Friday morning (I think), 4 September 1942
I haven’t had lunch yet and already I wish this day could be over. It started out so perfectly, too.
Ercole saw that painting. I don’t know how many more of them he saw before I got him out of the vault. I hope he didn’t see the one that has him in it. I need to go down there and catalogue those bastards and make some decisions as to which ones I’m going to make notes on and then destroy and which ones I’m going to keep. I really didn’t want Nicodemo to destroy the one where Alessio and Valeria died, but I couldn’t stop him. I have severe, gut-level misgivings about destroying any of them, particularly without taking the leisure to analyse all the information that is in them, which I don’t have time to do.
But that’s irrational. And even though some of my best decisions have been irrational, made from the gut and the heart, so have some of my worst ones. Nicodemo is a good advisor because he’s logical in ways I’m not, and when he has an irrational, gut-level reaction to something, that’s meaningful, and then it’s my turn to be logical.
And logic tells me that I feel this way because, as an artist myself, it goes against my deepest feelings to destroy a piece of art. I know it’s not the same thing as killing a child or even a pet, but it feels like the same sort of thing. Logically, realistically, he destroyed the painting, all except a piece of it, and then, when the sword and Alessio and Valeria converged in time and space, they did not die. A piece of the painting remained, and Alessio lost his leg. 1:1 correspondence, almost.
So into the flames a few paintings must go. But we still have to decide this very carefully, because there are things, in the divinatory world, that look much worse than they are. I’ve been getting the Death trump in my readings ever since I came back, and it confuses me, because I’ve already been reborn and regenerated, but I know that the Death trump does not mean literal death, it means change, which is something else I thought I was finished doing. But apparently not. At least it’s not the Tower, which was all over fucking everything before I went to Germany.
There are a lot of things in those paintings that look terrifying or destructive, but we don’t know, given the circumstances in which they appear, whether they are ultimately for our good or not. Alessio and Valeria dead is obviously not something that could ever be good. So is that painting of Ercole. So are some of the other ones, including that creature that looks like it couldn’t decide if it wanted to be a snake or a man hurting my son.
But some of the others, I really don’t know. And I can’t know. I’m too close to the matter. I am the Querent as well as the Reader and that’s always dangerous, because you never know if you are seeing the truth or your own hopes and fears when you ask for the Sight. The Sight, when it’s true, comes to you.
I also haven’t decided where, when, how or whether to tell Ercole or Jadis that I don’t care if she sleeps with him, but please don’t do it in the master bedroom of the Manor, which by rights belongs to me. I know I have to deal with this. There are a lot of things I have to talk to Ercole about, because I’m not giving this thing we have up again. Nicodemo and I really tried to. We meant to. But his marriage hasn’t worked, and now I know why.
I didn’t know whether to be relieved or pleased when he married Portia and not the woman in the painting. He looked so happy in that painting that I knew that woman, whoever she was, could make him forget about anyone else, and I didn’t want that, because I knew I was anyone else. But I love him enough to want him to be that happy, even if it can’t be with me and at the time I was convinced that it could never be with me, not just because I wanted Ercole home and safe (and thought I wanted him back as my husband, but do I? I really don’t know) because I knew he wanted children and the kind of marriage that the people he’s been playing to will buy, not a barren marriage to a person who was legally still male.
The ancestors and the forest cousins are telling me exactly what they think, whether or not I want to hear it (one thing that I will never get through some people’s heads is that Keresek and Steren, strange as they look, are actually my first cousins, and they run my household out of love, and they are not to be treated like fucking house-elves, even by me, but especially not by humans who are also in my service…)
I’m getting the usual strange requests from various tribes and raths and clanns, reminding me of all the reasons why there is so rarely anything like a High Queen in my father’s world, and the queen of Loch Ness wants Bella, and she doesn’t say why or how or for what, and I don’t even know how she knows of my daughter, or what she wants to do with her, but that is a strange and cruel thing to ask and I have to write to Steaphan Macmillan, whom I only know from meetings of the Wizengamot, to ask him if he knows what this is about, because I need her, but Bella will always be my first baby.
I can’t discuss any of this with Ercole. I can’t talk to that man any more. He always thinks I’m asking him to make decisions and I’m not. Either it’s ‘that’s a household affair, you handle it’, or ‘this is what I want to do’. And this is his daughter, but I nursed her, I took potions and pills so I could, and by faerie law, in the blessed absence of her accursed birth-mother, that means she’s my child, and I have to agree to this, or not, or negotiate something else, and I won’t give Bella to Ness if I think she’s going to be drowned or made into a pet, but I have to make this decision, and he has to live with it. This is the sword of the Law for what I did to that Crockford woman, I know it. Take what you want and then pay for it, Lady Malfoy.
And my peacock is dead. I was reading that letter from Ness, and I burst into bitter laughter, and Nivello came and put his head on my knee, and I could see that he wasn’t well, and we sat like that for a while, and then…he just went. This shouldn’t be a surprise. He is twenty years old. But it feels like another blow to the gut, and I can’t take too many more.
I want to go to bed and pull the covers up over my head and put the pillow we were lying on under my head and breathe in the scent of us and go to sleep, and wake up in some other world where this isn’t happening, but I can’t. I am Queen. I was given my life back, but not for myself, for the land. It gets to use me as hard as it wants and then, I suppose, if I do a good job, when the war is over I get to be something like happy.
I hope.