by Jean Gill
‘You can’t do it, Rinduran,’ she yelled. ‘Your children have the Forest inside them and if you loose the destruction you planned, they’ll all die.’
The blackness rippled, as if gathering strength, suffocating her. ‘I know you, Mielitta. We’ve talked before. We’ve connected before. You recognise who I am, what I am. You enjoy killing, don’t you?’ the voice grated. ‘Even children. Because they have what you don’t. They’re normal. They have parents who love them. Of course you want to destroy them and their home.’
‘Bees,’ Mielitta sought the solidarity to protect her against Rinduran’s vicious darts but her bees still huddled, shaken by her vision of a dead world. Rinduran had not wounded them to near-death with his misglamour. She had. She’d pictured the nightmare and shared it with the creatures she most loved. They would never recover. Maybe Rinduran was right.
‘I spy with my black eye, a foul bug, unwanted child, friend to no-one, traitor, riddled and contagious. Do you know her, foundling? If you don’t trust me, the walls can show you, your beloved walls. Look.’
Stones appeared in the blackness. Mielitta could not move, as if the ground was indeed the Citadel’s fabric, rooting her to the spot. She could not see beyond the walls that now surrounded her. The walls could never lie. They wavered, just as they had done to show her the Council Chamber.
‘They gave birth to you, foundling. Remember?’
Her favourite story came to life as she saw the baby coming through the walls. Only this time the baby oozed insects that crawled all over her, vanishing into her eyes when the smith heard the crying and stopped. He didn’t know what evil creature he was adopting, the honest, kind smith. As he picked up the baby, Mielitta could see the scurrying of insect legs in the baby’s smile, but the smith noticed nothing. He was too good to see the evil being he harboured, nurtured for years, who would reward him by killing his whole community.
‘You see her, don’t you, and you know her. You know this is the truth.’ The voice stabbed at her, prodding, searching for weak spots, for more weak spots, rejoicing at the pain it caused.
Mielitta sat down, rocked back and fore, hugging herself. She felt the glow of the bee sigil, her inner queen.
Are you ashamed of us? asked the bee.
Unable to answer, Mielitta rocked to and fro.
The walls showed Declan again. The poor smith was sitting in the forge, weeping, knowing now the terrible scourge he’d brought on his community. The Maturity Ceremony was outside, Rinduran’s voice was saying that he had an important announcement to make later, when the new adults came out of the Barn. What should have been a wonderful day was the worst of the smith’s life because he’d found out the truth about the freak he’d brought up as a daughter. The truth about what she’d done.
Mielitta stopped rocking. The walls wavered, uncertain, then turned black again, the visions gone. Her bee sigil glowed ever brighter.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m not ashamed of you.’
‘Tell me,’ she yelled at the blackness that was only a mage’s eye patch, whatever the misglamour he used. ‘Tell me, how did Declan know so much about his daughter’s condition before the candidates came out of the Maturity Barn?’
The black shimmered into walls again, showed Kermon at the spyhole and Declan learning about the Test from him. But Declan did not cry. If this was when he found out, he would have cried. This picture did not match the one before, did not fit the story.
‘Fake!’ she cried. And if one bit was fake, so was the rest. Either the facts or the way of seeing. What had Drianne said about Rinduran? ‘You are the infection in the Citadel! You have infected your daughter with your way of seeing, with a desire for death! She could live if you let her. The Forest could save her. But you’ll never find out, will you, because you prefer being certain she’ll die. You prefer to blame somebody else!’
The fake walls were leaking light, not blackness but sunlight, pouring in and destroying the misglamour, until Mielitta was free again, glowing with the natural force the bees gave her. She could not see her three partners but that didn’t mean they weren’t near. They must fight their own battles. In front of her stood Mage Rinduran, glowering in his gold braid and temporary defeat. Beside him, as she’d dreaded, was Declan.
What’s the target? she asked herself. Make the ground your friend and use the arrows of light.
‘It was you,’ she stated. ‘Not Kermon. Forging people, all these years.’ Her tone dripped contempt. She drew three arrows from her quiver, kept talking. ‘You knew I hadn’t taken the Maturity Test because if I had, you’d have been involved. You just watched and waited for your moment to betray me, your unnatural daughter.’
