Melissa Honeycomb's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Melissa Honeycomb could name every flower her bees had ever touched. But she had never found the one that mattered. The kingdom's grand culinary prize went each year to the rarest honey, and Melissa meant to win it. For that she needed a legendary bloom she had only heard whispered about. No one had ever told her where it grew. She stood among her rounded wooden hives that morning, lid in one hand, frame in the other. The honey inside was good. Good would not win. Good had lost her three years running. She set the frame down and watched her bees settle in their striped cluster, wings flashing in the sun. "You travel farther than I ever can," she said to them. "You know where the rare things bloom." The thought stopped her. The bees did know. She had never thought to follow them. Melissa marked one worker with a dot of flour and waited. When the cluster lifted and streamed off across the fields, she ran after the pale speck. She lost it twice. She found it again by the hum. The swarm climbed a slope she had never bothered to walk, past the last fence, into cold air that made her breath show. The bees dropped toward a shadowed hollow. There, in a patch of frost that should not have survived the spring, grew a cluster of ice roses. Their petals looked carved from glass. The stems wore a skin of frost. The bees crawled over the crystalline blooms, drinking something no other flower gave. Melissa knelt in the cold grass. She had heard the old story. A honey so rare it came from flowers of ice. She had thought it a tale for children. Here it bloomed, three steps from her hand, with her own bees feeding on it. She pressed a fingertip to a petal. The cold bit her skin at once, sharp as a needle. The frost did not melt. She pulled back and saw a thin white burn rising on her finger. So this was why no one harvested it. The flower fought back. Her bees could sip the nectar in a breath and fly off. She could not. A human hand on that frost would freeze before it filled a single jar. Melissa stood and studied the shadowed hollow. The sun never reached it. The frost held firm while the whole slope went green. She had found the legendary bloom at last. Now she had to steal from a flower that burned any hand that touched it, before the brief spring warmth failed to kill it and the bees moved on. She wrapped her stinging finger in her sleeve and started back down the slope. She needed a way to harvest ice without losing her hands.