The bee king, p.1
The Bee King, page 1
The Bee King
Mathilda Zeller
Ampersand Books
Copyright ©2023 by Mathilda Zeller
Cover Design Copyright ©2023 by Kari Schuerch
All rights reserved.
No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.
Contents
Content Note
Dedication
. Chapter
1. Monsters
2. Contracts
3. Finery
4. Jalopy
5. Moon Bees
6. Saint Millicent's
7. Egg Cream
8. Oleander
9. Visitors
10. Unborn Queen
11. Moon Honey
12. Perfidy
13. Blackberries
14. Jelly
15. Honeypuppies
16. Sacred Knowledge
17. Wax
18. The Bee King
19. King Suite
20. Birthright
21. Kerosene
22. Golden Liability
23. Catacombs
24. Oxenbee
Thank You
Acknowledgments
About the Author and Designer
Also By Mathilda Zeller
Content Note
The Bee King contains mild language, some fantasy violence, brief depictions of domestic violence, references to human trafficking, and references to sexual assault.
For Jane,
And her unrelenting determination
to make the world a better place.
And for young women everywhere.
Wherever there is gold
there is a chain, you know
and if your chain
is gold
so much the worse for you.
Feathers, shells,
and sea-shaped stones
are all as rare.
— "We Alone,” by Alice Walker
Chapter one
Monsters
The summer was too cold and wet for the crops to survive, and that meant only one thing: the monsters would be here by winter.
Anyone else would tell you they were men. They had arms and legs and heads, all the things that men had. If you passed one on the street, you might not even notice anything amiss.
Alice knew better.
They were monsters.
Alice burned as a cool, steady drizzle misted her face and clung to her dark curls, too light to soak them, too heavy to brush off. Normally, Alice liked the cold. It gave the heat in her blood something to fight. But this late in the year, the cold meant blight and crop death. It meant skipped meals. It meant fighting to keep her sister and cousin safe.
She brought her ax down hard, cleaving the wood with a satisfying crack. The two pieces fell to the ground like dismembered limbs. She paused to pull her head to one side, stretching the thick cords of muscle from her neck to her shoulder. She chopped wood faster than most men in the town, and even through the derisive glances and snorts, they admired her for it. She was proud of her strength. Usually.
“Rough morning?” Lyle asked, crossing his arms and leaning against the fencepost.
Alice swung the ax through another log as easily as if it were butter. The smack echoed through the clearing. “Didn’t sleep well last night,” she grumbled, picking up one of the pieces and setting it upright on her chopping stump. “And Helga came over to take my dress measurements and said she’d never seen a bride as muscular as me.”
Lyle’s mouth twisted into a half smile. “Good for you, then.”
Alice swung the ax again, harder this time. “She didn’t mean it that way and you know it.”
“How miserable for her, to be the sort of person who thinks like that.”
“In that case, this whole town is miserable.” Alice wiped her sleeve across her nose. Lyle was likely the only one on this wretched island who may notice that she’d been crying, but she hoped he’d just think it was the rain coming down, and perhaps a cold.
“Your family would have died ages ago without your strength.” Lyle's voice had turned gentle, and she hated that. It made it harder to hide the fact that she was crying.
Alice grunted. “They’d have figured something out.”
“Baz would have sold Sarah by now.”
Alice grimaced at the thought. Her father loved whiskey, which meant they were always in need of money, but he lacked the resolve to wrestle his daughters into submission to the monsters. She’d always made a way around it, scraping and serving and bartering, threatening to never work again if he tried. As Sarah grew to an age where she caught the monsters’ glances, Alice worked harder. Sarah was brilliant. She was a scientist, out there in the field and forests with her bees and flowers. She harvested honey, beeswax, grew lavender and roses and bee balm and hyssop. People sometimes even came from the mainland for her tinctures. The thought of her father selling her, making her do what others had made daughters do, brought a sour tang to the back of Alice’s throat. She couldn’t abide the idea. She wouldn’t.
“You’re not exactly in a position to criticize people selling out for money,” Alice pointed out, desperate for a change of subject.
Lyle had become Ingrid VonBlurn’s honeypuppy last year, and though he never complained, he spent as much time as possible out of her house, chatting with Alice or wandering the town.
Lyle shook his head, unabashed. “I’m in a perfect position to criticize it.”
Alice brought her ax down again, so hard that splinters went flying. Lyle pushed himself off the fence and strode towards her, crouching to pick up the wood she’d just decimated.
He stood, his arms full, blinking the drizzle out of his blue eyes. “You don’t have to marry him.”
Him. Even unnamed, the reference to Old Vick made her stomach clench. Times had gotten harder and leaner. No matter how many errands she ran for Mrs. VonBlurn, no matter how many trees she felled and fields she plowed, there wasn’t enough. She’d said yes to him last fall on the promise of his support for her family, and on Papa’s promise to keep Sarah in school and out of a marriage bed. Old Vick had leered at Sarah, but settled for Alice.
