TO SECRETLY ATONE FOR HER EGG, FLORA GATHERED more pollen and nectar than any other sister. Because of the threatening skies the foragers each made hundreds of flights while they still could, but later in the day when the clouds darkened and the wind gusted, Flora alone stayed out, fighting her way toward the sweet distant flower wealth she could still smell.
Through watching other sisters she quickly learned the pleasantries some blooms demanded before they would release their nectar, but she studied the bumblebees as well, and their cruder ways, until she could also barge at mallow flowers and pump her tongue, forcing them to give up every drop of nectar. Lily 500’s data was immaculate at factoring the imminence of rain, distance to the hive, and fuel remaining, and Flora used it to pack her panniers so full of pollen that only a bee of her strength could carry it. When she landed back on the board just as the first raindrops began to fall, even the Thistle guards cheered at her daring and profit.
When the shower had passed and the sun shone bright, the foragers went out again, and the increased warmth brought new pollen and nectar to the flowers’ lips. This time Flora took pleasure in the delicacy of her approach and studied the ways of the smallest, sweetest blooms she could find, tiny pimpernels and forget-me-nots hiding in the pockets of the fields. The energy of the sun on her body and the joy of foraging filled her soul, and when she thought of her egg, it was as a bright bud she had not yet visited, glowing as it grew. She flew the fields and gathered until the light began to fade and she heard the sound of her forager sisters’ wings turning for home. Then she joined them.
As Flora’s feet touched the sun-warmed wood of the landing board, a great weariness filled her body. She gave her nectar to the ardently admiring receiver, too tired even to register her kin. Then she stood quietly as careful hands unpacked her pollen panniers and voices marveled at the double load she had brought—and then she was free to rest.
It was all Flora could do to latch her wings, then take herself to the canteen and eat whatever was put in front of her. She sat at the foragers’ table and drew comfort from their presence, and now she understood why they did not speak, for it was not possible to do any more than eat, drink cool water to rehydrate her burning wings, and find a place to rest. The idea of going to the Nursery, and the energy required for her planned interaction with Sister Teasel, was unthinkable. Flora took herself off to a dormitory and collapsed. It was almost too tiring to seal her antennae, but she did it, lest she dream of her egg—and then her exhausted body took her down into sleep.
MANY FORAGERS DIED OF EXHAUSTION every night and in the morning sanitation workers carried out their bodies. Those surviving stood by their berths until the workers had passed, singing the plainsong chant of farewell and respect:
Praise end your days, Sister, Praise end our days.
Flora’s first thought on waking had been to go to the Nursery to pay her visit to Sister Teasel, but despite her intention, her feet took her to the canteen for fuel, then the landing board with all the other foragers. Her secret love for her egg glowed deep inside her, but once again, as soon as she stepped out into the dazzling warmth and unlatched her wings, the physical desire for flowers took over, and all she wanted to do was fly. The sun was bright and strong that day, and the more Flora gathered, the more she wanted. Each time she touched down on the landing board she remembered her egg, but her missions were already celebrated and the Dance Hall crowded to watch her dance, and there was no possible opportunity until the day was over.
Each successful mission improved Flora’s skills and added to her knowledge, and on each one she went farther and visited hundreds more flowers. She brought back dandelion nectar and the soft purple-black pollen from poppies. She knew the right time to visit the mallows when their nectar was just rising, and she stormed through a bank of ultraviolet oxeye daisies, tasting which were tainted with road wind and which were fresh to gather from. Her sense of smell strengthened so that the air vector back to the hive was easy and fast to locate, and when she returned and disgorged her loads, her choreography became more detailed and roused more cheers.
She flew so many missions on her second day foraging that her sense of the hive stretched far and wide, for she saw and smelled her sisters at vast distances, and each of their bodies was a point of beloved, familiar scent. She was near one over a great swath of pink rosebay willowherb when she heard a strange rattling sound. Before Flora knew it a beauty of dragonflies was upon them, mesmerizing and terrible in their iridescent armor. Moving with astonishing speed and agility, the sublime monsters cut through the field, taking bees out of the air—and then they were gone, high and distant before any could cry alarm.
On her return to the Dance Hall Flora left no detail undanced. In graceful steps she told of the dragonflies and all the flowers that were safe to forage—and then her rhythm changed as she danced of the lost sisters from another hive. She had passed them on her return, their blind and dizzy flight striking pity in her heart as they cried out for their mother and home, the wet gray film weighting their wings and burning their minds. The bees stopped following as they recognized the stark message, and each one looked down at herself and her neighbor, to check that she was clean. When Flora stopped there were no cheers, but slow applause for the valuable warning.
