I hated to leave them hungry and confused.

I hated the idea that more of them would die trying to stop me.

But there was a woman on top of the mountain who needed me. Needed what they had to give.

I poked the smoking stick into the hole, waited for it to do its work, and then cast it aside.

I reached slowly, slowly, into the hole.

I could feel the bees on my sleeve. One of them stung my wrist where there was a sliver of skin between glove and cuff. I tried hard not to yank my arm back, but it wasn’t easy to keep still. The sting was like an acid fang in my skin. And I knew another bee had died.

The comb was like a soft, vibrating brick in my hand.

I broke off a chunk of it and pulled it out of the tree, jammed it into the jar, bees and all, and screwed the lid on as I stumbled away from the hive, falling into the bushes, bees attacking the pack that blinded me, their stingers catching in its weave, dying as they stung. I imagined their soft bodies embroidering the pack in yellow and black and blood.

Another one stung me on the ankle where my pant leg didn’t quite meet my boot. Another on my neck where my hood had come loose.

And I felt besieged, suddenly, by the bees, by the need to steal from them, by the way I’d been banished from my own home, by the blame I carried with me like a harness, like a thorn in my hoof, like a puppy taken from his mother, from Maisie, from me.

But crying did no good at all.

—

When I could no longer hear the bees, I carefully pulled the pack from my head, a little at a time, and plucked the bits of bee from where they’d stung me, rubbing the awful stings and gulping the cool air, crying a little as I filled the pack with my things again, the jar fizzing with trapped bees.

Then I hurried up the trail.

Toward home.

And then past it, upward bound.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

This time, Cate was not alone.

A boy was standing by her bed.

“Well,” she said when she saw me. She was breathing too hard for a woman lying down. “Larkin, this is the girl I told you about. The one who speaks dog.”

And this was the boy whose face I’d seen in the woods.

He was about my age but a little older and a fair bit taller. Thin, winter-pale, with hair as thick and black as a bear’s.

His clothes were ragged. Many times patched. His hands were covered with scratches, as if he’d been handling wild kittens. And his bootlaces bristled with burrs.

Even from across the room, just looking at this boy, I hurt all over.