“A horrible old cockchafer,” the butterfly shuddered. “So ugly and unrefined! Put his little claws around her waist and flew right off with her, without so much as a bye-your-leave, and her shrieking indignation! Disgraceful.”
A cockchafer. Bugs were often employed by witches, but not usually one so short-lived as a cockchafer. Why, even if he’d been born at the very end of their season, he’d not live more than another two weeks, at the absolute most!
“When,” I managed to say. “When did he take her? And where?”
The concept of “when” seemed to be beyond the butterfly, but at last I got it to say that the kidnapping had occurred further upstream, where it had been small and brook-like. I fought the urge to scream in frustrated rage; I’d come miles too far!
“But why? Why would a cockchafer take my daughter?” I wasn’t really asking the butterfly, just trying to find a thread to follow, any thread, but he answered nonetheless.
“Probably because she’s so beautiful! Cockchafers are ugly and stupid. He probably saw the two of us together, so beautiful in the sunlight, and thought that if he had one of us for his own he would become beautiful! Ugly things always want to possess beautiful things, or else destroy them to keep others from possessing them.”
Destroy them? No! I surged to my feet. There was no time for further conversation- I must retrace my steps immediately! But…
“Sleep now, butterfly,” I said. “And when you wake you can help me rescue my daughter from the cockchafer.”
“Of course I will,” the bug said sleepily. “Beautiful things are always noble and good and heroic.”
I did not answer this silliness as I broke what little camp I’d established- there was a definite irony to the shallow little butterfly calling the cockchafer stupid. I didn’t even find them particularly ugly, myself, but then I’d never been one to put value on appearances. Ugly, beautiful, or somewhere in between, if the insect had harmed my daughter, I’d turn it inside out in the name of testing the “beauty is skin deep” precept.
It was slower going, back upstream. I desperately wanted to rest, but I felt it made the most sense to get as far as I could tonight. I also wanted to cry, but decided to wait. A witch’s tears can be useful in certain powerful spells; there was no point in crying if I wasn’t also going to take the time to harvest them. The butterfly, carefully wrapped in the lilypad and tucked into a pouch at my waist, was presumably sleeping the sleep of the dumb and righteous. I tried not to envy him.
In the end I stopped a little downstream of where I felt the stream was small enough to be considered a brook. Dawn wasn’t far off, now, and I needed to sleep for at least a few hours, so that I would be alert when I searched for… for whatever trace of passage a winged thing might have left.
I sank to my knees in despair, fighting the tears with every ounce of my willpower. I had to sleep. Once I had slept, my brain would be sharp again and surely- surely I would come up with something. Was I a powerful witch, or wasn’t I? Retired or not, reported dead or not, people still knew and feared my name. I was not someone to be trifled with, and I would find who had taken my daughter.
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