Today is the last day of our readalong for The Butterfly Assassin, two and a half months after we started. It’s been my longest blog series, with well over sixty thousand words in posts – not quite as many words as another volume in the trilogy (they tend to run in the 95-100k range), but certainly an additional short book. So if you’re feeling like you’ve read an entire book’s worth of posts, that’s because you have. And if I’m feeling like I’ve written one, well, ditto.
Today is the fifth of December, the day of Emma’s funeral.
A lot of the elements of this scene have been present for a long time – we’ve always had some kind of funeral for Emma at the end of the book, Isabel’s always had a bit of an angsty little speech / internal monologue about what Emma meant to her (though in some previous versions she said more of it out loud), and, crucially, Isabel has always taken revenge and killed Michael.
A lot of details have changed, however. Emma’s funeral used to be the penultimate chapter of the book, while the revenge scene was a chapter of its own, at the very end, with a considerable time skip between them – all the way to the following spring, in the first five drafts. As a result, there was no need for that scene to serve as the final confirmation of Isabel’s return to Comma, because she was already firmly ensconced within the guild – which meant there was no appearance from Ronan at the very end. Instead, we closed on the act of vengeance, of Isabel looking down at Michael’s body… honestly, it had big Aeneid energies, not least because it felt somewhat unfinished.
But before the moment of revenge, we had a bridging scene – a happier moment. In the existing book, Emma inspires Isabel to dye her hair bright colours, in imitation of her mural, but she doesn’t directly engineer it. But originally, it was her idea in a more direct way. From the fifth draft:
It’s spring. Isabel can hear birdsong as she drags herself out of bed into the morning sunlight. The winter felt interminable, any hopeful daffodils quickly beaten down by frost, but today the air feels warm and gentle.
In the kitchen she fills the kettle and, while she waits for it to boil, looks through the cupboard in case there are any clothes packed away that are better suited to the spring air than her winter gear. It’s mostly full of boxes she shoved in there to get them out of the way, but right at the bottom, there’s a package. Daragh brought it round after the funeral, a gift that Emma never had the chance to give, but Isabel couldn’t bring herself to open it.
She finishes making her cup of tea, then retrieves the parcel. Two shopping bags, taped shut – Emma bought them while she was living with Leo, right before she was taken.
Isabel opens the first at the kitchen table, mug in hand, and laughs aloud when she realises it’s a pair of ripped and faded black jeans. The second contains a leather jacket.
You were serious about that portrait, weren’t you? Isabel shrugs the jacket on over her pyjamas. It fits, despite the muscle she’s gained, but there’s a hard lump in the pocket. She reaches in and finds a small box, containing a pair of earrings and a note paperclipped to some money.
Get your hair done, Bel, it says. It’s on me.
Bit of unsubtle pathetic fallacy there, if we take the winter as a metaphor for grief and healing, but hey.
But now there’s only a week between these events, and we don’t see Isabel’s decision to dye her hair – only the results of it. I gave Isabel blue hair with one side shaved because, at eighteen, I desperately wanted this for myself and was far too shy to actually do it, but anyone who’s seen pictures of me aged nineteen or twenty will know that eventually I did shave one side and dye the rest a variety of colours (with blue being my favourite). They might imagine I gave Isabel my own characteristics as a kind of self-insert, but it was actually the opposite – she had it first.
One of the other big differences with the early versions of the final scene is that Michael’s mother, Angela, was present for many of them, and Isabel’s revenge was against them both. Obviously, Angela is no longer involved in the events of the book, and has actually been dead for quite a long time before it starts. Including her grave in this scene was sort of a nod to her earlier presence at this point of the book, but it’s also a way to explain Michael’s actions – his lack of resistance, his general despair. We know that he was traumatised by Angela’s death, and that Judith capitalised on this as a way to manipulate him; now, having lost any hope of safety in the arms of the Ryans’, he’s got no one left in the city to turn to, and no guild to take him in.
Unlike Isabel.
Ronan’s presence in the final scene is an innovation of the sixth draft, and since then has always taken more or less the same form that it takes in the finished book. It’s an ending that tells us the story isn’t over yet – that Isabel’s time with Comma has only just begun, and that she hasn’t succeeded at escaping the guild, despite her best efforts. We’ve also successfully isolated Isabel: she’s left Leo and Mortimer inside at the funeral, she’s killed Michael (her double, her almost-brother), and she’s kneeling beside Emma’s grave. The reliable catharsis of violence has failed her; revenge has proved unsatisfying, and now that it’s done, there’s nothing left to hope for in terms of closure. Nobody is here for her in this moment, except Ronan.
And Ronan isn’t there to comfort her. Just to use her.
Some readers (those who didn’t realise the book was the first in a trilogy, for the most part) have found it too abrupt, too open-ended, and with The Hummingbird Killer ending even more suddenly, with a cliffhanger, I’ve felt significant pressure when working on book three to make sure the ending feels solid and everything important is wrapped up, with just enough ambiguity to leave doors open for the imagination to work.
I’ll be the first to admit that as an author, I struggle with endings. I’m not a planner, so I don’t often know exactly where I’m going until I get there. The Butterfly Assassin is one of the rare exceptions to that, actually, because I knew the approximate plot of book two and even some of book three right from the start, so I knew where I needed to get us in the end… I just also knew that wasn’t an end, yet.
It’s difficult as a debut author, though, because you can’t rely on selling the whole trilogy, and you need to make sure the first book can stand on its own. Which I tried to do (reviewers are torn on whether they think I succeeded!): I tried to give Isabel a coherent character arc, even though it isn’t a character arc that’s finished, and I tried to make sure she either failed or succeeded at her various goals (escaping her parents, success; escaping the guild, fail) rather than leaving them incomplete. I’ve read some deeply unsatisfying first instalments of series where none of the character’s goals or development were wrapped up in the first book, and that always makes me feel like they only gave me half the book.
So, I wanted to get Isabel to a place that felt narratively satisfying, while also being sure that we were all set up for book two. But not a cliffhanger, because people don’t tend to love those from authors they don’t yet trust to pick things up again in a satisfying way. I was prepared to either sell just the first book, or the whole trilogy.
What actually happened was that I sold two books. The Butterfly Assassin and The Hummingbird Killer. And that was… honestly, possibly the worst case scenario on a story level, though better from my point of view than selling one. The ending of The Butterfly Assassin would be an unsatisfying place to end Isabel’s story, and a rather sad one, but it would work. The end of The Hummingbird Killer, though… well, it would make me look like an edgelord trying to make everyone miserable, for starters, but it also leaves Isabel in a far more precarious, transitional position, and would be much less narratively satisfying. Book two is where I break everything – book three is where I intended to fix it.
Fortunately, we did, in the end, sell book three as well, and I got the chance to fix the things I broke – well, those that can be fixed. But those who are lost are still lost, and not coming back. Some people told me that until the funeral scene, they really thought I was going to find a way for Emma not to actually be dead, but I have to say, I find that deeply irritating in books when I’ve already mourned for a character and invested emotions in their loss, so I don’t tend to pull that kind of fake-out.
I do like to give characters time to process their grief, though. I think it’s an essential part of making the deaths hit for readers, but I also think it’s part of the process by which tragedy becomes comforting – catharsis rather than angst, comfort rather than harm. I like tragedies to feel healing, not because nothing bad happens but because terrible things happen and life goes on.
Life goes on. And keeps going on. Even when it’s unbearable, even when we don’t want it to, even when it feels catastrophically rude that it should do so. How dare it go on? But it does. And we endure. And grief doesn’t necessarily go away, but it becomes easier to carry.
Isabel isn’t ready to carry it yet; she’s hardly ready to pick it up in the first place. But allowing her to acknowledge that it’s there is the first step towards that. It’s not revenge that will bring her peace, in the end. It’s time, and the chance to heal.
She’ll get the former, but the latter will be largely out of her reach – at least for a little while. But we’ll get there in the end.
Just as we have come to the end of this readalong. (Although I could, if I were desperate, write a whole post about the author’s note, or the epigraph, or the dedication…)
It’s been a commitment. I won’t lie, I don’t think I anticipated writing 2/3rds of another novel when I started this readalong back in September. It’s achieved my goal of encouraging some comments on my blog, after all these years of silence, though it still hasn’t quite prompted the lively comment section discussions I might have hoped for. To those who have stuck around and shared their thoughts, though, I am immensely grateful to you.
If you’ve enjoyed this series: you’re welcome, I will probably never do this again, thanks for reading. If you’ve been waiting eagerly for it to be over: I’m amazed you’re reading this, also I’m sorry, it’s over now. And if you have finished The Butterfly Assassin (recently or longer ago), please consider leaving a review on Amazon/Goodreads/Waterstones/wherever else you can find to leave a review. They really do help with visibility, and I would be extremely grateful.
But for now: tell me your thoughts on this chapter, on this ending, on this whole book, on the readalong as a format, any and all comments you may have. It’s not your last chance to comment on my blog (you’re extremely welcome to comment on my non-readalong posts in future), but it’s your last chance to comment on this readalong, so I hope to see lots of you in the comment selection below.
Oh boy. We have five chapters to get through in today’s post – the entire climax of The Butterfly Assassin – so I’m going to have to keep things super businesslike and not get too distracted by my notes/past drafts if I want this post to stay under 10k words. Apologies to those who wanted 10k words, but I am not getting paid for this, and have already written 57k in posts for this readalong, so we gotta keep things manageable.
General content warnings that these chapters are pretty violent; some of the excerpts from drafts include descriptions of violence and some of the discussion will focus on it.
First off, a quick summary of what goes down in these chapters / on this day:
On the 27th of November, Isabel and Michael travel to Isabel’s parents’ secret guild, the ransom in tow. Ian Ryans insists on giving them a tour of his new guild, which he’s named Katipo, after the spider Latrodectus katipo.* While showing them around, Ian reveals that Isabel’s poisoning was not entirely intentional – he intended to use her as a hiding place for his poison, but because she ran away, the pellet wasn’t removed in time before the coating broke down and the poison was released. Isabel is, to put it lightly, not particularly happy about this revelation.
Among other projects, one of the things Ian is doing with Katipo is training children, the one thing that Comma forbid him from doing after Cocoon was shut down. Isabel is horrified to encounter the children, and realises that her own safety is meaningless unless her parents are prevented from hurting anyone else. After the tour, Ian reluctantly allows Isabel to see Emma, and accepts the ransom in exchange for her release – if Isabel will stay. Isabel begs Michael to take Emma to safety, which he does, leaving Isabel trapped with her father, who locks her in the cell where Emma was being held.
Eventually, Isabel manages to break out of the cell, planning to save herself and the children her father was training. On her way out, she runs into Mortimer and Emma: Mortimer, who came looking for her just as she’d asked him to, and Emma, who refused to stay outside and safe and insisted on accompanying him. The three go looking for the children, separating to check different rooms. Emma is then threatened by Michael, who has been loyal to Judith Ryans all along, and by extension Ian. Isabel tries to negotiate with him, and when that fails, to fight him, but Michael kills Emma, and sets the lab alight in the struggle that follows. He flees; Mortimer and Isabel rescue the kids and carry Emma’s body to safety. Comma have attacked Katipo in the meantime and they’re forced to fight their way out. Toni Rolleston is killed. Isabel comes face-to-face with her father one last time, and kills him. Then she leaves his guild for the last time.
So I think it’s safe to say that 27th November isn’t a great day for Isabel.
Where do we start with these scenes? A lot has changed in this section of the book. Katipo didn’t originally exist; the earliest drafts involved Hummingbird. By the fifth draft, the third guild and Ian’s insistence on giving Isabel a tour of it had entered the story, but I hadn’t figured out that he was training children. That came in the sixth draft, once I drilled down into his motivations and figured out what he wanted to do that Comma wouldn’t let him do (at which point it became the obvious direction to take things in).
Introducing the children then meant a lot more of Isabel’s emotional arc was resting on these moments – in order to decide to rescue them, she needs to get past the trauma response that says I survived, why shouldn’t they? and reach the point of saying Nobody should have to go through that. Which is what Emma has been trying to tell her for a long time, but she hasn’t really been able to believe it until she sees those kids and realises exactly how young they are – and by extension, how young she was when she started training.
