Bee Sting Cake

by Victoria Goddard

“There can’t be all that many Imperial titles still vacant, surely?” Mr. Dart was asking. “Not on Alinor, anyway.”

  “A surprising number. There were over two score titles in Northwest Oriole alone, and at least a dozen were lost in the Fall. Some because everyone was at court in Astandalas, others during the Interim.”

  “We were reading in last week’s New Salon that the Ironwood heir has been found.”

  “Yes. I expect I’ll be meeting her this Winterturn—my aunt was called to Chare to assist in the identification, and tells me she’s a ‘charming gel and very striking’. Her name’s Verity or Charity or some sort of virtue, which must be tiresome for her, but probably appealed to my aunt.”

  I thought of the Honourable Rag claiming the Ironwood heir must be ugly if the paper didn’t mention her beauty in the same breath as her title and fortune, and once more liked Hal’s relations.

  “Starting to be time to think about the next duke, eh?” Mr. Dart said with a sympathetic smile.

  “So I am informed. I’m surprised you and Jemis aren’t up to your ears in matchmaking mamas?”

  “My brother’s certainly trying, with the willing assistance of my aunt. And once Jemis’ family is all sorted out, all the mamas currently shunning him will start flocking around.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t find someone in Stoneybridge,” I said, rocking my barrel closer to where they were sitting.

  “Back with us, are you?” Hal said, but his voice was warm.

  Mr. Dart’s was much sharper. “Well, I didn’t—and since your taste in women appears to be for dashing criminals, I don’t think you’re one to criticize.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said blankly. “I didn’t mean to hit a sore spot.”

  Mr. Dart sighed heavily. “I’ve been getting that all summer. It gets wearying.”

  “Perhaps you should put an advertisement in the New Salon,” I tried, but he didn’t rise.

  Hal said, “Regarding the Ironwood heir, my aunt wrote to tell me that the heir had to prove herself in some sort of traditional magical competition before she was granted it—had to be acknowledged by a magical sword, I think it was.”

  “That’s all that I need,” I replied with a not-very-realistic chuckle. “A magic sword.”

  “I fear the Marquisate of Noirell is superabundantly likely to require some sort of magical competition, Jemis.”

  Superabundantly had been a joke, all second year, when I thought I was on top of the world but was probably just flying nearly out of sight on wireweed.

  “Given the riddling dragon and cursed Woods,” interjected Mr. Dart, sounding as if he were trying not to laugh.

  “Bah, I tell you. Where’s the light coming from, Hal? Did you make a werelight, and if so, can it be a little brighter, please?”

  “Can’t you make a were light of your own, if you want one?”

  “I don’t know any magic. I only found out I might have a talent for it last week.”

  “Seriously?” he said. “Oh—right—that was why you’re so concerned about the missing witch. Hmm.”

  “I take it you’re not making the glow, then?” I said, ignoring this for the moment.

  “Is it the moss?” Mr. Dart asked incredulously. “Now, that is something out of a tale.”

  “Jemis’ whole life appears to be something out of a tale, and we are caught up in it, Mr. Dart, as loyal friends—companions—possibly even guides.”

  “Well, loyal friends, companions, possibly even guides, do you want to sit in this cellar all night, try to escape, or see what the mysterious glow down the even-more-mysterious passage is?”

  “The last, obviously, being both the most foolish and the most interesting option,” Hal replied, laughing.

  “I’m sure you spent just as much of your boyhood as we did preparing for the day when the Red Company would require our assistance,” said Mr. Dart. “Shall we?”

  WE WERE PRESUMABLY still in the cellars, which were extensive and cavernous. Occasionally we passed miscellaneous items, junk of the sort that gets put into cellars: broken furniture, old barrels and jugs and boxes, empty bottles, dusty sacks I hoped were empty. Most of it was identified with brands or stamps showing the bees and skeps of Noirell. The bee was a device of Damara, one of the Imperial houses, but the Marquisate of Noirell had been granted use of the image—though never in gold or silver—as a result of some ancient service to a Grand Duke of Damara, still (in the person of the Last Emperor) technically High King of Rondé.

