Mielitta didn’t want to open her eyes. She could lie here forever, vibrating, vital, breathing the green scents of sap, moss; gold sacks of pollen; and – joy on the breeze – flower hearts ringed in colours she’d never seen before. Ultraviolet. Shades of ultraviolet, from yellowish to purple, opened nectar to her tongue. Then brown of fur hit her nose and her eyes snapped open, seeking the intruder. No furred beast. She raised herself onto her elbows, shaking a dense clump of dead insects from her thigh onto the Forest floor as she turned her head to check behind her. No threat.
She stood up, slowly, dizzy, and hundreds more tiny striped insects joined the piles on the ground, outlining the form where her body had lain. Dead bees. Their tiny darts were a cluster of black on her thigh and when she ran her fingers through her hair, she swept a shower of dark points onto the ground.
She repeated the sweeping motion over her hair and head until she no felt no prickles. She remembered the box, the bees’ anger, pain from their stings; then she must have lost consciousness. Now, her body thrummed with barely-contained energy.
There must have been thousands of dead insects around her. They’d left their stings in her and died, fatally maimed. Poor bees. They must have been terrified to be so angry. She began to hum gently, a dirge for the dead. The ground beneath her vibrated with her wordless song and, as she watched, first one bee, then dozens, began to change.
From striped amber and black to iridescence, each tiny corpse was transformed. Then it wavered into transparency and a final ultraviolet sweetness engulfed Mielitta’s senses as the bees vanished. She touched a leaf where dead bees had been, the faintest trace of ultraviolet still lingering. Passed, she thought. They have passed. But where to?
She shook her head to clear the effects of bee venom but, apart from some strangeness in vision, which was clearing already, she felt normal. Better than normal, in fact. Any aches from archery practice and running into the Forest had disappeared, along with the scratches she’d accumulated. As had the visible effect of the bee-stings. Her skin had been covered with red, raised bumps and was now its usual smooth gold. Except on her thigh, where a dark patch remained. She shrugged. If that was the only harm from her adventure, she could count herself lucky.
The shadows had lengthened and changed direction. She must get home to the Citadel before the evening meal, so nobody would know what she’d done, guess where she’d been. But she’d run from the bees heedless of direction. Where was home? Around her each tree flaunted its difference and was no help. She had not marked her way and there were no paths in the Forest. She was going to die after all.
No, she was not. She had known and faced down panic many times over the years and she was not some Maturity-tested woman prone to hysterics. She breathed deeply, shut her eyes again, forced panic into an imaginary jar in her deep thinking and stoppered it so she couldn’t hear panic-man shouting.
She’d decided in a very boring lesson on table service that the Citadel Steward was the personification of panic. Running around, shouting, ‘We’re all going to die!’ was only a slight step up from ‘Somebody’s forgotten the goblets!’ It always made her smile to see his gangling arms being folded into her mind-jar and to hear his last shriek of ‘I knew this would happen!’ before she shut him up. A smile conquered panic every time.
Where was home? She had to retrace her steps somehow. She conjured up the Citadel, the rainbow water gate, the stream, her first tree, the darkness of the deep Forest, the clearing and the bee box, her flight. Patterns shifted in her mind, like a geometric dance, lining up all the route markers she’d named in her thoughts and moving them until they settled into place. A map. Clear as ultraviolet arrows on trees.
Mielitta opened her eyes and saw only the same blank-faced trees. But this time she noticed the pattern of where they stood.
She shut her eyes again, saw the route she must take, and took a few steps forward. Opened and shut her eyes to confirm the shape and placement of the trees she must pass between. And she walked on.
In this manner, she followed an invisible path through the Forest, trusting her instincts. She moved more quickly as she gained confidence and could see the pattern of grasses, stones and trees with her eyes open.
‘Beech,’ she said, as she reached her first tree and the edge of the grassland, where blue harebells and pink campion commanded, Look at me, drink my nectar, here. They fluttered their invitations but she ignored the temptation. The sun had lost its heat but was still warm, edging the grass-blades with amber. She did stop for one last scoop of water, despite a flurry of foolish warning voices in her head.
