Lasrua’s butterfly love gets away

“Come in, child,” Cian said wearily. “I know you can hear me.”

Lasrua could hear him. Even when he did not speak, she could hear his breath whistling through his lungs like the wind through naked boughs.

She could also hear Eithne sleeping, her every breath a sigh. She heard Sweetdew dozing deeply, snoring more than purring, and the newborn kittens whimpering drowsily into their mother’s fur.

Lasrua had never been alone with Cian before.

“Come in, dear girl. I want to talk to you.”

His raspy crooning was unnerving. It reminded her of Druze. She reminded herself he was Dre.

Lasrua stopped just behind the corner of the wall. “What do you want?”

“Come closer, now, I can’t hear you,” he sighed. “I’m only a man, you know.”

His voice rose in pitch with his last words, leading her in. He turned his head away as she entered, and she saw only the corner of a scythe-​sharp smile or grimace of pain before his mouth relaxed, and it faded.

“Is she sleeping?” he asked the stones of the wall.

“Yes.”

He lay silent for a while, except for his breath. Then he asked wistfully, “With her wee kitties? Did she fall asleep playing with her kitties? I heard her talking to them…”

Eithne was curled up around the cat, and the cat around the kittens.

“They’re all there,” Lasrua said.

“Cute and so-​forths,” Cian murmured to himself in Gaelic, and he chuckled deep in his chest, though she knew it must have caused him pain. Then he asked Lasrua in her own language, “She will be a good mother, do you not think?”

Lasrua shuffled away from the bed, so subtly that her hips swayed more than her feet moved, as the elven ladies walked in their awkwardly elaborate gowns.

“A good one,” she said in her lowest voice, which she fondly believed sounded more like her father’s than like a girl’s. Lower still she added, “Not a happy one.”

The pillow rustled as Cian turned his face abruptly towards her.

Her body froze still and straight, but the hem of her gown brushed her ankles as it swung from her hips’ last sway. This movement she could not control terrified her, as though she were a mouse trying to escape an eagle’s glare.

Cian only asked plaintively, “Did she say what she thinks of me as a father?”

A thin tendril of disgust twined up the back of Lasrua’s throat. She did not want to indulge him in his delusions of gentleness. Indeed, she wanted to ask him whether he ever wondered what Eithne thought of him as a rapist or a jailer. But she feared too much for Eithne to indulge herself in that.

“She seems to find your awkwardness endearing,” Lasrua said. “She will show you what to do when the babies come. Listen to her, and you will do well, so long as you do not do anything foolish.” She was only thinking of what he had done to his mortal body in his carelessness, but for some reason she added, “Or cruel.”

He paused for a frightful moment, and his eyes blackened beneath his lowering brows until even the sparks of reflected candle flame were snuffed out.

Again, however, he spoke as if he had not heard. “Will I live to see them? Or for them to see me? Tell me the truth now,” he warned. “Now that she’s sleeping.”

“I am not a doctor,” Lasrua said coldly. “But I do not believe you will ever be a strong man again. You will often cough and be out of breath, and you may limp. For as long as you live. But I believe you will live.”

Cian made a shallow sigh and ran his hand down his breastbone. His wrist was thin, and always would be. His skin was sallow, and always would be.

Lasrua’s face flushed with a surge of grim, triumphant pride. Though it had been done unwillingly, she saw now that by saving Cian, she had trapped the monster Dre in a sickly mortal body that he nevertheless did not wish to leave. If not for Eithne’s worry and exhaustion, she might have left him weaker and let him suffer more.

“Can you do nothing else?” he muttered.

“Nothing that would make you stronger. The damage is done. I hope you will remember how fragile mortal bodies are, now, Dre. I hope you will remember that Eithne is still more fragile than you, and that helpless babies are as delicate as butterflies. One foolish act, and they can die.”

She heard him inhale painfully. His lungs were drained now, but the flakes of scar tissue that were forming inside of them rattled like dry leaves. He coughed, and Lasrua felt no pity. He turned away, expecting none.

When he had begun to catch his breath he grumbled, “If you can do no more for me, then I want you to leave at once.”

Lasrua glanced down at Eithne, wondering what she might yet do for her. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps her jagged presence would simply pierce the bubble of Eithne’s happiness and make her see how unreal it all was.

And whenever Lasrua began to think of her father, her heart raced, and a tendril of his anguish closed around her throat like an angry hand. She had to go home.

Cian snapped his fingers in the air, startling her heart out of one panic and into another.

“Malcolm!” he said.

Lasrua gasped, “No!” and stumbled against the wall. She looked all around—at her feet, on the ceiling, in the fire—as if by merely snapping his fingers, Cian could make Malcolm appear in any place. Then she looked a second time, because he was not there.

“Eithne promised I would find him,” Cian said.

“No!”

“It amuses me little, dear girl, but it is Eithne’s fond desire.”

“I don’t want you to do—anything—to Malcolm,” Lasrua panted. “With Malcolm…”

“Merely find him for you.”

