Wren Kael's Arc

Chapter 3 of 4

The far field ended at a wall of gray stone. Wren reached the beekeeper's gate before noon. She raised her fist to knock, then stopped. A heavy chain bound the gate shut. A wooden sign hung crooked: NO OUTSIDERS. She pressed the moon chart against the bars and called out. No one answered. She counted her ferns. Two days, Clara had said. She had walked one of them to get here. Wren coughed. The light spilled from her mouth again, brighter now. She sank against the gate. Bees droned somewhere past the wall. She would die here, chained out, with the beekeeper's answer six feet away. "Don't waste your breath." A girl crouched in the tall grass by the wall's corner. Flowers stuck out of her tangled hair. She held a beetle in her cupped hands, its shell lit with glowing orange seams. She watched it crawl across her palm. "She sealed the gate after the last one came. She stopped talking to anyone after Mama got sick." "You live here," Wren said. "I'm Meadow. She's my grandmother." The girl looked up. Her eyes moved to the shine on Wren's lips. "You've got it too. The cough with the light." "I need to ask her where the sickness started. She's the only one who remembers." Meadow said nothing. She looked lonely enough to talk to a beetle for company. Wren held out the moon chart. "Do you know what this means?" Meadow took it. Her thumb traced the painted moons. "Grandmother marks her days by these. She'd trust anyone who brought one." She glanced back at the dark house. "But she won't unlock the gate. Not even for the chart. Not anymore." Wren coughed again and could not stop. Blood-colored light dripped from her lips. Meadow set the beetle down and grabbed her sleeve. "There's a gap," Meadow whispered. "Behind the hives. Where the wall fell. I use it to get out. She doesn't know." "Take me through." Meadow bit her lip. "If she catches me, she'll seal that too. I'll have no way out." "Then you'd be trapped like me," Wren said. "Please. I'm running out of days." Meadow looked at the shine, then at the moon chart in her hand. She stood. "Come on. Stay low." She led Wren along the wall to a pile of fallen stones. Beehives hummed on the far side. Meadow slipped through first, then reached back. Wren crawled after her, staff scraping the gap. They came up in a garden gone wild. A hunched shape sat on the porch, wrapped in shawls, watching the moon rise in daylight. The beekeeper. Meadow froze. The old woman turned. Her eyes found the chart in Meadow's hand, then Wren behind her. She did not shout. She did not chain the gate. "You brought an outsider into my house," she said to Meadow. "Then she'd better sit. And you'd better hope I still remember what she came to hear."