Don’t drown, don’t drown!
As if she could drown in water as shallow as this! She’d have to be the size of a bee to worry about such a stream.
At the iron gate, she had to put panic-man firmly back in his jar. She’d traversed the gate once and she could do it again. She just had to think for a moment about what she would do when she reached the other side. Carefully, she walked across the stepping-stones to stand in front of the gate, the stream rushing around her and through the wards to the Citadel.
She reached out, held the gate firmly, pronounced, ‘Radium.’ When the gate shimmered to rainbow, she stepped through, without letting go, and swung her legs to the left to land firmly on the path. Everything was as she had left it, bar her pursuers, who must have long gone.
She retraced her steps up into the dry and into the Citadel. Grey was deepening through the windows so she still had time to change out of her bedraggled clothes before going to the Great Hall. If she cut across the courtyard, she could get to her chamber without going past Jannlou’s usual haunts.
She unlatched a door, walked out onto the odourless green ground, which she scuffed deliberately. It mended itself immediately.
Fake grass. Grassette.
There were no shadows anywhere, just the optimum light for pre-evening, diffused through the canopy.
Fake light. Greylight. Mielitta scuffed the ground again.
She passed the empty practice-yard, without pausing. She kept her weapons in her chamber, close to hand, although, of course, she couldn’t take them into the Great Hall, nor carry them during her servant’s duties. In theory.
She couldn’t help humming. If there had been words, the lyrics would have sung of the Forest, its cornucopia; of her fear and achievement. One of Tansies’ sayings: without fear, where is the achievement? The Archery Mage would have been proud of her today. She sang of her maturity, for she was a woman now and had known her own testing; of her escape from the enemy. Her heart sang. And then she heard the unmistakable sound of a girl crying. And stammering.
Mielitta knew exactly where they would be. She knew all the places where they cornered a victim. If she could hear them, then they were behind the practice-yard, in the barn where the equipment was kept. They’d have their choice of weapons, should their prey choose to fight, so running was usually the best escape option. But a twelve-year-old had no chance against a group of young men, at the peak of their fitness, with a mage for leader and an overdose of male hormones. Mielitta could smell the brash red testosterone and it offended her nose in its brutality.
Drianne cried out again but Mielitta knew that the Citadel was deaf to such an everyday occurrence. She crept up to the wooden side of the barn and listened, shutting her eyes to visualise where each person stood.
‘You know where she is,’ Bastien was saying, with pauses, as if he was prodding the girl. ‘You follow her everywhere. You always know where she is.’
‘I saw her g-g-go d-d-down, to the cellars, I think. But I cou-cou-couldn’t follow because you d-d-did.’ An involuntary cry of pain. The note of defiance had earned a blow.
‘But you went down later, didn’t you.’
‘Yes.’
‘And?’
‘And I t-t-told you. She wasn’t there and she didn’t come up how she went d-d-down. She must have f-f-found a secret p-p-passage.’
A long pause.
‘Maybe that’s it.’ Jannlou’s voice. ‘We’ve wasted long enough on all this. I’m bored. It’s nearly time to go and eat.’
‘Not yet.’ Bastien’s voice reeked unhealthy fervour. ‘A worm to catch a fish, that’s what we’ve got, like my father says. Now, girl, this is what you’re going to do. You’re going to ask the bitch nicely about her day and find out where that secret passage is, for the sake of our beloved Citadel. We can’t have somebody spying, can we? Somebody knowing about a secret passage that even Jannlou here doesn’t know.’
Drianne’s reply was unintelligible but presumably vulgar because one of the others stifled a laugh and Bastien’s voice broke with rage. Mielitta heard steel unsheathed as he shouted, ‘By the time you’ve f-f-finished spluttering, you’ll find out exactly what I can do! What use is a tongue on a girl who can’t speak and won’t f–f–.’
