Ammonite🌊

The poem tells us how far away the lady is from the city:

And what she spends her time doing, and why: 

Weaving is a repetitive, appropriately feminine action that demands most of the lady's attention. The patient weaving and waiting in isolation also calls to mind Penelope waiting for Odysseus to return.

The poem also tells us that the Lady's circumstances discourage her from thinking too much about them, or from imagining a different life for herself.

The Lady must remain cloistered in her tower but her her heart's hopes depend on a faraway knight that she catches glimpses of in her magic mirror:

Said knight is desribed as... very shiny.

And eventually, comparing the knight's freedom to ride away, to her own entrapment leads to the lady admitting that what she's been doing up to now is never going to give her what she wants from life.

And to take decisive action to leave the tower.

And the curse rears its head in this absolute banger of a verse: 

The lady decides to float down the river in a boat towards Camelot, despite knowing that she will face the consequences of the curse. By the time she reaches the city, she is only a mysterious, beautiful corpse, though Lancelot himself is drawn to her.

The Lady of Shalott 'knows not what the curse may be' and when you first meet Caracalla, you might be forgiven for thinking she doesn't feel the full weight of her family legacy. While her mother and Marius are preoccupied with propriety and inevitable doom, Caracalla is busy imagining the Cobra sweeping her away and all those bitches at court being jealous of her. She recruits Ink to be her best friend with the perfect self-obsession of a privileged sixteen-year-old. Eumenida and Marius may consider Valerius manhood as something that must be struggled against but is never overcome, but Caracalla believes in her brother utterly. As far as she's concerned, they're a happy family (bar her terrible dad) and the genre is coming-of-age.

But it doesn't take much digging to see that Caracalla is also not immune to generational trauma. The most she can hope for from the Cobra as a husband is that he will find her somewhat desirable and appreciate her company, not that he will ever be faithful to her. (He can have lovers, she's cool with it. She's trying so hard to be cool with it.)

And when she's talking to Lucius after the Cobra rejects her, it becomes clear that part of her knew she would never escape her fate through marriage. The Valerius curse is one of inevitable, gendered violence; the men keep killing until they are finally killed, while the women stay unobtrusive to avoid death at their hands. (Arguably Marius has taken the first step towards change by refusing to actually kill their father).

Caracalla's mother has taught her that this is not a cycle that can be broken, and Caracalla knows she cannot abandon her mother, or persuade her mother to abandon her duty. The Caracalla who died in the previous two iterations of Time of Iron was only able to change things inasmuch as she chose to die like a male Valerius (with sword in hand), rather than waiting passively for death.

In the conversation where Caracalla agrees to help Lucius with his plan, there's an undernote of bitterness that she can't pretend any more. All the work put into propriety and weaving is useless; the mirror breaks because illusions are no longer enough. She's lived her whole life 'imbowered' in a house with a monster in the basement and the blood of dead women staining the walls. The Valerius curse has come upon her, and the only way out is to destroy the manor and the patriarch that uphold its traditions.

The Lady of Shalott dies without ever meeting her knight, but she chooses the possibility of the curse over the certainty of never getting what she wants. In response to the Valerius curse, Marius has taught himself never to want at all, but Caracalla has taught herself that she can fantasise all she likes, until the time comes to face the curse, and pack her childhood dreams away. When she's told her destiny is to burn with the manor, she's ready to be brave.

But in the end it's Eumenida who faces the god, and wrenches the cycle out of joint by dying like a male Valerius. Caracalla may not have everything she dreamed of, the knight may never be hers, but she gets to live, and to keep wanting.

*the Lady is unnamed in the poem but the story is that of Elaine of Astolat

Two other bonus classic lit references in chapter 17:

Eumenida is frequently referred to as the Last Duchess, a reference to the gothically creepy Robert Browning poem 'My Last Duchess', about an aristicratic man who totally didn't kill his wife.

And the internet informs me that this reference is frequently attributed to Shakespeare but is actually from Walter Scott's 'Marmion'.

I’m cagey around certain details of what happens in Eric’s book vs Rae’s book, because I know it can get bewildering and other versions of the tale are now on the table. (This is another reason I don’t do the Cobra’s POV, because having him refer to a book that isn’t Rae’s book but has the same title plus the tangled murder board he has in his mind of what he knows of Rae’s book, oooof, a mess!)

But one thing I wanted to make clear was my doomed triumvirate of ladies - Lia, Rahela, and Caracalla. All of these women die in both Rae and Eric’s version of the books. They die in every version. They are doomed through many story configurations - fairytale, Arthurian legend, poetry, swords and sorcery fantasy. They are fantastically, mythically, epically doomed.

