Queen of the Warrior Bees

by Jean Gill

  She stopped at the beech tree but not, this time, to marvel at each separate leaf. Instead she slipped an arrow into the notched rest of her bow and looked around for a target. She could hear Tannlei’s voice. ‘What is your target today, Mielitta?’

  The day she was told Tannlei had gone, she’d hated her teacher for abandoning her. Hated her in angry tears and blurred shots until she disciplined herself to shoot in Tannlei’s honour, in memoriam. Until the day she heard that voice again, preserved in her deep thinking, saying ‘What is your target today, Mielitta?’

  And she’d replied, ‘To honour the best teacher, ever.’ She’d tried so hard to centre herself, loose her arrows with skill but she’d been blinded by tears. When she went to collect her arrows, she couldn’t believe that one was right in the heart of the bull’s-eye.

  As if Tannlei had been watching her, she’d answered the unspoken question. ‘Today I learned that a lucky hit is still a hit. And that the archer cannot control all events.’ And she’d wept again, for the events she could not control.

  Today, in the forbidden Forest, surrounded by the difference of each tree, each rustling leaf, she asked herself, ‘What is your target, Mielitta?’ and she let the answer come from her deepest thoughts, unforced.

  ‘To be worthy of my teacher. To rise to any challenge to rescue Drianne.’ As she relaxed, felt her body in tune with the bow, felt the vibration, she saw a formation like a cross in the bark patterns of a tree. A tricky shot between the trees. She felt the invisible line between herself, her bow and its landing point, the arc of motion and she loosed an arrow, smiled.

  Darts. Stingers, murmured the bees in approval.

  Then she held four arrows and turned so her target tree was behind her. She whirled and loosed one after the other, forming a neat five-pointed letter M, with the middle dip at the heart of the cross she’d first noticed. She stepped forward to recover her arrows and was nearly bowled over by a solid brown creature with fey eyes. Deer.

  The doe froze, fixing Mielitta in its liquid brown gaze, then bounded off, weaving skittishly between the trees. Mielitta instinctively raised her bow, nocked an arrow and aimed at the retreating deer but stayed her hand. If she needed food, this was something she would have to learn how to do but she had no such need. She smiled, wondering what her teacher would say about shooting deer in the Forest. She pulled her arrows out of the tree, checked she hadn’t split or spoiled them and stood still, watched, turned invisible.

  The more she looked, the more she saw. A trail of ants was marching up the tree-trunk where her arrows had left sap oozing.

  Making honeydew.

  A flash of brown alerted her to another creature startled by her presence but this one was smaller, sat up on its back legs before zigzagging madly away between the trees. Deer? Not a deer. Hare.

  Something green coiled and wriggled along a thick branch out of sight. Snake.

  An irritating whine from an insect near her face stopped for a painful second as it jabbed her. ‘Ouch!’ Mosquito.

  And always birdsong. Long-tailed swoops over her head, red and gold, blue and white. Mielitta had never seen living feathers before and each bird’s flight was as distinctive as had been the individual leaves. So much singularity was overwhelming and Mielitta found the word drunk, savoured it. Yes, she felt drunk on so much Nature.

  If she hadn’t shut her eyes to listen better to the birdsong, she wouldn’t have heard the tell-tale snap behind her. In that second’s warning she whirled round with an arrow ready in her bow. But it would be no use against a mage.

  Jannlou.

  ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ he began, moving closer, dominating her. ‘It’s dangerous.’

  He couldn’t say any more as Mielitta threw him to the ground with her full weight and held an arrow to his throat. So he was a mage. So what! She was going to make him work his hardest to take her, however strong his magecraft.

  It would be easier if he shut his eyes but instead, he stared at her. She could see her own grimacing face reflected in duplicate. Twin blue mirrors, purple and silver ringed. Circles like the archery corkboard for target practice.

  The longer she sat in this ridiculous position, astride a supine assailant, the more vulnerable she was to a quick knee-jerk from someone much stronger than she was. Her advantage was in surprise, in catching Jannlou off-balance, in darts and distance. Her hand was steady but her thoughts were not.

