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

he was only five years old, and—perhaps because he had entered the world at the hands of a human midwife—was fascinated from the start by what he called the Sightless Folk—or as we call them, Humankind.

At the beginning, his duties were few, and he was given into the care of the Glow-Worm Chancellor until the time of his coming-of-age. Thus the young King learnt the ways of his people; the kind and industrious Honeybees; the fierce and warlike Cockroaches; the voracious Greenfly; the dutiful Ants; the Beetles, Earwigs, and Centipedes; the many Butterflies and Moths. He also learnt the ways of the court; the etiquette and the ritual; the history of the Silken Folk.

A King must be accomplished; and so he learnt to hunt and ride; to shoot a bow and fight with a sword; to read maps and charts of the night sky; to write poetry and compose music. He was an able student, but he was wilful and troublesome, and from his palace underground, lined with silk and moths’ wings, protected by glamours and conceits and buried in the heart of the woods, he would watch the world above and its folk; their little dramas; their fears, their dreams, their adventures; their seemingly endless quest for love.

As he grew older and more adventurous, he would often evade his teachers and the duties set out for him and go out into World Above; and sometimes he would take human form and walk among the Folk in the guise of one of their children. The young King had soon realized that children go unnoticed, even where strangers are viewed with mistrust, and he would often amuse himself at the expense of the Sightless Folk, playing tricks to alarm them.

Thus the milkmaid would find that the milk had turned, not to butter in the churn, but to a quart of earwigs, spilling forth in loathsome exuberance; or the baker, cutting one of his loaves, would find that it was empty inside except for a single fat maggot. The boy (for he was still a boy, in spite of his royal status) would watch them from the top of a tree, or from the roots of a thorn-bush, or from a foxhole underground, and laugh at their fear and confusion. Sometimes he would show himself, but only to a child of his own age—always a solitary child with no other friends, a dreamer—and he would befriend them, play with them, show them the ways of the woods and the trees, then, tiring of the game at last, would vanish without warning, leaving them to wonder whether he’d been real at all, or whether they’d imagined him.

Anxious parents, hearing the tale, would warn their children against him, telling them not to go into the woods, and to guard against imaginary friends. But the young King always found someone reckless—or lonely—enough to disobey the warnings.

No one stopped him. No one dared criticize his actions. The Glow-Worm Chancellor lived in a state of perpetual anxiety for his royal charge but was unable to find the words to express his concern for the young King, or to forbid him his cruel games. Because they were cruel—but the young King never really considered that, any more than a human child would consider the feelings of an ant, or hesitate to pull off the wings of a fly, or step on a spider. No one taught him otherwise; no one ever challenged him.

His gentle mother, the Honeycomb Queen, had not been allowed to stay with him. Custom decreed that a new King or Queen always stands or falls on their own. Cruelty and intelligence would serve him better than kindness and love; and so as he grew, the Lacewing King became increasingly ruthless. He also grew to be handsome: tall and straight as a sapling, with hair the shade of a moth’s wing and eyes as dark as honey. And because the midwife had given him the nectar of the dreamflower—the nectar that allowed him to see things as they really were, and not just as they seemed to be—he could walk between the Worlds and look between the shadows.

What he found there is a tale that only bees know how to tell. And the bees still tell it to this day; taking the story from flower to flower; adding other tales to it; whispering it to the winds; making it into nectar. For thus it has always been with the bees, wisest of the Silken Folk; the spinners of stories; builders of Worlds; the living heart of the Honeycomb.

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When the Lacewing King was a boy, he liked to escape into the woods. There, he would swim in the quiet streams, or swing in the canopy of the trees, or run for miles with the forest deer, far away from his underground realm and from his royal duties.

One day, when he was still only half-grown, he came to a wall, deep in the woods. The wall was brick and very high, overgrown with vivid moss that fell in great, green, velvety swags all along the perimeter.

The Lacewing King was curious. He followed the wall through the undergrowth, and soon uncovered a wrought-iron gate, almost as high as the wall itself, faded rust-red with the years, its scrolls and florets of metal grown as fine and brittle as autumn leaves.

The young King tried the gate, which was locked. But through the bars he found himself looking into a garden—or at least, what was left of one—now grown monstrous with the years, with peonies and hollyhocks and roses tall as houses, with thick and thorny branches and heads like those of shaggy sea monsters rising from the greenery.

This was the lair of the Spider Queen, who lived with her three daughters in the heart of the forest. She was old—and cunning—and her home was a silken pavilion under a canopy of leaves,