The Hive Queen

by Tui T. Sutherland

  “Oh no,” Sundew muttered. “You want to go over there. To the house your queen literally just raided.”

  “So she’s hardly likely to come back right away, right?” Cricket said.

  Sundew shook her head and moved to one of the bowls, scooping a dark purple liquid out of it and sniffing it suspiciously. “I should go find my parents. I have to tell them that our plan didn’t work.” She sighed. “The Chrysalis knew nothing helpful about the mind control. Nor do they seem like particularly useful allies, but I’ll ask Belladonna what she wants me to do with them.”

  “Wait,” Cricket said, feeling a surge of panic. “Sundew, please. We still have until sunset. Don’t go yet. Give me the rest of today to try to find some answers.”

  The party host had found some perfume and was wandering the courtyard, trying to inconspicuously spritz it everywhere. Sundew wrinkled her snout at him. “Fine. You can try,” she whispered. “But don’t get your hopes up. And you can’t take Blue to Scarab’s house with you. We don’t know if we can trust that old HiveWing, and he’s too valuable to risk.”

  Blue protested, but Cricket agreed with her — she didn’t know how Lady Scarab would react to Blue, or how she felt about SilkWings in general. She was the only wealthy HiveWing Cricket knew of who had no SilkWing servants. Cricket got the impression she disliked them only about as much as she disliked all dragons. But Lady Scarab was very unpredictable, and Cricket didn’t want to put Blue in any danger.

  “All right,” she whispered. “If I don’t come back before the party ends, meet me at the statue in the Glitterbazaar.”

  She turned and touched one of Blue’s talons lightly with hers, wishing she could hug him, but not sure whether the rules could bend quite that far.

  “Be careful,” he said softly as she slipped away.

  The guests who remained were valiantly trying to ignore Lady Scarab’s residence and the odor that still lingered around it. Still, Cricket was afraid that knocking on the front door might catch the attention of the more gossipy dragons, so she tried walking in the opposite direction and circling through the streets until she reached the side of the mansion, where a smaller door was set into the wall.

  She knocked nervously and stood for a long, anxious moment, gazing up at the weathered treestuff that formed the outside of the mansion. Most wealthy dragons kept their homes neatly maintained and constantly updated with new features, but the green jade beetles inlaid in even rows looked as though they had been put in decades ago, maybe when the house was first built. Some of them were even missing, although Cricket couldn’t tell whether they’d been pried loose and stolen or whether they’d fallen out and nobody cared.

  The door swung open abruptly, making Cricket jump.

  “No!” Lady Scarab barked, and slammed the door shut again.

  “Wait!” Cricket knocked more firmly. “Lady Scarab, wait!”

  The door flew open midknock and Cricket nearly rapped the elderly dragon on the nose.

  “Go away!” Lady Scarab shouted.

  “It’s me,” Cricket said quickly, shoving her veil aside to reveal her face. “Please, Lady Scarab.”

  “Oh, by all the stupid moons,” Scarab growled. She grabbed Cricket by one of the scarves and yanked her inside, almost throttling her in the process.

  Cricket stumbled into a poorly lit kitchen, bare and cold. One flamesilk lamp sat alone on the central table, its light dim as though the thread had almost faded completely. Next to it were two plates, neatly stacked, and a small glass jar of pale lavender sugar cubes. In the sink she spotted the bones of a bird, but there was no other food in sight. The walls were empty except for two small paintings on either side of the stove: one a lemon tree, the other an orange tree.

  Trees? Cricket thought, startled. No one was allowed to make art with trees in it. No one was allowed to have art with trees in it. She squinted at them and saw the spidery cracks in the canvas. Maybe they were quite old, from before the laws about trees in art. Still, it was bold of Scarab to have kept them.

  “Come on, you nuisance,” Scarab muttered, grabbing the lamp and stomping past Cricket into the next room. This one was much bigger, reaching all the way to the back wall of the mansion, where tall sliding glass doors led to a balcony overlooking the moonlit savanna. Perhaps it had been a ballroom once, or at least intended for hosting grand parties, but now it felt like a giant empty terrarium with only one seed rattling around inside it.