Lia and Rahela are stepsisters and foils. Caracalla is the sister of the Arthurian-coded knight figure, who doesn’t appear in the first book but who Marius writes to and thinks of, in a way meant to echo Darcy and Georgiana in Pride & Prejudice. (They’re both trying hard not to be gothically doomed siblings, but unfortunately… the curse…) In Eric’s version of the story, Marius does not die and Caracalla still does. When Marius is most positively inclined toward Lia in Long Live Evil, he gives her a dress he intended for his sister, except Caracalla didn’t make it to the capital. In Eric’s version of the story, Marius is textually romantic with Lia and kisses her. In Rae’s version, he is not, but she is the queen he defends and fights and dies for. (The knight forever kneeled.) She is also the girl who made it to the capital. She is, in Eric’s version, the girl the knight can still save. And then he doesn’t.

Caracalla is also paralleled with other doomed characters: Torhell and Ivor. We meet all of them in the same way - first through the narrative of the earlier version, in their death scenes. The manner (manor) of their deaths informs us about their characters, in a way that belies the way they’re introduced in the narrative proper: only Rae and Eric, like the rest of you readers, know how these characters face the end, at the beginning.

It is no coincidence that Torhell storms into the Emperor’s court demanding to see the Golden Cobra. Rae has a predetermined shape in the narrative, the voluptuous villainess stepsister trying to get her man. Eric, who stepped into a nameless character, carved a place for himself in the narrative. Different positions with different problems, but it’s worth noting how people look to Eric as an off ramp to the doom, especially in All Hail Chaos where Eric - influenced by Rae - is making active moves to change the course of the story. Caracalla thinks she can save herself by marrying him, even though marriage is clearly an instrument of doom for Valerius women, leading to death in childbirth or death by domestic violence.

(And Ivor and Torhell, the king and the general of the icelands - paralleling Key and Marius, victorious emperor and general, parallels all the way down - are doomed to be consumed by empire. One of the big themes of Time of Iron is who is doomed by the narrative, and why and when.)

Caracalla is resigned to her doom in her death scene - the curse had come upon her - but not in the present narrative. I also love a character out of place in their own narrative, so she wants to be in a novel much more like Jane Austen or Georgette Heyer. The hopeful striving makes her cheer tragic, as we can see that endeavour is already doomed. Trapped in the Gothic manor, women’s tears freezing on the walls, Caracalla wants to escape the doom of her family - by marrying her brother’s best friend? The knight she’s waiting for is her brother. Neither Marius nor Eric is going to save her.

It is only through another story reshaper carving a new place for herself in the narrative that Caracalla is saved: Alice, Rae’s sister, who recruits Caracalla’s mother. The duchess finishes the Gothic tale, dying as a sacrifice in place of her child in a reversal of what the Great God did, as the manor of her death burns. And only in that moment having broken out of her role can Eumenida fully love both her children.

Caracalla never escaped the manor. Caracalla never made it to many-towered Themesvar. Until this version of the story.

As soon as Caracalla leaves the manor, she becomes aware people can be queer (escapes the hyper-paternalistic structure). She thinks she’s massacred people in a berserker fury (the Valerius curse has come upon her) but she actually has not done so. The doomed gothic maiden who always dies watches the Oracle perish, who has never before died until the world ends.

Then the Great God, who created Eyam in blood, takes control of the narrative. A dragon seizes Caracalla and carries her off, a classic fantasy maiden’s fate. She’s back in her father’s house - but it’s not quite her father anymore, and this isn’t Ancilley (ancillary...) Manor that always burns, but the Palace on the Edge.

You parallel characters through differences as well as similarities- Caracalla is textually bad at weaving, and weaving as with Penelope in the Odyssey means both femininity and scheming. Lia’s good at it. Rae is mixed (big swings, big misses). Caracalla is, like Key, Marius and Emer, all of whom have supernatural martial prowess, brutally straightforward, and at least Key and Emer have experience serving schemers. Caracalla and Marius, highly socially privileged, do not serve or scheme. Lucius, undead schemer with shades of Austen’s Wickham and Milton’s Lucifer, has a hard time manipulating both Valerius siblings because they steamroll over every subtle hint. Like the Cobra’s attempt to hint at romance with Marius, the Valerius siblings do not hear you and they will not know! (Poor Lucius ends up just yelling that he wants to eat their dad. Guys can you please allow him to finesse. This is so embarrassing.) As a woman Caracalla knows she should try, but she isn’t good at it. By the manner of her death, in the manor of her death, we know her: she’s the Valerius lady who would pick up the sword.

If you are more a ‘cut the Gordian knot’ type than a weaver type, your experience of palace intrigue is going to be interesting. Especially as a woman.

And Caracalla is now at its heart, with the Great God, the Emperor, the god’s chosen prophet, the wicked Prime Minister and his scheming niece. She finally made it to many-towered Themesvar.