Bees travel widely for their food. They range over hill and dale, and they do wander everywhere. They bring back with them the taste of foreign fields, nectar sweet, and they make no distinction as they crawl into the frames of the Priory’s hives, packing their comb, fanning it with their wings to remove the water. They leave only sweetness and the faintest hints of where they’ve been. Buckwheat flowers produce dark brown honey, rich and nutty on the tongue, while meadowfoam adds a soft thickness, impossible to describe and impossible not to taste. Frame by frame, the wax is filled and capped and then, at last, extracted by the nuns. The wax is peeled away, the honey runs down, and it finds its way to waiting tongues.

Phosyne tastes those tongues as they taste her, and she fractures apart again, spread between a hundred, two hundred bodies, all pressed together inside a stone husk, keeping them piled one atop the other. They are starving. They are reaching. They feel so strongly, in the midsummer air, and they . . .

They are not alone.

They have been alone, for so long. They’ve kept this sweetness at bay. Oh, they’ve taken honey on their tongues, but they have not taken the true nature of the wood into them in many decades. Centuries. Too much hardness around them, too much sharpness, but now all that terrible strength has melted away, gone to nothing, and the sweetness can come in once more.

This sweetness that wears the Constant Lady’s face, but is made of something far less regimented. Far less venerated.

And it is hungry. She is hungry. With the walls of Aymar grown strangely porous, she passes through stone as if it is air, because to her, it is air. She has been borne upon the air, and into the stone, and now she exists in all of it. She sees the whole of the spur that Aymar rests upon, and she is inside each beating heart within (save two, and those two, who are they, why do they not taste sweetness on their lips? But no matter—) and so, when she arrives at the gate, they will be ready for her.

But they are afraid. Fear does not serve her. She wants them to know her, to love her, and so she waits at the walls, paces them, finds her equal born upon a litter. Round and round this effigy goes, until the sweetness has learned her form. She drapes herself in white, paints yellow upon her cheeks. She chooses this form because it is pleasing and it is powerful, and when she comes to their gates, they fall at her feet.