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

in the heart of her realm—and blindly, through her fingers, she sensed the young King in his hammock of silk, wearing a coat of nine hundred eyes.

The Queen gave a howl of outrage. The honeybees rose like a column of smoke. The young King saw the column and knew that his ruse had been discovered. Jumping from his hammock, he threw on his thistledown moths’-wing cloak and fled through the overgrown garden towards the wall and the rust-red gate.

The Queen ran into the heart of her web, hoping to cut off the young King’s escape; but without her crown of a thousand eyes, she was unable to see her prey. She ordered her spider retinue to take the King and bind him—but with his new-found vision, the King could see the danger approaching; and reaching the gate of the Spider Queen’s lair, he quickly climbed to safety and escaped with his stolen treasure.

The Spider Queen sensed his escape through her web. She looked out of her window. Below, in the courtyard of her lair, the preparations were underway for a wedding she now knew would never take place. Nine days of preparations; of kitchens filled with roasted caterpillars stuffed with ants; of damselfly comfits and greenfly jellies and woodlice fried in their jackets. Nine days it had taken her daughters to make the wedding dress with its jewelled train, so long that ten thousand spiders had had to be stitched into the hem, to ensure its elegant drape and to keep the delicate lace from touching the ground. The veil was spun from moonlight and air; the petticoat from blue butterflies’ wings; the gown from finest thistledown gauze, stitched with living lacewings.

The Spider Queen, in her nightgown, stood in front of her mirror and looked at her reflection. Her face was very pale beneath the eyeless, empty coronet—and yet, at that moment she seemed to see more clearly than she had in days.

She summoned her three daughters and ordered them to clear her lair of every servant, every cook, every courtier and cleaner and squab. “I want to be alone,” she said.

And then she put on her wedding dress and once more looked at herself in the mirror, and saw how foolish she had been, and how the King had duped her. Now she could see him in her mind’s eye, sitting in his library, wearing his golden coat of bees. And stitched all over that coat were the eyes from the Spider Queen’s coronet; a thousand eyes, bright and alert, gleaming in the lamplight.

And right there, she promised herself that one day, she would have her revenge on him. She would make him pay in full for all that he had done to her. She would see him humiliated and broken into pieces. She would find what was precious to him and take it away, whatever it was.

Then she lay on her marriage bed under her canopy of silk and started to spin herself a cocoon. She used her train and wedding veil, stitching their folds around her. Before long, there was nothing left of her but a bundle of jewelled gauze, and moths’-wing fur, and thistledown.

And when it was finished she went to sleep, and dreamed dark dreams of vengeance.

5

T

HE

T

EACHER

There is a story the bees used to tell, which makes it hard to disbelieve—except for a teacher of some renown, who disbelieved them every one. He lived in a village by a bluebell wood, not far from the Lacewing King’s domain, and his greatest joy was to sit and watch the children at play and mock them.

“Don’t you realize,” he would say, “that all your games are just make-believe? You there, with the wooden sword; you’re not really a knight,” he said. “And you, with the sheet around your head; you’re not really a princess.”

Sometimes the children ignored the man. But he was difficult to ignore.

“Why do you waste your time,” he would say, “with games and fairy stories, when Science and Reality have so much more to offer? Admittedly,” he went on magnanimously, “there is virtue in the fairy tale, for the young, in that it teaches Critical Thinking. But Lies are Lies, and the Truth is the Truth, and the Silken Folk are no more real than dreams that come to us at night.”

Now it happened that the Lacewing King overheard the man’s comments one day. With his coat of a thousand eyes, he could see almost anywhere, and he often ventured forth from his underground citadel and came to watch the children at play by the edge of the bluebell wood. Most of the children could see him, being too young to have learnt to be blind. But of course, the teacher saw nothing—except for bees and butterflies.

That day, the Lacewing King was abroad, regal in his coat of bees and crown of living centipedes. He heard the words of the teacher and came to sit beside him. The children stopped their games and watched. But of course, the man saw nothing.

The man said, “What are you staring at?”

But the children were so used to being scolded and ridiculed for seeing the things that he could not that they did not dare tell him what they saw. And so they watched as the Lacewing King walked up to the man who did not believe, and put his hands over his eyes.

And when he removed them, the teacher found that he could see the Silken Folk, watching him from every branch, every leaf of every tree. Golden-eyed and silken-winged, and cluster-clawed, they watched him; the Cockroaches, in their black armour; the sleepy, furry-footed Moths; the Butterflies, with their rainbow wings; the Wasps, in their yellow livery.

The man began to scream, then to run.

He ran right out of the bluebell glade, and through the village, and into the woods. He ran right to the end of that World and into the cities of