Amber Honeywell's Arc

Chapter 12 of 14

The carriage wheels had not yet faded from the lane when other footsteps came. Amber heard them before she saw them — soft, uneven, too many. She set down her ledger and walked to the gate. A small crowd stood in the mud below. A woman held a sleeping boy. An old man leaned on a stick. A girl no taller than the post cradled a small purple cauldron against her chest, its engraved sides smudged with ash. "This was my mother's," the girl said. "She brewed for the sick. She can't anymore. Please. One jar." Amber's throat closed. She counted faces. Seven. Each one a story that would travel whether she answered or not. Sir Bumblewort shifted beside her, quiet for once. Amber thought of the dark carriage already gone down the road with a lie in a pot, and of the true hives breathing under their cloth. She could not give the real color away. She could not send them home empty either. She went to her shed and brought out plain honey — last year's, ordinary, gold — and filled seven small jars from the open crock. She passed them through the gate one by one. "This will not give visions," she said clearly. "It will feed them. It will soothe a cough. That is all I have today." The girl held the cauldron up like a question. Amber placed a jar inside it. "For your mother." The crowd thinned slowly, some grateful, some not. A man spat in the dirt and walked off muttering. Amber watched him go and knew the story would split now — kind woman, cruel woman, both at once down different roads. She returned to her ledger. She wrote: gave bread, kept the seed. Then she covered the open crock and stood listening to her hidden hives hum behind the cloth, louder than yesterday, waiting.