  She should use the arrowhead. She could see the pulse below his Adam’s apple, where the steel pushed against the skin, making a tiny discoloured dimple in the even pores. Even as a blunt instrument it could kill. She would only be defending herself. Not that she would ever be asked to justify herself. Nobody would know. But he kept looking at her with sunshine and her face in his eyes.

  Clearly, Jannlou had come to the same conclusion. ‘Are you going to kill me or not?’ he asked her, not one cloud in his eyes.

  ‘Don’t try glamour on me!’ she told him. ‘I’m immune. It doesn’t work.’

  ‘No, it doesn’t,’ he agreed. ‘But this does.’ Inevitable as the Citadel’s greylight, he bucked her off as if she were a feather and then he rolled, so Mielitta’s half-hearted jab landed in the earth.

  Then he was behind her, grabbed her arms behind her back, avoided the backward lunge of her head and bent her forward so she couldn’t try it again.

  ‘Vicious beast, aren’t you,’ he panted.

  Bite your head off, thought Mielitta but she said nothing, saving her breath for her next move. She flopped, as limp as if she’d fainted, a dead weight in his grip. Then she back-kicked with both feet, using all her strength and aiming for his privates. As she’d hoped, he was startled enough to slacken his grip and jerk backwards to avoid her boots. She caught him higher up, enough to wind him and to give her the momentum to follow-through in a full flip out of his grasp. She was fit and flexible so she landed facing away from him. She turned, grabbed her bow while he was still doubled over and ran past him into the Forest.

  ‘Mielitta!’ he gasped.

  From a safe distance, she called, ‘I know, you’re going to tell me I’ve got it all wrong. But it doesn’t look that way to me!’ She nocked an arrow, pointed it towards him.

  He stumbled a pace in her direction and she loosed a warning. The arrow twanged into the tree-trunk beside him and Jannlou stood still. Her heart thumped as she waited for the blast of magecraft that would surely come. Even if it was half the power of Rinduran’s, she had no chance. And if she survived, she would have to kill him or she was doomed. Once he reported her to his father, her future was in ashes.

  Jannlou was no deer but the same reluctance stayed her hand. Did she really need to kill him?

  Hesitation would be the death of her.

  ‘I followed you,’ he yelled. ‘I saw you at the water gate. Heard you use the password and I followed.’

  ‘No kidding,’ she yelled back. ‘And I suppose you were trying to be helpful again.’

  He tried moving another step towards her.

  ‘Don’t move or it’ll be in your head next time.’ Why was she still warning him? She even felt the urge to tell him what she’d overheard in the library, between Bastien and his father. As if she wasn’t in deep enough trouble without meddling in mage politics. Jannlou would never believe her anyway, not when he’d witnessed her using a stolen password and committing trespass.

  Then she realised what else Jannlou must have witnessed.

  Outraged, she shouted, ‘Did you watch me in the stream too?’

  ‘Did you go in the stream? I waited before I tried the password. Didn’t want to bump into you the other side of the gate.’

  She flushed crimson, wondering whether to believe him. She could hardly say, ‘Did you watch me undress?’ and whether he said ‘no’ or ‘yes’ she wouldn’t know the truth. The only certainty would be that he’d laugh at her. That deserved an arrow in the head!

  ‘It’s the first time,’ he called, his voice start
ing to regain its usual gruff, deep tones. ‘I’ve never been in the Forest before. It’s–’ He was searching for words.

  She had many words for the Forest but they were personal. ‘It’s not fake grass that cleans itself or greylight,’ she told him.

  ‘Why is it forbidden?’

  ‘You tell me. You’re the mage. Perfection forbids it, I suppose. You’ve been into the walls so you know the history.’

  There was a silence. ‘I drank the water. In the stream.’

  ‘Then you know.’

  ‘Yes. Every citizen should come here, should have the right to come here.’

  ‘You’re going to tell Daddy that when you go back?’ she mocked.

