With only books for company, Mielitta pursued her cataloguing as mechanically as if her spirit were still in the beehive. Fungi Identification took its place beside Flora in Wetlands and Wolds while she tried to catalogue her thoughts, a more difficult exercise.
Whenever a title made her hesitate between categories, she placed it in her To be revisited bookstack, cleared for that purpose. She did the same with the questions that led nowhere. To be revisited. Why had Jannlou helped her after years as gang leader, making her life hell? What was he hiding?
Her attempt to evaluate what she knew of her new powers was more fruitful. Whether it was a psychedelic experience, entirely in her own head, or not, made no difference subjectively. She felt connected to a community of bees, via the sigil on her thigh and voices in her head. She could summon their qualities to help her and sometimes they came unasked. That was a danger if she wished to remain invisible, innocuous among the Citadel adults.
If she was to believe Jannlou, she’d left her body like an empty shell for several days, while she experienced life as a queen bee. Yet, when she’d broken into the Maturity Barn as a bee, she’d regained consciousness in her own body, inside the Barn. So there must be some way of reuniting what she could only call her bee self with her human self, of moving the human body through barriers only a bee could cross. For a short distance at least. Whether she could travel to the beehive instantly in bee form and reunite there with her human body was a different matter. She remembered how sick she’d felt in the Maturity Barn and doubted the wisdom of such an experiment. If she wanted to go to the Forest as Mielitta – and oh, how she longed to go there! – she must take the long route through the water gate.
The optimal, safe greylight made her long for shafts of sunlight and pools of shade. ‘There is more than this,’ she murmured, carrying more books to a shelf.
What if she talked to someone? Showed them the bee sigil and told them what it meant, what she could do? Declan. She had always talked to Declan, of her finding, her lessons and archery, her smith-work. She had even told him of her pain in being passed over, of losing her childhood friends year on year. But he had chosen Kermon, told her what girls could not do, told her to be a lady, to accept that she was an adult now. She could hardly tell him that her maturity had been fabricated.
How would Declan react to her tales of bee powers? He was a mage, accustomed to magecraft and its appearance in those chosen. But she had never been chosen, had been the dullest of children, had worked hard for every small achievement in her ordinary world. At best, he would think she was attention-seeking, telling stories that made her seem important.
If he thought she believed what she was saying, he would think her mentally impaired. What excuse had she made to Jannlou? An adverse effect from the Maturity Test. Jannlou had accepted that easily and so would Declan. He’d seek medication for her and wait for the madness to pass. In the Citadel all madness passed – or the mad person did. She shivered.
And if Declan believed her tale as fact? Then he would know how many crimes she had committed. Lying about the Maturity Ceremony was insignificant compared with stealing a mage password, breaking out of the Citadel to trespass in the Forest. All were crimes too terrible for her even to know the customary sentence. Nobody had ever been accused of so much treason. Not even Crimvert, and look what his fate had been.
And she had no words, not even book-words, to describe what she was doing with the bees. She knew it was beyond forgiveness. If, that is, it was real and not just a figment of her imagination.
She started work on the Psychology section, removing the section Women’s Mental Health problems and carefully putting Delusional and Hysterical Phases in Women next to Delusional Psychosis in One Hundred Patients. Surely, they had more in common than difference? She was the Assistant Librarian and she would make all such decisions. If she couldn’t shape the world, she could shape the library according to how the world should be.
And why did the mages keep books on so many subjects nobody was allowed to talk about? Who read them? She opened the ledger showing which titles had been checked out and by whom. Very interesting. Rinduran’s reading on wall history and safety in wall visits was unsurprising. But his forays into revolutions and propaganda in ancient times might be of interest to the Council.
Bastien’s taste was for erotic romances. Mielitta’s mouth screwed up in disgust at the thought as she skimmed names that meant little, noted Puggy’s preferred mixture of philosophy, gender politics and make-up tips.
Jannlou’s name caught her attention. She felt almost guilty, prying into someone’s reading habits. But wasn’t that part of a librarian’s job? Perhaps she could start a conversation with mages who visited, recommend books to them, make use of her memory. If, of course, the Citadel calmed enough for simple activities like reading to be popular again. Meanwhile, she would learn what she could about the mages and their apprentices.
Her heart skipped a beat. Forest Predators was not what she’d expected to see checked out to Jannlou, along with Heredity and Magecraft. The latter she could understand being of interest to the Chief Mage’s son but the former was too close to her own secret. A Citadel predator, he was stalking her, and she must be wary. But the book had been checked out before she visited the Forest. Had his magecraft sensed something of the Forest in her before she had?
