BÉYLA FROSTCOMB's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Béyla Frostcomb had promised to raise the first apiary on the far side of the forest, and she had no bees to bring. She stood in her family's twilight yard among the twelve frost-burnished hives. The bee-glow inside them pulsed turquoise. She pressed her hand to the tallest hive and felt the hum through the wood. These colonies were the pride of her line. And she already knew they would not survive the trek. The far side lay past the river and across the lake. Days of hauling. The hives were bound to the yard's frost and fungi. Move them, and the shock would kill the queens before the boat reached open water. Béyla had watched her father lose a colony to a single hard journey. She would not gut her family's stock to plant a doomed dream. So she went to the wild instead. She followed a chemical trace on the air, faint and sweet, drifting from beyond the tree line. Her scalp filaments trembled toward it. She walked until she found them: a ribbon of alien bees, metallic green and blue, furred in pink, their triple wings dragging turquoise trails through the gloom. A wild swarm. 5,000 strong. Bred by no Lunari, bound to no frost-yard. Free to travel. Béyla lit her smoker and worked slow. Frostbite grass smoke rolled over the swarm. The bees slowed and clustered on a low branch. She had brought an empty hive tier, its runes freshly cut, and she coaxed the cluster down into the dark box one careful sweep at a time. The purple-eyed workers crawled inward. When the last one entered, she sealed the lip and felt the whole box come alive under her palms. She carried the sealed hive to the water's edge. Wild bees. No yard-frost to leave behind, no shocked queen to mourn. She had her stock at last, and she had not touched a single family hive. The dream had a colony to carry it now. Then she opened the box a crack to check the cluster, and the truth stung her. These were not her Frostbark bees. They fed on nothing she knew. She had no idea what this swarm ate, or whether the far side grew any of it. She had solved the wrong half of the problem. The bees would ride the river fine. Whether they would eat when they arrived, she could not say. Béyla closed the lid and looked downriver, toward a shore she had never fed a single hive. She still needed a boat to transport the bees up the river and across the lake. Her brother-in-law’s wife Thorn was a woodworker from the north frozen grasslands and they were visiting the next cycle. She will surely build a boat in exchange for some hive products.