Amber Honeywell's Arc

Chapter 5 of 14

Amber sat at her empty table until the sun climbed past the prisms. She had not moved. The ledger lay open at the line she had written. Then a sound came from outside — not a knock, but a slow settling, like a heavy thing setting itself down on her stones. She opened the door. A small painted wagon stood in her yard, parked beside the bee boxes. On its roof a dragonfly turned in the cold light, its wings catching colors she had no names for. The wagon was old. She knew the paint. She had helped mix it, a lifetime ago. A man sat on the driver's bench with his hands folded, waiting. He was not Durgan. He was older than Durgan. He was from before. He climbed down without speaking and lifted a flat wooden case from the bench. He set it on her step and opened the lid. Inside, on dark cloth, was a small model — a domed roof painted with stars, gold doors, tiny windows lit from within by paint alone. An observatory. The one she had been going to help build. The one she had walked out of, eleven years ago, to follow a recipe she could not yet name. Her name was carved on the base, beside another name she had not let herself say in eleven years. "They finished it without you," the man said. He did not say it cruelly. "I thought you should know what it looks like. I thought you should see it before you spent another eleven." He looked past her, to the empty table through the open door, to the clean vessel. His face changed. "Ah," he said. "You already spent it." Amber knelt by the case. She touched the tiny gold doors. She thought of the hive she had kept instead — the small one she still tended, the one that had been a cottage once, a home she had emptied out and filled with frames. She thought of Durgan walking down the path with her lantern, and a child she had never met waking in a room he had already seen. She closed the lid of the case. "I know what I gave up," she said. "I have always known. I just needed someone to bring it to the door." She stood. "Take it back. Tell them I saw it. Tell them it is beautiful." The man studied her for a long moment. Then he nodded once, picked up the case, and climbed back to his bench. The dragonfly lifted from the wagon roof and flew off over the bee boxes. He turned the wagon in her yard and went. Amber watched until the road was empty. Then she went inside, took down the ledger, and wrote a second line beneath the first: kept what I chose. The bees, when she went to them, were already settling.