  It was also cold and sparsely decorated, especially for a dragon who seemed as rich as Lady Scarab. A polished old wood bookcase filled the opposite wall, lined with books that looked as though they might crumble if you actually touched them. One dark green floor pillow was set by the balcony doors, as though the only place she wanted to sit was near the exit, with a view of the stars.

  Lady Scarab set the lamp on the low table and sat down on the pillow, leaving Cricket standing awkwardly in the middle of the room.

  “Well?” the old dragon demanded. “After all this trouble, at least tell me you brought the Book.”

  Surprised, Cricket said, “My friend has it. What do you know about the Book?”

  “Not enough,” Lady Scarab growled. “I’ve wanted to get my claws on it for years. I assume you read it. What happens next? Say the words ‘Wasp dies slowly and horribly’ and I’ll make you my heir.”

  Cricket was startled into almost laughing. “No, no,” she said, recovering quickly. “It’s not like that. That’s the thing: there are no more predictions in it. Clearsight only saw a few hundred years into the future — there’s nothing about now, nothing about the last thousand years. Queen Wasp has been lying to us.”

  Lady Scarab’s eyes were like small dark coals, with flickers of dark red in their depths. Those eyes pinned Cricket to the bare floor for a long, agonizing moment.

  “What?” Scarab spat.

  “The Tree Wars were all a lie; Clearsight never saw that. The SilkWing queen giving up her throne so her tribe would bow to Queen Wasp … that wasn’t in there, either.”

  Scarab breathed deeply in and out through her nose. “I suppose,” she said icily, “there wasn’t a list of the HiveWing queen succession line, either.”

  “N-no,” Cricket said. “What’s that?”

  “A list, allegedly, of who should be queen and who should succeed her, from Clearsight’s time all the way until now.” Lady Scarab let out her breath again in a long hiss through her teeth. “So my mother was lying about the Book, too. And so was my sister. Both lying, in fact, about the fact that my sister Cochineal had to be queen. I suppose Mother realized she was always a much better liar than I was. The most essential quality for a queen who had to rule by deceiving her entire tribe about their most sacred artifact. What a lovely, lovely royal family we are.”

  She picked up a paintbrush from a tray beside the pillow, and Cricket realized there was a small easel there as well. The half-finished painting, as far as she could see, was of a wasp being eaten by ants. She shivered.

  Lady Scarab shoved her spectacles higher up her nose and squinted at Cricket. “The queen would very much like to kill you, you know. Tell me, why aren’t you hiding in some distant corner of the continent?”

  “I have some questions —” Cricket said.

  “Ah,” Lady Scarab interrupted. “Curiosity. That never ends badly. Carry on.”

  “The queen can’t mind-control me,” Cricket blurted.

  “Yes,” said Lady Scarab. “I gathered that from the you-not-marching-yourself-off-to-jail-right-now.”

  “But why? Why can’t the queen mind-control you?” Cricket asked. “Or me?”

  “I have no idea.” Lady Scarab waved the paintbrush at Cricket. “Next question.”

  “How can you have no idea?” Cricket asked. “Don’t you know how it works?”

  “Apparently I am not among those blessed with the secrets of my noble family,” Lady Scarab snarked. “In any case, nobody knows why Wasp can do what she does. No other dragon has
ever done it before.”

  “Ever?” Cricket echoed. “In all of Pantalan history? Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure.” The royal HiveWing stabbed her paintbrush into a puddle of red paint and started adding thin lines of blood coming out of the wasp in her painting. Cricket had a feeling this particular piece of art might be even more poorly received than the trees in the kitchen. “I’ve got history books going back centuries. I’ve traced the family trees as far out as I can. Not a single HiveWing with mind-control powers, all the way back to Clearsight, as far as I could find. And it certainly didn’t come from her SilkWing husbands.”

  “SilkWing?” Cricket said, extremely startled. “Husbands?”