She shelved that question with the others waiting to be revisited. If Jannlou suspected her true nature, she was in even greater danger but she could not ask Declan for help. She had closed that door. She’d never told him that books and their words entered her mind as she cleaned in the library, so that she knew of life before the Citadel. Such knowledge was meant for mages and she did not want to be banned from the library.
And she had never told him of the harassment from the gang. His intervention would only harm both of them. It was just the same regarding her new powers.
The gang. Bastien, Jannlou, and their new roles. There was something she needed to remember. Another disadvantage of her bee life to be filed: her memory after shifting shape had gaps relating to the events just before it.
She checked the books were straight on the shelf.
Let us work, buzzed her voices.
Why not? There was nobody in the library.
‘Dust the books,’ Mielitta told the bees and soon the shelves were alive with a working hum and a whirr of wings. Her spirits lifted in such company and her own work became satisfying in its rhythm rather than boring. Bees had no concept of boredom and Mielitta had no urge to change their mindset.
Engrossed as she was in cataloguing the books on Macrobiology, Mielitta took a few seconds to notice a change in the working rhythm of some bees on an empty section of shelf. They were crawling round a bee-sized object, covering it in orange goo. When Mielitta looked more closely, she could see a dead bee being wrapped up in orange. She touched it. Sticky. Some of the orange stayed on her finger and she had to rub it off. She stroked a bee working with the orange substance, soothing it, as she looked more closely.
No, not a dead bee. A dead fly. Mielitta had seen flies in the Forest, their whine so different from the hum of bees, so irritating. There had never been a fly or any creature other than humans in the Citadel, dead or alive. Until now. Dogs, cats, rats, mice, spiders, flies, fleas – book words. Citadel society was safe, hygienic, Perfect. So how was there a dead fly in the library? Was it Crimvert who’d breached the Citadel’s defences, guilty as charged of allowing Nature to infiltrate? Or was somebody else responsible. Somebody who’d defiled Perfection with thousands of bees.
The hairs rose on the back of her neck at this new evidence of her treason, even as she instructed the group of bees anxiously disposing of the dead body. ‘Leave it, little ones. I will take care of it.’ Carefully avoiding the bees, she swept the fly to the floor with one finger. Let the floor do its work.
The woodette around the dead fly rippled as it always did when absorbing a snag of fabric, crumb of sustenance or other accidental debris. But this time the ripple hit the fly and froze, forming a hard outline round the small corpse, an outline that grew larger as more ripples hit the previous ones. When the floor gave up its attempt at cleaning, there was a dark accusatory stain around the fly’s orange-wrapped body.
‘What’s in that stuff?’ Mielitta asked, stroking her bee sigil to calm her racing pulse.
Propolis, her inner queen answered. It protects the hive from infection if we cover debris in it. We seal joints with it when we’re building, to keep out rain and secure the walls. It is both medicine and glue.
‘It’s certainly sticky enough.’ Mielitta still had specks of orange on her finger. ‘And looks so weird!’ Worse than weird. The fly’s body was incontrovertible proof that the Forest was in the Citadel and Mielitta did not want the Council of Ten investigating the library.
She tried to pick up the dead fly but it was now firmly enmeshed in the fabric of the floor. A knife or an arrow-point might cut it out, but what if the hole left in the floor caused damage to the magical structure of the Citadel itself? Unthinkable! Far worse than the flaw caused by the dead insect.
She moved a stool to stand over the stain but the dark patch was clearly visible, even from a distance. She took a pile of books and stacked them under the stool, then piled more around them and on top of the stool. There. Unless you knew what you were looking for, you wouldn’t spot the faint shadows rippling through the woodette, outward beyond the stool. Just cataloguing in progress. Nothing unusual.
The subtle change in greylight was enough to alert one Citadel-born to the day’s end. She breathed a sigh of relief and recalled her bees. At last, she could retreat to her own room. She picked up her book on survival in the Forest, to take with her. She wanted to ensure its words and pictures were fully memorised before returning it to its shelf and she should have an hour’s guaranteed solitude, perfect for reading, before she must brave the evening meal in the Great Hall.
She would seek a table in the middle, be invisible among the other women in their gowns and gossip. If she’d fooled Jannlou, she could fool everyone in the Hall. Declan and the Maturity Mages would have sent the necessary messages, announcing her adulthood, to the stewards, archery tutor, teachers, in kitchen and schoolroom, so her absence in her old haunts be expected. Nobody would miss her.
Then she remembered. Drianne. Danger.
Everything came back to her, the whole conversation between Bastien and his father in the library. Now Bastien was Maturity Mage, he had power over Drianne. Mielitta might be safe in her Assistant Librarian disguise but Drianne would suffer twice over. Bastien had said, ‘I could mute her and make her a good citizen.’ And days had gone by since then. What had he done to Drianne?
