.: myr'avallenau :.

My son, the seer, wants to go up today to the Academy, even though he is the queen's man down to the bone, because the little queen and his sister are there, and the little prince and his trickster are there as well. The halfling princess, too.

There is nothing very surprising about any of this. I wish she had eaten the heart. I still don't understand how she could not understand what it meant that she lived, that her children lived, and that Pendry was dead. Do I have to tell her everything? They have killed so many of our queens that she had to be born as a boy to escape it. There were three of them killed in Armorica and I still don't know how the little one survived. If she mates--and my son believes that she will--we may yet have a tribe again.

I saw this when the queen first came to us, came to her father, in the body of a boy, which she had had hollowed out and cut open. The people would have killed her for maiming herself like that, if they had had their way. My son saw her crown before I did, but nobody took him seriously, because boys are so seldom seers. He saw that she was not a fisher-king, but a queen trapped in silk which was not of her own spinning. Now, my son says that of course they will strike the Academy, because they do not want our little queen to mate, and because our little prince and his trickster are there. Yet if she does, if she can, we will have two. We can of course not keep them under one roof, but we will have two, and they will be mated.

My son says we have three, but we don't want the third, because she has mated with the Pennchough's bastard. I think she is one of the ones that we have thought dead.

Ordinarily I do not care for ironfolk; I leave it to their own healers, or to the fox-wife who will care for anything. But the boy is the prince's true love and the prince will wear himself out if I do not make him potions, and he would wake our queen to do it as well. I suppose he is endearing. I liked the way he waited at the prince's side. But he is maimed; the people will never accept him as the consort of a king. I do not know how to heal him completely but it must be done. Brocéliande will not survive what's coming with a fisher-king.

I know I should not say these things. I chose to follow her despite the way she maimed herself. But I knew she had her reasons, that for her it was not an iron-wound, and that she couldn't know she should have come to us for help with that, and she must never know, not then, because it would have broken her inside. Now I think I could tell her, but I will not. They think what befell her was miraculous, but anyone who loved her could have done it at any time. If someone had loved her enough to slay the false flesh on her own earth she would have come back to herself, as the lindwurm does; it was a curse on her that made her so. I would have done that for her if she had ever asked me to. And every queen must fall, and sleep, and change.

But the iron people think of her now as a saviour, because she was dying when somebody finally did put her out of that misery. And it is good for them to think of her that way, if they will help her become High Queen. I cannot tell her she is not, for then she will know she is tricking them, and she will feel guilt (guilt, over tricking the ironfolk!) and that will not do, she will show herself.

The prince has lied to me, and that I did not expect. But I will deal. It is at last a sign that he accepts his nature as it is.

I wish she had eaten the heart and claimed her victory. I see what the broken healer sees, in the chart. And if she had claimed her victory, she might have ended this thing. But because she does not claim her victory--because she does not want her enemy's children to suffer--the thing still goes on.

This would not have happened, if she had claimed her victory.

This house stinks of iron. She has given hospitality to people who do not even know what it means. The prince lies half slain. The man with the cane thinks he can tell me my business, and yet he does not even know what virtue there was in the tree from which it came.

When all of this is over I am telling my cousin: I warned you. This was foolish.