place that has changed around her as time changes all things.
She wishes to rekindle flames long extinguished.
To find something she has lost that she cannot name but feels the absence of within her like a hunger.
The painter makes her decision without telling anyone. Only her single student notices her absence but thinks little of it having learned long ago that sometimes people disappear like rabbits into hats and sometimes they return and other times they do not.
The acolytes allow for this rare concession, as their numbers are dwindling.
The painter spends her time in solitude and contemplation categorizing losses and regrets trying to determine if there was ever anything she could have done to prevent any of them or if they simply passed through her life and out again like waves upon a shore.
She thinks if she has an idea for a new painting at any point during her time locked away she will refuse this path and return to her paints and let the bees find someone else to serve them.
But there are no new ideas. Only old ones, turned over and over again in her mind. Only the safe and the familiar, things she has captured and recaptured in brushstrokes so many times that she finds nothing but emptiness within them.
She considers trying to write but has always felt more comfortable with images than with words.
When the door opens long before the painter expects it to she accepts her bee without hesitation.
The acolyte and the painter walk down empty halls toward an unmarked door. Only a single cat notices them in this moment and though the cat recognizes this mistake for what it is he does not interfere. It is not the way of cats to interfere with fate.
The painter expects to sacrifice both eyes but only one is taken.
One will be more than enough.
As the images flood the painter’s sight, as she is bombarded by so many pictures unfolding in such detail that she cannot separate one from the other, cannot dream of capturing even fractions of them in oils on canvas even as her fingers itch for her brushes, she realizes this path was not meant for her.
But it is too late now to choose another.
ZACHARY EZRA RAWLINS walks the halls of the Harbor, realizing that he doesn’t actually know where Mirabel’s room is, he had not thought to ask. He loops down through the cavernous ballroom to where he last saw her but the wine cellar is unoccupied. The painting of the lady with her bee-covered face looms over the racks of wine and before Zachary leaves again he picks an interesting-looking bottle to put in his bag, an unnamed red marked with a lantern and crossed keys.
Zachary takes a different flight of stairs up from the ballroom and doesn’t know where he is. He has wandered from familiar to un- again.
He pauses, trying to get his bearings, by a reading nook lined with books with a single armchair and a small table formed from a broken column. There’s a teacup on it, with a lit candle burning where the tea should be.
Between the bookshelves is a small brass plate with a button, like an old-fashioned light switch. Zachary presses it.
The bookshelf slides back, opening into a hidden room.
It would take an eternity to find all the secrets here, the voice in his head observes. To solve a fraction of the mysteries. Zachary doesn’t argue with it.
The room beyond looks like something from an old manor house, or a period-piece murder mystery. Dark wood panels and green glass lamps. Leather sofas and overlapping Oriental rugs and walls covered in bookshelves, one of which has opened to allow Zachary inside. In between the shelves there are framed paintings lit with gallery lights and a proper door, open and leading out to a hall.
An enormous painting is displayed on the wall opposite. A nighttime forest scene, a crescent moon visible between the branches, but within the forest there is an immense birdcage, so large that on the perch inside where a bird might be there is a man, turned away from the viewer, sitting forlornly in his prison.
The trees surrounding the cage are covered with keys and stars, hanging by ribbons from branches and tucked into nests and fallen onto the ground below. It makes Zachary think of his bunny pirates. It might have been painted by the same artist. The wine-cellar bee lady might have been, too, for that matter.