‘No daughter of mine.’ Declan’s face was hardened steel, his eyes flint. ‘I watched you for the Council, from the moment you came through the wall.’
She felt red-hot steel probing her mind but her bee-self danced round it, let her workers douse it in oil. She zigzagged round the hammer and the clumsy tongs attempting to grip her.
‘You should have respected my smithcraft more,’ she told Declan as she blocked his invasion. ‘You’ve betrayed yours. You don’t even smell of the forge any more. You smell of nothing. You are nothing. How many children have you mind-raped?’
He flinched. ‘Helped,’ he told her. ‘I helped them become Perfect. I wanted to help you but they warned me your sweetness was a glamour, that you didn’t fit and never would.’
His hand sneaked behind his back. Always reluctant to waste magecraft and he was on his own now. Rinduran had vanished. She would deal with the Chief Mage afterwards. He must be tired after his wall stunt if he was letting Declan finish the job.
But Mielitta also knew how to time her move. She screamed high, the death song of a queen about to be murdered, and she fused with the glowing sigil so that she was in bee form when the thrown dagger passed through the space where her head had been.
‘You always were full of yourself. Try this for smithcraft! Forged from your own mind and can’t miss, so zigzag away, little bee.’ Declan hurled a fine thread of seek-spell towards her, with the command, ‘Steel, kill!’
Steel? She looped high to evade the seek-spell but Declan was right. The magical tracker merely turned and headed for her again. Her bee-body wavered and she reached instinctively for her lucky pendant. Steel! She dived down and the seeker whizzed overhead, turned towards her again. Visualising her human body, Mielitta transformed enough to unclasp the arrowhead that was about to kill her. It thrummed in her hands as she held it out. Each Damascene blue line vibrated like the bees’ wings she’d imagined in her design, so beautifully executed by Kermon. Steelwing. She pointed it at the white light spearing towards her.
The seek-spell was too quick for her human form to duck and, in a blinding flare, it hit the arrowhead. The glowing steel jerked itself from Mielitta’s hand but, instead of pursuing Declan’s command, it stayed true to its forging and to its maker Kermon’s whispered injunction. ‘Steelwing, know one master, Mielitta; one aim, to protect her; one revenge, reverse all harm.
Welded to the seek-spell, the arrowhead traced the spell’s reverse route. The deep wavy Damascene lines took on a life of their own and an escort of glittering blue bees accompanied the weapon honed against himself by the words of the Mage-Smith.
Declan tried to swerve and run but he had cast a seeker-spell too strong to counter. The arrow-head pierced him, buried itself so deep in his heart Mielitta could no longer see it. Her father’s cloudy eyes repeated Rinduran’s words as he crashed to the forest-floor, clutching at his chest. Unwanted child, friend to no-one, traitor, riddled and contagious.
‘No!’ she cried, dropping to the ground, searching for signs of life. Her father was gone. Had never really been, she told herself. Rinduran’s doing all along. Channelling her self-pity, her grief, her outrage, she forged all the flaws in her raw material into a weapon against the Chief Mage. She would find him. She was the arrow. Her bee sigil glowed as she
transformed once more.
Now she called her bees. She felt them stagger, then respond to her need, grow stronger as they felt her passion. Then she connected them to their hive, their home, and fifty thousand bees responded, Ready.
Now she called the creatures of the Forest. Now she called to the Forest itself.
She focused on her bee sigil, merged with the queen into a flying warrior, with infinite arrows in her quiver and all of them poisoned. Then she drew her natural forces together and led the attack.
All glamour had lifted from the Forest and, adjusting to communal bee-sight, Mielitta spotted the remaining enemy mages as ten ghostly faces in black robes, scentless. As if their lives no longer touched them or marked them, left no smell. Even if they threw off their garb, their lack of scent distinguished them clearly from Drianne and Kermon. She and her bees could smell Drianne-flower and smoke-Kermon. And Jannlou. Mage or not, his earth pungency told her his position as clearly as any map.
