ephemeris profugi

I spent a few hours this afternoon with Esteban and St John, while Delgardie was in Trevena with her. It was an object lesson in 'you're not the only one she left, you fool'. Or rather in 'you left her first'. Because they all knew that someday she would have to choose, and they all chose to love her, anyway. And somehow I've thought I was better than they are for not letting go.

I really have been an utter, contemptible fool. The day my luck went against me was the day I spoke her Name in anger, rather than love. I always knew what she was, even when she didn't. I always knew there'd be a day when she would go a place I couldn't follow her. But I forgot. I don't really know why I forgot. I knew with the others.

I thought I could bind the fata morgana. As if she were a mermaid, and I'd found her shawl on a rock. The fata morgana, regina brittaniae, regina sacrorum. And that's why I lost, and why they all suffered. Even Benedetto knew. And now I have only a choice of damnations.

I wonder if she'd let me go in the boy's place. She says nobody's going--that you can't pay the Danegeld and ever be rid of the Dane. But we're at war, and spread too thin. She knows, as do I, that they want him, almost as badly as the angels do. That yellow-eyed bastard thinks that he owns me. He thinks that he knows what he bought. But I pledged myself to a god in the Tuscan hills, and his name was not Azazel. I just didn't realise that there would be so much protection and so little service, when I swore to serve and protect.

So, Alessio didn't marry that mistress of his. Alessio's going to marry Yvon, they all say. If he lives. Susie Kyteler came up to see me and she told me all about it, about Marco's wedding to Meli, and how much they all wished I had been there (but I doubt, very much, that Nico wished that, or Yvon--though Dracaena may have actually wished it for Marco's sake).

Yvon was dying when she left, and no-one would admit it; she will not even say so now, but I hear what she won't say. I don't know what to think about that. I hated the way he always came between me and Dracaena. I hated what he made of Alessio. All those years I fought with Fulvio to keep Alessio alive, even though he couldn't or wouldn't speak, because Nicodemo loved him so, and I loved Nicodemo, though I can't remember why. And then he brought Yvon to us out of the streets and the two of them lived in one room and slept in one bed and Yvon was his lord and his master and that was the end of it; he waited on that boy like a woman--a boy who grew taller than him and stronger and still couldn't fight except in a rage. Alessio defended him and then came back to his wrist like a jessed hawk, eager to get his head in the hood again. And yet as much as I disliked Yvon, and he disliked me, and all the more so because he was golden and beautiful and everything that Dracaena once was...he fought with the Company, for me and for Britannia. I am sure he was only a field medic, and I am sure he would say he did it for Isabella and Marco, never for me. But he went with them. And so, I cannot wish him dead.

Sometimes I only wish I had never met the Malfoys, not one of them. I would have left Carmela when I was able, and married Stefania. Marco and Isabella would not exist, but they would not have suffered, either. We would have bunkered down in Tuscany and we would have survived, and I would never have been Archigallus, but maybe the Gallae could have also survived, without me. Would it have been so bad?

( She's gone, and she's gone forever, and I've no-one at all to blame for that fact but myself. )

She said she loved me because I go into the dark with her, but she doesn’t want to go into the dark. I asked her to tell me what she was thinking and feeling, there at St Mungo’s, and she tossed me a sketchbook, an old one. She doesn’t want to talk about it, none of it. I asked her how long it had been since she painted something that wasn’t a wall or a ceiling or a chest with wards on it, and she said she didn’t feel like doing portraiture any more. But I remember when she used to just paint, great rambling canvases, and made the grasses move and the insects fly (sometimes off the canvas and right through your hand till they landed again on the swaying flowers) and you could feel the sun shining out of the paint. She says that painting is dangerous now, and she wouldn’t elaborate.

The sketchbook is about six or seven years old, maybe more, I don’t know. It’s full of scenes from Spain. A lot of them are aerial views. Some of them are churches, villages, some of them are battlefields, bodies, graves. She spent a lot of time in the air above Spain. There are maps of a house in Spain where for a while they kept us, me and the children, but incomplete. Obviously they never got in. There is a drawing of St John’s face, just his face, that is enough to bring tears to my eyes. There are a few drawings of me, done from memory, and a lot more drawings of Nicodemo, done from life, more than one where he’s lying there naked and tangled in sheets. I guess that’s when he started cutting his hair so short. One of them he wrote on, something about how funny she must have thought it was, to see him half-undressed in the kitchen of some inn somewhere. I don’t understand what the joke is to that, but he signed his name to the drawing and she signed hers underneath and entwined the flourishes of her signature with his.

There is a drawing of Bella, looking out of a window, that did make me cry, and there are drawings of Lucius searching determinedly for something that she wouldn’t explain, and she held me then; but later she slipped away. She made me promise never to show that book to the children. The starkest ones are black and white and grey, with splashes of red where the blood is. This is a story she says she wanted to tell me, but she will not speak of it.

“Set me as a seal upon your heart,” it says, on one page, in Nicodemo’s handwriting. Across from it she’s drawn herself, as if she could see herself in a mirror, in a position that I do not wish to name. It’s all playful, and there’s nothing of duty or obligation about it, only her love and her laughter.

( So last night we finally got out of the hospital, and Nicodemo took us to a flat he keeps for who knows what sort of assignations, but my wife, who says she has not slept with him in the last three years, knows exactly where everything is. )

( Dracaena is in a very odd mood. )

I understand, I do, that the laws are different here. I read law at Bologna. I know about the rule of law; I even rather believe in it sometimes.

But after everything they did to her--and even though there are no marks in her flesh, I know, as her husband, where all of her scars are--this insult can only be washed away in blood.

Marcus Weasley and Septimus Snape, whose fault this was to begin with, whether or not we can prove they are traitors--will die at my hands. Perhaps not today; perhaps not even this month. But they will.

This is vendetta.

( I've been awake and alive for a week and a day. )

I wonder how long it has been since I've seen the sunlight.

I'm...alive? This can't be Elysium, no, not this.

Remember. I have a true name too, because she gave me one.

My falling star.

...she is the soul of every rose, she is the queen of every hive...

We know what you did.

...she is the woman you don’t see
the eye that nothing can deceive
the dream that never came to be
the promise no-one planned to keep
the voice that no-one will believe
the truth you whisper in your sleep...


If you will persist in drinking from a broken cup, you shouldn't be surprised when it poisons you.

The baby is crying again, and nobody listens but me.

She doesn't want the baby anyway. My wife loved the baby but that's not my wife.

I will rend him and tear him to bits.

You know what I'm talking about.

...did I see a butterfly...?

where did she go!