  “Yes, of course,” Lady Scarab snapped. “Maybe they weren’t called SilkWings back then. ShimmerWings or Flibbertigibbets or something in the old language, I don’t know. But Clearsight married one, and then another one when the first one died, and had an alarming number of dragonets with each one, and then their dragonets and their dragonets’ dragonets kept going, marrying Ye Olde SilkWings or what have you, until there was enough of them to be considered their own tribe. HiveWings. Stupid menacing name, if you ask me. It was only about five hundred years ago that we officially split into two separate tribes, you know. My charming great-great-grandmother was the queen who ordered no more mingling of the bloodlines. She was a nightmare.”

  “We’re related to SilkWings?” Cricket said again. “Really?”

  Lady Scarab squinted at her with concern. “Oh dear, are you thick?” she asked. “I thought Katydid said you were rather clever. It is perfectly obvious that HiveWings must have started with Clearsight marrying a SilkWing.”

  Cricket did feel like rather an idiot. In her defense, history was the most neglected subject at Terrarium Academy. “Well,” she said indignantly, “it is also perfectly obvious that HiveWing books leave that out on purpose because they don’t want any of us to know that.”

  “True,” said Lady Scarab, settling back to her painting, which was getting gorier by the moment. “That was probably also my great-great-grandmother’s idea. Oooo, she was a horror show.”

  “Did any of Clearsight’s children inherit her prophecy powers?” Cricket asked. She’d always wondered about that. HiveWings had all sorts of weird powers pop up throughout the tribe, but nothing like Clearsight’s. The mind control had seemed the closest, to her, being at least kind of mental.

  “Not according to the records.” Scarab coughed violently. “But then, if I were Clearsight, I’d tell my kids to keep that information to themselves. If you know the future, but no one else knows you know the future, you’ve got an advantage, see? HA!” She started coughing again, finally sputtering to a wheezing stop. “Maybe I am related to my family after all.”

  Cricket started to pace up and down the long, empty room. Through the haze of drizzling rain outside, she thought she could see a faint line of gray along the horizon, which meant sunrise was coming, which meant sunset was getting ever closer.

  “So why doesn’t the mind control work on us?” she said. “Let’s think. Do we have anything in common? Is there anyone else who’s free of it?”

  “Wasp’s sisters,” answered Lady Scarab. “And Jewel, although Wasp has threatened her with it a few times.”

  “Threatened her with it?” Cricket echoed, pausing for a moment. “Like … she could mind-control her, if she wanted to?”

  Lady Scarab shrugged helpfully.

  “Hmm.” Cricket went back to pacing. “Do you know anything about a home for old dragons in Tsetse Hive? Where they’re kept because none of them are controllable?”

  “No,” Lady Scarab said, narrowing her eyes. “But I have noticed that I am the oldest dragon I know. All of my friends started dying off or vanishing during the Tree Wars. Most of them were loudly against the war, so I wasn’t too surprised. But some of them went funny before they went — saying weird things that weren’t like themselves, strange flutters like curtains in their eyes.”

  Cricket tipped her head to the side. “As though their eyes were flashing white, then back to normal?” Scarab nodded. “I saw that happen to a dragon, too.” She described the dragon she’d seen out the window when she was two.

  “Charming story,” said Lady Scarab. She added some more red paint fountaining out of the wasp’s head.

  “Maybe what we saw were Wasp’s experiments,” Cricket said slowly. “Maybe she was testing out whether she could control those dragons, but she couldn’t for some reason. Or maybe she couldn’t yet — maybe her power was still getting stronger at that point.”

  “Makes no sense.” Scarab jabbed the paintbrush at Cricket again. “HiveWings are born with their powers. They don’t wander in fifty years later. Why couldn’t she do any of this when she was younger? Those forty or so blissful years before she became queen? Not that my sister was any picnic as a ruler, but at least she wasn’t a dictatorial zombie-making maniac.”

  “And why doesn’t it work on us?” Cricket said again. She sat down opposite Lady Scarab and tried not to look at the painting of the dying wasp, which now looked as though it might drown in blood before the ants could eat it. “I — I have one theory. About me, anyway. I don’t know if it’s possible, but I wondered maybe …”

  “Spit it out,” Lady Scarab ordered.

