them on, pushed my sleeves down into them, felt for my collecting jar, carefully picked up the cold end of the smoky torch, and took a long breath.
Blind, my feet feeling the way, I navigated by sound, too. By the buzzing that came from the hive.
I knew the tree by its roots underfoot. Felt my way to its broad trunk. Took a breath. Closed my eyes for no good reason. And ran my hand along the bark until I felt the big hole where the bees were waiting.
I hated to take what was theirs.
I hated to leave them hungry and confused.
I hated the idea that more of them would die trying to stop me.
But there was a woman on top of the mountain who needed me. Needed what they had to give.
I poked the smoking stick into the hole, waited for it to do its work, and then cast it aside.
I reached slowly, slowly, into the hole.
I could feel the bees on my sleeve. One of them stung my wrist where there was a sliver of skin between glove and cuff. I tried hard not to yank my arm back, but it wasn’t easy to keep still. The sting was like an acid fang in my skin. And I knew another bee had died.
The comb was like a soft, vibrating brick in my hand.
I broke off a chunk of it and pulled it out of the tree, jammed it into the jar, bees and all, and screwed the lid on as I stumbled away from the hive, falling into the bushes, bees attacking the pack that blinded me, their stingers catching in its weave, dying as they stung. I imagined their soft bodies embroidering the pack in yellow and black and blood.
Another one stung me on the ankle where my pant leg didn’t quite meet my boot. Another on my neck where my hood had come loose.
And I felt besieged, suddenly, by the bees, by the need to steal from them, by the way I’d been banished from my own home, by the blame I carried with me like a harness, like a thorn in my hoof, like a puppy taken from his mother, from Maisie, from me.
But crying did no good at all.
* * *
—
When I could no longer hear the bees, I carefully pulled the pack from my head, a little at a time, and plucked the bits of bee from where they’d stung me, rubbing the awful stings and gulping the cool air, crying a little as I filled the pack with my things again, the jar fizzing with trapped bees.
Then I hurried up the trail.
Toward home.
And then past it, upward bound.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
This time, Cate was not alone.
A boy was standing by her bed.
“Well,” she said when she saw me. She was breathing too hard for a woman lying down. “Larkin, this is the girl I told you about. The one who speaks dog.”
And this was the boy whose face I’d seen in the woods.
He was about my age but a little older and a fair bit taller. Thin, winter-pale, with hair as thick and black as a bear’s.
His clothes were ragged. Many times patched. His hands were covered with scratches, as if he’d been handling wild kittens. And his bootlaces bristled with burrs.
Even from across the room, just looking at this boy, I hurt all over.
I could feel his loneliness as if it were mine. And, in that moment, my own loneliness doubled . . . and then receded down to less than what it had been.
Which was when I learned that loneliness shared is loneliness halved.
He looked at me much as the dog had at first. Unblinking. Still.
“She’s not going to bite you,” Cate said, as if I were the dog.
“The rabbit. The fish,” he said. “That was good of you.”
I wanted to say, You’re my carver! You’re the one who made the beautiful bee that’s in my pocket right now! Right this minute! You’re the one who’s been watching me all this time!
But he was part of a secret that was still mine to keep. It would have been wrong to blurt it out, especially when it was his secret, too.
“The dog caught the rabbit,” I said. “And a slug caught the fish.”
He seemed to like that. He lifted his head up and let his shoulders settle down. “I brought her some food and did some chores a few days ago. I would have come back sooner if I’d known she was sick.”
Cate reached