The Frame of Dead Butterflies

Swallowing a strangled gasp, Kasvren looked down and was startled all over again. He could hardly help it. Anyone who saw such a scene would have felt their heart lurch.

Scattered at his feet were butterflies. Dozens of them — a great many, brittle and dried, strewn about like petals shed in their countless multitudes once a spring day had passed. Some were large, some small. Some were common enough, and others were species Kasvren could not even begin to name, specimens he had never laid eyes on before. If there was one thing they shared, it was that every one of them was dead — and yet their bodies had been preserved so vividly that they seemed alive still. Their wings, too, were nearly intact.

He carefully picked up a butterfly that had fallen atop his shoe. The dried wings were so impossibly thin that he felt a shiver run through him, as though he were holding a sliver of skin peeled away with no blood in it, cut with meticulous precision. It was a black butterfly patterned with white. The large markings, one stamped on each hindwing, had an eerie shape, like wandering spirits drifting about a graveside. Up close, the tips of the wings were a little worn, but the creature looked so lifelike that a single warm breath might rouse it and send it fluttering back into the air.

Having set the butterfly down on one corner of the dust-laden desk, Kasvren finally understood what the frame he had broken was. It had been the last resting place of countless stuffed butterflies. Several were still pinned in place, unable to escape the frame. Of those, perhaps four or five were species he could recognize. He thought he had seen them as a child, in a book written by some entomologist — though honestly, even that memory had grown hazy, and he could not be certain the species were ones he truly knew.

Aside from the single fact that they were all dead, the butterflies could not have been more different from one another. One had wings covered edge to edge in a dense embroidery of star-shaped markings. Another bore wings of a metallic green that, when tilted, shimmered strangely between pink and blue — astonishingly similar to a dress worn by a countess a decade or so ago, a gown that had caused quite a stir. There was a marvelous butterfly with emerald antennae, and another with gaudy, irregular washes of color, like an opera performer painted for the stage.

Who on earth had caught all these butterflies? As he gathered them up one by one and laid them carefully on the desk, Kasvren sank into deep thought. Whoever it was had precisely sealed shut the struggling creatures' throats, then shut them into a frame in forms no different from their living selves —

"Oh, dear."

Isolde's voice came without warning. Kasvren instinctively moved to hide the broken part of the frame, then felt a flush of embarrassment. Isolde, who could not easily approach him because of the butterflies strewn at his feet, drew near and said, offhandedly:

"That was the frame Bell treasured most. And you've gone and broken it."

"Bell……?"

Isolde quietly crouched down and began gathering up the butterflies. Only after she had collected every one around his shoes could he finally move. Kasvren let out a sigh, stepped back, and gently lowered the frame.

"I'm sorry."

"There's no need to apologize to me. I never much cared about the butterflies my brother killed anyway."

Isolde's two hands were piled high with the paper-thin corpses. For all her claimed indifference, she handled them with care. Setting the broken frame on the desk, she arranged the mounted butterflies Kasvren had gathered back in their proper order. The act stirred such a solemn feeling in him — like holding a funeral for the butterflies all over again — that it left Kasvren unsettled.

"Was the name of your brother, the one who owned this room, Bell?"

"That's what I called him. His real name was Corbel, but I was the only one who knew he didn't like his own name."

"Not one of the other family members knew?"

"No. Bell was a man of few words."

Isolde carefully picked up a single mounted butterfly. It was smaller than her palm. Whether because of the chemical treatment, or because it had worn such vivid colors even in life, the butterfly's blue wings were strikingly, almost startlingly bright. The tips of the wings were edged in a line of black, as if lightly dipped in ink, and beside the line a row of faint black dots was stamped in sequence, like a constellation. Rare was the word that sprang to mind at a glance.

"Do you know what this butterfly is?"

Kasvren shook his head honestly.

"I know very little about insects."

"I see. This one is called the Large Blue Butterfly. Rather a long name, isn't it?"

"Extraordinarily long. Longer than the names of the great kings of old history."

"Bell spent practically the whole of one summer living in the woods just to catch this butterfly. He searched every puddle and every pond, thorough as could be. I followed him once, and it was miserable — it was summer, and the bugs were unbearable. But to my brother, all those nameless things were friends. Once, a horribly enormous wolf spider landed on my shoulder, and Bell — without a single word — reached out his hand toward it. And that spider climbed onto his hand as if it recognized him, and sat there, perfectly calm."

"How could such a thing be possible?"

Isolde shrugged.

"How would I know? I wasn't like Bell. The moment that spider climbed down off my shoulder, I ran screaming out of the forest. I was only a child then. But I knew, absolutely, that what I'd felt when it sat on my shoulder was that thing people speak of — fear."

The room held many frames of stuffed butterflies, but along one wall stood a heavy shelf that took up nearly its whole length. On the shelf, jars of formalin were lined up in a row, and inside them floated every species of spider and unnameable beetle imaginable, suspended in the liquid. It made Kasvren wonder whether that was why the room had been left open, yet never cleared away.

"If your brother had lived, he might have become an entomologist with a promising future."

"I doubt it."

"You don't think so?"

A faint crease between her brows, Isolde let out a barely audible scoff.

"Bell was a strange one. Even if he had become an entomologist, he would likely have been called an eccentric and made a laughingstock among all those pompous, self-important scholars. I heard he could hardly bring himself to look people properly in the face. His interests lay in insects and insects alone. He was downright obsessive about butterflies especially. As you can see."

She swept a theatrical glance around the room. Somehow, she looked pleased. Kasvren, by contrast, shuddered at his fingertips, feeling as though the countless mounted butterflies were staring back at him. It even seemed as though they might burst out of their frames at any moment to avenge their own deaths. When he finally tore his eyes from the frame where monarchs of every color had been pinned in order of size, Isolde was fixing each freshly arranged butterfly in place, driving small, slender pins into their bodies one by one.

"Still, you seem to have been close with your brother."

"Why do you think so?"

"I'm watching it right now. You're mending the broken frame — for his sake."

"I'm not fixing the frame for my brother's sake, particularly. I simply don't trust myself to bear it if those cold, dried butterflies drift around this room forever as dust."

"Then you didn't get along with him?"

At his question, Isolde paused, the pin she had been about to set hanging in midair, and stared straight at Kasvren. Her expression was impossible to read. Was she reproaching him, or —

"Must it always be one or the other? Bell and I were neither close nor distant. As I said, my brother kept away from people. Even me, thirteen years his junior — I was no exception. But when he was making his frames, he did allow me to sit beside him. Never once did he allow that to anyone else."

"Then that would mean you were close."

"I suppose. Is that what you think?"

When Isolde tossed the question back at him, Kasvren felt a flicker of irritation. He could not understand why she dragged out so complicated a matter when simply saying yes would have ended it. Unless she was lying in wait for some grievance to seize upon, what was the point of all this?

"What exactly is the problem?"

"Whatever do you mean?"

"Couldn't you simply admit that you were close, and have done with it?"

"Because that wouldn't be the truth. To begin with, what 'being close' means is different for every person, isn't it? Don't you think? If Bell had lived until I was old enough to understand the world, perhaps I could give a clearer answer to your muddled little question. But unfortunately, my brother died before I ever came to know the world at all."