They were not betraying anything when they did this. The point of being an acolyte is to assess and be assessed as to the truth of one’s vocation among the servants of Jad.

They were given food and drink and blessings, and a mule to carry their goods, and they…disappeared down a path to the south, and from the sight and knowledge of men and women forever.

But not from legend, because of the poet.

It was not an immediately successful work for Marina di Seressa. It really did mark too great a change from what she’d written before. No enchanted ships, no maidens imprisoned in richly described gardens, no courtly settings at all. But it endured, and over time its reputation grew. And as a consequence, the names of Célia Maronniel and Pons van Cové also endured. Surviving through time is a victory for art.

She had them journey through many perils—parted, reuniting—all the way to the sea in the south. In one passage, Pons is abducted by three brigands who believe he might be worth a ransom. Célia enlists a dozen stout clerics from a nearby sanctuary to her aid, and they rescue her beloved.

Originally, the poet confided to a few, it had been Célia captured and Pons saving her, but in the middle of a restless, windy night on her estate the thought came to her that she could write it differently, and she did. Because she could. It was her poem. No one had commissioned this work. No one had a right to any expectations of it. All they could do, really, was read it or not read it.

In the poem, the lovers finally settle in a town near Massilia on the southern coast. They live long lives together, and they die at very nearly the same time, days apart, not to be separated in life or death. They are buried beside each other by their children. The poem ends with a description of their shared grave by the sea, with waves and a sunset.

That poem was Marina di Seressa’s truth superimposed on the absence of knowing what had happened. Or, more properly, it was her invented tale. Not quite the same thing.

Not quite. But near enough to make such stories one of the things we use to carry us through the uncertainty of our own days.

She sent it, anxiously, to a few trusted people when she thought it was done. She received a reply by courier quite soon from one of them.

“There you are at last,” wrote her friend Thierry Villar.

Only that. But it said so much.

On the bottom of the page he had drawn a symbol, an elaborate arrow, in fact, inviting her to turn it over. On the other side he’d written, “Oh my. I see Alaina visited you.”

She laughed so long and so loudly it disturbed the servants.

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