  ‘When the time is right.’ Maybe he was working his glamour on her but she couldn’t shoot him, not if there was even a tiny chance he was telling the truth. What if, in the future, the Forest could be visited openly? What if Jannlou could bring that about one day, when he took over from his father? And she would be the one who made it happen. What if? She lowered her bow and watched as he walked cautiously towards her.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The birdsong had stopped during their shouting and in the ensuing calm, tentative whistles and tweets queried whether the danger was past. Rustling began again in the canopy above the human heads.

  ‘Will you show me the Forest?’ he asked her. He was wearing his leatherette jerkin and britches, swordbelt, his knight’s clothes. He must have abandoned his mage’s robe as she had her lady’s gown.

  ‘I’ve only been here twice,’ she said. As a human. Her bees thrummed their disquiet, before falling silent. ‘But we could explore together. As quietly as you can.’ She eyed his clanking apparel with disapproval but he just shrugged and put his hand on his sword pommel.

  ‘It’s like your bow. I need it with me. And you didn’t notice me following you.’

  ‘Fat lot of use a sword will be in the Forest!’ She told him, ‘Follow me, then, seeing as you’re so good at it.’ She shut her eyes, focused her bee senses and found the Forest mapped as she remembered, between the drinking-water of the stream and the beehive that was home. She recognised other landmarks: rock formations, trees and flowers, sources of nectar and pollen. There was one place she definitely did not want to visit, with or without Jannlou. Even as a human, she felt queasy at the thought of the drones gathering.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he whispered. ‘It looks like you’re consulting with the walls.’

  ‘Hush,’ she told him. ‘Follow me and keep your eyes open.’ Which was funny, given how well she could see with her eyes closed. Guided by the bees, she weaved in between trees, through pools of light and shade. She made a game of trapping the sun behind branches in the canopy, so that its rays were concentrated into sharp spikes, spearing one rock or one tree with light. Then she’d move and unleash the sun’s full brightness in a blur.

  She stopped by one tree and pointed, waited for Jannlou to see and understand. Bright green leaf-shadows stood starkly outlined on the grizzled trunk.

  ‘How can shadows be green?’ he asked.

  Like their archery teacher, she led him to see. ‘What are they shadows of?’

  She watched him see what she had seen, the leaves that made the shadows, with sunlight filtering through them, catching the green colour in its joyous rays and painting leaf-shapes on the bark.

  Jannlou touched the shadows, watched them change. He caught green leaf-shadows on his own broad fingers.

  Verdigris on bronze. His brown skin shimmered green and Mielitta wanted to reach out, touch it. Instead, she stroked the tree bark, feeling its unique whorls and lifelines, like those on Jannlou’s hands. She breathed in bitterness of bark and brown sweat, catching the acrid scents at the back of her throat, relishing them.

  Time moved as slowly as a finger along a tree-trunk and Jannlou seemed no more rushed than she was. They watched a procession of ants at their feet, each carrying ten times its weight in seeds.

  Work.

  ‘Look,’ she told Jannlou. In the direction of the ants’ march was a whitish tower, a strange stone pillar. Ants’ nest.

  ‘That’s their Citadel,’ she explained. The pleasure of sharing the Forest with someone whose face expressed the same wonder she felt made her forget her mistrust.

  Jannlou asked her, ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘It’s as if I was born with all this knowledge in my deep thinking.’ Damn. Now she’d have to explain that.

  But he’d been taught by Tannlei too and he just nodded, so she continued. ‘I used to clean the library, when I was a servant, and I’d skim the books. Words sort of stick in my head. Then when I see something, the words that go with it come to me and I just know what it is. It’s as if my experience is catching up with my deep thinking.’ She flushed. ‘That must sound stupid.’

  ‘No, I know what you mean. I–’ Whatever he was going to say next was interrupted by an anxious fluttering of birds, all rising from trees an arrow’s flight away from the humans. There was a stillness in the air and Mielitta remembered the deer, frozen in fear. Some danger approached. They had been so loud in their fighting and talk. Every creature in the Forest knew they were here.

  She put a finger to her mouth and nocked an arrow, faced the direction of the disturbance and braced herself. Now she was concentrating, she could hear it, as she’d heard the snap underfoot when Jannlou tracked her. But whatever was tracking her this time was much better at it. Four-legged and huge. And made the Forest hold its breath, each creature praying Not me, not me. Praying for invisibility. Mielitta remembered the feeling well but there were no walls here to hide her or give her strength.

