The Burning Stone (Crown of Stars 3)

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.

5

me 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,