It was night again, and Flora still had not visited her egg. Her mind was filled with flowers and pollen and the stream and the hedge and all the sights and sounds of her forage, but she forced them back. Her egg. She felt its need for her. She wanted to get up and go to it, but her exhausted body would not move. Tomorrow.
THE BEES WOKE TO RAIN, battering the hive wet and chilling the air. The floras came to take the dead to the morgue because the air was shut to flight, and despite the wear and tear in the field, many foragers groaned at the prospect of a day of enforced rest. Flora waited until the bodies were carried out, then dipped her antennae and followed her kin-sisters out, eager to put her plan into action.
She clamped her antennae shut, folded her wings respectfully, and went into the Category One ward. Sister Teasel sat sobbing with her nurses at the station. They all looked up as Flora walked in, and she saw their tearstained, frightened faces.
“What has happened?” Flora ran to them. Sister Teasel could barely speak.
“A most terrible calamity.” She burst out crying again. “It must have been a novitiate, her mind addled because she cannot get enough to eat!” She stared at Flora through her tears. “What are you doing here? I knew when I heard a flora had been promoted, that it must be a bold thing like 717, I said so— Oh, my poor babies, my poor, poor innocent nurses—now I must train these girls from scratch and no one for them to follow and learn from—” She reached out her hands to the young nannies clustered around her, and Flora saw their fur was flat and damp and fresh from Arrivals. “If we do not get enough to eat ourselves, we cannot concentrate properly, and mistakes will be made! It is not my fault if the food supply runs short—it is yours, it is you foragers not bringing enough—and now look what has happened—” Sister Teasel burst out weeping again.
“Sister Teasel, please. What has happened?”
“Why are you even here? Have we not had enough grief and terror for one day without everyone coming to stare at us?”
“I came to see you!” Flora fought down the impulse to run through the ward to search for her egg. “It is raining, we cannot fly so I thought—” She stopped, smelling the fertility police.
“Yes, they came.” Sister Teasel shuddered. “How many more nurses must I lose to them? And even Lady Speedwell dragged out of the Queen’s Chambers—oh, it was unspeakable!” She looked at Flora. “You know how they are. And one girl lost her mind in fear and said it was Her Majesty’s doing—well they tore her apart on the spot, right there where they found the egg.” She pointed to the end of the ward. “There, in that last crib. I don’t know how we will clean it, the blood went everywhere, and the child screamed and screamed for so long I will never forget—”
Flora’s whole body went cold. “What child.”
“A new-hatched drone. Oh the most beautiful little boy he would have been, such a handsome face—but in the wrong crib! A new nurse must have put his egg into a worker cell, and of course the boys must always get more, so no wonder he was starving by the time we found him—I said he was not yet stunted, I said there was still time to feed him up and move him, but the Sage hear everything, for next thing the police are here—and then—” Sister Teasel gathered the new nurses to her and sobbed against their fur.
Flora stared at the crib where she had placed her egg. Sanitation workers scrubbed the floor around it, and a bee from Propolis repaired the broken edge.
“You said something about Lady Speedwell.”
Sister Teasel wiped her eyes.
“Well I had to tell the truth. She came into the ward late one night, so I thought I should mention it. I never intended them to—do what they did. In public, even while she screamed on Holy Mother’s life she was innocent.” Sister Teasel got up and waved the young nurses away. “But the police must do their job, else where would we be? Overrun with monsters and cripples. Accept, Obey, and Serve, even when it hurts.”
“Yes.” Flora turned away, sick and heartbroken.
“Look around if you want, the trouble is over, and this is still the holiest place in the hive.” Sister Teasel shook her shabby old wings straight. “Holy Mother will make it right at Devotion. I don’t mind telling you I shall be first to breathe it today.” Her smile was weak. “How well you’ve turned out, 717. I’d never have believed it. Is something wrong? Your antennae tremble so.”
Flora clamped down on them so hard she gasped.
“Quite well, Sister. It is just—very sad news.”
Sister Teasel groomed her own antennae straight and combed down her chest fur.
“One egg is nothing. Holy Mother will lay a thousand more this sun bell, and a thousand more every day. It is the nurses I grieve for. All that training wasted.” Sister Teasel laid a light claw on Flora’s arm and pulled her close. “I’ll tell you what I really fear, 717. That it was not one of my poor nurses, but a vain and evil laying worker.” She stared at her. “We must all be vigilant.”
