Honey and Frost

The bees of Fallowmere were famous in the valley of Dall for two things: their honey, which was dark and tasted of heather, and their temper, which was worse than anyone's except Granna Tansy's.

Wren Fallowmere had robbed them bare-handed since she was twelve. She worked slowly, with a smoker made from an old kettle, and she talked to them while she worked, because her grandmother said bees liked to know what you were about.

"I'm taking this one," she told the third hive in the row. "You've got plenty. Don't be greedy."

The bees did not agree, and a dozen of them came up out of the box to say so. Wren gave them a puff of smoke, lifted the frame, and held it up to the light. It was heavy and full, the comb capped white from edge to edge. Late August sun came over the eastern hills and lit it gold, and for a moment she stood there with the whole summer in her hands.

Then a bee stung her on the thumb.

"Fair," she said, and scraped the sting out with her nail.

Behind the bee-yard the land rose. First came the orchard, then the long sheep-pastures, then the gray shoulders of the Cloudwall. Above those, where the mountains met the sky, the snow never melted, not even in August. The west road ran out of Dall past Fallowmere's gate and climbed into those mountains and stopped. In Dall, when a man walked off and never came back, people said he had gone up the Stair. Nobody had gone up the Stair and come down the other side in living memory, or in anyone's grandmother's memory either.

Wren had lived under those mountains for twenty-three years and did not look at them now. She was looking at the frame.

"You'll drop that," said a voice from the gate.

"I won't."

"You will. You'll drop it, and it'll land comb-down in the dirt, and Granna will skin you, and I'll hold the knife."

Wren set the frame in the carrying box and turned around. Her cousin Dorrit was leaning on the gate with a basket of jars on each arm. Dorrit was twenty-seven, broad as a barn door, and red in the face from walking up the lane fast. She had brought, by the look of it, every jar in the valley.

"Did you rob the inn?" Wren said.

"Hobb gave them to me. He wants six pounds of the dark for the harvest supper and he says he'll pay in beer." Dorrit set the baskets down with a clash. "I said we'd take coin. He cried a bit."

"He always cries."

"He cried more than usual. I think he's getting soft." Dorrit came through the gate and stopped a careful distance from the hives. She was not afraid of much, but she was afraid of bees. "Is she up?"

"She's been up since four. She's got the extractor out."

"Gods' teeth. She's not supposed to be lifting anything."

"You tell her."

Dorrit looked toward the house, a long gray building under a thatch so deep it came down nearly to the windows. "I'd sooner tell the bees," she said.

Granna Tansy was seventy-nine and the size of a child, and her left hip had been bad for ten years. She walked with a blackthorn stick and ran the farm from a chair by the kitchen fire. Nothing happened on Fallowmere without her knowing it first, and very little happened in the rest of the valley either.

When Wren and Dorrit came in with the first boxes, Tansy was standing at the extractor with both hands on the crank. The kitchen smelled of wax and hot iron and the sweet, heavy smell of honey.

"Sit down," Dorrit said.

"I'm cranking."

"You're cranking on a hip that's held together with spite. Sit down."

"If I sit down," Tansy said, "who cranks?"

"I will."

"You'll break it. You broke the last one."

"That was nine years ago!"

"And I've not forgotten." But Tansy let go of the handle and let Dorrit take her by the elbow, grumbling, and steer her to the chair by the fire. She lowered herself into it with a hiss. Then she looked up at Wren. "Did you take the lot?"

"Every full frame from the white hives. I left the skeps."

"Good. Leave the skeps." The three old straw skeps at the end of the bee-yard gave almost no honey. They were kept because they had always been kept. "Did they sting you?"

Wren held up her thumb.

"Only once? You're getting slow. Your mother used to get stung a dozen times a harvest and call it luck."

She said it lightly, as she said it always. Wren's mother had been dead sixteen years, and Tansy mentioned her perhaps once a month, always in passing, like a stone dropped into a pond to see if the water was still deep.

It was. Wren took the next frame to the uncapping table and bent over it.

They worked through the morning, Dorrit at the crank, Wren uncapping the comb with the long hot knife and feeding the frames into the drum. Tansy watched them both from her chair and told them what they were doing wrong. The honey ran out of the spout in a dark, slow rope, and the jars filled one by one along the table, and the kitchen clock ticked above the dresser.

On the dresser, where it had always been, sat the oak box.

It was a plain box, about the size of a family register, bound at the corners with black iron and fitted with a lock. Tansy wore the key on a cord around her neck and had never, in Wren's life, taken it off. Inside the box was the Waybook.

