P. interrogationis, she writes in blue-black ink, hesitating only the briefest moment between that first r, and the second. Closing her little black notebook, capping the pen, she leaves her hands to these tasks as she leans forward, intent on the glass tank before her, the two white plastic pots within packed full of rich wet dirt and barky mulch upholding small copses of slender green stalks, topped by feathery fronds eaten away in countless brown-edged holes like lace, or ash. A dozen or so cocoons depend from this branch, that groin, rippled packets blackly umber but for that one, there, it’s burst, shell of it no longer tight-packed darkness but whitely translucent and delicately struggling free of the last clinging shreds, wobbling its way atop the frond, ungainly with the brand-new bulk of furled and sodden wings, a butterfly.
“You’re early,” she murmurs.
Hesitantly precise, the butterfly picks its way to the very end of a frond that doesn’t seem at all to notice the negligible weight, and there, achingly slowly, it unfurls its great frail span, russet-spotted ruby sheets filigreed and edged with ghostly white, shivering as they dry in the light of the lamp close-set above.
“New addition to the harem?”
She closes her eyes, dips her head. Takes up unseen from the foot of the bed beside her a round of fabric beigely grey, lifts it up over her head to tug it down, a stretchy yoke about her neck. Gathering the softly mass of her long black hair into a practiced bun she holds with one hand as the other pulls that yoke back, a clinging scarf to hold back her hair, to smoothly, closely, frame her face. Only then does she turn on her stool, the flutter of a couple-few other butterflies about the room at her sudden movement, and she looks up to the blurry silhouette there, a mass of white locks draped about dark shoulders on the other side of the cloudy gauze, there in the open doorway of the room. “You are always to knock, first,” she says. “You did agree to that.”
“Perhaps you didn’t hear,” says Agravante.
“I hear a great many voices below,” she says. “Comings, and goings. Am I to be paraded at another gathering?”
“Circumstances,” he says, the form of him shifting as he steps closer to the gauze, coming into focus, concern and resolve squaring off in his expression, “have forced our hand. We’ve made the first move.”
She leans forward, hands on her knees somewhere beneath her long empurpled skirts. “You’ve made a move,” she says. “I wonder: have you made a decision?”
“Action demands decision,” he says.
“But not, so much, reaction,” she says. “You’ve a certain renown for keeping options open, Viscount, but there’s a fine line between such admirable reserve, and dithering till the iron’s cold, and circumstances force.” She takes, then, a deep and fortifying breath. “Which, then, is it to be? Am I to rule a city? Or a suburb?”
“A city,” he says, after only a moment. “By this time tomorrow, I should imagine.”
“So very sudden,” she says. And then, “Are you, here, to quicken me? Is that the plan?”
“I will not be King. I’ve made that clear,” a step back, his features blurring with the distance, and the gauze. “I’ve another in mind, for that.”
“And will I get to meet Señor Another, before the event? Have a word or two, perhaps, with my Bridegroom, before he has my husbanding?”
“You will, you should,” says Agravante, “stay here, and safe; the next two dozen hours or so will prove fraught. Knights will be posted, at your door. And food – are you, hungry? We have,” he says, stepping back, into the hall, “pizza.”
“I’m not,” she says, a shake of her scarf-wrapped head, “hungry. Some tea, perhaps.”
The door swings shut, more firmly, perhaps, than necessary. She sits, without moving, until she hears the scrape of the hasp, and the clack of the lock, snapping home.
