. He hears Aleys enter and watches from the shadows as she stares at the taper he lit for her. Her visible ardor unsettles him: He feels a shameful longing to be caught up in her spiritual fire, to have his own failures and doubts consumed by her passion. When she sprints toward the altar, he steps out from the shadows holding a robe and a knife to perform her induction ceremony.

The following morning, Aleys’s father and brothers ride into the church. Aleys preempts Lukas by removing her veil to reveal her shorn head. Lukas holds up her severed braid and announces that she has taken Franciscan vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Papa, overwhelmed, formally renounces her, declaring that she is God’s child now. Aleys feels grief and exhilaration at the same time.

While sitting in the garden afterward, doubt and hunger begin to erode her triumph. She recalls the haircutting as a moment of liberation. Each severed strand of her hair represents something shed: the marriage, the domestic servitude, and the chains of her former identity. She tries not to think about the consequences for her family’s guild license. Opening the psalter to the image of Gabriel and Mary, she resolves to trust in both God and Friar Lukas.

Lukas paces the garden, uncertain what to do with Aleys. When Brother Hervé arrives with food and discovers Aleys dressed in a friar’s robe, he is visibly alarmed. Lukas defends his decision: The order is under pressure to expand, she appeared like a providential opportunity, and she is genuinely literate in Latin. Lukas proposes placing her with the Benedictine nuns; Aleys refuses, insisting that the Benedictines lack true poverty. Hervé suggests the beguine community in Brugge. Aleys is scandalized, repeating common gossip that the beguines are immoral. Lukas, their pastor, defends the beguines as independent and genuinely devout laywomen who support themselves without Church endowment. Hervé adds that they run a school and a hospital. Lukas informs Aleys that she’s a novice on probation who must demonstrate suitability for the order. Her first test is to live among the beguines and recruit the founding members of a new Franciscan sisterhood by Midsummer, just two months away.