  All this Hal conveyed to us in a low voice. Mr. Dart nodded or murmured at appropriate moments, seeming genuinely interested. I trailed along, no longer sulking—or at least, trying very hard not to sulk—but feeling a little cheated that Hal knew so much more about my family history than I did. On both sides.

  But I had spent three years at Morrowlea drugged, enchanted, besotted, beguiled—and beyond all that, very deliberately distancing myself from Ragnor Bella, from being Jack Greenwing’s son, from mourning my mother the Lady Olive, whose title I, like everyone else, never thought of as more than an honorific.

  “It is the moss,” said Hal, “but it’s not only the moss.”

  “It’s coming from through there,” Mr. Dart added. “Well, Jemis?”

  “Why am I making the decision?”

  “Your grandmother, your riddle, your inheritance—”

  “Fine.” I contemplated the glow emanating from what seemed to be a curved passageway. I felt sneezes tickling the back of my nose, twisted the ring as had so quickly become habit.

  “Fine, what?”

  “Fine, let’s go see what the mysterious glow is.”

  But I had listened to my father’s stories, and had read dozens of romantic adventures besides, and so I picked up the broken stave of a barrel from the corner, a makeshift weapon if ever there was one but better than nothing.

  WE DIDN’T NEED IT.

  We advanced down the passageway. My action in arming myself seemed to have infected Hal and Mr. Dart with a belated sense of caution, for they came close behind me, broken barrel staves of their own in hand.

  I reviewed their skills in my mind. Mr. Dart was a good fencer, but he was right-handed and could not yet have learned to compensate for the petrified arm. Hal was a wicked polo player and acceptable boxer, but although not a disgrace with a sword—he had certainly had the tutors to ensure he wasn’t a dead loss—he was also certainly not much more than average.

  I did not feel very heroic, but it was nevertheless something of a disappointment to reach the source of the glow and discover no adversary nor any sign of one.

  We did, however, find the bees.

  WE HUDDLED IN THE MIDDLE of a large stone chamber shaped like the interior of a skep. It was round, the sides curving up above us to a vaulted ceiling, in the centre of which was an unglazed opening. A few spatters of rain came through, even at the distance of a dozen or fifteen feet.

  I felt the water absently. My thoughts were on the unpleasant crunch underfoot before we realized what we were stepping on, the golden glow coming from nowhere in particular. The light illuminated the lost bees of the Woods Noirell, descendants (so it was said) of the bees of Melmúsion, whose honey gave the gods their immortal youthfulness.

  “Are they ... dead?” said Mr. Dart.

  “Asleep?” I murmured. My mouth, my nose, my mind was full of the taste, the scent of honey, sweet, heavy, familiar.

  “Enchanted, surely,” said Hal.

  Every memory of my mother seemed crowded around me, as numerous, as heartbreaking, as the thousands upon thousands of stone-still bees on the floor.

  The curving walls were honeycombed.

  My mind snagged suddenly on how analogy and reality chimed together, jangled with unexpected aptness.

  The walls were honeycombed: analogously by some skilled stone carver, literally by the work of hundreds of thousands of bees. Old comb, dull gold, caramel, some of it nearly black; none of the white of new-drawn comb, none of the
pure bright gold of autumn honey.

  Memories were coming back to me. Memories of my mother in our garden at the Dower Cottage, showing me how to light the censer, calm the bees with the fragrant smoke. Opening the skep to show me queen and eggs and larvae and workers and drones. Laughing when I asked her about the drones, telling me through gurgles of laughter I didn’t then understand that even drones had a role to play in the world, microcosm and macrocosm. Showing me wax and honey and propolis, telling me that this was my heritage: sweetness, light, stings.

  The first honey of the season; how she could say from the scent, the tiniest taste, the colour, that this was hawthorn, this clover, this borage, this rosebay willowherb; that none of them were the same as the honey of the Woods, for the bees in the Woods Noirell, descendants in how many generations of the bees of Melmúsion, drew nectar from the trees that grew there alone, the autumn-blooming Tillarny limes whose scent had been in the air as we rode on the looping old highway.

