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

Time passed: weeks, then months, then years. Still the young prince did not return. His four brothers stayed in the palace (which by then was in some disrepair), drinking wine and discussing their dreams and disappointments.

Occasionally, travellers who came by the palace spoke of a young man—a prince, they said—who had come to a city nearby. The boy had started out penniless, telling tales in the marketplace of his travels and of the many things he had learnt as he roamed the countryside. One day the queen of the city—a woman famed for her beauty—had heard of the marvellous stories told by the young traveller. She had come to hear him speak, and they had fallen deeply in love. Their wedding had been the richest that the country had ever seen, and their love the most passionate and lasting. And now, years later, the young man was famed throughout the land for his wisdom, his wealth, his talent, and his knowledge.

The four elder princes at last understood that this young man was their brother.

They opened another keg of wine (their cellars were greatly depleted by then) and said: “Well, he was lucky. He must have accidentally found his way to another city; one in which Love and Fame and Wealth and Learning were present in abundance.”

They never left their palace again, not even to see their brother. Instead, they emptied the wine cellars, one by one—until the wine had all been drunk. Meanwhile, reports of their brother’s fame grew, but by then they had all stopped listening.

36

T

RAVELS OF THE

L

ACEWING

K

ING

Meanwhile, and for many years, the Lacewing King had been travelling. Far from his kingdom, he wandered alone, learnt to fend for himself, and had many strange adventures.

For a time, he travelled the roads, living rough from day to day. For a time, he worked on a farm, where he learnt to plough the soil. For a time, he sailed the sea in a ship from the Outlands, and saw the sun set in a green flash over the islands of the West. He walked across deserts of blood-red sand and mountains crowned with ice and snow. He entered one city as a king and left another as a condemned man. He slept by the roadside and under the turf; learnt how to find food and water. He clothed himself with glamours so that he could walk among the Sightless Folk, appearing to them as a tall man with hair the shade of a moth’s wing. Sometimes he stole supplies as he went—his spun-silk shirts and dragonfly boots having long since been reduced to rags—and travelled now in the battered boots and leathers of a journeyman, hiding his face with a broad-brimmed hat and carrying a satchel.

He seldom spoke, and seldom smiled, and no one—not even the bees—could say what he was seeking so far from home, or whether even he would know when he eventually found it.

One day, the King was passing through a city like many others. A grey and cheerless city on the banks of a river that smelt of mud and dead fish. On the far bank of the river, he came across a floating market of barges, rafts, and river-boats. Here was trade of all kinds: fruit; flowers; spices; wine; fried Fat Boys; bacon; bread; chickens; carpets; magic charms. Here, too, were entertainers; rope-dancers; drummers; tellers of tales; prophets in rags and scarlet paint; talking parrots; dancing bears; jugglers and acrobats. And here too, of course, were the Silken Folk; cockroaches and woodlice; gnats and water-boatmen and wasps, brought there by the promise of food and the scent of warm-blooded creatures.

For a time, the Lacewing King wandered idly from barge to barge. Then he noticed a couple who were standing by the quayside: a young man and a woman of strange, inhuman beauty, whose head was wrapped in a ragged scarf and who carried her broken arm in a sling.

No one approached the couple. They stood apart, the young man cautious, the woman serene. For a moment, the King observed them. His eyes saw things that the Sightless Folk could not, and he understood that the woman, for all her beauty, had no soul. This did not trouble him. Neither did he. But he sensed the fear in the hearts of the Folk when they ventured close to the strange pair, and he knew that trouble was not far away.

Finally, a Lawman came to investigate. He demanded the young man’s papers, and seeing that he had none, ordered him and his woman to leave.

“We’re doing no harm,” said the young man. “All I want is a few supplies. I have money. I can pay.”

The Lawman shook his head. “Be off. No one wants your money here.”

And so the strange couple turned away and seemed about to leave. But the exchange had attracted the attention of a crowd of market-goers, who now clustered around the pair, taking courage from the Lawman’s presence.

The Lacewing King was curious. He had no reason to interfere, and yet he felt sympathy for the outsiders. He came a little closer, using the crowd for cover. He saw that the young man was very young, but that the beautiful woman was old. A hundred years old, or older, he thought, and with a silent, inhuman grace. The crowd grew bold, and pushed closer, plucking at the ragged clothes of the young man and the woman. One woman in the crowd took hold of the woman’s scarf and pulled, revealing the hidden part of her face, a crazed and sunken eye-socket and a broken arm, inside which secret machineries worked and gleamed—

“It’s a demon!” the woman cried. “A soulless, mechanical demon!”

The crowd took up the woman’s cry. Rough hands took hold of the young man and the clockwork woman. The Lacewing King watched from afar, feeling increasingly curious. He had encountered many unusual things,