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

glow, the Princess saw a cloud of bees, and a tiny boat, in which two figures were standing. The bees were all but exhausted, but they managed to guide the tiny boat to the ship of the Spider Queen just as the green flash of sunset dispersed, sending its shadows into the sky. And from the boat came a young man and a beautiful woman, whose face was half-obscured by her hair of spiderweb gauze, and from whose nacreous china skin came the sounds of clockwork.

“We will speak for the Lacewing King,” said the erstwhile watchmaker’s boy. “We have searched the whole Nine Worlds for a chance to repay him.”

And now the boy told his tale to the court, while the Clockwork Princess stood beside him, looking down at the Lacewing King imprisoned in his bubble.

“It seems the Lacewing King has found someone to speak in his defence,” said the Barefoot Princess to the Spider Queen (who was no longer smiling). “By the terms of our agreement, you must now give up your case and return to your own domain.”

The Spider Queen said nothing, but her eyes gleamed with anger. She looked down at the Dragonfly Queen and the Queen Below the Water. Both of them nodded agreement.

“Release the King,” said the Dragonfly Queen. “This court has made its decision.”

With a gesture to her servants, the scuttling spiders of the sea, the Spider Queen had the Lacewing King released from his bubble of sea-spider silk.

For a moment, she watched as the King celebrated his victory. The Barefoot Princess flung her arms around him. The Clockwork Princess and the watchmaker’s boy held hands, smiling shyly. The Dragonfly Queen and her daughter, who had reason to thank the Lacewing King for bringing them together (even though his actions had been far from selfless), added their voices to the chorus of applause and merriment.

And in that moment, the Spider Queen reached for the strands of the web that she had built high in the rigging of the ship. “Congratulations,” she said to the King. “You have evaded my justice once more.”

And, with these words, she pulled at the web, releasing the intricacies of its design like a bouquet of flowers. For a moment the funnel gaped like the throat of a spider lily, and at its heart was darkness and a silence sure as Death.

And then she smiled and said to the King, “But at least I can make sure that I never see your face again.”

And at that, she cast her web at him, and the darkness swallowed him whole.

“Bring him back!” cried the Barefoot Princess, but the Spider Queen simply smiled and spun the silken thread tighter and tighter, closing the throat of the lily.

And so the Barefoot Princess did the only thing that she could think of to do. She ran headlong at the Spider Queen and tore the silken thread from her hands. For a moment it twisted in her grasp like a living creature. And then she jumped from the bows of the ship into the funnel of darkness, which snaked and collapsed into itself, then winked out of existence.

The Spider Queen blinked her thousand eyes. “Well, that’s the last we’ll see of them,” she said at last to the two other Queens.

And so—at least in that world—it was.

My mother used to say to me: There are no such things as fairies. Ignorant people saw butterflies and imagined they were fairies. But my old grandmother said: That’s not true. People saw the fairies, all right, but just believed they were butterflies.

51

M

OONLIGHT

There are many doors between the worlds of the Faërie and the Folk. Some look like doors; or windows; or books. Some are in Dream; others, in Death. And some simply wait for one person—the right person—to find them and to pass through.

So it was with the Lacewing King. Banished by the Spider Queen, he was dragged through the space between the Worlds into a different place and time; into a different ocean. He found himself drifting there, alone; under strange stars, with no land in sight; and no sign of his ship, his crew, the Spider Queen, or the Barefoot Princess. Exhausted from his long ordeal, lost and at the mercy of the waves, he drifted in the darkness, watching the river of stars above and the glimmer of phosphorescence below, thinking about the Barefoot Princess, and what might have befallen her.

Beneath him, shoals of angel fish swam through arches of coral. Great whales passed like shadows; Moon Jellyfish rose and fell in the depths. For a moment the Moon Queen herself glanced up from her midnight cradle, and saw the man floating far above her. Her tentacles had grown so long that they almost reached the surface, drifting like a bridal veil, and for a second they brushed the soles of the feet of the Lacewing King, and he looked down and saw her.

It had been five hundred years since the Moon Queen had last come to the surface. In that time she had grown so large that she rivalled even the Moon himself, glowing pale and perfectly round on the floor of the ocean. Against that ghostly circle of light, the King looked small and helpless. But although he would have made easy prey, the Moon Queen did him no harm. Instead, for the first time in centuries, she found herself growing curious. How had he come to be there? What was his story? What was his name? Why was his skin so pale; his hair so silvery in the starlight? Where were his people, and why was he floating above her so calmly?

None of her people could tell her these things, or even guess at the answers. And so at last she broke the rule of five hundred years of solitude, and, slowly, rose to the surface to see what the tides had brought her.

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