  “It’s not too late for the autumn honey, if we could waken the bees,” I said, opening my eyes to find the dim light glaring. I rubbed my eyes with cold fingertips, the ring strangely—or not so strangely—warm on my skin. “Any ideas?”

  Hal shook his head. Mr. Dart had his slightly cocked, as if trying to listen to something on the edge of hearing.

  “Do you hear something?” I asked him.

  He started, shook his head vigorously. “No. Nothing. Just—just thinking—what Hal said about the Ironwood heir.”

  “I’ve never even heard rumours of a magical sword in the Woods.”

  Hal said, “No, clearly it has something to do with the bees—and the dragon—did your mother never tell you anything about this? Family stories, jokes, songs, anything?”

  There was a kind of raised plinth in the middle of the chamber, directly under the roof aperture. I scuffed carefully along the floor, sat down on the bee-free edge. Tried not to cry.

  “We kept bees,” I said, turning my face up to the cool drops of rain sprinkling down. “She showed me how to look after them ...”

  Hal seated himself beside me, Mr. Dart on my left a moment later. His stone arm made a muffled thud as it touched the plinth. Hal said, “She looked after them herself?”

  “She loved gardens, growing things, bees. Sweet peas were her favourite flower. We weren’t well-off, you know, Hal. My father had his pay, nothing from his father—my grandfather nearly ruined the Arguty estate gambling. My elder uncle managed to repair the damage, but only after many years. And my mother’s people ... she had a small independence, nothing else.”

  “I think we might now have a better understanding of why that might have been a strained situation,” Mr. Dart murmured. “Do you think it would hurt them if I smoked?”

  I explained about the incense, how smoke rendered bees sleepy, calm.

  “Renders me calm as well,” said Mr. Dart, and spent a few minutes fussing with pipe and tobacco and lucifer.

  “Perhaps it was a special incense that wakes them,” Hal suggested.

  “No, the incense was to calm them. She did use a special kind, before the Fall. We ran out during the Interim. After that she just used what we could find in the house, the garden. We were caught in the Dower Cottage, she and I. I—I don’t know how long it was before we got across the grounds to Arguty House, let alone to Dartington.”

  “It was hard everywhere,” Hal said, fairly matter-of-factly. “We could see Zabour fall into the sea from the upper tower of Leaveringham Castle. It seemed to take forever.”

  Zabour, once one of the Circle Schools, now, like so much else, lost.

  Hurriedly, moving us all on from dark memories, I said, “I remember when things got better, when we felt the world was no longer spinning adrift. My mother told me it was time to dance the Lady in, and we sang in the garden under the hawthorn blossom. It was a song she used to sing often, a lullaby, a bee song, a gardening song. We used to dance to it in the garden sometimes. That time—I remember—I remember thinking it was like the world reached out to dance with us.”

  It was such a private, intimate, safe moment, there in the heart of a stone hive surrounded by hundreds of thousands of sleeping bees, there with my two best friends, there with the scent of my mother all around, that I added: “That was how I felt facing the ruffians, facing the dragon. Like they had set up the music for a waltz and the world just reached out its hand for me to take.”

  “Will you sing for us? The song your mother sang?” Mr. Dart asked, blowing smoke rings into the strange golden air, where they glowed like clouds at the edge of sunset, dawn.

  “That is a very good idea,” said Hal, and so—since I was trying not to sulk—I cleared my throat, closed my eyes, and with a few mistakes found rhythm, melody, words.

  Wood of the golden trees

  Home of the golden bees

  Where lost Melmúsion

  Sings one more song.

  Gifts of the Lady Green

  Sweetness of the seasons

  Summer in wintertime

  Sings one more song.

  Gifts of the Lady White

  Light in any darkness

  Winter wisdom in the spring

  Sings one more song.

  Heart of the golden trees

  Wood of the golden bees

  Where lost Melmúsion

  Sings one more song.