  You could run crazy with the fear or you could track it back to its source, waiting with a nocked arrow. Jannlou had unsheathed his sword, was shifting his balance in a warrior’s stance. There was nobody she’d rather have at her side in a fight.

  Their senses as tightly strung as Mielitta’s bow, they couldn’t have been more prepared but they saw nothing. Just stripes of trees and grass, sunlight and shadow. Stripes. The silence gathered itself to spring at them; a massive beast, striped yellow and black, broke cover and charged towards them.

  Tiger.

  Shock skewed Mielitta’s aim and she missed.

  Her bees were loud in anger and insistence. Flight! Up the tree!

  In an instant, she leaped onto the most accessible branch and reached down to haul Jannlou up to safety. He shook his head, standing his ground in front of the tiger, which had not followed through – the stones be thanked! – but which crouched low in front of Jannlou, tail swinging, ready for a lethal spring.

  What had Tannlei taught? ‘Don’t choose the companion who would fight a tiger with his bare hands.’ The tiger clearly felt the same concerns about a man unafraid for his own life. Unfortunately, the hungry gold eyes shifted to Mielitta, no doubt considering her an easier prey. She climbed higher up the tree, aided by a thousand tiny wings. If she could only secure herself to a branch, she could use her bow but the branches were bouncing with her weight and even if they held, she couldn’t guarantee shooting true. An enraged tiger would not think twice about taking the nearest prey and Jannlou was so close to the beast that, even with human senses, he must smell its foul breath, as she could.

  Jannlou seemed to grow even taller and broader as he faced the predator but if that was all his magecraft could do, Mielitta wouldn’t bet on his chances. Every time the tiger opened its mouth, issued a threat, she could smell its last victims.

  Then the tiger made up its mind, roared and sprang. Only to land on nothing but pine cones. Jannlou had leaped too, reading the intention in the coiled muscles. He opened his mouth as if to roar his own defiance but instead he yelled, ‘Stay in the tree!’

  The tiger hesitated, then it saw what Jannlou had. Crashing through the trees, tearing off branches, came a growling brown monster. Clumsy but surprisingly fast, it attacked the tiger, raking its huge claws along the strip
ed flanks. It reared up onto its back paws, a two-legged parody of Jannlou, before dropping onto the tiger and sinking its teeth into a writhing mass with equally dangerous teeth. Bulk against muscle, matched in tooth and claw, the giants wrestled with and gashed each other. Skin and hair made tattered fringes around bloody rips.

  Mielitta clung to her shaking branch. She had never seen so much blood. Cuts, scratches and her own monthlies were the sum total of her experience and her stomach churned at this carnage. Jannlou stood like a charmed statue while the savage contest churned up the earth all around him.

  Just when it seemed they would kill each other, in a ripple of black and yellow, the tiger freed itself from the bear’s crushing grip and conceded defeat by running away. The bear reared up again, facing Jannlou. Mielitta screamed. Mage and bear were face to face for a long moment, then the creature dropped onto all fours again and set off in pursuit of the wounded tiger.

  Mielitta threw herself to the ground.

  ‘Are you all right? Was that magecraft? Did you summon the bear? Wasn’t there a safer way to get rid of the tiger?’ she asked Jannlou.

  His eyes were distant and he still held the same warrior’s stance but he seemed his normal size again. He focused on her slowly, measured his words. ‘No, there wasn’t a safer way to get rid of the tiger. I think we should go home now.’

  But she wanted to check on the beehive.

  Silly girl, her bees murmured. If there was something wrong, we would know. Our people are fine. It’s better the man doesn’t go there.

  She could feel their suspicion of Jannlou and of course, they were right to be wary. But she didn’t mind having human company as they walked back through the Forest together. She didn’t even mind returning to the safety of the Citadel. At least she knew what dangers lurked there and if she had to choose between Shenagra’s braids or a tiger’s teeth, she wasn’t sure which was worse. The Forest held its own terrors.