presents...
|
Disturb the Slumber
Julius 1, 1668. Physical: Another lash yesterday, but it has been tended and is healing well. Emotional: Greatly upset. We were unable to follow up on yesterday's results because I cannot reliably control my strands today. VG leaves soon for home, as he cannot stay away indefinitely. I may visit him there to continue work, although the strands in Montaigne are frightening.
She lifted the pen from the log and paused. She should record the addendum. It was important, even if she'd rather forget it. Especially if she'd rather forget it.
Addenum to Sextus 30, 1668. Unexpected sorcerous event.
How to put the next bit, without being obscene? She chose the words carefully, clinically. Experienced a physical/emotional crisis brought on by excessive physical stimulation. (I am assured this type of crisis is common in women and is not itself a sorcerous event.) Lost control of strands for duration of crisis plus approximately one half-minute. Roughly half of the strands struck out seeking targets and thankfully found none. The remainder wrapped themselves around
She paused again, wondering how to balance accuracy and decency. She would much rather debate word choices in her head than think about the actual event, anyway. Eventually realizing that she was only drawing the task out, she set pen to paper again.
wrapped themselves around an Unbound in the room. Cross-reference entry on Quintus 7, 1668; the phenomenom matched the description of Alessandro Mondavi very closely. I do not recall them ever having done this before.
It suggests to me that Marietta, if she were similarly cursed with strands, did not keep them under vigilant control as I do but allowed them to react to her every passing thought. Not implausible, given the Lorenzo reputation. I hypothesize that she accepted them more fully, giving them no more thought than an arm or a leg, which enabled her to use them more naturally than I have so far been able. When I ceased to focus my own mind upon them, they reacted in some fashion natural to them which I had so far suppressed by my will.
It may be that further progress will not be possible unless I adopt this technique.
She left it at that. The log was not the place to record her opinions or her feelings. It was for the facts. She left the book open for the ink to dry. Getting up from the desk, she laid down on the bed. She was tired; she had not slept well.
Any one of the three things on her mind would have been enough to agitate her. Now she bounced from one to the other to the other, a spinning mess of ambitions and emotions. If she tried to think about the planned experiments, of what had gone wrong in the past and what had gone right, and what they should do next, she soon bounced to Morella and Montaigne and the bloodbath that loomed more and more inevitably each passing day. For twenty years, she had stretched her powers to try and avert that disaster, to spare Morella, and now she might have a pathway - a pathway, hadn't it been the Feast of Paths and Doorways? - to enough power to do it, if she let the strands have their horrible way like yesterday, yesterday, had been fire and then ice and then he had to leave and the leaving was like another lash.
And the detatched little voice in her head asked, brutally, if it wasn't possible that this was a ridiculous over-reaction to a simple novelty? Hadn't she seen men and women both manipulate each other's passions, causing Cups strands to flare and spark? Was she, Beatrice Caligari, going to be taken in by that?
I don't want to be alone, she answered the little voice, which grew enraged at the admission. I will be alone if I must be, she told herself. But I never wanted the hermit's life. Is it so awful and weak of me to want someone?
It would just bring more pain. She believed him when he said that he would write, that he would return - but returning meant that he would leave again.
Vincent had lost his Cups. He was in pain but did not regret.
Vincent, the experiments... and the bouncing started over again, and over again.
|