Honeycomb by Joanne Harris (book series for 12 year olds .txt) 📕

100

H

ONEYCOMB

And that was how the Lacewing King became Ruler of the Kingdom of Death. Tales of him continued to grow and spread across the Nine Worlds, which of course number as many as there are stories to be told. And the bees stayed with him, always—even in the deserts of Hel—taking their nourishment from Dream; passing from one World to the next as they did from flower to flower. For bees have eyes like honeycomb; made up of thousands of facets; each one reflecting a different world; a different Aspect of story. Or at least, so claimed the bees, in a voice which was that of the Hallowe’en King, which made it hard to disbelieve.

The Lacewing King had not forgotten the words of his royal father. Arriving in the Kingdom of Death, he took out the crystal vial, containing the last of the nectar of dreams, took out the tiny glass stopper and raised the vial to his lips.

It was only a tiny drop of the dreamflower’s nectar. But the taste was like sunlight, and true love, and forgiveness, and hope. And, tasting it, the Lacewing King suddenly found that he could see into every World, every dream, every cell of the honeycomb. His blue eye saw the present, the Worlds; the souls and secret hearts of Men; his amber eye, the past, the dead, the river Dream and the Kingdom of Hel, infinite in its complexity. And just as he was about to discard the crystal vial, he noticed something left inside—a tiny, luminous, golden speck, no larger than a grain of pollen.

It was a seed, set in honey like an insect in amber. The King knew at once from what flower it came; and he carried it, very carefully, to the shore of the River Dream, and planted the seed in the hard, dry soil, using only his living hand—for the Ruler of Hel has a dreadful gift—and gently patted the soil into place, and silently hoped that something would grow.

And so, in time, the dreamflower bloomed once more on the shores of that river. Its petals were pale as young love; its leaves were like the starry sky; its roots were drenched with the dreams of the Folk; and its scent was like honey and heartbreak. And the bees that had followed the Lacewing King took nourishment from the flower, and carried the pollen home to where two Queens of the Silken Folk now ruled the Kingdom together—the Queen that had been the Barefoot Princess, and the brave Engine Driver, who had followed her back from the gates of Hel, and whose loyalty had never failed, not in the darkest of places.

As for the Harlequin, it crawled into the wreck of the Night Train, where it slept, and waking, found that the Train was once more in motion, journeying between the Worlds, ferrying the souls of the dead as yet unready to enter Hel. The Watchman and the Clockwork Princess had seen their opportunity never to be parted again, for Death had no power over her—except as a threat to the man she loved. And so they had boarded the Night Train, and the man who had been a watchmaker’s boy repaired and oiled its machineries, and set it on its way again, fuelled by the dying cries of those who have lived their lives in regret, although neither he nor the Clockwork Princess felt any reason to grieve for a world that had never accepted them.

Now the Train had reached cruising speed, flashing between the Worlds like a blade, and all the Harlequin could do was watch, and gnash its mandibles. The creature howled, and threatened, and screamed, and pounded against the engine-room door. But the Night Train ran on such fuel as this, and little by little, the Harlequin, diminished by its rage and by its failure to ruin the Lacewing King, found itself shrinking, first to the size of a blackbird, then that of a hornet, until finally, it had become a single red-and-black spotted ladybird, crawling up the carriage window, bright against the cloudy glass.

The window was open a tiny crack. The Harlequin crept through it. And in time, or so say the bees, it found its way to the shores of Dream and onto the leaves of the dreamflower, where, having come full circle, it died, finally at peace with the Worlds.

The Lacewing—now the Hallowe’en—King watched all this from his royal throne of velvet and dead man’s ivory. Then, using only his living hand, he drew his mantle of honeybees a little more closely around his shoulders, and smiled a little to himself as he listened to their old, old song:

“Long ago, and far away,

Far away and long ago.

The Worlds are honeycomb, we know;

The World’s our honeycomb.”

The End

A

CKNOWLEDGMENTS

Ten years ago, I started writing little stories on Twitter. I don’t know why I did this, except that Twitter seemed to me to be a place for stories, and because I felt those stories were for telling, not for writing. Some stories take life from the fact that they have an audience right there, ready to comment and react, and Twitter gave me that audience. It also gave a context to some of my stories—which seemed at first to be fairy-tales, but which were often also drawn from the world of current events and politics. And as time went by, people began to request more news of their favourite characters, and I began to realize that I was creating something like a new oral tradition: a new medium for folklore. An interlinked series of stories, all set in the same honeycomb multiverse as The Gospel of Loki and Orfeia, with an overarching storyline about love, magic, the power of story, and the quest for redemption.

I would never have done all this