“And do what? Let Papa marry Sarah off instead?” Alice couldn’t allow that. If Old Vick’s drunken rages didn’t kill her sister, the smell at the tannery would.
Even the thought of the tannery made her nose curl in disgust. She’d be living there this time next week. She shuddered at the thought of Old Vick’s loose, wet lips; his yellowed hands; his sagging, sallow flesh. All the putrid things that awaited her on her wedding night.
“You don’t have to marry him.” Lyle repeated, his face growing sober. “Ingrid gives me an allowance. I could give it to you–it would easily support your family–”
Alice adjusted her flour sack dress, which was coming loose at the seams. “And where, pray tell, would I say I got the money from?”
Lyle grinned. “Take the ferry into the City once a week.”
“And have the whole town assume I’m whoring myself to the city people?”
Lyle’s grin turned wicked and he made sure to step backwards out of arm’s reach before replying. “You’re tired of going unnoticed.”
Alice’s tongue suddenly felt chalky. Has it been that obvious? She laughed, a little too loudly. “Because every man in the City is just aching for a woman who would break his fingers as easily as look at him.” She squatted and began gathering wood. “Why would you do that for me, anyway?”
Lyle jammed his hands in his pockets, growing still as he looked out over the bluff towards the town. “Some men like strong women.”
Alice fumbled her armload, dropping several split logs onto the wet grass. She squinted up at Lyle through the rain, blinking through the curls that had fallen into her eyes. His face had changed. There was an uncharacteristic sincerity in it that sent a current through her.
“Alice–”
“No.”
“But–”
“You’re married.”
“To an old bat who needs me more for companionship than…companionship.”
She snatched at the wood she’d dropped, gathering them back into her arms. “So you want my companionship?”
“I’d marry you as soon as she dies.”
“Have you been drinking moon mead?” Whatever shock she had felt at his tenderness had fallen to a fire that was rapidly growing white hot.
“I've loved you my whole life.” Lyle tried to take some of the wood out of her arms and she twisted out of his reach, the tightness in her chest almost more than she could bear.
“And I assumed you’d be a better friend than to ask me to be your whore! To accept the leftovers of a moth-eaten septuagenarian! To betray promises you’ve made, promises I’ve made!”
Lyle scowled. “You haven’t made any promises yet.”
“I will. Next week.” She hated herself for saying it, and worse for the conviction in her voice.
“How is becoming my lover worse than marrying for money?” He scoffed. "Marrying Old Vick, of all people.” He stepped in close, kneeling till he was eye level with her, closer than he had ever been to her before. She felt his breath on her cheek as he spoke, and the way it quickened her heart made her angry. “I love you, which is more than can be said for anyone involved in marrying you off to that ancient, smelly tanner.”
“You love me so much you’d have the town believe I’m whoring myself in the Cit y. And oh, when you, poor young wealthy widower, magnanimously take me to be your wife, even though I don’t deserve you, city whore that I am–” She couldn’t go on. She spat in the grass and stood, fumbling the wood again. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. She let the whole load fall to the ground.
She didn’t care where she was going, what branches cut her as she pelted through the woods, what bears or wolverines awaited her in the darkening forest. Nothing mattered besides getting as far away as possible, as quickly as possible. If she could have peeled off her own skin and left it behind, she would have.
Alice ran until she couldn’t run anymore. Falling to her knees on the forest floor, she cursed Lyle, her father, every damned soul on this island. She hated all of it. Even the trees felt as if they were closing in around her. Her hands drifted to her back, tracing the scars that crossed her skin. She was a workhorse, a pack animal, and a strong one at that. And, like a pack animal, she was beaten when she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—do as she was told.
The thought of marrying Old Vick made her want to vomit. She knew in her bones, knew by the leering, lingering looks he gave her that life with him would be worse than it ever was with Papa and Sarah and Ina. But what if she didn’t marry him? It was early summer and the crops were already failing.
The monsters would hear of the failing crop, and it would draw them here. They would come from the mainland with hungry eyes and fistfuls of money. They would come on the evening boat, the one that made port on Friday, and wouldn’t leave till Sunday. Not all the mamas and papas would talk to them, but the hungrier the village was, the more families met them there at the port, ostensibly to provide them, as tourists to the island, with room and board.
But it was not a room with a view of the ocean that brought the monsters to their rusty little town.
The mamas and papas would not shake their hands or look them in the eyes, even as they took their money. Those parents were cowards, and, when the crops failed, that cowardice turned them hideous. The monsters would disappear with the daughters into the woods, or the hay loft, or the woodshed. They would steal away into the potato cellar, the attic, or to the very bedroom where the daughter had slept since infancy. When the monsters re-emerged, they were much the same as they had been before—hungry-eyed and rich.
When the girls re-emerged, they had changed.
Alice had fought off the monsters, had fought off her father and had the scars to show for it. She’d gotten so good at fighting, at working, at running and hiding, that even her sister and little cousin, as poor as they were, had never known the touch of a monster. She’d die before that happened. Worse than dying, she’d marry Old Vick.
