“All right, okay. God, I want a shower. I want a toilet. You can’t imagine how much. Look, I’m The One, and that makes me important. You should want to do me a favor.”
He didn’t budge, and the next ten minutes of trying to use her mind to trick him into flying away gave her a mild headache.
She needed a plan, she decided. She knew where he was now. She’d work up a plan, come back.
She shrugged as though the owl and the apple meant nothing, strolled away. She’d return, she thought as she moved from green shadows into dappled light. She’d bring a gift for the faeries so she could swim in the pool, and a plan to distract the owl long enough to get the apple.
She said nothing to Mallick about finding the apple, and though for the second night she went to bed with a stack of books, she spent considerable time plotting her strategy.
And in the morning, for the second time, she found gifts at the door. Stunned, delighted, she crouched down to examine the wood, the screening, the paint, the nails. The benefactor had even found the slats needed to separate the workers from the queen.
She stood again, stared out into the trees.
“Thanks!” she called. “When we have fresh honey, you can share.”
She rushed to muck out the stalls, lay fresh bedding. She reminded Grace they’d take a ride later as she fed and watered both horses.
In building the bee box, Fallon was the teacher, and she liked it. It balanced out the morning of lessons, instructions, practice—none of which involved swords—and Mallick’s less-than-enthusiastic response to her class work.
But for the hive project she took charge because he knew, in her opinion, zippity zip about hives, bees, and honey production.
“We’re doing it from the bottom up,” she told him once she had the supplies and tools organized to her standards. “So that’s the hive stand to keep the hive off the ground. We’re going to do an angled landing for the bees.”
She had already measured and cut, so she showed Mallick how to lay a bead of wood glue. And found the scent of it reminded her of her dad.
“We have three hives at home. The first one, my grandmother gave my grandfather the kit and the bees for his birthday the spring before the Doom. The other two I helped Dad build, then the one we built for the ladies at Sisters Farm. They’re not really sisters,” she said as she worked. “They’re witches, really nice, and friends of my mom’s especially.
“Now we do the bottom board,” she explained. “We’re going to use the screen for ventilation, and we need to add the entrance. The bees come and go through the bottom board. So we’re making a reducer. It keeps out mice and wasps. Pest and robbers.”
She taught well, Mallick thought, working steadily, but explaining each step, guiding him through. She tasked him with constructing a board of slats, for more ventilation, to separate the brood chamber.
“I’m making two medium honey supers. Two’s enough just for us, enough to feed the hive, have some for bartering. We’re building a queen excluder.”
“ ‘Excluder’?” Mallick frowned. “I thought the queen was vital to the hive.”
“She is, but we don’t want her laying eggs in the honey, right?”
“I confess I hadn’t given that a thought.”
“You would if she did. She’s bigger than the workers and drones, so we just make the excluder. She can’t get into the honey supers, but the bees can get to the queen. We’re going to build eight frames for the deep super—that’s where they start building their wax. The excluder goes between the deep super and the honey supers.”
“Your father taught you all this?”
“Yeah. Well, he had to learn. He read his father’s beekeeping books because he didn’t do much with the hive until his dad died, so he didn’t know much about how it worked. Then we built more. My dad likes to build things. He’s really good at it. He built the rooms onto the house and the picnic tables and the …”
She trailed off, kept her head down, her hands busy.
“It’s natural to miss him, miss your family.”
“If I think about it too much it’s too hard.”
He’d told her he’d never loved, but he had. He’d loved his mother. Fifteen hundred years didn’t kill the memory of his sorrow at leaving her.
His duty was to teach, not to comfort, he thought. And yet, some comfort, some understanding surely paved a path toward teaching.
“What you do here, the sacrifice you make, the knowledge and skills you earn, you do for them. For the world, but they’re in the world. What your mother did to keep you safe, what your birth father did, your life father. And they gave you a life, a foundation. Brothers, family. A reason, Fallon, above mere duty to face what comes. They taught you well and gave you knowledge. Enough that you can teach me how to build a home for bees.”
“If … If I’d said no, would they die?”
“I can’t say. I don’t know. But you didn’t say no. Yet.”
She flicked a glance over at him, went back to her work.
She studied his slatted board, approved it, then had him follow her step-by-step as she built one honey super and he the second.
“Okay, this part’s really messy. We’ve got to coat this plastic with beeswax. It gives the bees a start. We need to melt the wax first. I can take it in, melt it over the fire.”
Mallick quirked an eyebrow. “Or you could consider this part of the task practice.”
She liked that better.
She’d put the two cakes their benefactor had left them in a small cauldron. And now under Mallick’s watchful eye, she held her hands over it, glided them down the sides, up again.
He felt the heat, slow and steady, saw the light shimmering from her palms, her fingertips. Soft, pure white.
Inside the cauldron, the wax began to melt.
“What do you call on?”
“The light,” she murmured, her gaze fixed on the melting wax. “The heat. Not fire—not flame. Warmth and light.”
“Where does it rise in you?”
“Everywhere. From the belly and … below. From the heart and the head. It’s through me.”
“How do you control it?”
She frowned at that. “I … think. Enough to melt, but not to burn or boil. That’s enough.”
She looked up, smiled. “Now it gets messy.”
It took most of the afternoon to build and construct, to paint the exterior a bright white. While Fallon circled around it, crouched down to examine, Mallick stepped back. And found himself foolishly satisfied to have had a part in building something with his own hands.
“It’s good,” Fallon decreed. “Sound and sturdy.”
“You’ll give me lessons on the keeping of the bees once we get them. Do they come to the hive, attracted by the box, the wax?”
“You wouldn’t get a healthy colony that way, and you’d never draw the queen. You call them, invite them.”
“Show me.”
“I scouted a colony yesterday. They’ll like it here. You’ve never called bees?”
“No. It’s not my gift. Show me,” he repeated.
She closed her eyes a moment, a young girl, long-legged, slender, her raven-wing hair in a braid over one shoulder.
“I am in the air, of the air. I am in the light, of the light. I am on the earth, of the earth. I am by the water, of the water. And all these, magicks join. I am of the magicks that join the creatures that walk, that crawl, that fly, that burrow, that swim. We are all of, in, by, on. The queen nests while others brood, work, hunt, build. Here I offer a home, humbly. Come and see. Come and live. Come and thrive.”
She spread her arms. “Come.”
He saw nothing, heard nothing but the girl, her arms spread wide, her body statue-still. And her face, he thought, luminous.
A minute passed, then another, then a third. He thought to stop her, to tell her she could try again another time.
Then he heard the swarm.
The air filled with a deep, droning buzz, and Fallon stayed still. The cloud, a swirl, swooped out of the woods. His instinct was to rush to her, to pull her away, inside to safety.
Before he moved, she opened her eyes. And glowed.
A large honeybee—the queen?—hovered over the palm of her right hand. And the swarm covered her outstretched arms, her hair, her shoulders, in a mad buzz.