Mielitta didn’t wait for his last words but rushed to Drianne’s defence, covering the final yards in a burst of superhuman speed. If it crossed her mind that an eighteen-year-old had little more chance than a twelve-year-old against this gang, she placed the thought firmly in a stoppered jar that was likely to become very crowded in the next few minutes.
Arrow in hand, she used the advantage of surprise to jab Bastien in the thigh but her assault merely increased the fury in his eyes. He did drop the girl, but from choice, so he could focus on Mielitta as Drianne crumpled to the ground.
‘Padding,’ he sneered. ‘You don’t get me that way a second time. Get her,’ he ordered the others.
Then Mielitta smelled black, a throbbing cloud of fury that turned all the unfairness in her life to murderous intent. Enough hiding, enough running. An arrow in each hand, she moved as fast as a thousand bees, stinging Bastien everywhere he was not padded, starting with his poisonous mouth. Stabbing black darts into every pore of his skin until his fear hit her nostrils, acrid yellow, driving her berserk.
Then she turned on his friends.
She whirled and somersaulted as if flying, loosing her rage as a weapon in itself. Somewhere in that black cloud, a voice urged caution.
Defence, she was reminded.
‘Don’t kill them,’ she muttered. ‘Mustn’t kill them.’ Shaking with the internal struggle to control her darts, she stabbed just the skin surface, moving so fast they couldn’t even see her coming. She mustn’t jab too deep, mustn’t kill but the urge was so strong she wanted to feel the barb catch and rip their enemy bodies apart.
‘Run!’ they screamed at each other and their fear turned the air acid green, bilious, feeding Mielitta’s black cloud.
Only Bastien and Jannlou were left, standing over the girl who still cowered on the ground, hands over her head.
‘Run, Jannlou,’ Bastien yelled, distancing himself. ‘She’s insane. And she’s using magecraft. It’s forbidden! We can tell your father! We have witnesses!’
‘No! We sort this ourselves,’ Jannlou yelled back. ‘How we’ve always done things.’
Bastien hesitated, arms flailing as if he fought off imagined bees. Then he shook his head and was gone.
Only Jannlou was left, hands by his side, no weapon drawn. Mielitta circled him, shifting her balance from one foot to the other, ready, humming a throaty battle song.
He just looked at her. Blue eyes with silver flecks, purple rings, like a pansy. His sweat strengthened the brown solidity exuded by his warrior’s trained body. Mage glamour, she reminded herself.
She should finish this. Kill him. Why not? No witnesses now. Except Drianne and she would support anything Mielitta said. She deserved this death, sweet little soul. Drianne looked up at her, eyes pleading.
‘Don’t hurt me,’ she said. And she was pleading with Mielitta. The knowledge was a bucket of cold water over Mielitta’s fury but Drianne was just a child and this fight was between adults.
Shaking, still shifting in readiness, Mielitta was between battle-blaze and conscience, waiting for Jannlou to force her next move.
He stood stock still. ‘You said, Don’t kill them,’ he reminded her.
She held his gaze. Blue, silver, purple. ‘Go,’ she told him.
‘Truce?’ he asked.
‘You could call it that.’ He nodded, turned his back on her and walked slowly away. She was suddenly very tired. She sat on the ground beside Drianne, took her in a hug, ignored the instinctive flinch.
‘I would never hurt you,’ she said.
Drianne gave way to a child’s sobs against her shoulder, mumbling, ‘I l-l-love you.’ A child indeed.
Mielitta sighed and squeezed the girl. ‘Love you too.’ She threw the expected response back, staccato, embarrassed, not meaning it. It was just something you said, wasn’t it.
‘And I wouldn’t kill them,’ she told Drianne. This reassurance came out with more conviction but, in the heat of battle, she hadn’t meant the men. She’d meant she mustn’t kill the bees, who were now part of her, who could not leave their stings beneath the surface and live. So neither could she. It wasn’t you, I cared about, she told an imaginary Jannlou. It was my bees.