As she came closer to adulthood, Radegund understood ever more clearly that she was a sinner, that all the horrors which haunted her – the slaughter of her people, her aunt’s split skill, the smell of smoke that kept returning –, that all these were the price of sin. That she was soiled and had been since birth, and only Christ, and her own repentance, could ever wash her clean.

She was almost thirteen when she woke to vivid proof of this – blood was pouring from between her legs. Horrified, she pressed her stained gown against the flow and called for her slaves.

Frotlindis and Framberta came running, followed closely by Ingund, who had heard the noise. “Look how I am being punished! This is God’s judgment upon me!” The two slaves smirked. “No more than any other woman, my lady.” But Ingund’s frown silenced them. “Fetch some rags and a bowl of water!”

Soon that first flow had been wiped away and a rag tied between her legs, with a pad of cloth beneath it. Her women brought her a fresh robe. Ingund, teaching now what only a woman could, explained how this would happen each month and how she should learn to tie rags about her before that time.

Radegund had never worn anything under her robe and she found it strange to walk and sit with this new impediment. She feared everyone, especially Father Elias and Samuel, would see what she was wearing and felt terrible shame at the thought. But Ingund simply explained she would be keeping to her room for a few days. Father Elias understood and firmly told Samuel to ask no questions.

This new rhythm of bleeding, the swelling of her chest, the unexpected hair, filled her with confusion. Even her feelings, her dreams, became strange to her. She found herself looking at Samuel with an unfamiliar and disturbing warmth. She thought with increasing fervor of how she would spend her future, of giving her life to Christ, of living in purity and devotion.

Ingund began to talk to her of marriage, of what she would have to do when she became a wife. “But I will never be a bride,” she said, “to anyone but Christ. I will live a virgin for the rest of my days.” Ingund insisted nonetheless that she learn a wife’s duties to a husband. Radegund listened respectfully, but always repeated she would stay a virgin.

“Do you even know what that means?” asked Ingund.

“Why, to never have children, to never let a man share your bed.” She thought vaguely of her aunt, screaming with rage as the warrior pressed against her. She knew that being a virgin somehow meant for that never to happen. But in fact she was not sure why.

Her innocence maddened Ingund. “You are a woman now, Radegund. You have your blood. You can no longer think as a child.” Radegund could not understand her vehemence, why she seemed so sure that, like it or not, one day she must be married.

One afternoon, as they were weaving and Radegund again insisted she would always stay a virgin, Ingund grabbed her by the shoulders and pushed her back on her bed. She thrust her hand under Radegund’s robe and a finger into her as far as it could go. “This!” she hissed. “This is what makes you a virgin! And it takes nothing for a man to break it! In a heartbeat, it is gone!” She stood back and looked down at Radegund, who lay trembling, shocked by the finger she had felt inside her, shocked by Ingund’s ferocity, shocked now to know how fragile her virginity was, a bit of skin a man could break, could take, in an instant; and no faith, no devotion, no inner purity could prevent it. It had never occurred to her that once her aunt too had had such a barrier, that some man had broken her long before the Frank went into her, that virginity was not something to be preserved by faith alone.

Already the changes in her body, in her feelings, had made her feel vulnerable in a new way. Now she lived with a constant sense of being fragile, of bearing something that, like a pitcher, could be broken in an instant. She had seen a stallion mount a mare more than once, but never thought that men did the same with women. Ingund insisted she understand that the first duty of a wife was to give her husband children, to let him put his hard thing inside her until her belly swelled. Radegund had seen men and boys naked, that silly worm of flesh limp between their legs. She had never dreamed that such a thing could grow hard, hard like the huge rod she had seen on a horse, hard enough to break what was inside a woman. Now she lived in terror of that thought, sure that a man too could grow as big there, and again saw her aunt’s face as the Frank knelt behind her. She prayed with ever more fervor for Christ to protect her.

