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

were hidden in plain sight, their wings camouflaged against the stone, and they moved freely among the homeless, the exiled, and the destitute.

Thus it was that the Moth Queen’s spies first encountered the Lacewing King. To the Sightless Folk he was almost invisible, but to the Moths he stood out like a beacon in the darkness. Insects swarmed to be near him: moths and hoverflies and bees. Beetles in their thousands guarded his sleep in the alleyway. Wasps never stung him, even when he disturbed their nests on the rooftops. And although the stranger never spoke, the Moths knew he could see them.

The Moth Queen had watched him from underground throughout the long, cold winter. She found him both troubling and incomprehensible. He looked like a beggar, but she could sense a power in him. He looked like one of the Folk, but was not. He lived like one of her tribe, but was not. He made her uncomfortable, and from her royal chamber, she watched, and wondered how to deal with him.

The Moths of that world were very like the Silken Folk of the World he had left. They had their own rulers, their own wars, their own peculiar history. Once again, the Lacewing King was caught between two rival factions: the Moths and the Butterflies. The Butterflies were flamboyant; moving by day and preying mostly on the Sightless Folk. The Moths moved by night, and worked in stealth, and preyed mostly on the Butterflies. Both sides hated each other, and both sides were deeply suspicious of each other and of strangers.

Thus it was that these warring tribes never spoke with the honeybees, the messengers to the Silken Folk who link the Worlds through stories. The Moth Folk and the Butterflies both had stories of their own, passed down through generations, but over the years, these tales had become tangled and twisted beyond repair, so that the truth had been long lost, although both sides believed themselves to be the only ones in possession of it. And now that the Moth Queen was certain that the Lacewing King was no Butterfly, she wondered how she could use him in her war against the enemy.

And so, one night, she summoned her guards and had the stranger brought to her. The guards were ready to bring him with force, but the King came quietly. He barely glanced at the Moth Guards in their sumptuous livery, or at the Queen on her sable throne. He had looked into the eyes of the Harlequin, and all places looked the same to him. Faërie and Folk existed for him in a kind of dreamlike haze; the people that came and went around him seemed no more than shadows.

The Moth Queen addressed him from her throne. “Who are you?” she said. “What brought you here? What do you know of the Butterflies?”

The Lacewing King said nothing. His face was hidden in the shadows.

“Speak,” said the Queen, “and I will be kind. Be stubborn, and you will suffer.”

Still the King said nothing. From behind his matted hair, his strange eyes looked through the Queen as if she were a column of glass.

“Where are you from? Who are your kin? What do you know of the Moth Folk?”

Once more, the Lacewing King was silent. With one finger, he traced a spiral in the dust at the foot of the throne. A colony of ants began to march from the heart of the spiral. The Barefoot Princess would have understood that this was his way of answering her. But the Moth Queen did not understand, and she soon grew angry.

She summoned the Moon Moth, her Chancellor, and the Death’s-Head Hawk Moth, her Chief of Police, and ordered them to question her guest. But neither the Chancellor’s subtle cajolery, nor the Chief of Police’s more vigorous style of interrogation, provided any answers. The Lacewing King had forgotten more than the Moths had ever seen; and he answered their questions with a sullen, contemptuous silence.

At last, the Queen summoned her shaman, the subtle, shadowy Spider Moth, whose eyes were said to look beyond the boundaries of their World, even to the shores of Death and into the waters of Dream.

“Find out who he is,” she said. “There is something about him that troubles me.

The shaman clasped her pale hands under her robe of velvet. “Do you think he’s a spy?” she said.

“Perhaps,” replied the Moth Queen. “Whoever he is, I need to know.”

The Queen had ordered the King to be locked in a cell below her court. He had still not spoken a word to her, or to her interrogators. Now he slept, and the Spider Moth made her way into his cell and sat cross-legged beside him, silently, to watch his dreams.

This was the shaman’s speciality. She lived her life between the Worlds, watching for spaces and entry-points. The Moths had been exiled from their home many, many years ago, but their Queen had never ceased to hope that, in time, they might one day return. And so the shaman watched the King, and followed him into Dream as he slept, and when she had gathered what information she needed, she quietly returned to the Queen and told her what she had observed.

“Your Majesty, as you suspected,” she said, “your guest is from another World. His mind is damaged, but his dreams reveal knowledge of the Silken Folk. He has committed many crimes, and, in different circumstances, might have been dangerous. But now he is a nameless thing, divorced from his World and his memory. I doubt he presents any threat to us.”

“But who is he? Did you find out?”

The shaman shrugged. “Not with any certainty. But, from the fragments of memory I was able to gather from him—memories of the Spider Queen, the Silken Folk, even the Harlequin—I believe I can hazard a guess.”

The Queen leaned forward. “Tell me.”

“I may be wrong,” said the Spider Moth. “But all the omens point to it. I