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

for pleasure and carousing. Most of all, he found that his people were difficult and rebellious, violent, angry and uncouth. Keeping order took up all his time, and the King found it very wearisome.

“What is the world coming to?” he said one evening as he sat on his throne, drinking a small cup of cocoa and nursing a nagging headache. “Why aren’t people considerate and kind, the way they were when my father was King?”

No one answered. But that was all right, because no one was listening.

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In a city of towers and spires, there lived a girl who loved to dance. During the day, she dressed modestly; eyes lowered, head veiled. But alone in her bedroom at night, she would put on her satin slippers and dance in secret on the polished floor, to the sounds of passing trains and the heartbeat of the city.

But the girl came from a family that disapproved of dancing. And at night, the parents heard the sound of their daughter’s shoes on the parquet floor and knew that something was afoot.

“A virtuous woman does not dance,” her mother told her sternly. And her father, who meant for his daughter to make a splendid marriage one day, said, “If I hear of you dancing again, there will be serious consequences.”

But the girl did not listen. Dancing was in her heart and her blood. And besides, if no one saw her dance, she thought, what harm could it do?

And so she bought herself a rug on which to dance unheard. And every night, when she was alone, she would unbind her long black hair, slip on her satin shoes, and dance away to the city lights below her bedroom window.

But the girl’s family had a neighbour whose daughters were ugly, and whose son was cruel and mean-spirited. This woman was jealous of the girl; her beauty and her sweetness. And so she ordered her son to keep watch at the girl’s window every night. And when he saw the girl dancing, his mother quickly spread the word that the girl was flaunting her body to men, to the disgrace of her family.

The girl’s family soon heard the rumours. The splendid marriage the father had planned succumbed to the growing scandal. Women smiled behind their veils when the dancing girl went by; men made suggestive comments. Angry, the father gave orders to his wife to fetch their daughter. And when she had brought her to him, he took his largest chopping-knife, and cut off one of his daughter’s feet, so that she would never disgrace him again.

Time passed. But although the girl never danced again, the splendid marriage never came. Instead, her parents married her to the neighbour’s son, who gracefully accepted to take a crippled bride for the sake of her dowry. And she went to live with her mother-in-law, who treated her like a servant. Her dancing-shoes were left behind, under the bed in her parents’ house, so that even the small comfort of holding them in her hands was denied her. But when she was alone at night, she still sat by the window, and dreamed, and remembered when she was a dancer.

One night, at supper, a beautiful moth flew into the house. It danced at the window, trapped by the glass, its wings as pale as moonlight. The mother-in-law would have killed it, but the girl quickly opened the window.

“Dancers should be free,” she whispered to the moth, as she let it fly.

The girl did not know it, but the moth was the servant of the Moth Queen, who lived beneath the city. Flying back to her domain, she told the Queen her story. The Queen listened with interest; and then she summoned her people. They flew to the house of the girl who had danced. They crept in through the windows. They crept down the chimneys, and under the doors, and into the room where the girl was asleep, secretly dreaming of dancing. And when the girl opened her eyes, she saw the Moth Queen standing there, regal in her ermine robes, her long black hair unbound and decked with many shining jewels.

“Dancers should be free,” she said, and touched the girl’s face with her fingertips. And at her touch, the girl became a moth, all silk and velvet. Through the open window, she flew, into the heart of the city, towards the towers and the spires, and the moonlight on the water. Her family never saw her again.

But under the bed, her satin shoes, filled with moths, shifted and stirred. And sometimes, at night, as they lay in bed, the girl’s parents would sometimes hear the sound of their daughter’s slippers dancing on the polished parquet floor above them.

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There once was a lion who had no roar. He stood on a massive plinth of stone in the centre of a park, overlooking the lawns and beds in stern and hollow silence. He looked imposing, but the birds had long since discovered that he was powerless. He could not flick his tail at them when they perched on his hindquarters. He could not blink when they sat on his nose, or even growl when they called him names in their twittering voices.

Knowing this, the birds grew increasingly bold. They hated cats, and this King of Cats was theirs to torment, and could not fight back. The Lion hated the birds, of course, and he was very unhappy. The birds gave him no peace, day or night; they even roosted on his back and left their droppings like pale scars across the smoky bronze of his flank.

One day at the end of summer, the Lion noticed a man in the park. The man was not a beggar, though he moved as if his body hurt, and his clothes—strangely colourful among the city’s palette of greys—were ragged and torn.