Lyle had posed a solution, but “solution” was the wrong word for it. He wanted to use her, just as Papa used her for farm labor, bartered her for money to tide them over, the same way Old Vick would use her as a tannery wife, in the same way the monsters came to the island and used the girls here until they were hollow eyed and empty. Lyle might be nicer smelling than Old Vick, but in the end it would be the same. He was bored, and didn’t like his life with an old woman. Sooner or later, he’d get bored with her, and find someone less scarred. And even if he was using her to begin with, once he moved on it would break her heart.
The thought that haunted the space between waking and sleeping floated up through her throat and found a voice before she could stop it. I am alone.
She spoke the words to the rotting leaves beneath her hands, to the bark on the trees in front of her, to the small patches of sky visible through the leaves. “I am alone. I am alone. I am alone.”
Three small bees landed on her hand, and she resisted the urge to slap at them. For all she knew, they were Sarah’s. She loved her sister, and her sister loved the bees. She had built a whole world from them.
From the town, the church bells tolled and she snapped her mouth shut, painfully aware that she had spoken out loud.
She left the woods and found the path that wound through gorse and bracken and down the hill to where the town of Oxenbee lay, splayed like a skinned rabbit, along the island’s rocky coastline. The rain had let up but the clouds still hung low in the sky. Lyle was nowhere in sight.
The church bells continued, their incessant clangs signaling a summons. There must be a fire, an emergency of some sort, something dire. There wasn’t time to wallow, to bleat about what couldn’t be fixed. There was only time to go, and pray that no one had heard her out here, saying what she had never before said aloud.
There was no acrid smoke in the air, no screaming mothers, no fire. Why had they been called? Most of the village had already convened when she arrived, gathering in the town square, gazing up at four men on a dais, silky veils of black where their faces should be.
Her throat tightened as she took in the men with their impeccable pinstriped suits, shiny leather shoes, smart ties, white starched collars, and dark veils that obscured their faces like widows’ shrouds.
These were not the monsters who usually came–the philandering husbands, the thrill seeking playboys. These strangers only existed in whispers and rumors, in nightmares and dreams.
The Bee Men had come.
Chapter two
Contracts
The Bee Men were smaller than she’d expected. It wasn’t that she hadn’t seen them before, but her memories had run together across the years with the whispers and stories of fearful housewives and old drunks to form a creature more suited to legend than reality. In those legends, they towered above mere mortals, with hands the size of frying pans and merciless stingers protruding from their hind ends. Alice craned her neck around to see if the bit about the stingers was true, but all she could see were coat tails and pinstriped trousers covering what appeared to be ordinary, if not flatter-than-average, buttocks.
Whatever banality their bodies carried was made up for in the black silk veils that fell from their bowler hats and covered their faces. It wasn’t ordinary black silk. It fell like a fathomless shadow, reflecting nothing, revealing nothing. As Alice stared at one veil it seemed to grow wide and absorb all the light around it. She suspected that if she pulled it back, she would find a vast and terrifying eternity of nothingness, a darkness that would pull her in and swallow her whole.
The veils were so dark and blank that it startled her when the middle Bee Man finally spoke, his voice alarming in its normalcy.
Sarah joined her in the crowd, slipping her thin hand into Alice’s. She was three years Alice’s junior, and of course full grown at sixteen years old, but as far as Alice was concerned, she would always be her baby sister, wide-eyed and clinging to her for comfort at their mother’s funeral. Where Alice was dark haired, Sarah’s hair was bright red. Where Alice’s skin was warm and brown, Sarah’s was pale and freckled. In so many ways, she seemed a little fairy, springing from nowhere instead of the selfsame parents as Alice. It was alright, though. They shared the same irrepressible curls, the same disjointed laugh.
Alice squeezed her hand and Sarah leaned against her. Whatever brought the Bee Men to town, it wasn’t to be trusted.
“The Honorable Alphonsus P. Wintersbury requests the honor of a young lady’s hand in marriage,” the middle Bee Man said. “A young lady from this town.”
A whisper shivered through the crowd, like a cold wind blowing in off the coast.
From his perch on the Oxenbee Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, Old Vick picked something out of his teeth and flicked it in the general direction of the Bee Men. “If he’s so keen on marrying one of our girls, why doesn’t he come woo one himself?”
The Bee Man ignored this and pressed on. “The Honorable Alphonsus P. Wintersbury requests the attendance of all eligible young ladies, ages twelve to eighteen, at the VonBlurn estate this evening.”
Papa stood near the front of the crowd. Ina, Alice’s orphaned cousin, stood at his side. “Twelve? What sort of bottom-feeding parasite is this Wintersbury, that he’d expect us to offer up our little lambs as brides to him?”
Alice bristled. The hypocrisy of this man! When she was twelve, he was beating her for hiding from the monsters until they gave up on her. Across all these years, she was the only thing standing between Sarah and Ina and the monsters, and yet he had the gall to put on virtuous airs, a cheap facade to cover an ocean of vice.
