9. The Beekeepers and Kew Come to an Understanding

9. The Beekeepers and Kew Come to an Understanding

Before Kew slept, Frin took him to an apothecary who looked more like a set of ears than a person, and the apothecary gave Kew a small lump of honeyed meat.

"Mellified ape," he had told Kew. "It'll do in a pinch, but North bless me, we live in a world seeming made of pinches."

"What would you rather have?" said Kew, chewing.

"Mellified man, of course," said the apothecary. "Fixes all wounds of violence or accident. A powerful great thing to have around, but it's long since any man went into the casket for another."

"I see," said Kew. Medicine was a matter for apothecaries and doctors, not Guardians, and Hawthorn had taught him very little about it. If he had not been so achy and sleepy, he would have asked a great deal of questions, but he was so achy and sleepy, and questions would have to wait until the morning.

Thirty Robin led him to the mess hall where she and the other beekeepers, all various numbers of Robin, ate their evening meal. It was chiefly bread and vegetables. Then she put him to bed in a half-empty dormitory, where a lot of no-name apprentices like himself also slept, and told him and them he needed to sleep and there was to be no nonsense about that. Obedient to Robin's orders, none of them tried to speak to him, and he slept the whole night through.

If he expected the meat to heal his hurts overnight, he was disappointed, but he was still much better in the morning. The mellified ape had fixed his hands and feet, but his bruises persisted, so when he awoke he was quite stiff. Frin had to help him into his breeches, doublet, and sleeveless overgown. It was much more clothing than the beekeepers wore: they all had beige tunics and hose and black hoods, simple and practical. Next to them, Kew looked like a courtier from some old manuscript.

"What's that on your forehead?" said Frin.

"Probably a bruise or something," said Kew. "I feel made of bruises today." He flexed his hands and fingers to loosen up the joints.

Frin did not disagree, only looked at him strangely. In the mess hall, the apprentices and the beekeepers broke their fast on more bread, this time with fruit and small beer.

"I would have thought you'd eat honey," said Kew.

Frin looked at him even more strangely. "It's her honey," he said. With his rabbity ears and large, round, orange eyes, when he made that face at Kew, it was more amusing than anything else.

Kew packed up his things by noon and went to take his leave of Thirty Robin. At his farewell, her face became very blank.

"Didn't Frin tell you?" she said. "One says you're staying here."

"I can't stay here," said Kew. "I have to deliver a message to the tower."

Thirty Robin shrugged. "My boy, you're to stay here until Her Ladyship arrives."

Kew sighed and leaned against the wall. "When will that be?"

Thirty Robin shrugged again. "She's on progress. Left here a bit ago, will be back—oh, One will know. Might as well go ask her, if she's not busy."

One Robin had a little office up in a turret overlooking the huge central garden of the beekeepers' district. She was sorting through handwritten schedules and making notes on a wax tablet when they entered.

"He can't go," she said without looking up.

"I told him," said Thirty.

One Robin appeared to be made of bluish membranes, and it lent her frowns a grotesque, fearsome aura. "Boy, remind me of your handle?"

"Kew."

"A no-name delivering messages from Grey to Black? Now I've seen it all." One sighed and rubbed her forehead with near-translucent hands. "Kew. The Obsidian Lady, whose fief this is, don't take kindly to strangers. All the Ladies round about the tower's foot hate each other. Always fighting, and when they're not fighting, planning to fight. So there's spies everywhere. Does any of this make sense to you? I hear Grey's a bit out of things."

"I understand," said Kew stiffly. As if he wouldn't. The very idea!

"Good. Now Her Ladyship would not forgive us, not ever, if we let a stranger come and go. We are the beekeepers for all of Black Tower, and that's a powerful big responsibility, but she'd squash us without a second thought if we went against her. As I hear it, Grey has no Lady. Correct?"

"The last Grey Lady died at the end of the Bellflower Era," said Kew even more stiffly.

One Robin waved her hand. "Sure. Been a while, is my point. The mothers of our mothers' mothers would have died and gone knowing the Grey Lady as a distant legend, so for a squirt like you, any sort of Lady must be incomprehensible."

"All Ladies are," said Kew. If he spoke any more stiffly, his voice would snap in half.

