Queen Apisalia pressed her hands to her ears and fled the throne room. The hive's buzz chased her down every corridor. She had ruled longer than most queens already, and she meant to outlast them all. But she could not outlast anyone if the noise broke her first. She slipped past the outer guards and into the meadow beyond. There, hidden behind a curtain of climbing vines, stood a small yellow cottage she had built in secret. Stone walls. Honeycomb windows. No courtiers. No petitioners. Only the wind. At the path's edge, a small wooden watchtower marked the boundary. Its louvered walls swallowed the hive's drone before it could reach her door. She passed beneath it and felt the weight slide from her shoulders. Mellifer Ironsting waited on the cottage step, a bundle of hollow wood and bone chimes in his hands. "I made these for you," he said. "Soft tones. Nothing sharp." He hung them from the eave, and they sang in gentle, honeycomb notes. Apisalia closed her eyes and breathed. The roar of duty faded to a hum she could bear. She had her retreat now. She would reign longer than any queen before her — but tomorrow, the hive would come looking, and they would learn she had vanished.

At dawn, Apisalia left her cottage with a question burning in her chest. To outlast every queen, she needed their numbers. She crossed the meadow toward the grand yellow hall where the hive kept its royal records. Inside the archive, she found a tall wooden pillar lined with metal plaques. Each plaque bore a queen's name and emblem. But the crowning dates had worn away. The brass was smooth where the numbers should have been. She pulled the flower-pressed registry book from its shelf and flipped through the pages. Names. Lineages. No dates. Someone had torn the date columns clean out, leaving ragged edges. Her hands trembled. Without dates, she could not measure her reign. Mellifer Ironsting stepped through the door, his staff tapping the floor. "I heard you came here," he said. He looked at the torn pages. "Someone wanted you blind to this." Apisalia closed the book. The milestone she chased had no marker now. She could not know if she had passed it, or how far she still had to climb. "Then we find who tore it," she said. The hunt had begun.

Apisalia left the archive with Mellifer at her side. She needed a place to gather whispers without drawing the court's eye. They walked to a small stone cottage with yellow trim, tucked behind a row of hedges. She lifted the hearthstone and showed him the hidden cellar below. "We work from here," she said. "Quiet. No guards." Outside the archive grounds, they found the proof she needed. A tall wooden gate stood charred and split, its iron bars blackened by fire. Soot still smudged the bee carvings near the top. Mellifer ran a palm along the burnt wood. "Someone forced this open and burned the evidence after," he said. "Not an accident. A cover." Apisalia studied the ground. Boot prints. Wax drippings. A torn scrap of sash caught in a hinge. She tucked the scrap into her sleeve. The fire had been meant to erase, but it had left a trail instead. They crossed to a weathered shrine of stone walls and mossy hexagons where worker bees often paused to rest. Apisalia waited. By midday, three older keepers had stopped to murmur prayers. She offered honey cakes and listened. One keeper, eyes sharp despite her age, leaned close. "The night the archive burned, I saw a courtier slip out the side door. Wore the sash of the inner council." Apisalia drew out the torn scrap. The color matched. She had a thread now, and a circle to pull it from. The inner council. Her hunt had a direction at last.