Amber Honeywell's Arc

Chapter 13 of 14

When the last of the crowd was gone, Amber went back to the hidden hives. The cloth lifted easily. The color underneath glowed steady and strange. She filled one small jar from the comb. The honey caught the light like a lamp full of stars. She held it up and felt her hands shake. One spoonful could show a true road. One spoonful could send a stranger off a cliff. She had no way to know which this jar was. She carried the jar into the shed and set it beside the girl's purple cauldron, which had been left at the gate hours ago, forgotten in the rush. Amber stared at the engraved sides. A test, she thought. Not on a person. On a thing that already knew brewing. She poured a single drop into the cauldron's belly and waited. The metal warmed. A thin yellow bloom rose from the rim, then steadied into the same exact color as the jar. Held. Matched. True. A false batch, she remembered, had sputtered gray on bark once. This did not sputter. This sang. Amber sat down hard on the shed floor. She had a test now. A cauldron that answered honest with honest, and would surely answer false with false. She wrote in her ledger: the pot knows. Then she sealed the jar, marked it with a single dot of wax, and set it on the shelf beside the cauldron. The next jar she made would be tested before it ever left her gate. What left her gate after that was no longer a guess.