It also gave Isabel a reason to go back into the building after escaping, which meant there was a lot more going on here. Initially, Emma died much more quickly: Michael killed her on Ian’s orders while they were still in the cell, and Isabel was left with her body. Now, of course, Isabel’s escaped the cell long before any of that goes down, and Emma’s death comes in a moment of direct conflict, rather than being over before Isabel’s even had time to process the betrayal. These changes also meant it was Emma’s choice to be in the building at all: she had escaped, and was outside, and went back for Isabel, putting herself in danger. That made her a more active character, rather than one who was simply kidnapped and then killed, but also made the death more dramatic and emotional.
And Michael – Michael’s exact involvement has changed somewhat. Originally, before I introduced the subplot that he is a sad orphan who was taken in by the Ryans’ and basically functions as a surrogate sibling for Isabel, his mother, Angela, was part of the other guild – Hummingbird, first, and then Katipo once it started to exist. His betrayal was thus a fairly simple one, and he’d only ever been on their side. Now, it’s a lot more complicated, tied up in his own feelings; he’s far more loyal to Judith than to Ian, and has been following conflicting orders throughout, juggling them with some of his own feelings.
Oh, and also, Mortimer used to be Angela’s brother and therefore Michael’s estranged uncle. That was a thing. I cut that after the fifth draft and gave Mortimer a proper backstory and set of motivations that weren’t just your classic “surprise! Everyone’s related!”, but it definitely shaped some of those earlier drafts. I can’t even remember what I was trying to achieve with that, to be honest; although it’s referenced frequently in my notes, I still always forget that it was the case until I see it again in the old drafts.
All in all, then, we turned one chapter into about three and set everything up for Optimum Pain and Bonus Character Development.
Given how much of this part of the book wasn’t in the earlier drafts, let’s focus on the part that was: Emma’s death.
Like Nick, Emma has always died. There has never been a version of this book where she survived. There never could have been, because she is the living embodiment of hope and a symbol of Isabel’s life outside the guild, and Isabel has lost both of those things by the end of this book. Therefore Emma could never have survived: if she had, this would have been a different kind of book, and I was always writing a tragedy.
I did think about it, though. Some of the time in edits, I tried to work out if there was any way I could let her live. But the answer was no, if I wanted the rest of the trilogy to work at all; those who’ve read The Hummingbird Killer will know that many of Isabel’s ongoing choices are shaped by grief and guilt over this death, and without that, I would have had to write a different trilogy.
Let’s look at how it went down in the fifth draft:
She takes the key to the rucksack from her jacket pocket and tosses it to her father, forcing him to pick it up from the filthy floor. “You’ve got your ransom,” she says. “We’re leaving now.”
“But I still have so much to show you.”
“I don’t care.” Isabel tries to help Emma up, but she’s not strong enough. There’s no way she’ll get her back to the hospital like this. “Michael, give me a hand,” she says, and he steps forward and lifts Emma in one easy movement.
She makes a choking noise, and coughs blood.
For a second, Isabel can’t understand what she’s seeing, and then she sees the blade protruding from her friend’s chest, held by Michael as he cradles her like a sleeping child.
“No,” she whispers. “No, Michael, what have you done?”
“Isabel,” says Emma, and closes her eyes, and it’s obvious that she’s dead because you can’t be a killer without recognising death in all its forms. But this is far crueller than any Isabel’s worked and it doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t make sense.
In the following chapter, she managed to persuade Michael to open up about his motivations, which is when we got to see his alternate backstory, which has significant knock-on effects on the origins of his relationship with Isabel and their backstory together:
She takes three deep breaths, ignoring the stench of the room, and says, “I don’t understand how Angela can be your mother.”
“Oh, come on,” he says. “You really think someone with my level of training would mess up an assignment that badly by accident? I screwed it up because I needed them to chuck me out.”
“That’s not an answer.”
He sighs. “My mother was Hummingbird. My father was Comma.”
For a second, she wonders whether their relationship was anything like the star-crossed romances Emma was reading, and she wants to turn to her friend and joke about it, and then she remembers that Emma’s dead and won’t ever make jokes about trashy romance novels again. But she still isn’t crying, she notices. Is she going to? Does she know how to do that anymore?
“So…” she says.
“Dad won the argument about which guild would train me, which was fine until he died and I was effectively stranded there. They wouldn’t let me see Mum while I was still part of Comma, so I knew it was time to leave. She helped me plan my way out.”
“People died. I nearly died.”
“Yeah, and I saved you. I didn’t want any more collateral damage and I was counting on you to plead for me so that I didn’t end up dead. It worked. You’re very predictable, you know. You should probably work on that.”
“You did all that so you could leave?”
“You should know they’re not fond of letting people walk away.” He shrugs. “Hummingbird was as much my family as Comma. My sister was there – she’s not an agent, she’s just a kid, but she’s family. And of course, you’ve met my mother. I had no reason to stay, but when Toni persuaded the guild to take me in again, I realised I could play both sides.”
Ah yes, Michael’s sister. I can’t really talk about that plotline without giving non-spoilers for The Hummingbird Killer – which is to say, one of the characters in THK used to be Michael’s sister, and isn’t anymore, but I can’t really give any more details than that without some actual spoilers for things that do happen in the book, so, uh, ask me about that one in DMs if you’ve read THK, I guess.
By the time I was editing the book in 2020, I was trying to rework Emma’s death scene to be more drawn-out and emotional, but I was having some trouble with the exact logistics of lifting somebody up and stabbing them at the same time. I ended up asking one of my housemates (it was lockdown, after all) if she would come and be a body for me, so that I could figure out where everybody’s arms were going, a request she took very well. (I repaid this assistance by dedicating The Hummingbird Killer to my 2019-20 housemates.)
But notwithstanding my efforts to resolve the limb logistics, I ended up changing how it went down entirely, as well as moving the entire encounter to the lab – a chance to force Isabel to face her nightmares and flashbacks by putting her in a location that reminds her of her childhood, adding an extra layer to her suffering in this scene. This also meant it was much easier to subsequently set things on fire, and I made sure to painstakingly research the best way of doing this by going into the STEM channel of the grad student Discord server I was in at the time and asking, “Hey, how would you accidentally set a lab on fire?”
(They gave me a wide range of crucial information, from which chemicals shouldn’t be stored together to how sprinklers and other safety precautions work to the materials used for lab work surfaces to which way doors in labs typically open. I have subsequently forgotten all of it, but anything that needed to be in the book ended up in it, so that’s fine. Thank you, STEM nerds.)
By October 2020, then, this scene had almost achieved its final form – children, Michael, gunshot, fire – except that the fire was set deliberately. This change happened because I realised Michael is too scared of Ian and Judith Ryans to risk pissing them off by damaging their guild on purpose — and, most importantly, he is not actually trying to kill Isabel, since her parents want her alive. Moreover, once I moved this scene to the lab, it made even less sense for him to start the fire on purpose, because the chance of it reaching the gas supply and leaving nothing but a smouldering crater was too high — his self-preservation instincts aren’t the best, but he’s not going to take that kind of risk. But to do it by accident… yes, that worked, that made it his fault while not introducing the gaping plot hole of incoherent motivations.
It turns out, you see, that the answer to, “Why would he do this?” cannot solely be, “Because he’s a melodramatic edgelord,” which was, in fact, the only defence I had to offer for this scene:
“Rule one,” says Michael. “Don’t get attached to someone who can’t look after themselves.”
She looks back at him and her rage sets her alight. She would burn herself alive if there was a chance the blaze would kill him too. She has to force the words out through gritted teeth: “I’ll kill you.”
But when she reaches for a weapon, she finds none.
Michael pushes himself onto his knees, onto his feet, clinging to the wall. His face is still twisted with pain, but he gives her a cruel smile as he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small silver lighter.
“Good luck playing the Pied Piper,” he says, and flicks it alight, dropping the flame onto the carpet.
He must have planned this. Must have soaked half the room in alcohol. The fire sheets up instantly, hiding him from view, and she doesn’t have to chase after him to know that he’ll be long gone before she even gets to the door.
So she stays where she is: motionless, Emma’s body in her lap, waiting for this room to become their funeral pyre and burn them into ash the colour of grief.
Funny how actually thinking about your characters’ motivations can make your book better, who knew.
Anyway, all of that brings us to the fight in the lobby, and Isabel trying to get the children out – including one particularly young redhaired girl whom you should definitely remember because she’s going to come up again elsewhere in the trilogy – and Toni Rolleston’s death. As I mentioned a few posts ago, Toni originally died earlier in the story, off-screen, during an attempt to rescue Emma herself. By shifting her death to here, though, I gave her a chance to redeem herself: she risks herself to help save a child who should never have been in guild training, the way she didn’t save Isabel. And she dies. But the girl gets out.
I love mirrors, I love doubles, I love circularity. This whole section of the book is about events coming full circle and cycles of harm being broken or altered: the guild who didn’t help Isabel earlier does come back for her here, the people who failed her try to help her, Isabel tries to break the cycle for the next generation so that they don’t have to suffer the way she did. Things change in this moment, and that temporary break in the violent cycles that have trapped Isabel up to this point set her up for the next misbelief that’s going to cause her trouble: there is safety in the guild. (Because as we’ll see in The Hummingbird Killer, there is not.)
And, as such, this also needed to be the moment when Isabel came face-to-face with her father again. First she shoots him in the kneecap, and then she kills him.
She didn’t always kill him. As late as the fifth draft, she couldn’t bring herself to do it; even in the notes I wrote during Author Mentor Match, the climax of the ‘revenge tragedy’ elements of the book were only achieved by proxy:
Michael is a foil for Isabel, but to her, he represents her father. She fails to kill her father when she has the chance, but she does kill Michael. It’s the conclusion of that previous confrontation, but only by proxy, as Isabel can never be truly free of her father – only of versions of him. BAM, LITERARY SYMBOLISM. Put THAT in your essay and analyse it.
So the end of the road isn’t Isabel failing to kill her father, it’s Isabel killing Michael, who is
a foil for herself, under her father’s control, and therefore symbolic of her breaking out of that, and
a double for her father, whom she couldn’t bring herself to kill when she had the chance, and therefore a symbol of how she’ll never be truly free of him but can rid herself of his proxies, and
the mechanism through which Isabel’s final symbol of safety (Emma) was lost, making revenge her only (empty) way of responding to that.
By the sixth draft, though, I’d realised that proxies weren’t enough, and I needed to permanently take Ian Ryans out of the picture, and let Isabel be the one to do it.
I deliberated hard before changing this, because I don’t believe in revenge, and I don’t think you break a cycle of violence with more violence. I didn’t want to seem like I was endorsing it as a way of solving problems – a lot of the time, it just makes more of them. But I understand Isabel’s logic here: she knows as well as anyone else does that killing Ian won’t undo anything that’s been done to her, but having just rescued those other children from him, knows that to prevent this cycle from perpetuation, she needs to remove him from the picture. And, well, she’s not wrong, exactly, because she’s trapped in a system where there is no other justice and no other safety.
I think Isabel wants some other form of justice. She doesn’t want the responsibility for ending this: she wants her parents to be held accountable by a third party, and forced to make amends. But she knows it won’t happen, because Ronan told her as much. And she is not at the point in her character arc where she can prioritise her own desire not to be judge, jury and executioner over the fact that if she doesn’t do this, nothing will change and nobody will be saved. Killing her father means being what her father made her, but it’s the only way to stop him doing the same to others.
By changing this, then, I wasn’t endorsing this action as the right thing to do – I really don’t think there is a right thing to do in Isabel’s position – but acknowledging that given Isabel’s current state of mind and her other options for justice, it didn’t feel realistic that she would ever have done anything else. For starters, she would need to value herself and see herself as something other than a killer to take any action that doesn’t involve, well, killing someone. And she’s a long way off reaching that point.
That’s not to say the versions of this book where Isabel didn’t kill him involved leaving Ian unharmed. From the fifth draft:
“You should have kept your mouth shut,” she tells him again, and fires a single shot at his leg.
It hits him in the kneecap, and he screams, and Isabel turns and walks towards that square of daylight. Her father calls out, triumphant despite his gasps of pain: “I knew you wouldn’t kill me.”
Isabel looks back, smiles, and fires a second shot into the other leg. “Death’s too good for you, father dearest,” she says. “But you’ll rot in hell soon enough.”
He’s still screaming as she drops the gun on the bloodstained floor and walks out into the bright winter air.
