that the impure world separated him from the Father and Mother
in whom he once dwelled without separation.”
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,