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

storms. It caused a tidal wave to submerge several neighbouring islands. Such was the force of the mighty sneeze that it blew off the Cockroach Queen’s helmet. The helmet flew through the air, bounced and went crashing through the undergrowth.

The Cockroach clan averted their eyes at the blasphemy, expecting terrible vengeance to descend upon the culprit. But the Lacewing King just smiled, and when no retribution came, the Cockroach clan dared, one by one, to look up at the face of their Queen. But where the face of the Queen should have been, there was nothing but a space.

The Cockroaches grew bolder; first moving towards the foot of the Queen, then swarming up her burnished sides to peer into her armour. The armour was empty. Inside the gleaming carapace, there was nothing but darkness and dust and a fleeting scent of decay. The Cockroach Queen had been dead for years, leaving her armour for some other being to inhabit in secret; the space inside the helmet serving as an echo chamber for some other creature to take her place, and to issue its commands to them; commands to feed it; to worship it; to sacrifice their children.

The Cockroaches were first puzzled, then stunned, and then, fiercely, desperately angry. “We have been duped!” they exclaimed. “Let us find this parasite and make it pay for what it has done!”

They combed the island. They scoured the shore. They searched and searched for the creature, but in vain. Meanwhile, the Lacewing King and his companions went back to their ship with their supplies and sailed off into the twilight.

Some time later, the ship’s cook discovered, in the bilges, a single fat white cockroach, hidden away in a barrel of beef. He pulled out the helpless, bloated thing, wondering how it had got there. But there was no room on the ship for a parasite, and so he flung the stowaway out to sea, where, lacking the means to swim, it sank.

The Cockroach clan elected a King, who ruled the island wisely, and well; and made sure to give hospitality to any travellers landing there.

And the Lacewing King and his crew sailed on, through the blue archipelago towards the unknown horizon.

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Meanwhile, half a world away, the Spider Queen and the Barefoot Princess looked up at the same sky, and each in her way remembered the King and wondered how to reach him.

Every night, the Barefoot Princess would close her eyes and see his face; his hair the shade of a moth’s wing; his golden, melancholy eyes. And every night, the Spider Queen would spin the skeins of her web of dreams and finger the strands of gossamer. Every night, she would put on her crown and watch the sleeping King from afar. And every night she would tell the Princess that they were getting closer.

At last, one night, they reached the sea. A vastness of ocean so dark and huge that the Barefoot Princess was moved to tears.

“How will we ever find him now?” she said, as she clung to the skirts of the Spider Queen, so like those of the waves on the beach that whispered so relentlessly. The Spider Queen watched her in silence, her coronet of a thousand eyes shining in the moonlight. Then she spoke a silent command and set to work spinning another web. She spun it from starlight and coral dust, and from the sound of the ocean. And she summoned her spider servants to join her in the great work, to build a ship that would take them as far as the islands of spices and silk, where the Lacewing King had just arrived, weighing anchor in a cove at the foot of a giant cliff.

For three days and three nights, the Spider Queen spun her web of dreams, a web more complex and beautiful than any made, before or since. And on the third day, the Barefoot Princess saw that the Queen had made a ship as light and strong as spider-silk and as flexible as steel. The crew were spiders of every kind; clinging to the gossamer sails; watching from the crow’s nests; scuttling up and down the rigging. The hull was as light as a silken cocoon; but strong enough to withstand even the most relentless of storms. Inside, there was a state cabin, draped in the finest gauze, in which the Spider Queen and the Barefoot Princess would rest during the voyage.

And so they set sail on a moonlit tide, using the stars to pull them along. And as they sailed, the spider crew sang a little lullaby as they ran up and down the masts, adjusting the sails to suit the wind. And the Princess slept. But the Spider Queen stayed out upon the twilit deck, her coronet of a thousand eyes watching the horizon, and she dreamed of the day when she would have her final revenge on the Lacewing King.

For thirty nights, the Queen sailed west in her ship of silk and starlight. Meanwhile, halfway across the world, her enemy the Lacewing King was standing in the shadow of the tallest cliffs he had ever seen. These cliffs were so tall that their summit was wreathed in clouds; and their heels dug deep into the sea, a mile beneath the surface.

The Captain of the vessel had heard that there was rare profit to be had in the islands of silk and spices, which was why they had come this far, right to the edge of the Middle Worlds, where Pandaemonium meets the Sea. Here it was said that Dream went untamed; gold dust lined the seashore and men lived like wild animals. It was also the territory of two opposing, warlike tribes; one that lived at the top of the cliffs, another that lived below the sea, inside a labyrinth of caves.

The Captain took a dozen men and started to climb the tall cliff, using the purple vines that