(One of these days I will publish a book where nobody gets kneecapped. But both The Butterfly Assassin and The Hummingbird Killer contain Graphic Violence Against Kneecaps, so apparently it is not this day. I don’t know if this is a sign of some deep-rooted psychological issue about knees, or if it’s simply a very practical place to shoot somebody if you don’t want them to run away but also don’t plan for them to die immediately, but it sure is a thing I keep writing about, for some reason.)
All in all, the climax of this book offers us a pyrrhic victory. Isabel achieves her initial goal of escaping her parents’ control – but only at the cost of Emma, and only by ending up back in the hands of the guild. She’s permanently eliminated the threat posed by her father, but only by becoming the person he spent years moulding her into. She may have helped the children escape, but we’ll see as the trilogy continues that there’s a lot more to do before the systems that traumatised her are actually changed for good. And while Katipo has been destroyed, the damage it’s done – including to Isabel herself – can’t be undone.
And all the while, Michael is still in the wind, and Judith is nowhere to be seen…
Reviewers seem quite torn on this climax. This partly depends whether they’re here to cry or whether they actually wanted Isabel to succeed at living a normal life with a normal friend – some people are furious that I killed Emma, and not in a complimentary “I hate you for making me feel things” way, but in the “This isn’t the story I thought I was signing up for” way. That’s fine; you can’t please everyone. I always knew what story I was telling, and it always led us here.
I think reactions also vary depending on how people felt about Michael. One of the things that changed a lot in the late drafts is how much effort I put into making him seem sympathetic and building a rapport between him and Isabel, even if it’s a rapport largely based on shared traumatic backstory. In earlier drafts, there was less of that going on, so his betrayal didn’t hit nearly as hard.
At the same time, I’ve been foreshadowing it all along – for example, Isabel mistaking Michael for her father when she’s lost in a flashback at Grace’s lab, because he’s functioning as Ian-by-proxy all along. And he’s Isabel’s double, but just as Emma is the double who was never taken by Comma in the first place, Michael is the double who never got out. If his betrayal wasn’t a surprise to you, that’s fine; it means you caught the clues I was seeding in. I never intended it to rest solely on a “surprise! Plot twist!” setup, but to work equally well as a “I know something the protagonist doesn’t and I can’t stop her from making bad choices” kind of plotline. (I’m a chronic re-reader, so I like books to work even when you know where they’re going.) But at the same time, I think there are layers to it that hit harder when they’re a shock.
Still, it’s divisive, and not just because some readers didn’t realise this was the start of a trilogy and didn’t realise I would be making things worse rather than wrapping them up. So I’m curious how you all felt about it, and about any other thoughts you have on these chapters. I feel I had to rush through them quite quickly, since so much happens in one day (this post is already over 4k long, so imagine how bad it would’ve been if I hadn’t tried so hard to restrain myself); I’ve inevitably missed some really interesting detail that I’ll be sad not to have discussed. Which means it’s your job to spot those details, and ask me about them!
We have just two posts left in this readalong series, each covering half of chapter 38. And then we’ll be done, and I will finally be able to blog about something else. I will miss it, and I will also be deeply relieved. Perhaps youse feel the same…
*Sidenote: this spider takes its scientific Latin name from a Māori term for the spider, katipō. According to Wikipedia, this name derives from the Māori words “kakati” (to sting) and “pō” (night), thus meaning night-stinger, due to a belief that the spider bites at night. This would be an interesting symbolic counterpoint to Isabel as the Moth, if it were intentional. As a matter of fact, I was entirely unfamiliar with the Māori roots of the name, having encountered it via a more general discussion of the Latrodectus family and taken the Latin name without exploring its etymology. I certainly had no intention of co-opting an Indigenous term to use for an evil organisation, though I may inadvertently have done so. I realised once this was pointed out that my choice of name may be hurtful, belonging as it does to a wider trend of white authors treating Indigenous and minoritised languages as fodder for fantasy without considering the impact on speakers of those languages. I hope that the Latinised spelling of the name makes it clear that I was drawing from the scientific term, but I apologise for my lack of further research here. Within the universe of the book, I can only attribute the use of this name to Ian Ryans being exactly the sort of person to co-opt whatever terminology he wanted for whatever purposes he wanted to use it for, with absolutely no regard for the impact of his actions on anybody at all, because he is a prick.
We are so close to the end of this, guys. Today’s readalong post is a reasonably short one, covering only chapter 32, but tomorrow is a bumper edition, so get ready for that. Might end up being the longest post I’ve written on this blog, which would be saying something, because I have no self control when it comes to wordcount.
I’m actually not sure where to start with this chapter. Nearly everything I might want to comment on is something that’s on the page, rather than off it – and I want the words on the page to speak for themselves, so I’m wary of over-explaining them. Perhaps I should start with what wasn’t always there: this moment where Ronan almost seems sympathetic in the face of Isabel’s trauma, when she realises that the only way to rescue Emma is to put herself back in her parents’ power and trust the guild to get her out, and her backup plan, relying on Mortimer for help. Which is to say, basically the entire chapter.
This scene is one that was particularly affected by following some of the ideas and exercises in the book Story Genius by Lisa Cron. Although I didn’t follow any of the exercises to the letter (I found it a little too prescriptive, especially when working with a book I’d already written), the basic outlines were useful for emotional turning points like this – moments when characters needed to make a crucial decision.
Story Genius talks about characters having a ‘misbelief’ which drives their actions: something they’ve internalised that causes them to make certain decisions, until they eventually realise, as part of their character arc, that it’s not true and they need to do something differently. (I am paraphrasing wildly; you may want to read the book if character motivations are a focus for you.) In my notes, then, I have this about Isabel/this scene:
Isabel’s initial misbelief is that she can be safe if she leaves the guild and her father, which she’s rationalised / realised as “go to school”. By the end she realises that her father is not synonymous with the guild, and that in order to be safe she needs the guild’s help to destroy / escape him.
This sets her up for b2’s misbelief: that the guild is safe and that nobody can hurt the Moth, so while it’s truer than her initial belief, it’s still not the end of her arc. [book 2 and 3 spoilers redacted]
So while b1 is a complete arc re: overcoming her childhood trauma and walking away from her parents, it’s not the end of her arc as a person.
Isabel’s aha! moment begins when she puts herself back in her father’s power and trusts the guild / Ronan to get her out. That’s her realising that her father ≠ the guild, and that it was her father she was running from. Here, she’s literally putting her safety in Ronan’s hands, which takes considerable courage considering that what she’s asking of the guild (“get me away from my parents”) is what they have already failed to do when she was younger.
This moment was already there (esp. with Ronan reminding her that it’s temporary), but needs to be more emotional; we need to not see her fully trusting the guild up until that point, and resisting them for much longer than she does in the current draft.
It was therefore only in the sixth draft that we really dug into those emotional undercurrents in this scene. Previously, the question of relying on the guild to help Emma was already settled, and tied up with the question of whether Isabel would work for the guild at all; now, the latter ship has sailed, but that doesn’t mean she trusts them, and this moment is important. If she’s going to put herself back in her father’s power, she needs to have somebody she trusts to get her out again.
And that person isn’t Ronan. If it was, she wouldn’t call Mortimer later in the chapter, and set up contingency plans.
Let’s jump back to before I figured out that this was an emotional pinch point, though – to the fifth draft, when the main issue at this point in the story was practicalities. We had more characters involved (there were a lot more secondary characters in the early drafts in general, but they weren’t contributing much, so a lot of them got cut), but far fewer feelings:
“We have to look like we’re rising to their bait. We send Isabel in with the ransom, alone. I’ve also been wondering whether we ought to send her with her father’s poison – the sample and the formula – as a goodwill offering.”
Isabel shudders at the thought of being anywhere near the poison that almost destroyed her. “I know they sent the ransom note to me,” she begins, feeling like there’s a rock in her throat, “but my parents are there, and I don’t think I can face them by myself.”
Ronan looks at her for a moment, and then says, “Okay.” He writes ransom on the whiteboard, and adds Isabel’s name next to it. “We won’t make you go alone, but we need to think carefully about who we send.”
“Mortimer,” she suggests immediately.
“He’s a civilian.”
“Which means they won’t see him as a threat.”
“We have no authority to send him in there.”
“Better to send someone who can defend themselves,” says Kathy. “Are there any agents you’d trust to go with you?”
Isabel has an extremely small pool of options. “Michael, then,” she says.
Ronan adds Michael’s name to the board. “Fine. The two of you will go there and seem to cooperate. Whatever they ask, you do it. You hand over the ransom, act like you’re surrendering, and bargain for Emma’s release. Make them think you’re not a threat.”
“They’ll probably try and recruit you,” says Kieran. “Pretend to go along with it, if that’s what it takes to get your friend out.”
Pretend to put herself back in her parents’ power. Isabel feels sick, but if it’ll save Emma… “And then what?”
(Those who’ve read The Hummingbird Killer will recognise Kieran. He’s now only present for a couple of sentences in The Butterfly Assassin, and it’s easy to overlook him entirely, but he used to have a more significant role here.)
The Ronan in the finished version of this chapter is an interesting one – one who seems, almost, to respect Isabel’s autonomy as an individual. That’s not a Ronan we see very often, and while he attributes this to Daragh’s influence, there’s a chance this is all just another game that he’s playing. He knows that if he offers Isabel a choice, she’ll agree to do it; if he doesn’t, she’s more likely to disobey.
But Isabel – well, the Isabel we see here is an Isabel we met much earlier in the book, reaching desperately for those grounding techniques Emma taught her: five things you can see…
We also get a small worldbuilding detail at this point in the book: the idea that there are guild courts, to prosecute individuals for crimes that cause harm to the guilds they’re a member of, such as defecting to form their own organisation. These are separate from civilian courts, which try individuals for more general crimes. Ian and Judith Ryans can’t be tried in a civilian court – or even a guild court – for abusing Isabel, because that would mean talking about Cocoon, which is still top-secret; Comma are not willing to admit to its existence. As such, they can only be prosecuted for their actions against Comma.
This means that there is very little hope for Isabel that they will be brought to justice for their treatment of her – it will always be brushed under a carpet of secrecy. In the absence of justice, her only hope is vengeance, and Ronan, noncommittally, acknowledges that, as he has done since a much earlier draft. From the fifth draft:
“Well, then, I should probably warn you that unless somebody is there to stop me, I might kill them.”
“I would prefer it if you didn’t,” says Ronan evenly. “But once the attack begins, I understand that things may happen that are outside of my control.”
Which is almost like permission.
And then Mortimer.
Mortimer has always been involved in the ending of this book, but his presence was a little… random, until I realised I needed to show Isabel actually setting him up to help her. It’s the perfect opportunity to display his priorities. Mortimer will have read the newspapers. He knows about Oliver Roe and Nick Larrington, and he’s astute enough to connect them to Isabel. But the first thing he asks is not, How could you?, and he doesn’t hang up on her in disgust.
He asks, Are you safe?
And this is why Isabel called him. Gambling on the idea that his protective instincts might, in the end, apply to her too. But she can’t let herself look at that idea straight-on, so she pretends that she’s calling him only for Emma’s sake, because he’s friends with Leo, and Leo cares about Emma, and therefore by extension he should care. It’s much easier to ask for a favour if she pretends it’s not for her.
Mortimer sees through her, though. And he offers his help, because of course he does.
This chapter, then, has improved vastly since I realised that it needed to be a turning point in Isabel’s emotional arc: putting herself back in her father’s power, relying on the guild for help… but not only on them. Realising that she has allies outside the guild, too, who can help her when Comma fail – that is so important, considering she started this book believing the only person she could trust was herself. And it sets us up quite nicely for our climax, and the question of whether Isabel was right to put her trust in those people.
Which will be tomorrow’s post(s). So in the meantime, tell me how you’re feeling about this chapter. Do you trust Ronan to get Isabel out? Do you believe that he genuinely cares about her autonomy here? What about Mortimer – do you think Isabel was right to call him, knowing there was a risk he’d never want to speak to her again after Nick and Oliver?
Leave your thoughts in the comments, and I’ll be back tomorrow for chapters 33-37.
Today’s post for our readalong of The Butterfly Assassin covers chapters 30 and 31 – we’re in a rapid slide towards the end of the book now, and accelerating (Monday’s post is going to need to cover five chapters, and I haven’t figured out how to do that yet. Might have to split it!)
