the sun—he kept track of the boiling time by instinct and slow-moving shadow—when Ichabod loped across the garden, picked a berry from a bush, and dotted it repeatedly on his forehead and cheeks.
He stood before Tom with his red-speckled face.
“Lem,” Tom said.
Ichabod nodded.
Steam billowed from the pot and almost scalded Tom’s chin. He backed away, clapped his neck, and caught the bee beneath his hair. It stung his palm twice but he didn’t let go; if only he had hands big enough for Lem. Other bees surrounded him, apparently aware their compatriot was trapped, and buzzing something different now: a choral song of battle.
“Where’s Bess?” Tom asked.
Ichabod pointed up, his finger ringed with bees, wincing as he did so and eager to escape.
Tom gauged the simmer of the wort by its burble. He had fifteen minutes, maybe less, till he strained it. Too soon or too late and it was hardly worth keeping. Ichabod was dutiful but couldn’t read the boil. There was no good choice but to hurry inside and so he strode toward the door, letting go of the bee and leaving half his mind swirling in the belly of the copper.
He entered through the kitchen. Nabby chopped chickens, setting aside the beaks for talismanic garlands. She was short and had the spongy-firm skin of dried apples. No one knew her age; she’d been old when Tom was young. She spent every day of the year baking bread and pies, cooking meat, tending the hearth, and speaking of ghosts and omens as matter-of-factly as other people gossiped. Now she chewed a slice of liver, her infallible means of testing a bird’s acceptability, and frowned as if to say, “I know a group has come.”
Tom picked a stinger from his palm and fixed his hair. “Lem’s here again.”
“I have a nose,” Nabby said.
Indeed, the nourishing smell of the kitchen had succumbed to Lem’s stink, one of carcasses and flesh and foul, bubbling dyes. A smoaknut of tension grew in Tom’s chest, very like the bullet lodged in his shoulder. He left Nabby with her beaks and walked up front.
The taproom was cozy-dim even in the daylight, its furniture and floor weathered smooth by decades of visitors, browned by dirt and polish, spill and wipe, smoke and time. Tom could almost stand straight inside the unlit hearth; one of its stones was like a face, another like a wolf. Windows at the front overlooked the road, with the town down left and the river down right. The room was big enough for fourscore people, tightly packed, and smelled of fire and tobacco, travelers’ sweat and rum—an odor so familiar it was virtually his own. He knew the table nicks, the rafter cracks, the stains and warps and creaky chairs as thoroughly as any of the marks upon his body. However full of strangers, it would always be his home.
What to make of Uncle Lem: relative or stranger? He was muscular and tall, with receding, stringy hair. He stood in the middle of the taproom, blood-browned apron tied around his waist, bearing so little resemblance to his sister—Tom’s diminutive mother, now deceased—that an unknowing eye would never have spotted their relation.
Tom approached him as a small group of travelers entered in the front. Before a word was spoken, Lem crossed the room and clomped aggressively to Ichabod, who’d followed through the kitchen with the berry-juice dots still covering his face. Ichabod flinched and cracked his elbow on the doorframe.
Tom caught his uncle by the arm, using all his strength just to slow him down. Lem turned and the window light clearly showed his face. His cheeks and forehead were mottled, like most of his skin, with small crimson freckles: the permanent marks of bloodpox. The marks were exceedingly rare—few people who caught the sickness during the last serious outbreak had lived; it had killed Lem’s wife and nearly killed him—and they were generally less pronounced even among survivors.
“We were slapping song bees and Ichabod had berries in his hands,” Tom said.
It was an explanation so unlikely, Lem paused to doubt it, giving Ichabod time to clean his face with a handkerchief and hurry outside to tend to the travelers’ horses. Lem watched him go, grimacing and flexing. He was a lifelong tanner with an air of rotten skins. His tannery was failing due to his drunkenness and sloth. He was sober now, or seemed to be, and although Tom intended to keep him that way, he led his uncle to the