I’ll hold the children and block all attacks on us, Drianne told her. Don’t worry about me. Kermon is going to pick them off one at a time, blend in to confuse them. They don’t know he’s here.
Ten thought Mielitta. Why were there still ten? The Council had lost Shenagra but if Declan was the new member, there should be nine left. If only she could tell Kermon there were ten. And Drianne had said nothing about Jannlou. They were all separated now, each in a different world. She looped a swaying twig in dizzy flight and told herself, Concentrate. This was her domain and she must fight her own battle.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Ducking streaks of power that flared up violet in bee-vision, Mielitta collated the surveillance from hundreds of scout bees. They presented her with a map of the Forest and the enemy positions, which she passed on in mind-pictures to their force of thousands.
At the heart of every mind map was the home hive, almost empty now, containing only the drones and a bodyguard of workers to reassure the Young Queen.
‘Keep laying eggs,’ Mielitta told her. ‘We know you’re working and that creates positive vibrations.’
Do you have to take so many? fretted the Young Queen.
Yes, answered the workers, gathering round Mielitta in a volatile swarm. We have danced this question and if we lose this war there will be no home, no Forest.
The mages had failed with glamour and were now using focused power, seeking Mielitta with hurled fireballs that streaked out, screaming her name and intent on killing. If the seek-spell found a Forest creature in its path, it exploded. The Forest shrieked with dying animals. Trees cracked and fell in the unnatural storm. Birds no longer warned of danger but had flown away or died. Panic drove all away from the last attack, bringing unlikely companions together, bear and tiger, fox and rabbit, but they were as likely to flee towards their deaths as away.
As the bees buzzed their frantic fear of fire, scrambling to re-form a tightly packed ball, Mielitta danced confidence until a few bees tried her dance, tapping and waggling on top of the others, then more tried the movements, until fifty thousand bees shared the same conviction.
Then they shared one word, one thought, one flood of angry banana scent. Attack.
As one army, they zoomed at an enemy they saw as purple-faced in black clothes. Mielitta didn’t even identify the mage except that he was not Rinduran, nor of the greenish hue of Hamel. This one crossed his gauntleted hands as he wove a spell that cloaked him in chainmail, allowed him to taunt a bemused stag with a spear before plunging the point into its side, again and again, as the deer toppled, its eyes lightless.
They said she enjoyed killing? More bee than human, she roared as she took handfuls of arrows, jabbed them into the chinks in his badly-forged armour. The rage of bees was its own volition. When the front ranks had buzzed to their own deaths, piercing every gap in the metal links, wave upon wave followed, berserk with the scent of bee-deaths, finishing what their comrades had begun.
Mielitta was everywhere, stabbing, screaming, buzzing her grief at their losses, defying the last feeble streak of power that singed the top of her head. She felt no pain.
‘Next!’ she yelled as the mage crumpled, slipping down to lie in the blood of the dead stag.
Bite his head off, responded the giant rage of tiny creatures. Their flight was not the playful zigzag of pollen-gathering but the purposeful loosing of an arrow. Mielitta pictured the next purple face, steered this living weapon she wielded and another duel began.
As bees died, so their anger grew and made them an unstoppable force, whereas the mages grew weaker with each death, each loss of magecraft, too selfish to pass on what they never thought to lose. Until it was too late.
Four left, thought Mielitta, stabbing a book that had been dropped on the Forest floor. A book entitled The Proper Education of Girls in Perfection. A book that screamed when pierced by a thousand darts before transforming into a dying mage, slumping into a human heap. What a foolish refuge! Bee-senses had ignored the shape and colour, fretted at the alien object and its lack of smell, while human sense had read the title and recognised the shape of mind that could create such a work.
Scout bees brought her updates, told her of the three that Kermon had disabled, attached to trees with his magecraft. And of the rage in the Forest itself, which had used the power flaring wild in its domain, against the wielders. Three trees had grown in diameter, fifty rings in fifty seconds instead of fifty years, until their screaming victims were silenced, part of bark history, like flies in amber.
Four left. And no sign of Rinduran yet. Nor of a mage with greenish skin.
