Rise of the Rune Lords: Melissah's Story

There was a bees' next in the Arbor. The girl could hear the buzzing even over the roar of the swollen river. These weren't the tiny, glittering green bees of the marsh; they were fat orange things, striped in black, that floated almost lazily through the spring air.

“Silly nuisances,” Guide remarked, tapping the rotten stump with his staff. “They don't belong here. They'll never find enough nectar in these woods to see them through the winter.”

“There are flowers in the water-meadows,” the girl said.

“Not bee flowers. These fat fellows are used to farmlands, rich and heady and full of sweets for them to feast on. They'll learn their mistake soon enough.”

The girl thought that would be a shame. She discovered an odd liking for these bees, with their bright colors and placid busyness. They may be foolish, but it was a brave and jaunty sort of foolishness that seemed friendly and inviting.

Guide tapped the girl with his staff and she turned quickly to follow. She had enough work of her own to do, learning to be a Druid. There were six Druids in the Arbor: Guide, Storm, Star, River, Marsh, and Mist. And Girl. She had no name. Undines were named for their work or for their family, and she had neither. Guide had hinted once that the girl's father was no Undine, and the girl was lucky she was still born to swim with the People. Most of those so born had to be left with their unswimming relatives, assuming any could be found. It was a waste, but women had their passions and would bear land children from time to time. At least the girl could be useful.

This last was said with a sniff and a significant glance. The girl did her best to look useful and not at all like the half-foreign children or the strange foreign bees who would starve soon.

Yet, they did not starve. The girl returned to the rotten stump in summer to find the nest had grown enormous. The bees were thriving, growing fat on something in this desolate land. The girl smiled as fuzzy orange insects landed on her.

“I am not a flower, silly things,” she said, and gently shook them off. Guide would be returning soon, and there was still gathering to do.

The bees seemed to watch while she dug for roots, cut small green plants, and filled her basket with hard purplish berries. When she paused to rest the bees landed on her bundles or petted her skin with their tiny feet. The girl took a plum from her pocket and cut it in half. “Do bees eat plums?” she asked, putting the fruit on the stump and squeezing it so the juice ran.

* * *

In the fall, the bees didn't drone. They roared. Some ferocious beast had invaded the hive, tearing out a great section of rotten stump and feasting on the bees' diligent work. The girl spent hours digging up clay and straw to patch the hive together. The bees would not be consoled, and stung her hands and arms in their fury. She pulled out the barbs and rubbed mud over her skin to draw out the poison. It hurt, but it wasn't their fault they didn't know she was trying to help.

“Maybe you really will starve, now,” she whispered, and astonishing tears dripped down her cheeks. The bees should live. They were pretty and brave and fierce and foolish.

So the girl set a trap. Guide had taught her to catch rabbits and lizards with snares, but from the size of the gouges something bigger and stronger was needed here. The girl spent all day digging. That night, she didn't return to the Circle, where usually she slept. Instead, she slept on the ground after an unpleasant meal of shelf fungus and sour berries. Her hands were blistered and her knees were rubbed raw.

In the morning, she dug again. It took her three days to build that trap.

Guide was furious. He made the girl scrub the floors and sweep the entire Circle and carry water for all six Druids before he let her collapse on her pallet and sleep a few short hours. Then he shook her awake and the chores began again, along with a lecture that she was forbidden to leave the Circle. It hardly mattered. She was too tired to care.

The punishment felt like an eternity, but Guide was quick to lose interest in lectures and finding new chores. Druids were not farmers, after all, with endless rounds of work. When you could summon water with a wave of your hand, why wait for someone to carry it? There were better ways for even a nameless girl to spend her time.

The girl crept back to the pit she had dug, intending only to fill it in. The rains had done half the job already, but when she began to attack the edge with her digging stick something thrashed in the mud, scrabbling at the collapsing earthen walls. The girl shrieked, imagining some kind of furious mud dragon, but then she saw two bright, beady eyes.

“You shouldn't be such a thief,” she scolded the animal that lay panting in the mud, the last of its strength spent. “Still, I suppose it's not your fault that you're hungry.”

Getting the animal out of the mud was far more difficult than digging the pit in the first place. In the end, the girl had to braid a rope from vines and tie food to a stick that she stuck almost out of its reach so that she could get her rope around it and haul it from the muck. By the time it was at ground level, they were about equally muddy, but at least a brief wallow in the river took care of most of the mud. The animal lay on the shore, watching her, making no move to leave.

