Chapter XIX One Speckled, One White
XIX
One Speckled, One White
The moth never thought she would be called to such a task. She, like all the others of her kind, had grown complacent, safe in the blooming garden, the greatest labor of her days flitting from one flower or willow frond to another.
She knew that her ancestors had been message-bearers and heralds, but she did not imagine herself an heir to this legacy.
The heroic winged envoys of Berengar were long dead; their stories were recalled with misty affection.
This disrupted none of the garden’s serenity, for not a creature there had been alive to witness the plague and the pillaging, and it was inconceivable to think that war might ever come to the island again.
The moth was chosen not for her particular bravery or intrepidness, but for her coloring, though she did not know that.
She only knew that a gray-clad lady had entered the garden and reached out an arm, beckoning.
Her fingers were tipped with nectar, and the moth flitted down from her perch.
Gratified, she sipped the nectar, and her antennae twitched and hummed as she listened to the lady’s rasping voice.
“You are a good and clever creature,” she murmured, stroking, very gently, the tip of the moth’s wing. “Will you serve me, as your kind once did the conqueror-king of Drepane?”
The moth was moved by curiosity, or perhaps stirred by an ancient, hereditary urge, passed down from those undaunted ancestors.
As if sensing her acquiescence, the lady then fixed a small scroll of parchment to her leg.
She whispered her instructions and promised another taste of sweet nectar upon her return.
And so the moth took flight, leaving behind the garden for the first time in her life.
The winds were propitious, the hot summer breeze gusting her toward her destination.
The moth was slightly unsteady, buffeted about in the air like a bee drunk on pollen.
She passed over bone-white beaches and scorched plains, dead trees forking up at odd angles.
She passed over a dry riverbed, a furrow in the land, and knew, with some unconscious certainty, that this was her path.
She followed it over an open field that bore the scars of a recent skirmish, tattered tents flapping and dented breastplates littering the parched brown grass.
Rather than cowing her, these sights enlivened her; she became ever more conscious of the importance of her duty.
This was precisely what her ancestors had done, steered by the war-wise hand of Berengar.
At last this gash in the earth led her to a place occupied by the living.
She did not know, as she first glimpsed those shining gray towers, like pieces of shale pointing upright, that she was descending upon Ironmanse, the ancestral keep of the House of Eyes.
She circled once the tallest tower, which at its peak was as narrow as an embroidery needle, and then fluttered down to a nearby window.
She perched there for only a moment, glimpsing the firelight and the other goings-on of a castle within, before a man appeared to block her sight.
He was a craggy, rather loutish-looking man, cloaked almost unbecomingly in all the jewels and finery of a noble lord.
His head was as bald and shiny as a shucked pearl, but his beard reached his waist and was a thick, lustrous, impassioned red.
Yet for all this, his face was set and cold.
He stared down a moment at the moth, lips pressed into a thin line, devoid of color, and then clipped the parchment from her leg. He unfurled it, and his jutting brow descended like a storm cloud over his eyes as he read.
The moth waited, her antennae quivering.
His gaze scanned the page once, twice. The parchment crinkled in his hand. With a barked command, he summoned another man to his side, a figure too concealed in darkness for the moth to see.
“The miscreant wretch of a prince wishes to treat with me,” the red-bearded lord rumbled.
“His words are beseeching; it is almost piteous. He writes like a supplicant. For all his brutish strength and pretending virtues, he knows what it is to kneel. I hear he has taken his father’s cock since he was a child. ”
The moth was too much an animal to understand his words, and too much an animal to know that she was bearing a second, silent message, one that perhaps even the red-bearded lord did not comprehend.
She did not know that the soft-voiced lady had carefully chosen her among all the moths in the garden for the color of her wings: one speckled, one white.
This was a dead language, resurrected only in odd elements, and known by two alone.
Still she waited, and more words passed between the men, and at last there came another scroll of parchment fastened to her leg. She flicked off her weariness and flapped her wings, rising again into the blustery summer air. It had grown dark, and the sky was riotous with stars.
As the white monument of Castle Crudele appeared in the distance, the moth was glad to see her journey’s end. She lilted gently back down into the garden, where the lady was waiting. Her skin was pale and luminous in the dark, but her eyes were the faded gray of rain-drenched stone.
She took the note and fed the moth yet another helping of nectar in thanks. Then the moth flitted off, to ensconce herself in the petaled embrace of a white flower, heedless to the gravity of what she had done. She drifted to sleep and dreamed only a moth’s idle dreams.