The Burning Stone (Crown of Stars #3)

The Burning Stone (Crown of Stars #3) Page 228

It came to Rosvita in that moment, unasked for, unexpected, a bolt from heaven not seen before it struck and shattered earth.

“The world divides those whom no space parted once.”

What if Fidelis was Radegundis’ son?

Then the enormity of it slugged her. She was suddenly unable to catch her breath. The railing seemed to shift under her like the earth when a tremor wrenches the ground on which you had once stood firmly.

What if Fidelis was Taillefer’s son, his rightful heir?

“For God measured it and laid it out,

the Father with the Mother by Their sexual union they founded it.

They planted it with their descendants.

To the Garden of Life, which is the Chamber of Light,

all souls return.”

If it were true, then why had Queen Radegundis not proclaimed abroad that Taillefer had a living son? Her silence had brought about the end of Taillefer’s great empire.

Why had she not spoken?

“Yet out of necessity Love compels us.

It is completely impossible for a solitary one

to bring forth and to bear,

therefore he was the child that was produced by two,

both Mother and Father, who together make life.”

“What are you, Eagle?” Rosvita had asked Liath that night last summer when she had given the young Eagle The Book of Secrets, which she had stolen from Hugh, because she had believed Liath and not Hugh. And Liath had replied: “I am kinless.”

“I lost my children because I had no kin to protect me,” Mother Obligatia had said not an hour before.

Taillefer’s legitimate son would have reigned after him if Radegundis could have found support among the Salian nobility for enough years to raise an infant to manhood. Salian princes often killed their rivals for the throne, even if those rivals were blood relatives, even if they were children. Radegundis was a woman without family to stand behind her. Her kin had all been murdered when she herself was only a child. Why should she have trusted the Salian lords?

“And he answered us, he said:

You shall come to that paradise if you act rightly,

if you heed the Word of Our Lady and Our Lord.”

Radegundis had not wanted to be queen. Perhaps she chose to remove the child from the temptations of worldly power. Or perhaps she only wanted to protect the child from his enemies. How better to do so than to give him as a foundling to the very convent in which she served?

What is in plain sight is hidden best.

Theophanu glanced at her and made a question with her expression, as if to ask if she were well. Rosvita shook her head, to show that she needed no help. To negate these disturbing thoughts. It was too incredible. She couldn’t believe it.

And yet it was so unbelievable that she had no choice but to believe it.

“And he said to her, ‘When will we see your wedding feast,

you who are the blush of the earth and the image of the water?

For you are the daughter I set upon my knee and sang to sleep.

We all came to be because of the union of Father and Mother.

The road to purification arises out of conception and birth.’”

Mother Obligatia had unknowingly given birth to Taillefer’s legitimate granddaughter forty-five years ago. What had happened to that child?

As she knelt, the sweat cooling on her neck, the trembling in her hands subsiding, she was reminded again of words from the Holy Verses: “The beginning of wisdom is this: gain understanding, although it cost you all you have.”

She had to escape, even if it cost her everything she had. She could not risk being held prisoner by Ironhead, even if it meant the greater risk of trusting to Hugh’s sorcery, even if it meant her own complicity in that sorcery.

She had to find out if it were true. She had to find out what had happened to the child.

She had promised Mother Obligatia, and it was obvious now that someone else had discovered the old woman’s secret and sought her out, hoping to find the only descendant of Emperor Taillefer, if she still lived. She had a duty to aid Adelheid and Theophanu. She owed loyalty to King Henry and his ambitions.

But mostly, she was just so damned curious.

Yet the song of Queen Salomae the Wise rang in her ears as the congregation knelt in silence and the rock walls of the tiny chapel breathed dust and the weight of uncounted years into the musty air:

“Do not let your heart entice you to stray down his paths: many has he pierced and laid low. His victims are without number.”

So be it.

She had long known that curiosity would be her downfall. She would find out the truth, no matter where the path led her.

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