Which stopped her in her tracks, though it didn’t shut her mouth. “You think I’m mean?” she said, though she didn’t yell it and there wasn’t quite as much darkness in her eye.

“I need honey,” I said. “For Miss Cate’s leg. Which is festering terribly. And I don’t want to have to cut off the bad part, and she doesn’t want that either, so can Larkin please take me to the hive to get what we need?”

She pinched her lips shut for a moment. “There’s some justice in that,” she finally said. “If she dies of something she can’t fix.”

And I knew she was talking about how Larkin’s father had died. “See, that’s what I’m talking about,” I said impatiently. “That’s just mean. When that’s not what we need right now.”

She glared at me for a long moment. Then she sighed. “There’s no honey. Not in our hive. I was just there, not two days ago, and it’s dead. Every bee.”

I was shocked at the idea of that. A whole hive dying. “But, why?”

I sounded like Samuel.

She looked at me in surprise. “Things die. No reason to it.”

“Maybe too wet,” Larkin said. “Maybe mites. Maybe something robbed them and they starved.”

I thought of the honey I’d taken from the hive by the river.

“Don’t you have any of your own?” I said. “From last summer?”

“We might,” Larkin said, his eyes wide. And off he ran, into the cabin, then came slowly back again with a jar in his hand.

“Nowhere near enough,” he said, tipping the jar into the sun so we could see the thin golden film in the bottom of it.

I knew that our own honey was much the same, spent on Christmas.

I couldn’t imagine Cate dying for lack of honey, though maybe any reason, even that one, was better than none. “We could go for the doctor,” I said.

“Who will want to be paid,” Larkin’s mother said. “In real money. Do you have any of that?”

To which I said nothing.

“Nor do I,” she said. “Not enough.”

“We could offer something in trade,” I said. “When my father got hurt, my mother paid the doctor with a silver locket.”

She lifted her chin. “Do you see a silver locket?”

I looked at the fine cabin. “You must have something you could trade. A mandolin?”

“No,” she barked. “I have just one left and I’ll not trade it away.” Though I knew she would, in an instant, if it were Larkin who was sick. “Besides, it would take too long for a doctor to get here.” Something she clearly knew, as Cate had known. Something that brought the darkness back to her face.

She turned and went into the cabin.

But she did not drag Larkin with her.