I’ll admit I didn’t write something new for this blog hop… I’ve been in the middle of editing, so I took a scene from my work in progress - The Dragonscale Throne - cut out the parts that don’t make sense if you haven’t read the book, and polished a bit for you. I hope you enjoy!
Don’t forget to scroll to the bottom for more super-short stories from around the world.
(Honeybee on a yellow and pink Dahlia - with thanks to Annette Meyer from Pixabay)
Bees
Wind Dancer led Roshi into a new part of the forest, thick with bees and riotous flowers. “Look,” she said, pointing out the main hive set in the crack of two trees.
So far, the bees were the only normal things inside the wilding wood: yellow and black and as big as her thumb.
“Outside the nali nethali, the homeland,” Wind Dancer continued, “the bees must hide their hives from predators, but here they know they are safe. We speak with them and they with us. We share with them new flowers and they share with us their honey.”
Staring, Roshi let her feet carry her forward one step, then two. “Bees make honey?”
“Yes, bees make honey.”
“But won’t they sting us?”
Wind Dancer laughed, a low chuckle that encouraged Roshi to join in the joke, instead of making her angry. “Why would they sting us? We are them and they are us. We are the same. We both want the hive to thrive.”
“You… speak to them? I could…?”
“Of course.” Wind Dancer hummed something, then pointed. “Stand there. You must learn their language to leave safely.” Then she turned her back to Roshi and sang to the bees.
Terrified, Roshi stood where she was told and waited for the winged insects to attack her, but as Wind Dancer had said, she was safe. For the first few moments, all she heard was her heart thundering in her ears and all she tasted was blood in her throat.
How could she speak to them? They were small, possibly lethal bugs. While eavesdropping on the kitchen workers in the castle, Roshi had only ever heard rumors of the honey-gatherers dying from too many stings, never that they had sung to the bees. Wind Dancer was insane!
Eventually her fear ran out, and she saw the sunlight filtering down through the petals of the pink flowers snuggled up next to the white leaves of the red-bark trees, and touching the purple leaves and periwinkle flowers of the deep blue trees, and shying away from the black trees. The bees flitting around Wind Dancer sparkled and hummed as they dropped from their hive and dipped into the talit flowers running low to the ground and up the black tree trunks. The talit flowers were an odd, shimmery color somehow mixing black and teal and blue.
Roshi’s feet moved a fingerwidth wider, and her hips relaxed so that she stood straight. Under the bees’ buzz, this part of the forbidden forest was almost silent, so she became as still as the trees and light as the sunlight.
But still when she listened to the bees, she heard buzzing, not words.
“Good,” Wind Dancer said. “You’re almost there.”
Startled, Roshi blinked out of her stillness. “I… I can’t understand them.”
“Imagine what they might be saying. Bees speak not just with sounds but with their bodies.” Wind Dancer stood in the fall of sunlight and glint of bees, her body shimmering and vibrating.
By my father the king, the wilding girl is beautiful. Blinking again, Roshi tore her eyes away from Wind Dancer and let her gaze track the bees.
They shimmered like Wind Dancer.
The tiniest vibration started in Roshi’s middle and expanded out to her feet and her hands and her hair.
Little sister, she heard, taste.
An explosion of tastes filled her mouth: the sweetness of honey, with hints of the talit flowers Wind Dancer so loved, then dozens of other flowers—bitter and sweet and strange—she didn’t have names for, and then at the very last, a hint of the roses her sister had loved in the castle gardens.
You’ve flown far, she replied with sound and shimmer and taste.
As have you, little sister.
Roshi opened her eyes and found shimmering bits of light—bees—tickling her skin and flying around her as they were around Wind Dancer, and then she tried to call out her joy…
And lost it all.
The feel, the sounds, the taste, all gone, and the bees were just insects again, and she had to fight herself not to swat at them.
Wind Dancer laughed. “Your face, Roshianna,” she said.
“I had it!” Holding herself very still, she reached for the bees’ language again, but couldn’t quite hear it.
“And you’ll have it again,” Wind Dancer said with a tiny smile. “Don’t try so hard.”
“But it takes so long—”
“What is time, little resnali, but our own construct? The sun will rise and fall, the moon will glow, the stars will shine. Try again.”
Muttering curses under her breath, Roshi tried to remember the steps she had taken, and found her shoulders tensing. She waited and waited, wondering how the sun could stay in the same place in the sky while what felt like hours passed for her under the trees.
Just when she had decided to run for it and risk the bees’ wrath, her feet moved, and the vibrations came.
Yes, little sister, now you hear us.
In a daze, Roshi stretched her hand out for one of the indigo blossoms. Biting her cheek, she bled and remembered the scent of her sister’s roses, the taste of rosehips tea, the careful way to hold the stems so the thorns didn’t bite.
And the indigo blossom in her hand changed, petal by petal, to a blood red rose.
One of the bees flew to the rose, tasted it, danced it. Well done, sister.
Wind Dancer held her hand out and Roshi knew it was time to leave. Still dazed, she clasped the girl’s hand and they slipped through the trees away from the hive, and when they pulled their hands apart, Roshianna’s fingers dripped with rose-scented honey that Wind Dancer gathered into a tiny pot and handed her with a tiny smile.
“A gift from the bees,” she said, and though Roshi tried, she could think of nothing but the bees all afternoon.
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