“You're a strange-looking thing,” she told it.

“It's a badger,” came a voice, and the girl shrieked for the second time in one day. Guide reached down, hooked her arm, and lifted her out of the water. “We don't generally see them around here.” His lips quirked wryly. “A honey badger. They do whatever they like, but never anything useful.”

The girl waited, but that seemed to be the end of his commentary, and he turned back toward the Circle. The girl followed, unsure whether she was in trouble again or not. Guide didn't seem angry, in fact, he almost sounded amused, an impression that was confirmed a few minutes later when the girl made a discovery.

“It's following us!” she hissed.

“Following you. It'll expect you to feed it, now.”

“But I don't want it!”

“It's a little late to say something like that! You tamed it, that makes it your responsibility.” Guide shook his head. “Trust you to find some completely ridiculous beast to be your companion. I suppose we'll have to start training you in earnest, now.”

“Wait, you weren't training me before?”

That did not seem to merit further response.

* * *

There were at least six hives in the Arbor, now. Whenever she passed that way, which was not often, the trees seemed to throb with activity. The girl had learned to move through the woods without causing disruption, enough to sometimes take an extra comb and share it with the badger and the other Druids. Even Storm enjoyed a bit of sweetness in her tea.

This visit would be the last for a long time to come. Warriors had come up the river, bringing gifts to the marsh Druids. Gifts and requests. They were planning a raid on a human settlement where no humans were supposed to be. They wanted the blessing of the Circle. Storm had looked up from her weather-gazing and said, “Send the girl. It is time she earned a name.”

The girl was not so certain she wanted a name if it meant going to war. “What does it matter if some humans live on a beach?” she asked.

“It does not matter now,” Guide said. “But they do not belong here. They do not know how to live in these lands. Soon they will grow hungry, and when humans hunger, they attack.” Guide was the angriest at the news. He would have gone with the war party himself, but Storm forbade it. The Druids of the Circle did not go to war.

So, the girl climbed into one of the canoes with the raiders. There was some difficulty as the badger attempted to join her and the warriors thought they could chase it away, but the badger had impressive teeth and claws and would brook no arguments. It finally settled on the girl's feet. The warriors stared at her while they rowed, their gazes flat and unfriendly. The girl wasn't like them, with their deep blue skin and hair like water weeds. Her skin was pale and pinkish, dusted with blue freckles. Only the webbing of her toes and fingers marked her as a swimmer and not a land woman.

“She looks like a human,” one of the warriors sneered.

“My father was not a swimmer,” the girl said.

“So your mother was friendly, eh? Are you friendly?”

“Cutter, be silent,” one of the woman warriors snapped.

“It's just a question,” Cutter protested. “We could use some friendly women around here.” He pawed at the girl's arm. She felt her lip curling. Bees did not suffer indignities, not even if stinging would cost their life. She called fire into her hand and threw it at Cutter. He flinched aside and the fire missed him, but the other warriors laughed.

“I'm not your friend.”

“No, you bite,” said the woman, showing sharp white teeth. “Are you a Biter?”

“Not with those rabbit-teeth, she isn't,” Cutter huffed, eliciting more laughter. But he turned away and ignored her after that.

The raiders camped for the night a few miles upstream of the human settlement, a crude and ugly log palisade that squatted in the mouth of the river. Undine scouts vanished into the darkness. Weapons and armor were brought out, cleaned, and tested. Strategies were discussed in low voices. No one seemed interested in the girl at all. She stepped into the trees and began to walk.

She threw rocks at the palisade for ten minutes before anyone even came to look, and it wasn't even a human, but some tiny creature that poked his head rather incautiously over the logs and blinked into the darkness. After another minute, the girl realized that he couldn't see her. He looked exhausted, his eyes blinded by more than just night.

“Down here,” she called finally, taking pity on him.

“Marteth?”

“Do I sound like Marteth?”

“No, but I could hope. Come out where I can see you, whoever you are.” He didn't even sound curious. But curiosity was a luxury, of sorts. The girl edged forward until the little man's eyes focused on her. “Who are you? What do you want? And why are you speaking like a native?” Questions coming from some lingering sense of duty, not any interest. The girl had expected anger and suspicion. But those were luxuries, too.

“I am a native,” she said. “What are you people doing here? Don't you know it's dangerous?”

“Yes, to our sorrow. What do you want?”