One Robin chuckled. "In the old days, maybe. The Lady in Yellow, who they say is an original, brings it forward to the present. But around the Great Tower we've got Ladies who are pretty shitting understandable. They all dream of taking the tower for themselves, and nothing gets in the way of that dream. Not love, not honey, not their own sisters. And I'm sorry for whatever your message is, and I hope it's not urgent, but I won't risk my women for you."

"Hawthorn always told me they were all petty upstarts," said Kew. "Bits of broken lineages that just haven't been swept away."

"Begging the pardon of the Guardian's apprentice," said One Robin, "but talk like that is the quickest way to get yourself killed, and more'n likely half of us into the bargain. Obsidian may be nothing more than a piece of fallen Apple, and she may need our honey to keep her trim, but she's still a Lady. And her word is law. Grey or no Grey, you'd best be obedient."

Kew met her eyes but said nothing.

"Anyone from Grey'd have to be stubborn to survive this long," said Thirty. "Must be bred into 'em."

Kew still said nothing.

One Robin chuckled again and shrugged. "I spose that's how it'll be then."

She went to a little niche in the wall, where a padlocked wooden chest hunkered. She took a key from around her neck and put it in the lock.

"Are you sure?" said Thirty. "He's just a no-name boy. He don't know what he's doing."

"I know what I'm doing," said Kew with a frown.

"Good," said One Robin. "So do I."

She turned the key and the chest sprang open. Her soft hand snatched at the air and she cooed and trilled to whatever her fingers had closed on.

"Hold him, Thirty."

"Sorry," said Thirty Robin, and caught both his wrists before he could move. She was very, very strong, and when she put her hand on the back of his head and pushed down, he had to let her tilt it or his neck would break in half.

One Robin showed him what she held. It was a yellowish insect with large eyes and transparent, fluttering wings. Instead of jaws, it had two bright blades, and its legs came to fine, needlelike points.

"This is a hornet," she said. "If you leave our domain, it will kill you."

She set the hornet on the back of his neck. Six sharp pins jabbed him. He sucked in his breath.

One Robin knelt down to his level and, as he gasped and shuddered, took his chin in her soft hand. "I am truly truly sorry," she said, lifting his head so he could meet her eyes. "None of this is what I want. Now, if you pass the walls of the beekeeper courts, the hornet will drive its mandibles into your neck, snipping your spinal cord like a rose stem. If you try to take the hornet off your neck, it will drive its mandibles in, snipping your spinal cord like a rose stem. If anyone else tries to take it off—well, I think you get the idea."

She waited as he got his breathing under control. "Do you understand why this is happening?"

After a moment, he nodded.

"I would hate for you to hold this against me," said One Robin. "I truly would. But I understand if you do." To Thirty Robin, she added, "Has he made friendly with anyone at all?"

Thirty shrugged. "He spent a little time with Frin."

"Right. Have Frin shadow him as much as possible." To Kew, she said, "Frin is going to try to keep you alive. Do you understand?"

He nodded.

"I am sorry," said One. "I can only say it so much, but I am. Now we wait for the Lady."

"How long?" said Kew, through loose, shivering lips. The hornet hurt more than he could have ever imagined.

"Perhaps two weeks," said One. She sat down at her desk again. "You can help out as needed in the time you're with us. And please do not hold what I've done against any of my people. I decided to do this for them; that don't mean they would have wanted me to."

It turned out to be fifty-four days. He tallied them with marks on his bedpost. On the first night, he stood with the beekeepers watching the tower. Visible through its tiny windows, a thread of light was making its way from cellar to throne, and he knew he had missed the Sparrows' dance. On the fourteenth day, he went to a window overlooking the Passage and thought about jumping. It was not too far down. The hornet's legs tensed up as he stood there, and he wondered if it would be very painful to have one's spinal cord cut. Was it the sort of thing you could survive?

Hawthorn's face came to him. If he left now, he would surely die. If he stayed, he might live long enough to reach the tower. A Guardian must protect, but a Guardian must also know how to read a fucking situation. Hawthorn herself had said that one day, when Kew had tried to protect another child from bullies and had been soundly beaten for his trouble. It was not her most inspiring maxim, but it had stuck with him. He turned and went back to the court.

