Morgana started from her spot against the wall. Her eyes went wide. "What is that? It's not alive." Very cautiously, she put out a hand and tried to coax the thing toward it.

The butterfly, though, didn't seem to respond to Morgana's hand, and kept flying in circles. "It's clockwork," Cara explained. "A machine. Like what the dwarves do. It can't see you, or sense you."

Morgana slowly withdrew her hand. "It's so small. It can fly, so it must be light. How does it work?"

Cara shrugged. "I studied insects," she replied. "The wings are dyed paper. The body is wire. It's full of gears that make it move like a...well, actually more like a hummingbird or a dragonfly than a butterfly," she explained. "Pretty, isn't it?"

"I can see that now." Still very carefully, as if nervous about attracting the creature's attention in spite of what Cara said, she slipped in closer to observe it from a different angle. "Aye, butterflies dance side to side, this one stays in the same path. But still . . . it flies." She looked in awe of Cara. "How did you . . . "

"I studied the real thing," Cara replied. "Enough that I understood how it flew, and then I mimicked it. It isn't difficult, everything in nature has to follow natural laws; for me it's just a matter of copying those laws."

She nodded slowly. "They must have little muscles, of course, they must be too small to see, and they're so delicate that e'en if you tried to take them apart and look, you'd tear them to pieces . . . " She shook her head. "You're making things alive. But out of things that aren't alive. And because they're not alive, you wouldn't have to bother with the bits it used to mate, or eat, or run away from danger. You could . . . " Her lips pressed tight together. "I don't know the word . . . you could . . . take out anything you didn't need."

Cara laughed. "I hadn't thought of it that way; I don't think of them as alive. They're just a mimicry of life," she explained. The butterfly, in the air, slowed its wingbeats and drifted down...Cara reached out a hand to catch it. "I only thought of it as a toy, a diversion;."

"Maybe not alive," Morgana insisted. "But it's real."

Cara frowned and caught the butterfly before it landed. "Well, yes, real," she agreed. "But isn't everything-- oh, do you mean real as opposed to glamourie?"