That was the difficult question. Truthfully, she didn't know, but she doubted he could rouse his tired mind enough to comprehend any complex equivocation. “Raiders are coming to chase you out in the morning.” That was direct enough.

“Are you by chance making some kind of joke?”

“No. They are camped upriver. There are a lot of them. They are armed.”

“I gathered as much when you said 'raiders'.”

“So, what are you going to do?”

The little man chuckled briefly. “Probably die.”

The girl threw up her hands. “Over this patch of dirt?! You really are mad. Just go. It isn't worth it.”

He stared at her for a while. “I . . . think there's something you need to see.”

“What?”

“Come to the gate.”

Bewildered, the girl walked along the wall until part of it groaned and creaked and tilted, rising from the ground high enough for her to duck through. It occurred to her that the little man might consider her a potential hostage. It was even remotely possible that the raiders were frightened enough of the Druids that they'd be willing to go along with it, but a man needed to have some sort of initiative left to imagine anything so ambitious as hostage-taking. This felt more like a plea.

The first thing she saw inside the palisade were two humans, both straining, red-faced, at the ropes that must be raising the gate. When she approached they let go and backed away, breathing hard. The girl nearly laughed at them, they looked so comical in their identical clothing and armor. They had weapons strapped on here and there, but they didn't look dangerous to her. They looked rather fuzzy and bulky and orange and black in the firelight. Like bees, defending their little hive. One gestured toward his forehead vaguely. The tiny man said something to them in a strange tongue, and both humans repeated the gesture and walked away.

“What am I supposed to see?” she asked.

The little man swept his arms wide. “Behold, your mighty foes!”

The camp was a wreck. It was obvious that the humans had meant to build a shelter inside the walls, but they hadn't finished it or had later demolished it for unknown reasons. A few small fires burned fitfully. The people were huddled around the fires, wrapped in filthy blankets. A few sprawled helplessly on the ground. They barely looked up as she passed. They were sweating or shivering or moaning. The camp stank of vomit and piss.

“Plague,” she said.

“Yes. So, really, raiders or not, we're dying over this patch of dirt.”

The girl surveyed the collection of wretched hulks and sighed. What could you do with people like this? So foolish, but a jaunty and brave sort of foolishness. “I can help.”

It was not the war she'd been sent to fight. She wondered, many times over the following days, if that war would have been easier. Fighting the plague was an endless, grinding effort with no time for rest. The raiders appeared on schedule, whooped a few war cries, and threw a few spears over the wall. The girl climbed up and shouted, “Plague!” at them, and climbed down again, not even waiting for a response. Eventually, they went away. She was too busy even to be amused.

“And I thought Guide's chores were bad,” she said, spooning an herbal concoction into a dying man's mouth. The girl couldn't have said whether the medicine was any use at all, but the attention seemed to sooth him, so she kept spooning.

“I'm sorry?” asked the tiny man, who she now knew was called Wentzel.

“It doesn't matter. Hand me that towel.”

Some just died, there was no help for them. The first few days, no one even had the strength to move them. The girl rushed from cry to cry and snatched at sleep in between, mostly sitting up wedged in a corner. She feared if she lay down, she would not be able to rise again and do what needed to be done. But, gradually, things began to change. The dead bodies disappeared, one by one. Scraps of shelter appeared over the sickest, then over everyone. Hot food appeared. Clean clothing. The girl allowed herself to fall onto a pallet and sleep, and no cry came, no desperate hand shaking her awake. When she rose in the morning, there were other hands to bathe and clean and feed and soothe.

“It looks like we might pull through after all, thanks to you,” said Wentzel.

The girl sighed. “The raiders won't stay away forever.” And she wasn't digging any pits this time. One badger was enough. She didn't need an entire army following her around and making nuisances of themselves.

“No, I suppose they won't. What about you? Are you . . . in trouble? You're welcome to stay . . .”

“No, thank you. I have other things to do.”

The girl sat in the Arbor, beside the rotten stump full of bees. Her badger dug at the ground, gulping down a wealth of disgusting grubs.

“They still don't belong here,” Guide told her.

“Not yet, but maybe one day they will.”

“Maybe. Why did you return?” In his voice, she heard that he had not expected it, but, strangely, he was glad.

“There is still one thing I need to know.”

“Ask, then.”

“Tell me my name.”

The Guide's face twisted briefly. Then he grinned. “You are Melissah.”

“Melissah,” she said, tasting the word.

Honey bee.