‘Where are they?’ Mielitta consulted her scouts again. But the answer came from the hive, in the voice she hated most.
‘Say goodbye to all your little friends,’ Rinduran rasped.
Mielitta saw the giant hands through the sharper vision of drones’ eyes, but it was the Young Queen’s anguish that racked her as a frame of brood was lifted out of the open hive.
Our babies! The bees’ collective keen paralysed the colony and Mielitta couldn’t move her warriors. They dropped to the ground, dizzy, lost. But she would not give in to the monster. She flew on alone, to certain death.
‘I’m sorry,’ she yelled aloud, her human voice tiny in her bee body. But the trees raised up a wind and the loose magic blew it harder, faster so that Mielitta’s words grew loud and large. When she heard the echo of her own voice, she knew sorry wasn’t good enough and she summoned all her strength. She could not do this alone.
‘Help me,’ she shouted and every tree in the Forest fanned her plea into a command that roused the very stones to resistance.
Mielitta burst into the glade in time to see Rinduran stamp on the first frame, crushing the unborn bees with his boot. He was torturing the bees with old-fashioned violence, no doubt saving his magecraft to use against her.
‘I’m here,’ she yelled. ‘Take it out on me!’
The Forest roared, ‘I’m here. Take it out on me!’ but it was not Mielitta’s voice that roared defiance in her words. She whirled off track in a sudden gust of wind as a gigantic bear stormed past her and rushed Rinduran.
Bear, panicked the bees, roused once more to attack by an enemy traditional as fire. Eats honey. Eats baby bees. They rose from the ground and from the hive, once more a fighting unit, one Mielitta could either join or watch. They were beyond her direction in their fury at the open hive, their dead babies, the damaged Forest.
After the initial surprise, Rinduran spoke some words of power and blazed white. The stench of hot, singed fur filled Mielitta’s nostrils and underneath was a more familiar scent. She couldn’t quite place it.
The bees were attacking both bear and mage randomly but the beast took no notice. He reared up on his back legs, twice the height of Rinduran and batted away the shafts of power fired at him as easily as he swatted at the bees with his great paws.
‘For my father,’ the bear growled and closed with the mage. Fur hung in tatters, blood oozed fro
m the dark brown skin but the bear took Rinduran into a smothering grip, dug his claws into the mage’s back and crushed the man to his chest, tighter and tighter. The bees made a furious halo round the opponents, buzzing their own anger.
Finally, the bear released Rinduran, lifted his snout to the blaze of sunny sky and roared, ‘It is ended.’ Even the bees faltered in their warnings, confused by the strangeness of the bear’s behaviour.
Mielitta felt her sigil glow, felt her instinct transforming her once more until she could run as a human to the beehive. She straightened the damaged frame as best she could. Rinduran had not killed all the unborn bees and some brood was still capped, so she slipped the frame back into the hive, put the roof back on, recalled her bees.
‘It is ended,’ she told them. How could she explain the temporary alliance between Forest creatures, that the bear was on their side in this war?
‘Like when there’s a fire.’ She showed them the purple-faced black-robed mages, their shafts of destructive power. ‘They’re like fire.’ She pictured the fox and the rabbit, together, hiding. Then the bear and the beehive. They grew anxious, rejected her dance but she showed them again, insisted. ‘Like when there’s a fire.’ She showed them home, the hive, safe.
The bear had dropped to all fours, watched with hard brown eyes. Was she so sure it wouldn’t charge them, follow its nature and pillage the beehive? She inhaled singed fur, bear stench and an earthy smell she knew well, peaty and male.
Yes, she was sure the bear would control itself, she told her bees. For now.
Then, one of the remaining mages ran through the trees, screaming, ‘Father!’ as he attacked the bear. The beast reared up on two legs again and let the mage run into his lethal embrace but the claws did not so much as scrape the skin of the mage’s back.
Mielitta could only watch as Bastien struggled to hurt the enormous creature that held him too close for any weapon to be used. Little spikes of fire had no impact on the bear, which showed all the concern of a wall being kicked by a child in a temper.