Chapter 5 #3
I don’t mean for anything to answer. I never have, not really, not with words. I’ve talked to bees my whole life like some women talk to saints, comfort over any real hope of a reply.
Something answers.
Not the hive. Past it. The green-gold light gathers itself at the treeline into a shape that wasn’t there a breath ago, tall as the old trees themselves and no taller, bark and shadow and something under both that catches the last of the light and holds it like a held breath.
Two points of brightness sit where a face would sit on anyone else, warm and old and, worst of all, kind.
The hum that’s been sitting sour in this hive for three days rises up out of the box and out of the ground both at once and turns into a voice that shouldn’t be a voice at all.
It sounds like bees in a wall. A hundred small hums layered so close together they make one low, warm note, the kind you feel in your back teeth before you’re sure you’ve heard it at all.
You hear me.
I don’t hear it with my ears. I hear it the same place I hear a hive gone wrong, low in the skin before it ever reaches my ears, straight down into the place where fear and wonder live so close together they might as well be neighbors sharing one wall.
My knees go loose under me. I don’t fall, though it’s a near thing, my free hand catching the hive’s edge hard enough to bruise.
My heart’s slamming too hard to steady, and my breath comes short and thin, and under all of it, tangled right up with the fear, is a pull I don’t have any name for at all, warm and terrible and wanting, the pull you get leaning out over a high place just to see how far down it goes.
Small enough to have carried this so long alone, the voice says, and there’s an ache folded into it I wasn’t ready for, old grief wearing the shape of gentleness. No one has heard the green in longer than your whole short life. It is owed. It has been owed a long while.
“Owed what,” I say, my voice coming out smaller than I like it, though I don’t try to make it bigger. “Owed by who. I haven’t done anything to anyone.”
Not you, the shape says, and there’s something almost sorry in it, almost fond. Not yet.
The light starts to thin the moment the words are out, green folding back into gold folding back into the ordinary long orange of an ordinary evening, the shape at the treeline going soft at its edges like smoke deciding to be air again.
The last thing I catch, right before the whole field snaps back to birdsong and wind and one very ordinary hive gone quiet and calm under my hand, is a single note that isn’t words at all.
Just warmth, and grief, and something that might, in a voice built of bees and old trees, have been the shape of a goodbye.
Then it’s gone, and the clover is only clover, and the sky is only going the ordinary color skies go at the end of an ordinary day, and I’m sitting in the grass with my palm still flat against a hive that hums steady and calm under it for the first time in three days, like whatever was wrong with it walked out through me and into the trees and didn’t look back.
I sit there a long while, longer than the walk home should let me sit, while the light goes from orange to grey to the first true blue of night.
I don’t cry, though it’s close. I don’t laugh either, though some fool part of me wants to, the same wild laugh I gave the road the day I first smelled linden on the wind.
I just sit there, one hand in the clover and one on the hive, and let my whole body shake itself out slow, patient as I’d let a hive settle after a bad storm passes over it.
I don’t have a story ready this time. That’s the part that scares me worst of all, walking back across the darkening field with the trees gone still and ordinary again at my back.
Every strange thing since the road into Thistledown, I’ve had some tidy shape ready to fold it into.
A sour hive. A long morning. Too much sun and not enough bread.
I don’t have one for this. There isn’t a bad-hive story wide enough to hold a voice made of bees and old grief telling me I’m owed to somebody, some thing, that’s been waiting a very long time to be heard.
I know one plain thing, walking home in the near dark with my heart still not settled all the way back into its ordinary rhythm. Something real is out there past that treeline, old and grieving and patient, and it knows my name in a way I never told it, and it isn’t finished with me yet.
I don’t tell Madoc when I get in. Not tonight. I don’t have the words lined up for it, and some part of me, the same part that’s kept moving my whole life rather than risk being asked to stay, wants one more ordinary evening before I have to hand him something this strange to hold too.
I bank down beside Bramble by the cool forge instead, and let the shop’s ordinary smell of oak and wax settle over me, and try not to think too hard about a color I still don’t have a name for, or a voice that sounded, under all that grief, almost glad to have finally found me.