On the 25th of November, Isabel deals with the aftermath of killing Oliver Roe and Nick Larrington. This comes in the form of Daragh trying to persuade her to talk about her feelings (a doomed endeavour, but we love him for trying); Ronan formally welcoming her into the guild and giving her the nickname she’s had since she was a child in training, the Moth; the newspapers reporting on Oliver’s death, forcing Isabel to accept the reality of what she’s done; Emma not answering the phone when Isabel calls, making her think her friend has turned her back on her because of what she’s done; and Leo breaking into the hospital to deliver the news that Emma has been kidnapped.
So that’s… a lot.
It’s been a while since we had a worldbuilding-focused discussion, but there are a few bits in this chapter that are worth dwelling on. In particular, there’s a worldbuilding detail in this chapter which is different in the audiobook and the ARCs compared to the finished book. (The audiobook was recorded from the text used for the ARC, so any last-minute changes didn’t get incorporated.)
This detail is Isabel’s comment about the Esperan newspapers, and the amount of information they share about guild kills. In the finished book, it reads:
Daragh tosses a newspaper onto the bed. She pushes it away without looking at it. ‘They’re speculating about you, you know. Well, about Comma’s newest. No calling card means no pseudonym to claim the kill.’
She doesn’t want to put her name on this, to give the city a target for its condemnation. Only La Revuo publishes pseudonyms alongside obits, but somehow word spreads beyond the pages of the guild newspaper and across the rest of Espera. Three Swallowtail kills this month, people say, if they’re the kind to keep track of that. Or: Nothing from Skipper in a while. Do you think they’ve retired? Those kinds of comments are made with relief, or fear: an older agent off the circuit, no longer a threat, means a new one coming to take their place and their name.
The version in the ARC and audiobook is almost the same, except for the first half of that second paragraph:
She doesn’t want to put her name on this, to give the city a target for its condemnation. Only the guild papers – the Times and the Express for the adjacents, La Revuo for top six – publish pseudonyms alongside obits, but word spreads across the rest of the city anyway.
It’s a small difference, the idea that pseudonyms are only published in one newspaper rather than three. And, honestly, the change doesn’t matter that much. I made it because by the time I was doing these proofreads, I had already drafted The Hummingbird Killer, and there were certain scenes in that book that rested on the idea that only La Revuo was officially a guild paper, and that this paper alonecontained the pseudonyms and this level of information about guild killers.
Those scenes mostly ended up getting cut, so although the same detail is referenced in a few places in The Hummingbird Killer, there are no longer any plot points resting on them the way there were before. (For example, one scene involved a civilian character getting their hands on La Revuo and joining some dots about Isabel’s activities as a result; that’s gone.) La Revuo remains the only official guild paper in the trilogy, but it doesn’t really matter that it is. Except that it means the ARC and audiobook have a continuity error that the paperback doesn’t have, which I find vaguely amusing.
(And this, kids, is why you don’t quote from ARCs without checking quotations against the published book, especially if you’re resting an argument on a tiny detail like this…)
Espera’s newspapers have played various roles in this book so far, obviously, and we’ve talked about them in some of the earlier posts. One question that was raised in the comments was why an otherwise slightly futuristic city like Espera, in 2029, with its solar panels and generally high level of technology, would still be relying on print media. I answered this in the comments, but I thought I’d circle back to it now, since we’re talking about papers again – and even newspapers for guild members, who otherwise have access to resources that civilians don’t have.
There are two main reasons I used newspapers so much in this trilogy. Number one: the aesthetic and the vibes. I can’t lie and pretend that wasn’t part of it! The simple practicalities of a physical object that characters could interact with, deliver, see in passing, crumple into a ball, print in secret, hide from each other… it has so many possibilities that purely digital media doesn’t have. Plus, I’d drawn a lot of my ideas about closed cities and resistance to oppressive regimes from 20th century history, and radio and newspapers were a recurring theme – naturally, they crept into my worldbuilding.
But reason number two is a more considered one: print media is a lot easier for the guilds to control. When you have social media and digital communication, there is a democratising of information that makes it very hard to maintain an Official Narrative and restrict sources of information. You can see it right now, in the discrepancies between official news sources talking about Gaza, and the Instagram videos from young journalists on the ground in the area talking about their own experiences. The official narrative fails, because there are too many voices. If you want to control a city effectively and squash resistance to your authority, you need to control the narrative and you need to control the news. That’s a lot easier to do if you’ve got print media that has to pass censors and receive official approval to be printed than if anyone in the city can share information online.
As the trilogy goes on, of course, we see more and more of the cracks in that narrative wall: the Free Press and their Weekly Bulletin are only the start of that, and once they go digital, it’s even harder to stop their words getting out. But the fact that even guild members primarily (or solely) have access to news via official papers like La Revuo is a reminder that everyone in Espera is living within a tightly controlled net of information, and it’s hard to break out of that when it’s so complete.
Another worldbuilding detail: the calling cards. We’ve known since those early chapters dealing with Ian Crampton’s death that the guilds have ways of “claiming” their kills, and some of that happens internally, with guild administrators confirming assignments to be their work. But some of it happens on the spot, when a field agent leaves a calling card with a body. And on that card will be their pseudonym.
I don’t know if we talked about this earlier in the series. I know that in one of Isabel’s phonecalls with Emma, they do talk about her mother, and the fact that her mother is known as Swallowtail, but I’m not sure that’s a detail I picked out in the readalong. (It’s complete coincidence that the butterfly on the book’s cover is a swallowtail, but I found it pleasing that Judith Ryans is haunting and shaping Isabel’s story even by accident, supplanting her name with her own. There’s some great symbolism there.)
So. Pseudonyms. Reported, as we’ve learned above, in La Revuo, a way of building an agent’s reputation. We learned a little about the department names way back on 27/09, but I didn’t dwell on pseudonyms, because I knew they’d come up later. And now they have. From my notes:
All of Comma’s field agents (contract killers) have codenames relating to types of butterfly. These are associated with specific kills and occasionally someone commissioning a hit might ask for a particular agent.
The names are not limited to butterflies of the nymphalidae family and some, like Isabel’s butterfly of night / moth,aren’t really butterflies at all.
They mostly use abbreviated English names like “Swallowtail”, “Grayling”, “Fritillary”. A few agents use Esperanto names as well, like Isabel, but many species don’t have names in Esperanto. The guild has created some Esperanto species terminology not in use outside the city, primarily for use in its own files (not with civilians).
There are not so many contract killers active as to need to use Latin names, but when somebody dies or retires, their name may be reused.
Butterfly of Night was the original title of The Butterfly Assassin, from 2014 through to 2021, when we sold it and began looking for a title that more clearly signalled the book’s genre. It derived from French, actually: the French for Moth is papillon de nuit, a phrase that came up when I was frantically learning a ton of French vocabulary on Memrise right before my A-Level exams. I thought it sounded badass, and combined it with the half-formed ideas I was playing with about an assassin story to give Isabel her nickname.
Isabel hints a few times throughout the trilogy that she earned the nickname in training because she suffered from nightmares and insomnia, and so was often up and about during the night. Is that the whole story? I’m not sure, and I deliberately left it open. It’s certainly all she gives us, but it’s fragmented in a way that suggests there might be more to it. Maybe she just doesn’t like to dwell on it because she doesn’t like thinking about the causes of the nightmares.
Comma’s symbol, on the other side of the card, looks something like this:
(I drew this in 2018, in a rather poor red biro, if you’re wondering why it looks so bloodlike.)
Initially, Isabel had her own symbol, formed of two commas, mirrored, to form the wings of a butterfly. It was hers, left to her by an agent called Marina Stockard, a relative of Isabel’s – a great aunt “or something” (in the fifth draft, “her father’s aunt”), who had become something of a surrogate parent to her. The burn scar on Isabel’s chest roughly resembled this symbol, and was deliberately intended to echo it. I cut this for a wide variety of reasons (not least because having two symbols was unnecessarily complicated), and Marina Stockard went with it.
I’d completely forgotten about her, actually, which means I’d also forgotten that she was the one originally known as the Moth. The symbol went with the name, you see, so when Isabel left the symbol on a body…
“You made the papers,” says Daragh when he wakes Isabel up the next morning. “Not the front page, but you’re in there.”
Isabel frowns. “I didn’t think there was anything remarkable enough about the job to be worth reporting.”
“You mean, aside from the symbol you left on the body?”
“Ah.”
He hands her the paper, open to the correct page. It’s a small article, next to the weekly list of kills – the Kill Column, Isabel calls it, although she knows a lot of other agents have their own nicknames for it. The headline leaps out at her: THE MOTH RETURNS?
“It’s what they used to call her,” he says. “Marina Stockard. That’s the agent who left you the mark, right?”
In this draft, the papillon de nuit connection was (somewhat clumsily) spelled out:
Isabel looks at the article again. “Why’d they call her the Moth?”
Daragh sits, crossing his legs. “Well, we’re talking twenty, thirty years back now. She was pretty much retired by the time you were born, and I hardly knew her. Almost all her assignments happened at night, and it became her signature. Comma have never really been night-strikers except when it’s unavoidable, but she made her name with it. The butterfly of night, that’s what they used to call her. And then somebody pointed out that the French papillon de nuit means moth, and I guess the name stuck.”
Though it’s not only in French that moths are given a name like this. In Esperanto it’s noktopapilio, night-butterfly, which of course works much better for this setting, even if it’s not quite as poetic in translation. So while that’s not the in-universe story behind Isabel’s use of the name, it was one story offered for why a field agent might be known as the Moth and not by a more conventional butterfly name.
This chapter ends with Leo bringing news of Emma’s kidnapping. Emma has always been kidnapped, right from the early drafts, but it didn’t always happen now. In many of them, it happened much earlier in the story, and it was in order to raise the ransom to rescue her that Isabel went back into the field and started working for the guild again. Even once the earlier parts of the book had started to look more like they do now, there were still several jobs after Emma’s kidnapping, because in general the pacing was way off.
Leo’s earlier appearances tended to be more angry than scared, too, but the more I learned about him as a character, the more I realised that didn’t work. He cares about Emma – a lot – but he’s not going to accuse Isabel of playing a joke on him by pretending she’s been kidnapped or anything like that, as he did in some of the earlier drafts.
Chapter 31, then, brings us to the question of how to rescue Emma from Isabel’s parents – a detail that has changed somewhat over the years. In some drafts, there’s been a more concerted effort to raise the ransom, with actually finding the money being the main barrier. (In the earliest drafts, of course, it would have been Hummingbird who’d kidnapped her, because the third guild didn’t exist yet.) See, for example, the third draft:
“This is bullshit,” says Toni. “I don’t have this kind of money. You certainly don’t.”
“They want me,” says Isabel. “They’re not expecting us to actually pay. The guilds never do, otherwise they’d pull this kind of stunt more often. They’re trying to give me a reason to walk in there and negotiate with them.”
“Then we’ll have to play this a little differently,” says Ronan. “We can raise the money, but it won’t be immediate.”
“I’ll do it,” says Isabel. “Give me jobs, and I’ll do them. I won’t leave Emma in there any longer than I have to.”
“You’re not cleared for active duty,” says Daragh. “You had four organ transplants, Isabel.”
(Ah, yes, the organs. The organs that she definitely did not take from Nick Larrington. Those organs.) (Okay, it was only Nick in Draft II. In this draft, it was some poor unnamed civilian from Rudston. Sidenote, I actually had to go look at the map to see if Rudston still existed, because I had no memory of that borough. It does, but it’s a Hummingbird borough, so it would be a risky place to target a civilian for organ harvesting purposes.)
In the fifth draft, however, there are other considerations beyond the money:
“That’s not the point,” says Toni. “I know Comma’s not in a great place, financially speaking, but we must be able to raise the money.”
“Our policy is not to pay ransoms,” says Ronan. “If we did, they’d pull this kind of stunt every other week.”
“Fuck the policy,” snaps Toni. “I’ll go and get her myself if I have to. I’m not going to sit around waiting for them to start sending body parts. She’s my daughter.”
“No.” Ronan offers no reasoning, no excuses, just a flat negative.
“You don’t have any authority over me, Ronan Atwood.”
“This… guild, if that’s what they are, want us to send people in,” he says. “That’s why they took a hostage. But there’s no way we can do that safely, and whatever plans we come up with won’t involve you. Have you thought about how much you know? If they tortured you for information—”
“I’d have a cyanide pill between my teeth.” Toni crosses her arms. “I won’t abandon Emma on that basis.”
