Chapter 7
Carys
The honey turns in the night.
I know it before I’m properly awake, the same sour thread that’s dogged me since the road, except now it isn’t out in a meadow or up a dark hill. It’s downstairs. It’s close enough to touch, and it’s got a smell on it now, thin and off under the sweet, like milk gone over in the sun.
I’m down the narrow stair with my boots still in my hand.
My crates sit where I left them by the cold forge, and Bramble’s standing over them with his neck low and his one eye murderous, ready to bite whatever’s done it.
Three jars of the clover have gone cloudy.
Not spoiled, not sugared, nothing I’ve got an honest word for.
Just wrong. The gold in them turned grey at the edges, the smell lifting out of the open necks and curdling my stomach the same breath it turns my heart cold.
“No,” I tell them, quiet. “No, no. Not you too.”
Good honey doesn’t go over in a night. Good honey outlasts the woman who jarred it.
It sits sweet in a sealed tomb a thousand years and comes out fit to spread on bread.
It is the one thing in my whole moving life that does not spoil, and three jars of it have gone grey in the dark of a woodwright’s shop with no heat near them and no reason on this earth I can name.
“It isn’t only yours.”
Madoc’s in the workshop doorway, and he’s been up a while by the look of him, dressed, sawdust nowhere on him yet. He’s got that flat set to his face that I’ve learned means he’s carrying something heavy and deciding how much of it to hand me.
“Ordun sent a boy up before light,” he says.
“Half the mead on the row’s gone thin overnight.
Two honey-sellers packing to leave. A dairyman’s whole morning churn split and soured in the pail.
” He comes and stands over my cloudy jars, not touching them, reading them with his eyes like they might tell him where the strain sits.
“Anything sweet. Anything the ground gave up this season. It’s all turning at once. ”
I sit down hard on the end of his bench. Bramble climbs into my lap uninvited, which he never does, and I let him, and I put my hand flat on his awful warm feathered back just to have something under it that’s still exactly what it’s meant to be.
“It’s collecting,” I say. The word comes up out of me from somewhere I didn’t know had it. “That’s what she meant. It’s owed, and nobody’s paid it, so it’s taking the payment out of the jars.”
Madoc doesn’t tell me I’m wrong. That’s the thing I’m coming to trust about him faster than I’ve trusted anything in years. He doesn’t reach for the comfortable lie first. He stands there with my ruined honey in front of him and he lets it be as bad as it is.
“Then we’d best go and see it in daylight,” he says. “Before it takes more than jars.”
We go out to the meadow together. That’s new, the together of it.
I’ve walked out to my own hives alone every dawn of my working life, and this morning there’s a seven-foot orc folding himself up onto my buckboard beside me with a bag of his own cold-iron tools between his boots, and Bramble installed on the seat between us like a chaperone nobody asked for, and I find I don’t hate a single part of it.
The meadow’s wrong before we’re halfway across it.
I feel it in my teeth first, that low sick note pushed up loud enough now that I don’t have to reach for it.
The clover’s still gold. The good hives still hum their good hum.
But under all of it there’s the other thing, the grieving old note the Keeper wore, except it’s changed since two nights back.
There’s an edge on it that wasn’t there. Less grief. More want.
I stop the wagon a stone’s throw from the treeline and don’t take it closer.
“There,” I say, and point, though there’s nothing yet to point at. “It’s stronger by the trees. It’s always the trees.”
Madoc’s already down off the wagon, one nail out of his pouch, holding it loose in his open palm as he walks the edge of the field.
Testing the air with a bit of iron, a wet finger held up for a wind nobody else can feel.
I watch the moment it goes cold on him. His hand doesn’t flinch but his shoulders do, a hitch, quick, then gone.
“Here,” he says. “The line runs here. Same as at the camp.” He crouches, sets his palm flat to the ground, holds it. “The strain’s worst right along the tree-shadow. It’s leaning on this edge and the edge isn’t holding.”
I climb down. My knees don’t want to and I make them.
I’ve been coward enough about this already, one more ordinary night stretched into three, and the honey’s paying for my flinching now, so I walk up to stand beside him at the edge of the dark, and I make myself do the thing I’ve been scared to do on purpose since the meadow.
I kneel, and I lay my hand flat to the cold ground, and I reach.
