Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky.

Listener discretion advised.

With the king lying dead out in the stable yard, chaos reigned inside the villa.

Nobles grabbed what valuables they could and fled.

Servants scrambled as rumors spread about assassins in their midst,

and the queen frantically paced in an advisor's chambers,

unable or unwilling to visit her husband's body.

Any shock or grief that Queen Fredegund felt on that fateful September night in

584 was outweighed by her survival instincts. Fredigand knew how swiftly the pendulum of power

could swing in the warring realms of Francia, having experienced higher highs

and lower lows than just about anyone. If she did not act quickly, she and her infant son,

whose existence she had kept a secret, would both be at the mercy of her enemies. By that point, she had already lost

four boys and could not bear to lose another. She had spent years clawing and scheming her way

from slavery to the pinnacle of the Merivindian monarchy, and she wasn't about to lose at all. So Fredegund fled to a cathedral

in Paris and hold up with her baby, cornered, but still calculating. Historians do not definitively

know who ordered the hit on Fredegund's husband, but it's not hard to make an educated guess.

Fredegund herself would have had an instant hunch about the orchestrator because, roughly a

decade earlier, she herself had planned the assassination of a neighboring king, who was the husband of a fierce rival.

Fredegund also knew that whether or not that rival, Queen Brunhild, was responsible.

Brunhild would certainly seek to capitalize on the frenzied aftermath of the killing,

because that was exactly how Fredegoon's rival operated.

Sure enough, as panicky members of Fredegoon's entourage fled,

...