Lady Nephele Decides to Write the Story of Queen Jelisaveta

I said goodnight and retired to my room, wondering if I should take my few belongings and run away into the countryside. The task I had agreed to do seemed likely only to cost me my life.

That was the night when Naysayer rattled my brain so violently that I had fisted my hands and pounded them against my head to get rid of her.

I sat that night in my room in Zadra as my candle burned down and the chill air seeped in between the casement cracks and the monasteries tolled their bells for Matins. The devils roam, they say, at this hour in the middle of the night, when all the world sleeps except those who rouse themselves to mumble the Holy Office.

And I think the devil stole into me that night, for I do not know what came over me except madness. A rage like a savage storm swept through me, sucking out of my mindmuck all the atrocities and fears of those last terrible months and rolling them out over the shoals of my sanity, scraping raw any control I had of my rational mind.

In a state of shaking agitation, I wrapped my cloak about me that night and put my writing finger into the flame of the candle, holding it there as I bit my lip until my finger screamed and my lip bled, begging the flame of Ahura Mazda’s power to burn through to the truth.

I snatched up a sheet of paper and grabbed the quill in such a vise I could have broken it, flinging onto the paper the words that would guide me.

I will tell the truth about those years.

I will tell the truth about all of it.

Then with calm mind, I took up my quill again and started writing, but not the stories that the men wanted, the stories that were certain to displease one faction or the other and end in my death. If I were fated to die no matter what I wrote, I would write my own story, the truth. The throbbing pain in my finger would burn away the falsehoods, and I would write true.

I would start with that time when the seeds of my determination to record these thoughts and deeds received the first drops of blood that met the heat of the sun of my anger and began to germinate in the dark soil of my resolve.

That was the night I started this long story of my Lady. That was the night I wrote and I wrote and I wrote, and the writing was true. I know that to be a fact because Naysayer disappeared that night.