Not the small reach I give a sick hive. The whole of it. I open the place under my skin where the hum lives, the place my old keeper found in me before I had a name for it, and I push it out into the grieving green and I ask it plain, the question I’d put to any hive that’s hurting.
What do you want. What would settle you.
The green answers, and it is not the Keeper.
The grief is still there, far down, but there’s a colder thing sitting on top of it now, and it turns toward my question fast, hungry, glad to be asked.
The light at the treeline doesn’t gather soft and gold this time.
It thins to something hard and bright and thornish, all edges, and a voice comes up through the ground and into my palm that has no bees in it at all.
It’s dry as a cracked pod. It’s old as the first field anyone ever fenced.
And it is furious in a way that’s had a very long time to cool into patience.
What do I want, it says, and it sounds almost delighted to be asked, almost kind, which is the worst of it.
I want what your kind swore and stopped paying.
I want the tithe of every high bloom your grandmothers ate and never returned.
I have kept the whole of it, small one, every un-given season, and I will have it back out of the jars, or the hives, or the children who wander too near the trees, or out of you, who can finally hear me ask.
It is owed either way, in the end. Sweetness owed is sweetness owed.
The reach turns on me.
It’s like leaning down to comfort a hurt animal and having a much bigger one lunge up out of the dark behind it.
The Keeper’s pull, that terrible lovely wanting, doubles and goes teeth-first, and it isn’t asking to be heard anymore.
It’s hauling. I feel my own self start to slide down the length of my own arm toward the cold ground like water finding a crack, and the meadow tips, and the gold goes grey at the edges same as my ruined honey, and some far-off part of me thinks, clear and calm, oh, this is how the child stood so still.
Then there’s an arm across my chest, hauling me back the other way.
Madoc’s got me. One arm banded across me from behind, my back against the wall of him, dragging me up and off the ground and three good steps back from the tree-shadow before I’ve caught up to being moved.
My hand tears free of the cold and the pull snaps like a cut line, and I come back into myself all at once, gasping, blood hot on my lip, the ordinary meadow slamming back down over everything gold and loud and blessedly dull.
“I have you,” he says, low, close to my ear, not letting go. “I have you. It’s back. You’re back.”
I’m shaking hard enough that I’d be on the ground if he weren’t the thing I’m leaning on.
My nose is bleeding, a fat warm drop of it off my chin and onto his forearm, and my ears are ringing that high thin ring, and every hair on me is up, and under all of it, tangled right into the fear same as before, is that horrible wanting pull, quieter now, telling me it would have been easy, it would have been soft, all I had to do was slide.
“It’s not her,” I get out, when I can. “It’s not the Keeper. There’s another one. A cold one. It’s angry, Madoc, and it’s not wrong to be. That’s the part I can’t get past. It’s owed. We did stop paying it. It’s furious and it’s got a case.”
His arm’s still round me. He doesn’t rush me off it. “How long,” he says, “before you’d have gone in after it. If I hadn’t.”
I don’t want to answer that. I answer it anyway, because he’s the one person I’ve met who I can’t bear to hand the soft lie to. “I wasn’t going to fight it,” I say. “That’s the worst thing. It didn’t drag me. It offered, and I was reaching back.”
He turns me round by the shoulders, careful, and looks down into my face, and whatever he reads there makes his jaw set hard. He takes his thumb and wipes the blood off my lip, rough and gentle at once, and I let him, and neither of us says a word about the fact that his hand is shaking too.
“Then you don’t reach for it alone,” he says. “Not once more. You reach, I hold. That’s the arrangement, and it isn’t up for debate.”
“That’s twice now you’ve told me a rule instead of asking,” I say. My voice comes out wobbly and I don’t care. “You should know I don’t take to rules.”
“I know exactly what you take to.” He says it flat, plain, and it lands somewhere under my breastbone and stays. “You take to a thing that holds when you lean your weight on it. You’ve told me so yourself. Twice.”
I don’t have an answer for that. I’ve got a nosebleed and a ruined morning and a furious old god in the trees that knows my name, and this enormous quiet man has just said the truest thing anyone’s said about me to my face in a decade, and all I can do is stand in the gold meadow and let him keep wiping the blood off my chin and try not to cry about a spoon a second time.
We don’t get back to town till noon.
By then the fair’s heard. Not the truth of it, nobody’s got the truth, but the shape of it, and the shape’s enough.