It was a perfect end to what had been a perfect first day.  

 

As she sipped her tea, she watched with pleasure the butterflies dancing through the garden where the coffee shop had placed its benches. All of the castle’s gardens had been designed to attract the pollinators - bees and butterflies.  The clan these days was a very pragmatic business and so, in addition to enhancing the sensory experience of guests as they lingered outside prior to the dinner chimes, the beehives produced a highly in-demand honey. As advertised, it tasted as though it had been kissed by the clan's Sith ancestors. 

 

It felt right to her to be present at this castle here in the Highlands, held by its people for over 1,000 years.  It had never been conquered and so the lineage of its archives were unbroken.  Moreover great care had been taken to preserve those archives for the future and so here she was, the recipient of that foresight and blessing.  The Tòiseach was providing her with unprecedented access, including ancestral diaries, and the richness of those stories had been astonishing.  

 

But for now she needed to turn her thinking brain off and let everything she had learned quietly process in her subconscious; her story would arrive in its own time.  So she had taken herself to the coffee shop and then out into the late autumn sunshine to enjoy the last warmth of her first day.

 

She turned the page of the women’s magazine that had been left on the bench, presumably by some visitor distracting themselves after a long day of touristing.  There were still some from the south with the money to rusticate in this ancient taigh-òsta.  She grinned imagining Knox’s horror at her daring to call the castle a hotel.

 

The magazine was filled with ads for shape-forming underwear.  She paused to skim the article that went with those ads and snorted at a stylist’s admission that one would likely not want to endure wearing a full body suit for any length of time due to its high levels of compression and discomfort.  That compression was de rigueur, however, for any dress occasion.  May the ancestors defend against any curve that appears in a place where a curve was not expected.

 

Not that it was new.  Women had been paying the price of their market commodification for a very long time.  The base economics of desire.  Mediaeval belladonna tincture in your eyes to increase the size of the pupils and make you more attractive.  It blinded them eventually, but served its purpose while being pimped in the marriage market by their family.   This was how one served.  The intersection of class and gender, contained in the juice of a single flower.  

 

“Makes you wonder who would want to be a princess these days,” she thought. 

 

The pale yellow butterfly alighted on the plate beside her.   She did not blame the butterfly one bit for seeing if there were any leftovers it might scavenge. The fine china still held some crumbs from the scone and jam she had just finished devouring.  Nothing, absolutely nothing, could beat the pure heaven of a freshly baked scone with clotted cream, and homemade raspberry jam. 

 

The butterfly flitted away, presumably having found nothing of sufficient interest to keep its attention.  Perhaps the raspberry jam was not the right kind of sweet for a butterfly.  It was after all a bit on the tart side which is why she loved it herself.  She would have to look that up once she got back to her laptop.  What would entice a butterfly to stay? To linger?

 

She remembered reading some advice on the killing of butterflies for human study. The mentor had instructed hobbyists that, in order to prevent the insect from struggling to escape and thereby damaging itself as you killed it, (they were, after all, delicate creatures) there was a certain pinching technique that could be used on its thorax.  

 

The pinched thorax would stun it sufficiently to avoid it inconveniently being less than the perfection you needed once you had finished it off.  Not even a pinch of irony in the instructions that viewing the death of a living creature at the hands of another as “undamaged” was more than a mite … well … sociopathic.

 

The mentor had also suggested that it would take some practice to perfect the exact amount of pressure required.  There had been no indication of how many “damaged-in-its-death-throes” butterflies had been sacrificed and discarded to arrive at said conclusion. On the surface it sounded substantially more than a few.

 

But first! The insect needed to be trapped.  Traps were designed based on what was known about the intended victim’s desires.  So many alluring, innovative ways of drawing living beings in for their death. Were they drawn to light?  Were they drawn to sweetness?  Drawn to blood?  Drawn, she thought, in a rare moment of cynicism, to power?

 

She wondered if instead of princesses, the fairy tales had been about insect collections, whether any of Bluebeard’s first six wives would have needed to die?  It could have eradicated any need for the seventh wife at all.  Or for her or any of the six that preceded her having to figure out how to solve the problem of Bluebeard in the first place. 

 

Killing jars, after all, could come in any size.