  “I think there’s another verse,” I said, frowning, eyes still closed, hearing my mother’s voice in my mind’s ear, echoing softly.

  “I think they want to dance with you,” said Mr. Dart in a strange voice.

  I opened my eyes to see that I had woken the bees of the Woods.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Bees of Melmúsion

  THE CHAMBER WAS NO longer silent.

  All those hundreds of thousands of bees—no longer stone-still, no longer silent, no longer—safe? It was hard to find words.

  The bees were golden, caramel and gold, their wings visible as glints, the mysterious light still not seeming to emanate from anywhere but nevertheless increased in strength, in luminosity, tenfold, a hundredfold, as if every wingbeat of each of those hundreds of thousands of bees made it grow.

  The room no longer felt cold, dank, damp. It was warm, glowing, fragrant with the scent of old honey, old pollen, old beeswax.

  It came to me that they would want new nectar, new pollen, new honey, new wax, and that the Tillarny limes were blooming.

  I pushed myself off the plinth. The bees were no longer motionless on the floor. The flagstones were clad in the glinting carpet of moving bees I remembered from peeking into our skeps when my mother did the ceremonies that had been such an integral part of Astandalan life.

  Some of the bees were in the air. They were not flying purposefully, they seemed confused, adrift, perhaps even expectant.

  Waiting to dance?

  I had not seen the queen, but now that the bees were moving I knew where she must be, in the centre of the thickest swarm, on the wall opposite the entry where the bees moved across the deeply carved shape of a Sun-in-Glory, emblem of Astandalas.

  I bowed to the carving, the queen hidden at its centre, heels clicking, extravagant gestures, hat off.

  I sang the old song again, eyes open this time. With each verse, each iteration, the light grew stronger, the buzz grew louder, more and more bees rose from the floor, the walls, found their wings, filled the air.

  I danced as my mother had taught me, singing the song over and over again, leaping around the room, hands and feet moving into spaces suddenly there, opened for me by the bees.

  Their movements were so quiet taken one by one. You could hear a single honeybee in a flower, flying by, if you were listening and nothing louder or more attractive caught your attention.

  A hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand bees? On a still day in summer, they said, you could hear the bees of the Woods Noirell clear across the Border.

  I wondered what it had sounded like, smelle
d like, felt like, to ride up the highway from Astandalas to Alinor, to feel the wind blowing magic across worlds to meet you, to hear the great mysterious hum from the other side of the sun.

  Inside that secret room, that stone hive, my voice at its loudest was fully absorbed into the sound of the bees, those hundreds of thousands, waking up so we could at last dance the Lady in.

  I danced, sweat pouring down my face, sweat sweet like honey, imagining as I moved my hands that there was someone else there in the room with me, someone in the spaces between the bees, someone whose footsteps matched mine, someone whose hand touched mine, someone whose voice sang somewhere in the harmonies between beesong and mine.

  I danced until the room was bright as day, until that other voice started the verse I had not remembered.

  Honey of the golden woods

  Sunlight caught in sweetness

  Light of lost Melmúsion

  Shine another year.

  And with the last word we all stopped: the bees, and the ghost, and I.

  I stood in front of the Sun-in-Glory, the same pattern as the Heart of Glory, the pectoral my father had won for his bravery, for holding the Sun banner firm at the edge of another Border. In the centre of the Sun was the queen of the hive and her attendants and those drones that had a role to play that I understood a little better now, microcosm and macrocosm.

  I held the last movement, arms out, foot pointed, and then, knowing the dance was over, feeling somewhere deep inside that the curse was broken, I bowed again to the queen, to the Sun, to the memory of my mother.

  I felt a soft hand across my forehead, brushing a stray hank of hair back into place, a gesture I knew far better than the song. And then in a brush of air scented of summertime the sense of someone else was gone.

  I fell to my knees and put my hands to my face and wept for my mother, while the bees she had so loved streamed out into the Woods to start that mysterious alchemy by which they distilled the essence of summer sunlight for the long, dark nights of winter.

  Chapter Twenty

  The Villagers have an Idea