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

The old woman nodded. “Take her,” she said. “Take her to your citadel. Show her the Silken People. Love her if you can, and perhaps you will find forgiveness.”

The Lacewing King gave a sigh of relief. If he was forgiven, he thought, the pain in his heart would surely fade. But instead, the pain grew even worse, as if a colony of fire-ants had moved into his rib cage.

“What have you done to me?” he said.

The old woman shook her head. “Forgiveness from others comes easily,” she said. “But, my love, to forgive yourself may be the work of a lifetime.” And then, having spoken, the old woman died, right there in her rocking-chair, her sightless eyes still open wide, a tiny smile on her ruined face.

The little girl wept. The Lacewing King put a hand on her shoulder. “Dream is a river,” he told the child. “Dream is a river than runs through Nine Worlds, and Death is only one of them. Look—”

And he touched the dead woman’s face, and spoke a word in a secret language. And as the child watched in wonder, her grandmother began to dissolve, softly and sweetly, into the air; becoming transparent, becoming diffuse; so that, minutes later, she was nothing but a cloud of tiny, golden bees that clustered in the candle-light.

The Lacewing King turned to the child. “Don’t be afraid,” he told her. “Now she has ten thousand eyes to see you and watch over you. Now she’ll always be one of us, and never be old, or hungry, or sad, but live forever in my court among the Silken People.”

The little girl looked at the Lacewing King. “Is that where we’re going?” she said.

For a moment the King did not reply. He did not know if it was because of what the child had said to him, or because of the trusting look in her eyes, but the pain in his heart intensified.

“I’ll be coming later,” he said. “But first, there are things I have to do.”

He took off his coat of a thousand eyes and draped it over her shoulders. “Here. Wear this. It will keep you warm. And that way, I shall always be with you.”

Then he opened the cottage door and addressed the swarm of bees. “Look after this child, and protect her,” he said. “Take her to the Honeycomb Queen. Tell her to care for her while I am gone, and to give her everything she wants, for she will be the heir to my throne.”

And then he sent the bees with the child and went on through the forest alone.

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After that, the Lacewing King disappeared for a long time. No one saw him—not even the bees; no one knew where he had gone.

Stories sprang up about him, of course, and were carried all over the Middle Worlds; but no one could confirm them, or even prove that he was alive. Some said he was in exile; some said he had met his end. The rumours flew wildly around the court, where the Barefoot Princess, as the Silken Folk now called her, was under the care of the Honeycomb Queen. And as those rumours grew and grew, voices all over the kingdom began to speak of a coronation.

The Barefoot Princess, however, would not hear of taking the throne. The King would come home in his own time, she told the Glow-Worm Chancellor. During that time, she would wait for him, however long he took to return. Alone of all the Silken Folk, she had nothing but love for the man who had rescued her from misery, and the only time she ever lost her sunny disposition was if anyone spoke ill of the King, or tried to change her opinion of him.

The Honeycomb Queen said nothing, but watched her with approval. The child the King had rescued was growing into young womanhood—not with the beauty of the Silken Folk, but she was good and kind and honest. No longer barefoot, she was clad in the finest of court finery; dresses of caterpillar silk, boots of scorpion leather—and of course, the Lacewing King’s magical coat of a thousand eyes. Her hair, which was now always neatly brushed, was plaited through with silver thread, and she wore a crown of fireflies that flashed and twinkled as she moved. She had everything a girl might want; beautiful clothes and jewelry; entertainers; musicians; a dappled-pink pony, which she rode in the woods, or along the tunnels of World Below; an easel and a writing-desk equipped with silken paper, dragonfly quills, caterpillar-hair paintbrushes, and three hundred different colours of ink.

But her favourite place was the library, where the Lacewing King kept thousands of books, bound in the finest materials, hand-inked in the tiniest of script. And her favourite stories were about the land of World Beyond, where buildings sometimes scrape the sky, and everyone is a Queen or a King, and most folk are blind, not because they can’t see, but mostly because they don’t want to.

In these books, most of the tales were about a young man or woman who discovered a way into Faërie and had a lot of adventures there; but the Barefoot Princess was much more interested in the World those people had left, and she dreamed of finding a doorway (perhaps through a wardrobe, whatever that was) that would lead her into World Beyond and to the land of the Sightless Folk.

She never told anyone else about this. The Silken Folk had been so kind, and the Honeycomb Queen so good to her that she felt ungrateful, dreaming of other Worlds. Besides, she felt that she owed it to the Lacewing King to await his return. And so she waited patiently, and read her books, and lost herself in dreams of science, and skyscrapers, and supermarkets, and plastic, and trains.

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