(And, for the record, in that draft Toni did try to rescue Emma, and did get caught, and did use the cyanide pill rather than let them take her alive.)
Regardless of what happens in between, though, we usually end up with Isabel in the training gym, trying to prepare for a rescue mission – even if in some drafts this involved a much longer period of recovery. And by the time we get to the final draft, the basic outline of Isabel’s motivation is clear: her parents hurt her, and nobody saved her; her parents will not be allowed to hurt Emma, because Isabel will save her.
Michael, however, introduces more questions: was Emma taken because Isabel’s jobs the night before alerted her parents to her survival? After all, they poisoned her, and then she disappeared from view for weeks; they might have assumed she was dead, until she showed up and made the papers and caused them to try another tactic. The timing doesn’t quite add up, and if Isabel were thinking logically, she’d never find that convincing, but she’s upset and emotional and just for a moment, Michael manages to convince her that she’s to blame for this. That killing Nick means she lost all rights to have friends in general, so of course Emma would be taken.
She’ll be dealing with the aftermath of her actions for a while. Even if she manages to rescue Emma, she’s going to have to come clean about it. But in the meantime, we have higher priorities, and a rescue mission to prepare for…
Tomorrow, I’ll be back with our pre-rescue mission scenes, from chapter 32, and then in Monday’s post, we’ll be covering all of chapters 33 to 37. I’m not actually sure how this is going to work yet, and I might end up splitting them, but I’m giving you a heads up so that if you’re reading as we go along, you’re not caught out by the sudden increase in material to read!
And then we will have just a couple more posts to do, and it will be over. Phew. It’s been a journey.
We’re picking up speed again with our readalong of The Butterfly Assassin – you can expect daily posts for the next week or so as we accelerate towards the end of the book. (Which I had not totally remembered was the case and I have not written them, so imagine me hastily writing posts like that one Wallace & Gromit gif of laying train tracks frantically as you zoom along.)
I feel like I need to put some content warnings on this post. While it won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s read this chapter that we’re going to be talking about the deaths of teenagers, there are some details from past drafts that are considerably more gruesome and dramatic than what actually ended up in the book, so, fair warning, we’re talking about organ harvesting, sorry.
Today is the 24th of November, and on this day in 2029, Isabel Ryans kills two people: her sixteen-year-old target, Oliver Roe, and her classmate, Nick Larrington, who saw her with the body. No hesitation, no mercy, no witnesses. There was, arguably, a moment of hesitation, if we’re feeling charitable towards Isabel. But there was no space for mercy, and by the end of the chapter, there were no witnesses.
Isabel has always killed Nick – there has never been a version of the book where he survived – but I have to say, there were some drafts where the circumstances of that were considerably more unhinged. Notably, the second draft, in which she. Uh. Harvested his organs?
“I have to.”
“No, Isabel, you don’t. Whatever twisted ideas the guilds have put in your head, this is not your only choice!”
Isabel moves quickly, pinning him against the wall. He’s still shaking, looks like he’s about to throw up. “You don’t know anything about my choices,” she says.
“I know that killing me doesn’t have to be one of them,” he says. “If you’d told me I was a donor match I probably would have given you one of my kidneys anyway.”
“Fuck off.”
“I would. If it would have helped, I would have done it. But this… this isn’t the way to solve anything.” He breaks off. “You’re crying.”
“I’m dying,” she says. “I’m dying and they won’t help me if I’m not one of them. I have to – I have to be loyal. And you’ve been on their radar for a while now. It’s only chance that makes this any more than a stupid pointless death like all the other stupid pointless deaths in this city. You would have told someone. Next week. Next month. A year. You would have opened your mouth and Comma would have killed you.”
Look. Sometimes when I tell people that I completely rewrote this book from the ground up, they’re like, “Oh, I could never do that, I don’t like the idea of an editor making me change my book.” And leaving aside the fact that the most drastic changes in this book have all been ones I decided to make rather than being an editor’s recommendation… sometimes, the book is bad. Sometimes, the book involves your supposedly sympathetic viewpoint character harvesting her classmate’s organs.
Sometimes, yeeting a plot point is for the best.
Isabel required organ transplants right up until the fifth draft, if I remember rightly, at which point I decided it screwed the pacing too much to put her in recovery for that long, but poor Nick was no longer the unwilling donor after the second draft. Since the third draft, his death has been much the same as the final version: after Isabel kills her mark at the nightclub, she kills Nick to eliminate a witness. Some of the details have changed, but the basic scene has been the same.
Poor Nick. He really did only ever try to be Isabel’s friend. Sometimes, I think Nick’s the character I relate to most in this book – especially the reference in the early chapters to the fact that he sometimes cries while reading the news. I do the same. I’ve been doing that a lot recently, and you’d think with the constant barrage of atrocities, I’d get desensitised to it, but I don’t. I’m still haunted by it. I never want to be the kind of person who isn’t, if I’m honest, but I don’t think I’d survive in a city like Espera.
One thing I did rediscover when I was looking at the second draft was this little worldbuilding detail:
“Let’s go. Before anyone comes to see why the shot was fired.”
They’ll have given it the Esperan Fifteen – quarter of an hour to let whatever agents still in the area get out of there before you go and investigate. Give it less than that and you might find your own body joining the weekly murder figures. Could take a lot longer for anyone to come, if there’s nobody nearby, but it’s best not to push it.
The idea of the “Esperan Fifteen” makes sense, in a city like this – when you know assassins are operating in your vicinity, you’re not going to go running towards a gunshot to find out what happened, because 99% of the time, you already know what happened, and the only thing you’ll achieve if you do is end up a witness, and therefore dead. But at some point I stopped explicitly spelling that out in the book, and the phrase was lost; I’d forgotten about it until now.
And then there’s Oliver.
Until the sixth draft, Oliver didn’t have a name. He ended up being Oliver because nearly everybody in one of my writing group chats at the time had an Oliver in their books, often one who died, and it became, briefly, an in-joke, so when I realised he didn’t have a name, I gave it to him. It was important to me, that he should have a name in the end. That he should be a person.
Isabel does not know why Oliver is on the guilds’ hit list. She doesn’t know why somebody paid to eliminate a sixteen-year-old. She knows that the money was good, because Ronan told her; good enough that the guild didn’t turn the job down. And that’s the only information she has.
But I know.
Oliver’s backstory is traumatic in a way that I didn’t feel could be sensitively or meaningfully explored in this book, and therefore it cannot be on the page, or anywhere in the trilogy. He deserves more than a passing note, and there’s no space to give him one. Suffice to say that he was innocent, and killed to cover up the wrongdoings of others, and because those others were adults and they were rich and they were powerful, and he was young and poor, they were able to click their fingers and have the guild come running.
Ronan knew. Isabel didn’t. It probably wouldn’t have made a difference if she did, because she didn’t feel like she had any choice, either way. And there’s no good reason to kill a sixteen-year-old (or, indeed, anyone), so it’s not like she wouldn’t suspect that it was this kind of situation.
Oliver’s death is the first premeditated murder that Isabel commits in this book, and we’re 300 pages into it. We might expect it to be more difficult than it seems to be, but then we’d be forgetting who Isabel is, the upbringing she’s had. And I think it’s hard, as people who don’t live in Espera, to fully grasp the impact of living in a city where the guilds and their actions are so normalised, to the point where dying at the hands of the guilds is practically more common than dying of natural causes.
Still: It should be harder than this, to live with herself.
It’s harder in this draft than it was in earlier ones; that’s about as much as I can say about that, and that’s less because I was deliberately writing Isabel as colder-hearted in early drafts than because in general, emotions weren’t effectively layered into the book until much later than they should have been.
One difference, though, is that at the end of this chapter, Isabel imagines the judgment of the world, crying out in horror that the guilds would kill a teenager – just a child. And Isabel thinks, So was I.
But in the earlier drafts, like the third draft, it wasn’t faceless judgement from the media and the newspaper that Isabel feared – it was judgment from an imaginary version of Mortimer.
She’s sitting in Mortimer’s workshop. “What if the guilds killed children, too?” she asks him, and his expression is horrified. Her fingers twist around each other. She’s afraid.
“I’d protect them,” he says. “And I’d hunt down the bastards who did it.”
The dream merges, and she’s running from someone, being chased through a forest of city skyscrapers flickering with the LED lights of technological stars. It doesn’t take long for her dream self to realise that it’s Mortimer who is chasing her, hunting her down.
He pins her to the ground, one of the woodwork knives in his hand. “You killed children,” he says to her. “That boy was just a child.”
But he’s fading to blackness along with her surroundings, the dream melting away with her answer still on her lips: “So was I.”
The first part of this scene is a memory, a scene that happened early on in the third draft and was since cut. Mortimer’s protective instincts have been present from an early stage in the book’s development, but his abolitionist values less so. The rest is her imagination, and even the third draft’s Mortimer wouldn’t actually have tried to hurt her.
But I thought it was interesting, that her subconscious focused on him as the source of judgment. I’m not sure when I changed that, but it was striking to rediscover.
Anyway. Bit of a bleak chapter. Bit of a dark moment for Isabel – and the worst part is, it’s barely even a turning point in her arc, because the turning point was the decision, not acting on it. Tomorrow, we’ll see Isabel exploring some of the emotional consequences and the aftermath of this act, but for now, I want to know what you think.
Did this chapter change how you saw Isabel? Did you think her friendship with Nick would end like this? Does his death seem worse than Oliver’s, or does the personal connection make no difference?
Drop your answers, or any other thoughts on this chapter, in the comments, and I’ll see you back here soon.
Welcome back to our readalong of The Butterfly Assassin! It’s a weird dark time in the world right now, and with the winter drawing in, the darkness is literal as well as metaphorical. I’m wrapping up my line edits for book three, Moth to a Flame, and finding it a strangely heavy experience to be working on a book about breaking cycles of violence and reimagining the future, while living in a world where those cycles seem to be spinning tighter by the day.
But today’s post is a slightly lighter one, which comes as something of a relief. We’re reading chapter 26, Korinklino – affection. In this chapter, Isabel has a conversation with Emma for the first time since she ended up in hospital and in the hands of Comma. Emma informs Isabel that she missed Emma’s birthday (it was on the 22nd, as I noted here), and they talk about terrible Esperan romance novels. Emma also challenges Isabel some of her long-held beliefs about herself, and what she deserves – notably, her not-quite-articulated assumption that she in some way deserves the pain she’s experienced, because of the harm she has helped to cause. (Never mind that that wasn’t exactly a free choice on her part, either.)
I’ve talked already about how important it is to me that Isabel is not perfect, and the fact that she still deserves better despite not being “innocent”. Questions of innocence and safety feel particularly pertinent at the moment, when harm is being articulated in terms of innocent women and children being killed – as though there are not also innocent men, and as though innocence is a prerequisite for life. I’ve been thinking a lot about that latter point, and how it relates to the concept of grievability, which I brought up earlier in the readalong. We are so ready to put lives into boxes: these are worth saving, and would be mourned if lost; these are acceptable collateral.
This is something I have been grappling with across this trilogy. It is, as limited 3rd-person narratives are wont to be, distinctly biased towards Isabel, its protagonist; her life is worth preserving, and therefore the choices she makes in the pursuit of survival can be justified. But I often find myself thinking of the unmourned characters in the background: unnamed, irrelevant, and just as dead.
This chapter isn’t dealing directly with those questions. But it does explore innocence, and what it means to have done harm. And in doing so, it touches on an idea that underpins much of the trilogy: that not being innocent does not equate to being undeserving of life, or safety, or even happiness. Emma tells Isabel she deserved better, and Isabel, at this stage in her life, cannot meaningfully believe her. It’s important that it was said, anyway, even if she wasn’t able to accept it. Sometimes the saying it is the part that matters.
As part of that conversation, we get to learn yet more about Isabel’s past, and about her relationship with her mother – mostly a sidenote in this book, compared to the immediate threat of her father’s influence – and all the ways Isabel has been taught to doubt her experience and downplay her own suffering. Which is pretty bleak and hardgoing, even with Emma there to immediately counter it with her affection, so central to this chapter.
We could probably dwell on that for a long time. But let’s not, because I promised you a lighter post. Let’s talk, instead, about the Worst Romance Novels of Espera.
