Queen of Swords · Swords · Air

She sits in profile on a grey stone throne, clouds banked to her lap on the right. Her gold crown is made of butterflies, antennae and all, over a red cap and dark curls. Her blue mantle is sewn all over with clouds. Butterflies again in the throne’s carved foot, and a winged child’s head in the panel under her seat. Her right hand raises the sword straight up, the hilt resting on the arm of the chair. Her left arm is lifted, hand open, a black tassel at the cuff, her face turned that way. One bird crosses the turquoise sky, high on her left. Far below, a dark tree stands on red earth.

The blade is what she carries. The butterfly is what she came through.

Waite gives her a severe, chastened face and calls her familiar with sorrow. He adds, oddly for a woman holding a sword, that she is scarcely a symbol of power. Her suit is air: thought, speech, the true thing said and kept in hand. She has paid for what she knows.

Upright, the tradition reads candor with a floor under it: discernment that names what is happening without flinching, solitude she walked into on her own feet. The open hand is what earns her the blade.

Reversed, one of the two goes missing. Readers name the tongue that cuts because it can, coldness worn as honesty, grief hardened into a rule that keeps everyone at sword’s length. Others read it the other way: clarity she has and will not spend, kindness that declines to say the necessary thing.

Nobody handed her that sword. She kept the one that went through her.