‘A thief!’ she says. ‘Look!’

‘Stop shouting,’ says Lisbet again, and raises her hands slowly overhead. Sophey falls silent and her face blanches. She lowers her rake.

‘What do we do,’ mouths Sophey. Lisbet moves her hands down to her sides.

‘Stay there.’

She walks as slowly as she can towards the house. As she goes, she sees what Sophey was pointing at. The upturned cones of two skeps flung atop one another, and beside them: nothing resembling a hive. Only debris. She forces herself to look away, to move past the mess and towards where Eren now stands with his lute, Frederich beside him.

She gestures to him, to play. He raises his eyebrows. Are you sure?

Slow, she mouths. Gentle.

He lifts the instrument to the centre of himself, to the place she carries her child, and cradles it. He begins to play.

The loveliness of it catches Lisbet in the chest. It is nothing she has ever heard before, and entirely familiar, like something someone sang to her in sleep. She eyes the bees, and by some miracle they are still not swarming though two colonies among them have had their homes ripped apart. With Eren playing to them, she trusts the situation enough to leave.

In the hot, cramped well of the shed, she breathes more deeply. The smell of wax coats her nostrils, cosseting and clean. She takes the veil and the robes, the net, keeping her movements slow though there is no one to see her, trying to make her heartbeat match the rhythm of Eren’s music, so when she approaches the bees they will see her as nothing but an extension of it, a soothing lull made flesh.

She dabs two stripes of honey from the ruined hives onto her wrists. They are older hives, colonies Henne’s father cultivated. Their honey is pale gold and smells of the forest. She takes one of the bees’ shallow bowls and fills it with tallow, dropping in a cube of beeswax to mellow the smell. She lights the wick with the wall flint, and when she comes outside she strips rosemary from the shrub outside, and scatters it over the fire so the whole thing begins to shed scented smoke.

Sophey walks carefully to join her, and takes the bowl in her stiff fingers as though this is a dance they have rehearsed, both moving in time with Eren’s tune. The old woman straightens, and without fear leads Lisbet through the heart of the skep yard, as if they are a procession at High Mass, scattering incense through a cathedral.

The bees, already lulled by the music, stumble lower in the sky, falling over them like a net even as Lisbet raises hers, and begins to work. There is a slight hesitation in Eren’s playing, his fingers stumbling as the women enter the bees, but he soon finds his place again.

Lisbet sorts among them, gently guiding them towards their sections of the yard, towards their hives. From the corner of her eye, she sees a figure emerge from the forest, but Nethe has the good sense to remain where she is, and not ask questions.