“No! If he cannot find himself…”

Cian laughed deeply in spite of his pain, preferring in his immense pride to be scornful rather than comfortable.

“My dear child, I believe that man could lose himself crossing over a stile. I could name a dozen of his cousins who would make a finer match for you than he, but if he is the one you want…”

He flicked the back of his hand at her, making the heavy gemstone of his ring flash like a scornful star in the candlelight.

Lasrua was enraged. She heard Eithne’s voice in her head, speaking again the phrase Lasrua had repeated to herself so often it had come to seem a prophecy: “He is your man…”

She would not hear her man scorned, even if she never saw him again.

“What I want is no affair of yours,” she growled in her low voice that was—she desperately hoped—like the voice of her father’s quiet fury.

“I do agree, child,” Cian sighed, “but what Eithne wants is my sole concern. She wants the two of you to be married and come visit us in the spring. And you and she shall gossip about babies and kissing and so forth,” he said drearily, “and Cousin Malcolm and I shall… I don’t know… compare limps.”

“Malcolm will kill you if he ever sets eyes on you,” Lasrua blurted in wicked delight, remembering the knife she had suspected on his hip.

Cian only smiled. “If he succeeds we will at least know who had the worse limp. Come now, dear—”

“No!”

“I promised Eithne…” he sighed.

“Then tell her you did it!”

“I will not lie to her.”

“And I will have no part of your magic! If he wants to come back to me, then he will come, and if he only comes because you made him, then that is not love—that is rape. I see you still have not learned the difference!”

Cian scowled viciously at her, and his thin hands clutched the blankets at his side as though he was about to pull himself up and leap at her. His thin arms were shaking.

Then he fell back onto his pillow, and he coughed and coughed until he beat his fists on the blankets at his side in frustration.

“I could not make him love you if I tried,” he spluttered. “Eithne must have told you that.”

Eithne had told Lasrua many things about Malcolm she could scarcely believe, but nothing else made any sense unless they were true. In her head she heard Eithne’s voice repeating in a weirdly blithe refrain: “He is your man…”

“A message,” Cian panted. “Mes-​sage! She expects me to send a message to him, and what he does thereafter is no concern of mine.”

“I have no message for him,” Lasrua blurted.

It was her pride that said it—the terrible, towering pride that twined itself up ever higher around her with her every loss, with everything she was denied.

It was her strength, and it was strangling her. She was wilting away inside the sturdy framework of its vines, but like Sorin’s she knew it would long stand up stonily in her stead, insisting, “I do not want anything. I do not even care.”

“Oh, come,” Cian said impatiently. “What shall we say? ‘Dearest Malcolm! How I yearn for your love!’”

“No! I have no message for him! If he wants to return, he will return, and if he does not… he will not,” she concluded limply.

“Perhaps he needs to be reminded,” Cian groaned. “Don’t you have something of his? Or anything he gave you? A ring or a letter or a pressed flower or so forth?”

“He never gave me anything,” Lasrua said triumphantly. Her pride only wanted to prove Cian wrong, in spite of the pain it caused the girl within. The girl writhed.

“Oh, that’s brilliant,” Cian sighed. “How am I supposed to find him? Look in every ale house and on top of every harlot between here and the Highlands? Doesn’t Eithne have anything of his? Don’t you at least have something he touched?”

Lasrua’s fingers flitted up to her lips, but Cian’s keen gaze followed, and she hurriedly dropped her hand to her breast as though it were only her necklace she had meant to touch. Then she remembered Malcolm also had.

“My necklace,” she blurted. Her pride squeezed and strangled her and pierced her with thorns, but she had said the word.

“He touched it?” Cian asked dubiously. “Would he recognize it if he saw it again?”

She said, “Of course,” before her pride could scoff at the idea.

Then her outraged pride twisted tight, reminding her that the man might not even remember having kissed her, much less the insignificant detail of her necklace, much less that moment when he had looked deeply into her eyes, seeming almost vulnerable in his confusion, and asked, “Caterpillars?”

Nevertheless Lasrua’s butterfly love had fed for months on little more than that moment, and that kiss, and the dew and the air.

Cian held out his opened palm as if he expected her to drop her necklace directly into it. “Give it to me.”

Lasrua pressed her hands protectively over the pendant. “It was my mother’s…” she whispered, though she was thinking of her father.

“I shall see that it gets back to you,” Cian said wearily. “I am not a butterfly-​necklace thief.”

Lasrua slipped one hand behind her neck to finger the clasp. “What will you do with it?” she asked.

Cian waved his hand at her impatiently. His heavy ring swung and sparkled in the candlelight, grown too large for his sickly hand.

“I shall find him with it,” he explained, “and leave it up to him to find himself. No message?”

“No magic?” she demanded.

The necklace fell open, and the pendant flopped loose into Lasrua’s hand like a dead moth, though she thought she had scarcely touched the clasp.

“No magic,” Cian sighed. “No message?”

Lasrua tossed the necklace onto the blanket beside him. Her pride lashed itself around her and snarled her up in its briars, but the butterfly was already away.

Her pride whispered, “No message.”