“Impossible,” she said.
“Certainly unexpected,” said the old woman with amusement: “I am called Mother Obligatia. I am abbess—or was, for we are refugees now. I was abbess of the convent of St. Ekatarina’s. We bided there in our rock tower in Aosta for many years in peace. All that is gone. I have much to tell you, dear child, and many questions to ask.”
“How can it be?”
“Will you hear the tale?” It was difficult to tell if a sudden diffidence had overtaken her or if she was out of breath.
“I will hear this tale,” said Liath, who found she could herself scarcely catch breath to form words. She leaned closer. “Rest when you must. I pray you, speak softly. Do not strain yourself.”
How strange that it should seem that the old woman was comforting her, stroking her hands as she spoke in a voice that did not penetrate farther than the tiny audience drawn in tightly around her: Liath, and the two nuns who held light aloft. They, too, seemed to be weeping, in silence, as if their bodies resonated with whatever emotion thrummed in the soul of their abbess. The ridges and shadowed valleys of the rumpled blankets were the only landscape in this scene. Rain pattered over the roof and faded.
“I am Bernard’s mother, but before that, I gave birth to another child.”
The tapestry of Liath’s life and lineage had always concealed more than it revealed, but Obligatia’s story wove in many of the gaping holes. So it became clear as Liath asked questions where she must and answered those she could. An hour passed as the story unfolded. She drank a cup of ale, shared with the old woman. The grandmother. It was still unthinkable to use that word, but she must use it because although it might all be a fabrication or a mistake, she knew in her gut that this piece of the story made all the rest explicable.
Bernard and Anne were half siblings. Obligatia herself had been used as a pawn in the dynastic schemes woven by the Seven Sleepers. It was hard to know what Biscop Tallia and Sister Clothilde had hoped for when they had shoved the fourteen-year-old-girl into the path of the fifty-year-old monk, except that they needed a compliant, kinless female to breed with the last direct legitimate son born to Taillefer. No one would ever know the whole, now that Anne was dead, and even Anne could not have comprehended everything because in many ways she had also been their pawn, their creation.
“Some part of the tale I learned from Sister Rosvita,” Obligatia finished. “The rest I know of my own experience.”
“Are you tired? If you must rest, I will wait.”
The hand squeezed her; strength lived there still! “No, I will go on. I have lived past my rightful measure of years. I dare wait no longer, dear child. I held on only for this, to see you and to touch you. I can see in your face that my beloved boy Bernard was your father, but how comes it that Anne claimed to be your mother? Is it true?”
“It is not. My mother was a fire daimone enticed to Earth and trapped here by a net of sorcery. Bernard loved her. Not Anne. The daimone was my mother. This I know because I have walked the spheres …”
What walking the spheres entailed, and how she had come to do so, she explained to Obligatia, who showed no sign of distaste, distress, or fear at discovering—or at any rate having confirmed—that her granddaughter was not wholly human. She was kind and generous and affectionate and wise and calm and amusing and indeed she possessed every quality that Liath had ever dreamed she might find in a grandmother, the one she had long since resigned herself to never having and never knowing.
“There is one thing, though,” Liath added. “Brother Fidelis was the son of Taillefer and Radegundis. My father was born to you and a lord born into the line of Bodfeld.”
“I always called him Maus, to tease him. His name was Mansuetus, fitting enough, for he was quiet and small and gentle.” She chuckled. The memory was so old that it no longer seemed to cause her pain. “And nervous of his aunts and uncle, though he defied them to marry me.”
“That quality runs true, then,” said Liath with a laugh. “But who were your parents?”
Obligatia smiled sadly. “No one knows. I was a foundling. I was raised at the convent of St. Thierry. I had a different name, then. Left behind like so much else.”
“Where is St. Thierry?”
“In Varre. In the duchy of Arconia.”
Liath lifted the old woman’s hands and kissed each one and set them back on her blankets. “You lost two husbands and two children—all taken from you. How can it be you have lived so long without falling prey to grief and anger?”