Yet Ingund told her gently, “Oh Radegund, you must not fear your duty. Six times my belly has swelled, and six times I have suffered, oh how I have suffered, in giving birth. And yet… that moment when they hold the baby up and you see that life before you, that life that has grown within you… A woman can know no greater joy!”

Radegund was moved by Ingund’s passion, by her sense of the immensity of this experience. Still, she did not desire it for herself. She wanted to swell with devotion alone.

One afternoon, a messenger came to the villa. After he left, Radegund found the Queen and Father Elias sitting in the study, both their faces pale.

“What has happened?”

Ingund rose. “You must tell her. I cannot.” Radegund saw now that she had been crying.

“Sit, Radegund.” The priest looked every which way, as if trying not to see something.

“You remember Chlodomir’s boys, who have been living with their grandmother?”

Those two proud little boys, preparing to be kings, and shy little Clodoald, so enamored of Christ. She remembered.

“The holy mother queen had been training them to be kings. Childebert, who rules Paris, and Chlothar, who was visiting him, sent to offer their help in this. They asked that the boys be put in their care. Chlothild was delighted and happily sent them to be trained by their uncles.” He took a deep breath. “A day later, a messenger came to her, holding a scissors and a sword. The kings demanded that she tell them which fate she chose: should the boys be tonsured, and put in a monastery, or put to the sword? In her rage at her own sons’ betrayal, she cried out, ‘I would rather see them dead than monks!’” He stopped again, swallowing. “No doubt, in her shock, she did not think of what she was saying. But the words had been spoken. And as soon as the messenger returned, Chlothar took Thibert and stabbed him in the side. His brother, seeing this, clung to Childebert’s legs, begging to be spared. And Childebert began to weaken. Only, you see, all this had been his idea, and so Chlothar berated him and insisted he too kill one of his nephews.”

Radegund struggled to understand “But they were boys...”

“Yes.”

She remembered again those strutting boys, so proud to know they would one day be kings. And then the third, that sweet little child… “And Clodoald?”

“The Lord has been merciful. His nurse, suspecting the worst, had already slipped off with him and gone to a monastery. His hair has been cut.”

“And so he will live as a monk?”

“Yes. But never as a king.” Never to live in cruelty, she thought, but always in Christ. It did not seem so hard a fate. Still, she found herself weeping for the two oldest boys. “Their own nephews, Father!”

“Such,” the priest said dully, “are the sons of Merovech.”

For days after, Radegund prayed for the souls of the two innocents, giving thanks too that Clodoald had been spared. For a long time now, she had pushed aside the memory of the Frankish warriors killing Thuringii children. But now it flooded back, with all those other horrors. She was hurled back to that awful day, layered over now with the hideous stories she had heard since. The thought of all this blood and betrayal reminded her that this was the world, a place of sin and horror; that any pleasures, any moments of delight or simply peace, were only distractions from the deeply sinful nature of Man.

As weeks went by, she struggled to put aside the image of those two little boys, begging for their lives, stabbed by their own uncles, their blood being spilled in the palace itself. With this, her own body tormented her, the recurring blood and the shame that went with it, the sudden and unwelcome rushes of desire. One morning she woke from a dream of Samuel on top of her and realized with horror that she was feeling pleasure, ecstatic pleasure, right there where blood had so recently left her body. She could tell no one of this, not even Ingund, and it only made her more aware of her own depravity, and the depravity of the world.

One afternoon, lying alone in her room, suffocated by this welter of unexpressed feelings, she reached blindly for the knife she wore at her belt, lifted her robe, exposing the source of all her confusion, and dragged the point of the knife along her inner thigh, gasping at the pain, the sharp, sudden split in her flesh, yet at the same time grateful to free her suffering, to feel it flowing from that thin red line. She moved the knife to the other thigh and slowly, exquisitely, drew a line of blood there too. Then she lay back, reveling in that sting, the sense that her suffering was pouring out; feeling, for the first time, something like release.

QUEEN -->