I worry, on occasion, that those who read this book without knowing anything about my own reading habits will assume that this gentle mockery of a certain subtype of genre romance is because I don’t respect romance as a category. Many people don’t; it’s often derided, considered “trashy”, or otherwise overlooked despite more or less keeping large sections of publishing afloat. However, I want to stress that that is absolutely not how I feel about it: I read a significant amount of genre romance, mostly queer historicals (though I’ve been branching out lately), and have immense respect for romance authors.
It’s one of the reasons I’ve made a point of having other characters point out that a) these are very much the worst romance novels of Espera, and good ones do in fact exist, and b) even these, while vaguely horrifying in their premises, are not automatically badly written. We see this more in book two, when they come up again (truly, I love that Holly Emerald, Espera’s Most Notorious Romance Novelist, became a recurring figure).
Of course, I didn’t always read a lot of genre romance. And this trilogy is very notably lacking in romantic subplots, because teen me was extremely anti-romance and anti-sex in books, and wanted more YA without either. It’s one notable area where my teenage tastes and my adult tastes have diverged considerably (though, frankly, I still prefer to keep romance to genre romance novels and not have it take over the plot of other books, I’m a bit all or nothing in that regard). Isabel’s general disinterest in, bewilderment about, and discomfort towards romance novels might echo some of how my teenage self felt about them – and in The Hummingbird Killer, it proves to be a way for her to begin to articulate what a canny reader might recognise as her asexuality and aromanticism, although she doesn’t have access to these terms to describe her (lack of) feelings.
But mostly, this conversation was a chance for me to have fun coming up with premises for terrible in-universe romance novels. An assassin who falls in love with her target. Two assassins from rival guilds in a star-crossed romance, which starts with a meet-cute over a dead body. Tasteless premises in a world where the guilds pose a very real threat, but the amount of military and police romance that exists in the real world tells me it would be far from unlikely that such a thing would exist. (Not to mention some of the more egregious IRL historical premises, such as the entire concept of Nazi romance.)
Moreover, I was poking fun at a certain type of story – the sort of assassin story I had very deliberately set out not to write. The assassin who falls in love with her target, or is humanised by sexual attraction, or otherwise abandons her murderous ways because of seeing a hot dude… yeah, the weird predominance of that kind of story is exactly why I decided Isabel was going to be ace/aro, so that there would be no chance of that happening here.
This scene was also a chance to think about how the publishing industry might work in Espera. We’ll see in The Hummingbird Killer that the majority of books circulating within Espera are not written and published within the city – it’s just not big enough to be wholly self-sustaining when it comes to literature – but all imported books are subject to guild censorship. Books like this, though, written by Esperan authors and published with guild permission inside the city walls, represent a very specific subset of literature that Esperans have access to.
It makes me wonder what other genres are popular. I can imagine that within the realm of “contemporary” fiction and real-world settings, Esperan authors would be popular by virtue of being more relatable to readers inside the city, who might struggle to relate to supposedly “everyday” stories that look nothing like their reality. But I can see sci-fi and fantasy being more typically imported, because a fantasy world is a fantasy world no matter where you come from, and there would be less of a need for a very specific Esperan flavour of it.
I also imagine that murder mysteries hit very different when you live in Espera, though we know from a line in The Hummingbird Killer that crime fiction and thrillers are surprisingly popular there. But I can see those being written by Esperan authors, too, because your straightforward police procedural might not translate well. I wonder what it’s like being a guild censor, and the extent to which books set in Espera have to be favourable in their portrayal of the guilds or risk being rejected. How many thinly-veiled allegories did authors with abolitionist sympathies manage to slip past the censors by transplanting them to a different setting – and how many did the censors catch? What would be the consequences for that?
These are the kind of worldbuilding questions I haven’t thought about in too much depth, not because they wouldn’t tell us anything about the city (on the contrary; I think they’d tell us quite a lot) but because I could tell it was a rabbithole from which I would not emerge except with great difficulty. Maybe one day I’ll play around with some of those concepts a bit more.
In the meantime, I’d love to hear what kind of stories you think Esperan authors would be writing, and what they would be reading. Would you pick up one of the romance novels Emma’s reading in this chapter – out of morbid curiosity, if nothing else?
Just before we start, the wonderful folks over at Jetpack Support and WordPress.com have been fiddling with the blog feed issue I’ve been having and it is now, finally, resolved! My blog should be working properly in WordPress Reader no matter what sort of login you have or what angle you come at it from. I don’t know if these issues were actually affecting people’s subscriptions, but I certainly seem to have a couple of hundred of extra subscribers showing up now that the feeds have been reunited, so there is a chance some of you are reading this post having not seen anything from me in, uh, several years. If that’s the case, hello, welcome! This is the worst place to start. We’re reading The Butterfly Assassin chronologically and discussing the backstory, worldbuilding etc — you can jump to 17/09, Eraro to start at the beginning, or stick around and wait for me to start talking about something else. Consider checking out the Research and Books pages to know what I’ve been up to for the last few years, and do leave a comment I know you’re here :)
I think this is the first time we’ve needed three posts in the readalong series to get through a single chapter of The Butterfly Assassin, but I guess that’s what happens when a chapter gets stretched over nine days. We’re lucky I didn’t give you nine posts, lol. (You did get a nice little interruption in the form of Emma’s birthday, though. Yay?)
Anyway, today is the twenty-ninth of October, and on this day, Isabel has a Meaningful Conversation with Daragh.
Unlike in earlier drafts, when Daragh’s connection to the guild was far less complicated and conflicted, in this scene he seems genuinely uncomfortable with the part he’s playing in training Isabel as part of her recovery – and he lets her see that, too, which I think is important. Isabel doesn’t trust many people, but she finds it a lot easier to rely on people who don’t lie to her, and who admit things like “I don’t feel totally morally okay with working for a global organisation of arms dealers even if I’m a doctor and not a weapons developer”. You know, those small gestures of mutual trust-building that are so important in all relationships.
Ronan hinted earlier that Daragh had some problems with the guild, during the argument they were having before Isabel collapsed, but this is the first time we actually get to ask him about it, and find out why he would join in the first place. We learn that he comes from an industrial borough, and had limited educational opportunities, and that at Ronan’s urging, he took Comma sponsorship to be able to study medicine, in exchange for ten years working for the guild.
I think I’ve covered most of the necessary worldbuilding here in earlier posts, talking about the different types of boroughs and the schooling available there. I also mentioned back on the eleventh of October that Daragh and Ronan weren’t initially connected in any way, and then for a while I had it that they’d grown up together as neighbours, and finally I gave them a family connection. So we don’t need to hash all of that out again.
But then there’s Christopher.
In this scene, Daragh tells us a story about Christopher, his partner, who was killed by Hummingbird three years into his contract with Comma. Daragh wasn’t there and couldn’t save him, and he was forced to confront the fact that the very people he was treating as a Comma doctor were the kids of people who would do that to innocent people. Not all of them – some were families of guild members, admin staff, as close to innocent as any cog in the guild machine can be – but some of them. And he couldn’t hide from that anymore. And he couldn’t leave the guild.
I know the “dead boyfriend” backstory can be fairly overdone, but for me, it was a fairly important piece of figuring out the heart of Daragh’s moral conflict. It was, as all the useful things tend to be, a late addition, developing during my “secondary character development” phase of revisions during Author Mentor Match. And it was not, originally, going to be Daragh’s backstory – it was almost Mortimer’s.
This… works, kind of. It must’ve been Hummingbird who did it, because I can’t see Mortimer cooperating with Comma if it was them. But it doesn’t really fit with the school-as-safety emotional trajectory that we were looking at, unless it’s building on an existing fear.
Actually, you know what? This works a lot better as Daragh’s backstory. It wasn’t his brother he lost – it was his boyfriend. Maybe he was at Comma uni, already aiming to be a doctor, and his boyfriend was a civilian. He’s there/nearby when [name] is targeted, but he dies too fast and Daragh can’t save him. That’s gonna make it SO MUCH WORSE when [redacted] in b2 and Daragh [redacted], OH NO. I hate that. And by ‘hate that’ I mean ‘I’m in physical pain just thinking about it so of course it’s going in the book because I refuse to be alone with my suffering’.
Okay, we’ll come back to that when we look at Daragh, but I’m HERE FOR IT. This section was meant to be about Mortimer…
Spoilers for book 2 are redacted, but I love that you can see them a brief hint of my plotting method here – my plotting method being coming up with the worst thing I can think of and then doing it, without hesitation.
I actually have almost 2,500 words of notes about Daragh’s backstory and upbringing, though, so the fact that it only constitutes about two pages of the finished book is pretty impressive, in my opinion. Apparently, Daragh and Ronan both have siblings, and are both the eldest of all their siblings; there’s a substantial age gap between them and the next sibling down, which is how they ended up closer to each other. (I had entirely forgotten about Daragh’s siblings until now. I am not sure they are canon, otherwise they probably would’ve been mentioned in book 3 when Isabel is talking about his family.)
My notes also contain more about Christopher, none of which is massively new information compared to what made it into the book – in fact, some of it is the book verbatim, which is hilarious because usually my notes are incomprehensible – but I like seeing the original wording of it:
About a year into his employment with Comma, he starts dating a civilian called Christopher. Christopher is a painter – a street artist, a house painter, a freelance art teacher, whatever he can find that will let him make things colourful. He’s full of light and love and colour, and Daragh is drawn to him from the day they meet. At first, he’s afraid to tell Christopher that he’s employed by Comma, but he’s surprisingly understanding once they finally have that conversation: he’s still a doctor, isn’t he? Nobody would judge him for getting his fees paid the way he needed to, and it’s not like the guild is 100% evil, right? Most of the people he treats have never killed someone, after all.
Dating Christopher shows Daragh a side of Espera he never really got the chance to see as a student. He comes with him when he goes out tagging and painting buildings, sees the way his murals spread across the walls of buildings and the underside of bridges. He tells himself he’s only there so that if Christopher gets in trouble, he can use his guild connections to get them out of it, but in truth it’s more than that. There’s something healing in that art. It feels like the moment a patient’s scans come back clear, the day he tells someone they can leave the hospital, the first second of holding a healthy baby in his arms after a tough delivery.
Christopher is a doctor, he concludes. A doctor for people who never leave the city. He brings colours and the world to Espera’s enclosed streets. Sometimes he even paints the city walls themselves, little sparks of sunshine dancing around watchtowers and bolted gates.
“Finn…” you’re saying, reading this, “is Christopher meant to sound so much like Emma?” Yes, of course, he’s basically a narrative double, I love a narrative double. (And I love to directly compare romantic and platonic relationships like this because the friendships are just as important. This will recur, as an idea.)
What I really love about these notes, though, is the details they give us about how Daragh ended up working for the Sunshine Project. He touches on this in the finished book, but it’s a passing reference, not the whole story. In my notes, though:
He takes a month of compassionate leave and wanders the city, looking for Christopher’s paintings. Some of them he’s seen before. Some of them he knows are Chris’s because of the style, but they were painted while he was working, or before they met, and they’re faded and weather-beaten but still unmistakeably colourful. He follows them down narrow alleyways he’s never taken until, finally, he reaches a small, brightly-painted building that declares itself to be the home of Espera’s Sunshine Project, a non-profit clinic for low-income civilians.
When he goes inside he asks them about the decoration. Yes, they say, it was painted by Christopher. He did it for free, and came back every few months to give it another coat, make sure it stayed bright. No, they hadn’t heard the news, but they’re sorry to hear that. He’d always been a friend of the clinic. They treated his sister a few years ago; that was how he’d got involved.
Daragh doesn’t cry. But he asks them if they need any more doctors, if it would help, if there was anything he could do.
When he goes back to work, he asks Ronan if he can reduce his hours to four days a week, and spend the fifth working at the clinic. Ronan doesn’t get it, is suspicious at first – but he knows Daragh is grieving. Truth be told, he thought when his cousin called him that it would be to ask if Ronan could get him out of his contract early. It’s not in his power to just grant the request, but he knows the person who has that responsibility, and he can pull strings, if he wants to.
Please, says Daragh. Christopher used to help them, and he’s dead now. Daragh can’t repaint their building for them, but he can help like this. Ronan liked Christopher well enough, though they only met a handful of times. More importantly, he knows how much Daragh loved him. He pulls the strings.