  “Could I be half SilkWing?” Cricket asked. “Katydid said my parents aren’t my real parents and so I thought, maybe one of my parents was a SilkWing and his blood or her blood is why the mind control doesn’t —”

  “No,” Lady Scarab said with a bitter little laugh.

  “No?”

  “No, you’re not half SilkWing.”

  Cricket blinked. “How do you know? Maybe you are, too. Maybe that’s —”

  “I am getting worried about your brain, dragonet. I knew that school would be worthless for you, but I didn’t think all your mental functions would atrophy so quickly.” Lady Scarab set down the paintbrush and clasped her front talons together, leaning toward Cricket. “I know you are not half SilkWing, because I know both your parents, and they are HiveWings through and through, zombie eyes and all.”

  “You know them?” Cricket cried, leaping to her feet. “They’re still alive? Who are they? Why didn’t they keep me?”

  “One of them did,” said Lady Scarab. “She just couldn’t tell anyone you were hers. I can’t believe you haven’t figured it out before now.”

  Cricket felt as if the Hive was falling in on her, slowly, level by level, like in a dream.

  “Katydid isn’t your sister, little snail. She’s your mother.”

  It felt like the entire world flipped over. It felt like someone picked up the Hive, turned it over, and shook it really hard until all the pieces fell out. Except one, and that one was the heart of everything.

  “Katydid,” she said softly. “My mother. Katydid is my mother. Katydid.”

  “I gather this is going to go on for a while,” Scarab muttered, producing a new easel from behind the pillow. On this one, a horde of shiny green beetles was dragging a dying wasp into a dark hole where little eyes and teeth glinted from the shadows.

  “I wish she had told me. Why didn’t she tell me? She knew I could keep a secret.” Cricket flicked her tail back and forth. “She just lied to me. Was she planning to hide the truth from me my whole life?”

  “Would it have made any difference, knowing the truth?” Scarab asked sharply.

  “Yes!” Cricket said. “It would have made everything make more sense. Well … all right, I would have had a few questions.”

  “Really. You.” Lady Scarab raised her eyebrows.

  “But at least it would have explained a whole lot of things. Oh. Oh. That’s why Mom — not-Mom — Cadelle hates me,” Cricket said. There were answers to all her unanswerable questions: the way her parents fought, why they barely looked at her, the reason Katydid always looked sad. “That’s why Katydid always took care of me. Oh my goodness, that’s what Cade
lle meant whenever she said, ‘You’re no daughter of mine.’ It was true.”

  “Lucky for you,” Scarab snorted. “That one has a personality like sandpaper.”

  Cricket thought this was rather funny coming from Lady Scarab, but she didn’t point that out.

  “How did they keep it a secret?” she wondered. She tried to puzzle through what they would have had to do. It was possible no one had noticed that Katydid was with egg; many dragons grew plumper in the rainy months when there was more food and less opportunity for outdoor flying. And Katydid was good at keeping secrets — obviously.

  But what did she do once she had the egg? All HiveWing eggs in each Hive were kept in a central nest until they hatched. Maybe Cadelle simply had to present herself at the nest with Katydid’s egg, claiming it was hers. It would be marked as hers, protected as the dragonet inside grew, and then returned to Cadelle a day before it was due to hatch.

  “It’s so hard to imagine Cadelle agreeing to a lie like that,” Cricket said aloud.

  “She didn’t want to,” said Lady Scarab. “There was an enormous fight when she found out Katydid was hiding your egg. If it was up to your delightful grandmother, they would have taken it out to the ocean and dropped you on a rock somewhere.”

  This Cricket could imagine, very easily. Although it was so strange to hear Cadelle referred to as her grandmother. I was still her family, even if I wasn’t her daughter. But my existence was against the rules. I represented Katydid lying to her and Queen Wasp being furious if she found out. Having me around put Cadelle at risk … she must have seen danger and crime and disorder and lies that could ruin her every time she looked at me.

  “In the end, Katydid agreed to sneak the egg into the Cicada Hive Nest, so it could come back official and approved instead of you being a secret forever. And Cadelle agreed to pretend it was hers.” Lady Scarab grinned with all of her teeth. “I might have helped with that little compromise.”