His stay was not unpleasant. The court was a place of eternal spring, where flowers bloomed constantly, and a place of eternal autumn, where fruit was always ripening. And trees, living trees! The spindly dead things of Grey Tower could not have prepared him for their lush greenery, the sheer fragrant life of them. It was almost worth being imprisoned.

Every day he practiced the fighting forms Hawthorn had drilled into his skull. Frin found him an old barrel stave, and with this meager weapon he put his body through each set of movements. There were few of them, at least compared to the endless droning chants he'd always heard the girls practicing, but each was demanding and rigorous. The Beast could look like anything when it came; the one who fought it had to be equally adaptable.

Every week or so, a Butler Itinerant arrived on a hollowman and was loaded up with casks of honey to take to those who, by ancient custom, were owed it. Despite his curiosity (or perhaps because of it), the beekeepers didn't let Kew help with loading; all he saw of the fabled hollowman was a curve of dull white flesh. And every two weeks, a delegation arrived from Black Tower itself to collect a barrel of honey for the Willow Lady, ineffable ruler of the whole palace. Kew, who could read and figure, unlike many beekeepers, found himself unexpectedly useful in these encounters. This helped distract him from the anxiety haunting every hour: that the Beast was coming, and it could be here tomorrow, or it could arrive a year from now.

Between these arrivals he helped Ten Robin with inventory. The previous One Robin had left things in a shambles, and the current One had spent the first three years of her regime trying to clean everything up. There were, it seemed, several different kinds of honey. To Kew, who had grown up only with what honey the little court of beekeepers in Ginkgo's district produced, this was an astonishing development. Every flower made its own flavor, which the beekeepers carefully managed. The hives were pastured in set places and times to produce specific blends, and these were prescribed by tradition and need: the Order of Transit, for instance, required one yearly cask of apple blossom honey, so there always needed to be two or three of them on hand in case of a bad year. Other groups or places had their own requirements, from the buckwheat honey sent to Red Tower's Sisterhood of the Hearth, to the clover honey for the farmers of Yellow's outer mansions. The Library of Black Tower got a little beribboned cask of azalea all its own. To a boy who had spent his entire life accumulating facts, it was all fascinating.

More than all those details, though, he learned a great secret of the beekeepers, entirely by accident. Ten had sent him down to Cellar 37 to count the casks there, and as he totted them up, he heard someone coming. Not being in the mood to talk, he ducked behind a rack of empty casks, and saw One Robin pass by, accompanied by Fifteen and Three.

"We can't keep doing this," said Three. "It's running out."

"We can dilute it with orange blossom," said One. "She won't know. And if she figures it out, we'll say someone must have siphoned off the missing bit."

"The Ebony Lady's cleverer than you think," said Three. "And if this arrangement breaks down—"

"You don't need to tell me," said One.

The three of them stopped before a blank wall, and One pushed on a stone about halfway up. A section of the wall swung away. Tiptoeing forward, Kew saw that the beekeepers had gone down a few steps into a smaller room off the main cellar. Wooden racks lined its four walls, and on the racks were glass bottles of honey. But not just any honey. There were bottles labeled Apple, Thistle, Bellflower, Lily, even Hellebore. Each bottle was meticulously dated. A deep thrill ran through Kew's body. Some of this honey was older than parts of the palace. Some of it had been bottled when there was a Lady in Grey. Some of it might even have been bottled in the lifetimes of the five sisters.

"It's the only thing keeping her a Lady," said Three. "She'll notice, I tell you."

One took a bottle of Thistle Era honey and tipped some of its contents into a jar. Even from outside the room, and even surrounded as he was by honey, Kew could smell it: the most delicious thing possible, golden-sweet and heavy as joy.

"If she's as clever as you say—or as clever as she thinks she is—she'll know we can't spend our entire store on her," said One. "She needs it, we have it, she'll do anything for it. If that means accepting a diluted supply, she will." She passed the jar to Fifteen. "Take this and fill the rest with orange blossom, then put it in the casket for Her Ebony Ladyship." She took down a nearly empty jar of thick, treacly Hellebore honey and spooned a bit into a green glass vial. This she handed to Fifteen with no explanation; presumably that was all business as usual.

Kew hid again as the beekeepers left the cellar. What had One meant? No point in investigating. He knew better than to meddle with the hidden room, but he stored it up carefully in his memory.