Larkin directed me toward the tree and then told me to wait while he slipped the hot branch into the hole and filled the hive with smoke, and then he rushed away to wait up the path at a safe distance.

It went much as it had the other times.

I stumbled back with all the comb that was left in the hive, most of the bees stunned by the smoke but some dying as they attacked my thick gloves and a few coming after me, dying on my clothes, my hood, though some made their way through a gap in my collar to die on my neck as they stung me.

And I cried as I had before. From all that hard, unnecessary pain. Mine. Theirs. Except it was necessary. We had decided that it was necessary, Larkin and I. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t cry as I lurched out of the undergrowth, saying sorry sorry sorry, and huddled on the path, waiting for the bees to give up and go home to what was left of their hive.

I felt their misery, which was much too big for such tiny animals, and their fury and their confusion. But, most of all, I felt their hunger.

And I was determined all over again to make Cate well.

—

When I finally pulled off the hood, I found Larkin coming cautiously back down the path toward me.

“Are you all right?” he said.

And I would have said yes if a last bee had not just then come to spin a halo around my head and kill itself on my neck where three other stings were already swelling.

“No,” I sobbed, swiping the bee away. “I’m not all right.”

So he put his arms around me while I cried some more.

As it turned out, a boy like Larkin was a fine antidote to bee venom.

“Okay,” I said after a bit. “I’m okay now.” I put the honey jar and everything else back in my pack. Smoothed my wild hair and wiped my wet face.

I rubbed the tears on my neck.

They did little to soothe the hot, bumpy terrain of my poor skin, though their cool saltiness helped for a moment.

Bee venom, even in a bee-sized dose, was a sharp and painful business, more shocking than a burn or a hard slap.

But it also infused, in me, a good kind of sharpness. A keenness. As if the poison were medicine as well, brewed from the best the mountain had to offer: something ancient and pure and perfect.

Larkin looked at me curiously as I smiled.

He didn’t know what I’d just decided to do.

And then we hurried off toward home with a jar full of honeycomb and a few furious bees trying their best to bore straight through the glass.

Chapter Fifty-Seven