Pinned Wings

The words they were dead struck Kasvren square in the sternum. No less tormenting was Isolde's placid manner as she spoke of her kin's untimely deaths, betraying neither pity nor longing. Does no one grow careful when speaking of a family member's death? Isn't it only right to show proper sorrow and mourning — whether the person died of sickness or by accident?

"How heartless you sound."

"I merely stated the facts. Would it satisfy you if I shed a few tears?"

"That isn't what I mean!"

"Don't raise your voice. Have you forgotten the rules? This is my house."

"Why did he die? Was he ill? Was there an accident?"

A twisted, bitter smile surfaced on Isolde's face. But Kasvren did not regret his question. He shoved the thought that he had let himself be ensnared by her far away, out beyond sight. Instead, he looked her straight in the eye.

"My brother died in the greenhouse. He struck his head, and the shattered glass left the place in ruins."

"The greenhouse...?"

"So many butterflies used to fly in through the greenhouse. Some of them were rare, so my brother was forever darting in and out of there. Then one day he caught himself in the vines — or perhaps, lost deep in his own little world, he missed his footing... Or maybe he breathed in too much of the dust from their wings and saw things that were never there at all."

"How can you speak of it so easily?"

Kasvren's voice was thick with earnest anguish. It hurt, it stifled — so much so that he could not have said what the anguish was for, or for whom. For the dead Corbel? Or was it pity, that a girl newly come of age should feel so at home in the shadow of death, draped about her like heavy velvet in place of the brightness and lightness of heart that should have been hers by right? Or was it because the fear she claimed to have grasped at six years old had spun an elaborate, vicious web through Kasvren's own heart?

Isolde offered no answer to his question. She neither rebuked him nor sneered that he was talking foolishness. She only drove a pin deep into the head of the last butterfly, and then murmured as though to herself.

"When I was very little, my nurse told me — I was playing in my cradle at the time — that the dead all become butterflies and go to heaven. That in heaven's beautiful flower fields they drink sweet nectar and fly about, happy, so happy, feeling nothing in this world but happiness."

"..."

"...But Corbel will never become a butterfly. Not after killing and caging so many innocent ones. Sometimes I would think of the nurse's story and of my brother together, and wonder: among all the butterflies he caught and smothered, was there not one poor soul on its way to heaven? A soul that, by the misfortune of catching Corbel's eye, froze stiff with cold and ended up shut inside a frame like this one..."

Having glued the broken corner of the frame back together, Isolde stepped slowly backward — away from the desk, and away from Kasvren. Then, with a face as serene as if nothing at all had happened, she left the room.

"Wait — just a moment!"

Isolde did not hear him. The hem of her white dress trailed softly over the floor as it followed her out of sight, its rounded spread for all the world like a butterfly's wings. For one instant Kasvren imagined her stuffed and mounted — then he recoiled from his own dreadful thought, cursing himself inwardly.

A great white butterfly. And the butterfly's name was Isolde Drasken. Eyes closed in stillness within a frame both beautiful and uncanny, she seemed sunk in a long sleep, resting in perfect peace. But her lips were bloodless, and a pin was driven through her fine brow. Even if she woke and screamed, no one would ever hear it.

No, Kasvren thought. Isolde was as good as stuffed and mounted already. She could not leave this place. Could not walk out of it. Was this very Dravenmoor not itself the vast frame in which she had been mounted?

Leaving Corbel's room behind, Kasvren climbed one more flight of stairs. Rounding the corner of the stairwell, the first thing to meet his eye was a door recessed deep past two bends of the corridor — as though it had shyly tucked itself away from the rest of the house.

The moment he laid a hand on the doorknob, he flinched at a feeling of familiarity and drew back. That familiarity was nothing more — and nothing less — than the traces of a hand that had touched it again and again.

In which case, this had to be Isolde's room.

It would have been a lie to say no curiosity stirred in him. If he could peer inside her room, brimming as it was with secrets, he might glimpse — just a little — what lay within that tightly shut heart of hers. The thought kept shoving at his back. His heart hammered as though possessed, the root of his tongue had gone bone-dry, and he swallowed again and again.

No. I mustn't.

After a long struggle with the impulse, Kasvren took another step back. Strangely, the door seemed to retreat by exactly the distance he withdrew. He rubbed his eyes — the door was still there — but he chose to trust his instinct. At least for as long as he remained in this mansion, he had no other choice. If he barged into Isolde's room uninvited, something irretrievable would come of it.

Whatever that something might be.

He quickened his pace before Rad Dat or Isolde could catch sight of him. The room closest to hers was locked fast. Perhaps a decorative nameplate had once hung upon its door, for one patch had faded less than the rest. Running his fingers quietly over the raised, petal-shaped patch of color, Kasvren speculated that this might once have been the room of Isolde's elder sister. He could not be sure how many siblings she had; he only guessed, judging by the flower shape of the plate, that it had belonged to a woman.

The last room he looked into was clean, as though it were dusted often, yet almost nothing remained inside it. No — it seemed it had never been a place crowded with small things to begin with. An antique desk and bookshelf, and a graceful chest of drawers whose legs curved like a mermaid's tail. The wardrobe and the bed appeared to have been cleared out long ago.

Unlike Corbel's room, its tidiness felt almost foreign. Through an unusually large window, the forest lay in clear view. For once, bright sunlight streamed in, and it lifted his spirits. When he opened the window, a startlingly crisp breeze filled the room. Come deeper winter, frost would lace and ice would bead upon every last thread of this wind — but for now, the air, not yet touched by the cold goddess's hand, was perfect for drinking in to his lungs' content.

It feels as though I'm being scoured clean from the inside.

So Kasvren thought. He found himself curious what manner of person had owned this room. He looked over the desk, but there was little there to reveal its occupant.

But then, from the drawer chest beside the desk, something emerged that could reward his interest: a notebook with a pen tucked into it. The cover was leather, and it bore the look of something long cherished and carefully tended. Yet no one escapes the passage of years entirely, and the smooth places were just beginning to show the first signs of splitting. Almost without meaning to, Kasvren slipped the notebook inside his coat. A dressing of beeswax and tallow, worked in little by little, would restore it.

Nor was that the only reason he took it. Kasvren had to admit, quite readily, that his curiosity was a somewhat base one. He wanted to know what might be written inside. A diary? Or notes from study? Whatever it was, it was bound to contain something proving that another person — someone besides Isolde and Rad Dat — had once existed in this house. Even if it concealed some hideous crime, even if it was a confession of that sin, he did not care.

He did not know. Truly, he did not know — how far he had been driven by loneliness. That he had come up against a dead-end wall, worn to the point of collapse.

If the owner of this room is watching from somewhere, I ask you to understand. If you were someone of House Drasken, I hope you will forgive this sordid act of mine — theft in all but name — rather than judge it by the law.

With the notebook hidden in his breast, Kasvren slipped quietly out of the room. Beyond it stretched a corridor of unbroken darkness; at its far end, it seemed, there was nothing but the stairs.

He returned to his own room. His bandaged hand had begun to throb again, and he could feel a fever rising in it.