“Your breath body lies in Holy City. Dangerous.” The woman spoke Empire vernacular with the musical accent of the floating cities. Her breath had the tang of a lightning storm. Cold radiating from her skin cut into Awa. “We should leave this region.” She scanned the surroundings. Spirit slaves lumbered toward them. “Now.”

“They’ll devour the hive!” Awa balled her fists. “I won’t abandon the bees without a fight.”

“You’d die for bees?”

“Green Elders say, I am the bees and the trees, I am the wind and the songs, the rocks and the dew, I am me and also you,” Awa replied. “Many bees have died for me.”

“You’re bold,” the conjure woman said, “but no need to die.” A spirit slave lunged from stink bushes, granite teeth bared. The woman jabbed something through transparent skin into an ember heart. Indigo sparks filled the fiend’s body. Color returned to a kind face; the heart beat lightning bolts and brown eyes filled with tears. The fiend hugged a heaving chest, perhaps a fiend no more.

A veson nodded at the conjure woman and disappeared. “Free the heart, free the spirit.” She lifted the giant hive and set it in a circle of cloth on her head as if it were a water pot. Sentinels swooped close, ready to sting her and perish. “Calm your friends.” Awa danced with the light of a setting sun and urged bees into the hive. The conjure woman smiled. “Travel with me?”

Dazzled by her craft and beauty, Awa would have done anything she asked. “Yes, but spirit slaves roam the six regions.” A few lumbered their direction.

The woman pressed Awa to a cold breast with her free hand. They rose up through green aurora to a cascade of stars and raced along a light bridge to a seventh region with a complex, blurry rhythm. Light reflecting off snowfields and frosted trees made Awa squint. The woman set the hive down on heather-covered cliffs by a crystal waterfall. “You and your bees are safe, for now.”

Awa’s exhalations turned to icy fog. She’d never been all the way to winter, never climbed Ice Mountain to its glaciers. She marveled at columns of ice growing in the stream that rushed over a cliff. Rainbow spirits played in curtains of mist. Cold burned her skin. She shivered. “Is it too chilly for bees?”

“They can rest, sleep, until warmth comes again.” The woman wrapped Awa in a cloud-silk cloak. “Winter won’t last forever.”

Awa strained to catch the rhythm of this seventh region. The pattern escaped her. “Must be a difficult place to find.”

“Impossible, almost.” The woman circled the hive. “Have you seen the Master of Weeds and Wild Things? Djola he is called.” She reached her hand deep inside the layers of honeycomb. “Djola is lost, but not his name, not his true spirit.”

Awa shook her head. “I don’t know him.”