It helps. It helps to know he’s helping. It helps to walk down those narrow, forgotten alleyways and to find himself surrounded by Christopher’s artwork. It helps even when it sucks hugely because he’s treating people who can’t afford what they need to get better, and he does more than he’s meant to and gives more than he can afford because it does something to fill the hollow pit inside him.
He starts working there on Saturdays as well. Ronan warns him against it, says he’s overworking himself, but it’s easier than sitting at home where Christopher isn’t and trying to forget the fact that yesterday he stitched the wound of somebody who will use their health to hurt somebody else. So, finally, Ronan stops trying to talk him out of it.
Daragh suspects, maybe, that one or two of the anonymous donations that come in to support the clinic’s work are from his cousin. But it’s not something Ronan would ever want to have associated with his name, so he doesn’t ask.
Again, I had forgotten about some of these notes. I had forgotten, in particular, what I wrote about Ronan here. It’s a version of Ronan we never see on the page, but maybe it brings us closer to the Ronan that Daragh knew, the one Isabel never sees.
And then, after she’s heard his story, Isabel asks Daragh how much longer he’s got of his ten-year contract – and he tells her five days. Given that we’ve already seen how Daragh is the only Comma doctor who seems to respect Isabel’s autonomy as a patient, you can understand why she might be freaked out about that, but Daragh tells her he’s staying. For her. Because he’s been kidding himself for a decade that he can make the guild better by being a part of it, so it’s about time he acted on that.
At the very end of all my character development notes from 2019, I have a single sentence: “[Character] wants…”. Daragh’s: Daragh wants to help people. To some extent, this translates into wanting to atone for the evil he’s been complicit in as a member of the guild. This translates into wanting to fix/make up for what the guild has done to Isabel, even at the cost of his own opportunity to leave Comma.
And while I may not have referred back to these notes very often in the past four years (to the point of having forgotten large amounts of what was written in them), I think that aspect of his character has continued to guide how I write him.
Safe. She never thought she’d find it here, in the hands of a Comma doctor.
God. I bloody love Daragh. I really do.
Anyway, tell me how this scene made you feel. Tell me how these excerpts from my notes make you feel! In Daragh’s place, would you have stayed? Would you have taken the 10-year deal in the first place? Let me know in the comments, and I’ll see you tomorrow for a phonecall with Emma and a glimpse of some of Espera’s finest genre romance novels…
Just joining us? We’re following the events of The Butterfly Assassin according to the book’s chronology, and I’m discussing the worldbuilding and writing process. You can jump to 17/09, Eraro, to start from the beginning (though that’s by no means obligatory! Join in wherever you like!). Since we’re now on Chapter 23, more than halfway through, all posts will involve a certain amount of spoilers. Continue at your discretion.
On the eleventh of October, Isabel wakes up in hospital. A Comma hospital, to be precise: Chadwick Green, in Weaverthorpe. (Named partially after Nora and/or H.M. Chadwick, who were foundational to my academic field. I used to have Nora Chadwick’s book The Celts on my bookshelf, so it’s probably her that it’s technically named after. I’m not sure who donated the Green.)
Daragh is there, and when she confronts him about working for Comma and his connection with Ronan, he admits that they’re cousins, and that he has always had a guild connection. He also tells her that she’s still sick, and they can’t necessarily fix it, because they still don’t have the formula for the poison.
The dates start getting a lot fuzzier at this point in the book, because Isabel is drifting in and out of consciousness, so while this chapter is actually spread over quite a few days, I’m going to treat the first half of it – up to the start of the flashback/memory – as though it all happened on the eleventh, and then you’ll get a break from posts until the seventeenth.
As I’ve mentioned repeatedly throughout this series, Isabel originally spent a lot more of the book in hospital, so this dramatic moment of surrender and then waking up in Comma’s grasp didn’t exist until I rejigged the plot and pacing in the sixth draft. That was also when I combined the characters of Dr Claudia Vernant, the civilian doctor, and Daragh, the Comma doctor, which means it was only then that Daragh became Ronan’s cousin.
Before that, I did briefly have a plotline in which Ronan and Daragh had known each other growing up, because they were neighbours / lived in the same area, and had been close friends. Making it a family connection was really just an intensification of that – it felt like it strengthened Daragh’s sense of obligation, as well as providing useful narrative parallels to Isabel’s own situation and her family ties to the guild. (It’s always about the doubles.)
You can see the moment I made this decision in my notes about Ronan from 2019, during AMM:
Mother’s family also from NI, like Daragh’s – brother is called Kieran, so names suggest this. Possibly actually related to Daragh – cousins??? (That would be wild, but ‘surprise, everyone’s related’ is basically a summary of every book I’ve ever written.) Anyway, this shared background explains why they grew up in the same part of Espera – big immigrant community.
I would also say that Daragh in the earlier drafts was a bit of a prick. I was reading through some of the early hospital scenes while writing these posts, and I was surprised how little I liked him. He was extremely ready to violate Isabel’s autonomy in the name of healthcare, failing to explain treatments to her or get meaningful consent for them, and he was also super complicit in efforts to pull her back into guild training as part of her rehabilitation/physical therapy, which I’d forgotten about.
Obviously, that version of Daragh belongs to a draft in which Isabel’s trauma was far less prominent (and in which it wasn’t handled well even when present). But it’s still the complete opposite of the Daragh we see in this chapter, where his defining feature is that he’s the one who makes sure Isabel knows what’s happening and that she’s okay with it.
Daragh being kind is crucial to Isabel ending up back in Comma. It’s easier to run away from an organisation that has only been cruel to you, and she would never have gone back to the Sunshine Project if she didn’t feel safe there. It’s because Daragh treated her with care and respect that she went to him, but that care is the reason she gets dragged back in, and that’s a betrayal she’s struggling to process here.
Comma is Ronan, her parents, bargains and violence and cruelty, but somehow, impossibly, Comma is also Daragh. […] When Daragh’s there, he explains the different treatments – the blood transfusions, the dialysis – and what her latest round of test results said, though most of it means little to her. […] He doesn’t touch her, but his hand is there and she grabs at it just to feel like she’s real. […] She’s clinging desperately to the hand of a Comma doctor and he’s the only person in this building who gives a shit what happens to her.
This moment is the reason that combining Dr Vernant and Daragh was one of the best decisions I made for this book. It’s rare for me to cut an entire character without also cutting the scenes that they’re involved in, but it added a level of complexity to Isabel’s relationship with Daragh that made everything more emotional: she both trusts him and doesn’t, has experience of him trying to help and associates him with the organisation that hurt her, is grateful to him and furious.
I’m pretty sure this decision was a direct suggestion from Rory Power (for those unaware, I overhauled this book during Author Mentor Match, with Rory as my mentor) and although I was originally hesitant, I’m extremely glad I took that advice. Thanks, Rory.
While most of this chapter is new, or has changed significantly from previous drafts, there are a few lines that I have been keeping and reusing and relocating across drafts for years: the description of Isabel’s nightmares, the strange iridescence of her dreams. After working my way back through draft after draft, I found that the first version of this passage comes from the second draft, dating to 2015:
She wishes she knew how to feel hope like that, but she’s too exhausted to feel anything but the dread settling like sediment in her stomach. The emotions of the day – both the laughter of earlier and the fear triggered by this discussion – have worn her out, and even as she tries to reply to Emma, she’s drifting into unconsciousness and the strange iridescence of her dreams. She’s no longer sure if they’re hallucinations or memories or both, only that they’re always full of blood.
This one has a soundtrack. She thinks she recognises the sound of herself screaming.
As we can see, it initially came after a conversation with Emma, at the end of the chapter where Emma paints the mural of Isabel on the hospital wall. (Comma are not impressed by this, and Emma is barred from the hospital after this point.) Because we’ve shifted everything around, and Isabel has only just entered the hospital, with Emma kept out from the beginning because of her civilian status, it now comes in the middle of a chapter and with a slightly different emphasis.
I knew I’d been keeping these lines for a while, but I didn’t realise it was that long. The other line I enjoy from this passage, the inevitable gravity of total implosion, was a later addition, entering some time after the sixth draft, although there were previous other descriptions of the gravity of illness/pain/giving up dragging her in. I find it fascinating to trace the survival of individual phrases and sentences across drafts, particularly when they wind up in different scenes and different context, and this section of the book is rich with those, because the basic details of the book have stayed similar enough that the lines can survive, but so much of it has been rewritten that they have to move if they’re going to stay.
I don’t think about it as moving, though, most of the time. I edit by opening a new document next to the old document and rewriting the whole book from the beginning, which horrifies a lot of people, including my editor. As such, I’m never deleting lines from the book – just choosing not to include them. And then I might choose to include them somewhere else. It’s a labour-intensive process, but it’s a good way to force myself to think about what I’m keeping: if I don’t want to type it out again, it’s probably not worth it.
But considering how radically I rewrite, I think it’s remarkable how many fragments of the early drafts survive after all these years. To end up in the finished book, they must have been retyped a minimum of eight times, probably more. Each time, I looked at them, and made a deliberate choice that I wanted those words, specifically. The entire scene might be new, but it’ll be built with the bricks of the old.
I did know this about myself, and I did know there were details in the book that had been there a while, but I didn’t realise how many of them or how long they’d survived: writing this blog series has been a fascinating exercise in going back to those old drafts over and over again, and for that reason, I’m so glad I decided to do it – even though it is, also, extremely labour-intensive as a way of working 😅 Did you know I’ve written over 36.5k in blog posts for this series so far? If we’re not careful, we’ll end up with an entire extra novel out of it.
One last detail in this section to discuss. Daragh admits that he doesn’t know how Isabel has survived this long, and Isabel jokes that it’s spite – but she also references the resistance her body has built up after years of poisoning. Now, originally, I had Isabel actually practice mithridatism, where you poison yourself tiny amounts each day to develop resistance to poisons. Turns out, this does not work and you should not do that, and even with the suspension of disbelief that fiction permits us, it was no longer at all convincing once the poisons Isabel started being exposed to were carefully engineered nerve agents and similar, rather than your average poisonous plants.
At the same time, bodies do habituate to bad experiences. People with chronic pain often end up with a wildly skewed sense of what’s normal, and endure situations that others would find unbearable, because that’s their day-to-day experience. So while Isabel’s past experiences of poison are more likely to weaken her immune system than strengthen it, they have taught her to endure sickness and pain and to keep struggling on when everything is awful, and they mean that it’s less of a shock to her body, because it has suffered in the past.
So if her past experiences are helping at all, it’s in that regard, not due to actual resistance to poison. (Again, we know the poison is a new invention and therefore not something she can have been exposed to before because that’s the whole plot.) But I realise the wording of this passage is slightly ambiguous, in part because it is influenced by previous versions of the book back when I did still believe mithridatism worked. (But it is not, as far as I know, a directly-lifted sentence from those drafts.)
So that brings us up to the flashback, which my calendar dates to the seventeenth of October. The twelfth through to the sixteenth are marked for me as “in and out of consciousness”, with parts of the scenes discussed above taking place in that period, but there’s no convenient way to express that in chronological post form. As such, you’ll get a more extended break from the readalong now, and I’ll see you back here on the seventeenth for some Dramatic Moments.
In the meantime, over to you: what did you think of the reveal that Daragh is related to Ronan? How does it make you feel that after fighting so hard to escape, Isabel is back in a Comma hospital? What else stood out to you about this chapter?
I’ve realised these posts are feeding through to my Goodreads profile, via the RSS feed there, so I’m going to make more of a conscious effort to add an introductory paragraph explaining the project to make sure no spoilers are visible until people click through. I apologise if these get a little boring and repetitive to those tuning in daily, but I’d rather that than ruin a plot point for a reader who didn’t choose to seek it out. (I’d completely forgotten I had a blog feed over there, and since it’s Goodreads, there’s a high chance people do have strong opinions about avoiding spoilers.)
So! We’re reading The Butterfly Assassin according to the book’s calendar and discussing the worldbuilding and writing process. Jump to 17/09, Eraro to start at the beginning, or join us whenever you like along the way.
On the 3rd of October, Ashvin, the newsagent, asks Isabel to take another delivery alongside her usual paper round – the boy who usually delivers the Weekly Bulletin of the Free Press is Isabel, and he trusts Isabel to fill in for him. It’s a risky choice for Ashvin to have made, and he can’t know how close he came to disaster, clueless as he is about Isabel’s guild connections. Isabel takes the Bulletin, and is startled to discover that one of the papers is for Mortimer Sark. They have an awkward confrontation, which ends in a kind of truce, or at least, the recognition of mutually assured destruction, with both knowing more about the other than they’d like.