Flora wanted to strike Sister Teasel, or scream, or shout that it was her child, that they should tear her apart to save her from her grief. Instead she bowed very gracefully.
“Yes,” she said. “We must.”
FLORA WALKED OUT OF Category One not knowing where she went, numb to the pulsing floor codes. She bumped into sisters and did not hear their words; she passed by others carrying food whose scent meant nothing. While she had obsessively gloried in her forage and fallen exhausted into sleep, her baby son—her son—had hatched and starved and died in agony. No flower on earth could heal her pain, but her steps still took her to the landing board.
Other foragers had the same idea, crowding the corridor until they could move forward and look out into the streaming gray. The close comfort of her sisters about her drew Flora’s grief from her in a ragged gasp of anguish. A gentle hand touched her, and she turned to see an old and battered forager beside her, Madam Rosebay.
“Tell me,” she said to Flora, “is it the headaches? We are all suffering them; no one will betray you. Do you feel it when you come in from the field and lie down? Because I feel your spirit so dull and sad within you.”
Her kindness made Flora long to weep and tell her everything, but she forced her antennae tighter closed.
“I—I long to fly.” That was all she could say.
Another forager, overhearing, smiled. Even in her grief, Flora could still see her beauty through her age and the wounds to her face and shell. She was so old every trace of her kin had faded, and she reminded Flora of Lily 500, though it could not be.
“We will have our flowers again,” the old forager said. “Have faith.”
“We take Devotion at these times,” said Madam Rosebay. “It helps.”
They went back inside but Flora held back from them, devastated at her failure to protect her child.
“Why the long face?” A leg missing its back hooks stuck out across her path. Sir Linden lounged in one of the forager rest chambers in the lobby near the Dance Hall. He indicated the vacant one beside it.
“You are a forager; when will this rain desist? It is dull beyond describing in our chambers, and I grow enraged hearing Poplar or Rowan or some other buffoon praising himself to the skies. As for the food—that is another reason I sit here, that I may overhear some information about the latest deliveries to know if we are fairly fed, for there is never enough choice.”
He groaned. “To think it has come to this, gossiping with a hairy maid in a public thoroughfare. Although you are a forager now, free to throw your earnest bulk wherever you may.” When she did not respond, he pulled a face. “Oh come now—I do not mean to offend you, it is just my offensive nature; I cannot help it. Flowers must be quite something, if their loss for one day makes you so sad.” Sir Linden crossed his middle legs and admired his hooks.
“By the way, since your bilious attack on my rival at Congregation, I find myself quite fond of you—is that not a strange thing to say? And probably to hear, but as you do not speak anymore, I have no idea. So . . . I will leave you to contemplate this or that.”
Flora straightened her wings and felt a new tear in the membrane. Until now she had not felt the wound, nor its throbbing pain.
“So the princess did not see you.”
“Aha; you speak to taunt. Of course she did not, or I would be reigning in kingly bliss far from this gloomy place. With special deliveries of hot-sucked spurge for my ever-so-slightly-aberrant royal taste.” He glanced at her. “Euphorbia. I shall use its polite name after my coronation. At any rate, Her Nubile Regality will find it charmingly adventurous, and let me corrupt her pure palate to share mine.”
“Queenspeed to your desire.”
“In fact, the next time you go out—”
“Spurge is not in season.” Flora found his smell comforting.
“Pah—nothing is in its proper season anymore—I believe this is supposed to be summer and the time of plenty, but you are confined by rain and I am starving.” He sniffed at her. “But no wonder you’re sagging there like you’re waiting for the Kindness—not a molecule of Devotion in your scent. Here.”
Without warning Sir Linden touched his antennae to Flora’s, and despite the lock she had put on them, he pushed the Queen’s Love straight into her brain. The divine fragrance had changed—or she had—for it no longer provoked ecstasy, but gradually it numbed the clawing feeling inside her. She shuddered in relief.
“Better?” Sir Linden smelled her again. “Must be something to it, though I don’t know a single chap who rates it. We’re Mother’s favorites so we don’t need it—but the way you girls go in for it: life or death business! Must be hard for you.”
Flora’s despair lifted. Holy Mother still loved her—she felt it in her heart.
“Thank you,” she said to him. “The rain eases; I must go.”
She ran to join the eager foragers crowding for the board. From this moment on she would be the hardest-working, most devout, dutiful, and self-sacrificing daughter of the hive. It was good her crime had died—it was good—danger would purge her—
The sun broke the clouds, the foragers’ engines roared, and Flora leaped into the air, in flight from her own desires.