Also on the 3rd, Isabel and Emma reconcile, and Isabel promises not to lie to her anymore. This immediately means having to confess the truth about Grace’s sideline as a freelance poisoner, which is a bit of a shock to Emma. The two skip school, and Emma shows Isabel some of the artwork around the city – as well as taking her to the cemetery, where they talk about Emma’s sister, Jean.
These chapters were largely late additions to the book. There was no space for them in the early drafts, when Isabel was already in hospital by this point, and Isabel’s confrontation with Mortimer couldn’t happen until Isabel had her paper round, an innovation of my 2020 edits. But even before that, their presence in the story required the existence of the abolitionist movement and its illegal writers and newssheet, and that was a much later addition than I remembered.
I’d been vaguely aware that they weren’t in the first draft – the words Free Press appear nowhere in it, and nor does abolitionist. I didn’t realise, though, that the abolitionist movement wasn’t even mentioned until Draft V. In hindsight, this makes sense: it was only in the fifth draft that I began to articulate the crucial pieces of worldbuilding that explained the city of Espera’s history and nature. But since the abolitionist movement plays a fairly significant role in The Hummingbird Killer, and since I had drafts of book two almost as soon as I had drafts of book one, I have to wonder what on earth was going on in the second book before that, too.
And when I wrote my Developmental Notes in 2019, I wasn’t sure what Mortimer’s relationship to the movement was:
Is Mortimer an abolitionist? I’m not sure. I don’t think Espera is split into guild-favouring and abolitionist – there are probably plenty of people who don’t like the guilds but don’t feel that getting rid of them is the solution. I think Mortimer has abolitionist values, but I also think he’s not sure what would be better – bearing in mind most Esperans have only a very warped and limited understanding of the outside world. He may see the guilds as the only barrier between Espera and political chaos. But also, I think, they’re very normalised to Esperans. They’re hated the way most governments are – by people who don’t actually have a clear idea what they’d choose instead, so they complain about it and find complex workarounds to societal problems while never working actively to change it. Mortimer’s own revolution is a small one – helping a handful of students. It isn’t a lot, but he’s afraid. He wants safety, after all.
This is still, broadly, true – Mortimer isn’t about to lead any revolutions. But he is somewhat more involved in the Free Press than he used to be, and certainly more than Isabel knows at this stage in the proceedings – that will become apparent in The Hummingbird Killer, for those who haven’t read that yet.
Isabel and Emma’s reconciliation is a scene with a longer history, although the initially tentative text messages before the in-person meeting are a later addition. The scene in which they skip school and go to look at the artwork only showed up in 2020, though, as did the visit to the cemetery.
There is a lot of street art in Espera. I mentioned before that some of this was inspired by the Berlin Wall, as well as by the art I saw in cities when I lived in Ireland. Here, it gives us a chance to talk about the political dimension of the artwork, such as the abolitionist mural that has been scoured away – a sign of unrest within the city that we didn’t get in the earlier drafts. Establishing those abolitionist elements – first the Free Press and Mortimer, now this art – was part of my efforts to set up book two and three, which of course, I could only do once I knew where I was going.
I’ve heard plenty of writers of series say that they have detailed outlines for the whole thing, spreadsheets telling them what to foreshadow, extensive planning notes… and that’s great for them. That’s not me. As is becoming incredibly apparent throughout this series of posts, I have a wildly chaotic approach to writing, especially the worldbuilding side of things. Crucial details show up at the last minute, and scenes that have stayed intact since the first draft get obliterated five minutes from publication. The only reason I am able to foreshadow anything from books two and three is because I’d already written them.
I wrote the first draft of The Hummingbird Killer immediately after finishing the first draft of The Butterfly Assassin, since they were always paired in my mind; I edited it somewhat in 2015, and then put it aside until 2020, when I worked on during lockdown. In November 2020, while The Butterfly Assassin was on sub, I decided I wanted to draft the third book. I didn’t know if the first one was going to sell, but I wanted to know, for my own peace of mind, how the story ended. This meant, when The Butterfly Assassin did sell in January 2021, I already had a rough draft waiting for me. Admittedly, it didn’t have a proper ending, but at least it meant I never had to draft a book from scratch on deadline.
Writing the opening of book two in a cafe on Guernsey, 1st August 2014
And it meant that the entire time I was editing The Butterfly Assassin for publication, I had a fairly good idea what happened in the third book, and where I needed to get to. So while a lot has changed about books two and three since their first drafts, those early versions were pretty essential to my backwards writing process. I am in awe of anyone who writes a series in the correct order without the option to go back and change things to match; couldn’t be me.
The cemetery scene with Emma talking about Jean, and about her own experiences after she was fostered, was also new in 2020, as I mentioned. It was a weird year, with a lot of death in the air. I’d lost a friend to COVID in May 2020, which probably intensified the extent to which everything I wrote in 2020 was, in some way, about grief. I’ll confess, though, that the line about how death means somebody can never surprise you again was stolen, shamelessly, from something I had heard in a Quaker meeting in 2019; it struck me as one of the truest things anyone had said about grief.
I write about death a lot – sometimes very literally, as in my longstanding Death & Fairies series, in which one character is an actual death god, one character is immortal, and one is cursed to kill those they’re in love with. Here, it’s no less literal, though it is less personified: this is a more familiar flavour of grief, one that can and does happen in the real world, bundled up with the added complication of the main character being a murderer.
I think this series has always been about grief; the characters who die in The Butterfly Assassin continue to haunt the rest of the trilogy, their presence inescapable within it. It’s about how to continue after the worst has happened, except sometimes, the worst that’s happened is you. But where grief makes Emma kind, as Isabel notes in this chapter, it makes Isabel sharp, and bloodied, and angry.
This scene was, of course, the direct result of the character development I was doing in 2019: for this scene to exist, I needed to know that Emma was still grieving Jean; I needed those glimpse of her childhood panic attacks and the way that her sister helped her through them. I needed to understand Emma’s relationship with Jean before I could understand her friendship with Isabel, and this scene is where those debts and that complicated tangle of emotions becomes very apparent.
This discussion seems to imply that this is a bummer of a chapter, but it’s not, is it? I mean, you may disagree, and feel free to do so in the comments, but I think this is actually a hopeful moment. Isabel calling a truce with Mortimer, starting to understand Emma and therefore to trust her a little more; these glimpses of the city’s art and its resistance to the guilds, reminding us that Espera is more than its darkness… I think this is a thread of light amidst the shadows.
But perhaps it doesn’t feel that way to you. In which case, tell me how it does feel, and what these insights into Mortimer and Emma meant to you, and I will see you back here tomorrow.
As of today, everything kicks off with my PhD and various induction activities, so I may be slower to respond to comments. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t leave them, however; I will be delighted to read them as soon as I get a second to catch my breath!
If you’re new here, we’re reading The Butterfly Assassin in real time according to the book’s chronology and discussing the writing process and the worldbuilding. Head to TBA Readalong Starting This Sunday for an overview of my approach, or start at the beginning with 17/09, Eraro.
On the 1st of October, Isabel runs into Emma, who rejects her; asks Grace Whittock for help with an antidote, and discusses her father’s lab; and has a tense conversation with Mortimer, in which he reveals that he speaks Esperanto and has guessed a certain amount about her past. (For those following along in the book, this is Chapter 15.)
None of these scenes exist in the first draft, which doesn’t give us too much to talk about. Although Grace/Graham was always trained as a poisoner, this aspect of the character was far less prominent in early drafts – involving her in trying to create an antidote was prompted by my attempts to keep Isabel out of hospital for longer, and give her more agency in saving herself. In the early drafts, she was in hospital not long after her first meeting with Toni Rolleston, so around this point in the book, and stayed there for most of the rest of it; while there was some action in these scenes, it definitely robbed Isabel of a lot of her narrative power over the plot, and a big part of my Draft VI/AMM rewrites was focused on changing that and keeping her independent and autonomous for longer.
The memory suppressant which Grace mentions in this chapter was also, I think, a reasonably late addition; pretty much all the specifics of the poison changed drastically over time, with various approaches in between, and this would have been an attempt to create a situation in which Isabel didn’t have the knowledge at first but might, over time, recover or discover it, giving her more personal responsibility for and autonomy over the antidote process.
Moreover, since the significance of Esperanto has changed over time, there would be no reason for Mortimer to reveal that he spoke it – in the earliest drafts, everyone spoke Esperanto, even though I hadn’t yet come up with a valid worldbuilding reason why.
I have to say, I do find it very funny when Isabel briefly thinks Mortimer is a Hummingbird spy, watching out for talented students to recruit, until it occurs to her that he’s a Woodwork teacher and the only talent he’s going to spot is for carpentry. While the guilds employ a lot of people with a lot of skills, and some of them are purely practical, everyday abilities, I don’t think those are the people they’re going to be headhunting straight out of school.
This moment is also a sly nod to the fact that in the early drafts (I-V), Mortimer did have a connection to Hummingbird: his sister and niblings worked for them, and he was estranged from them as a result because of his moral objections to the guilds. This was a detail that primarily had significance for book two, but was cut due to a broader overhaul of the characters involved, which disentangled those relationships entirely. For years, it seemed that every book I wrote had a “surprise! Everyone’s related” reveal, and while these are occasionally very effective, I figured we had enough of that with Toni and Emma and didn’t need to do it again.
But, in those drafts, we didn’t see much of Mortimer outside of formal classroom contexts until Isabel was already in hospital – which made his friendship and offers of help a lot less believable. Once again, his larger role was the result of prioritising secondary character development when I overhauled the book… but this specific scene, this moment, was a late addition.
By late, in this context, I mean it showed up in 2020, in the edits I did after I signed with Jessica as my agent. This whole section of the book got restructured, mostly for the sake of pacing – at one point we had two visits from Michael here, multiple scenes with Grace, a Symbolic Card Game, and a far more casual interaction with Mortimer. To keep the tension up, and add to the sense of threats on all sides, I shifted the scene with Mortimer to something a little more hostile and less relaxed.
It’s funny, after writing book two where Mortimer means a great deal to Isabel, to look back at these early meetings and see how suspicious she is of him, and how he’s essentially functioning as a minor antagonist within the narrative. I do love that, though, the transition of a potential threat to a weird uncle/surrogate father figure. Villain decay, but in the most chill way possible, with biscuits. For the moment, it seems like he might be one of the few adults who sees straight through Isabel despite a lack of other information: obviously traumatised. But this does make you wonder exactly how obvious it is that somebody who hardly knows her can see it.
Mortimer also says that he speaks Esperanto because he thought it might come in handy – know your enemy, etc. I have very little in my notes about this, except for one small detail that I had entirely forgotten: according to my Developmental Notes document from 2019 (during AMM), Mortimer originally trained as a Latin teacher.
We already said he was in the model-making club (what a soft nerd boy), and maybe he finds consolation in that – it’s his outlet while he’s grieving [a family member killed by the guilds]. He carries on with the Latin too, and ends up tutoring younger students, which is part of why he thinks he should become a teacher. Goes to college to train as a Latin teacher, but something’s missing. Halfway through he joins an engineering society or something and realises he misses being able to make stuff. Trains as a DT teacher instead, but uses his language (Latin) skills to teach himself Esperanto, in case it ever comes in handy.
I don’t know if this is canon. I had entirely forgotten it, and I’m always coming up with new headcanons about Mortimer’s backstory that I’ll never confirm on page. Since these notes predate a fair bit of crucial Mortimer characterisation due to the extremely late addition of all the most important scenes, it may be that our Mortimer doesn’t have a word of Latin.
But, hey, that’s the joy of these old notes. They’re true for a version of the character, even if it’s one who only existed between drafts as I refined ideas and played around with backstory. If it’s not on the page, you can ignore it or adopt it as you see fit.
That’s pretty much it for today, so over to you. I realise I’ve skimmed over the scene with Grace without delving too much into it: I think everything I might want to say about that part of the chapter is on the page, and I don’t want to focus too hard on that. But if you have any questions or thoughts on that scene and on Isabel’s childhood in her father’s lab, drop them in the comments, or tell me how you felt about Mortimer and his Suspicious Esperanto.