Wren had only ever seen the Waybook opened at the spring oiling. Once a year, Tansy took it out and oiled the leather and turned the pages to air them, and then she locked it away again. It was a book of roads: old maps, drawn by hand, of country nobody in Dall had ever walked. It had been in the family since before the Frost. There was a saying that went with it, which every Fallowmere child learned before they could read.

Keep it against the thaw; and when the road opens, the book goes home.

Wren had asked once, when she was eight, what it meant, and Tansy had told her it meant keep it in the box.

At noon they stopped and ate bread and cheese at the end of the table, with honey on everything, because there was honey on everything anyway. Dorrit licked her fingers and said, "There's a herb-seller at Marlford fair next month. From Merrow. Hobb's cousin says he's got seeds from the south that nobody's ever grown up here. Red peppers. Something called a quince."

"We know what a quince is," Tansy said.

"Have you ever eaten one?"

"I've no need to eat one. I know what it is."

"Well, I want to eat one." Dorrit pointed her knife at the window, at the whole wide valley beyond it. "I want to eat a quince, and see Merrow, and see the sea. I'm twenty-seven. I've been to Marlford four times and Elmcross once, and Elmcross doesn't count, because I was sick in the cart."

"The sea is wet and salty," Tansy said. "I can tell you that for nothing. Save you the walk."

"You've never seen it either."

"I've never seen a dragon, and I know I don't want one in my kitchen."

Wren laughed, and Dorrit threw a crust at her. Tansy rapped the table with her stick and told them both to get back to work before the honey set in the drum. But when Dorrit had gone back to the crank, Wren saw her grandmother watching Dorrit with an odd look on her face. It was the look she gave a hive that was thinking about swarming.

The harvest supper was held at the Bridge Inn, as it had been every year since the inn was built. By sundown the long room was full, the benches pushed back against the walls and the trestle tables loaded with bread and cold mutton and plum tarts. Hobb Millson, the innkeeper, stood behind the bar with his sleeves rolled up and his face shining, and poured beer as fast as people could drink it.

Wren always played at the harvest supper. Her fiddle had been her mother's, a dark old instrument with a crack in the back that had been glued so long ago nobody remembered it happening. She stood on the little platform by the hearth with Tam Hollin on the pipes and old Garret on the drum, and for three hours the floor of the Bridge Inn shook.

They played the harvest tunes, the reels and the jigs, and the slow airs that made the old women cry. And near the end of the night, when the room was hot and loud and half the valley was sitting down because their legs had given out, somebody shouted for the Old Reel.

Wren grinned and tucked the fiddle under her chin.

The Old Reel was the oldest tune in Dall, quick and bright and a little strange, with a turn in the middle that made dancers stumble if they didn't know it. But everyone knew it, for children in Dall learned it before their letters, and everyone knew, too, that it had no ending.

It ran for thirty-two bars, climbing and turning and gathering itself, and then, at the very top of a phrase, where any other tune would come round to its second half, it stopped. Nothing came after it, and nothing ever had. The dancers in Dall simply stopped with it, laughed, and clapped, because that was how the Old Reel ended, which was to say it didn't.

Wren played it through fast and clean while the room stamped and whirled, and at the top of the last phrase she lifted her bow, and the whole room stopped with her, mid-step, and roared.

"Waiting for the rest of itself," Hobb shouted from the bar, as he did every year. "One day it'll turn up, and we'll none of us know what to do."

"We'll dance," somebody called back.

"We'll need a longer night."

Wren laughed and lowered the fiddle, her arms aching and her fingers raw. She was reaching for her mug when the door of the inn banged open, hard enough to rattle the shutters.

Cob Hedley stood in the doorway.

He was a shepherd, sixty-odd, bandy-legged and brown as a walnut, and he was the worst talker in Dall. He could talk the length of a sermon about the price of wool. He could talk a dog to sleep. In all her life Wren had not known him to stand in a doorway and say nothing.

He had come down from the high pasture. She could see it in his boots and in the sweat on his face. He was holding his crook in both hands and he was breathing like a man who had run the last mile.

The room went quiet in pieces, from the door inward.

"Cob?" Hobb said. "You look like you've seen a tax man."

Cob came in, and instead of going to the bar he went to the fire and held his hands out to it, though the night was warm and the room was hotter. Wren saw that his hands were shaking.

"I've a ewe dead," he said.

"That's sad," said Garret the drummer, who had a ewe dead most weeks. "What of?"

"Cold."

Somebody laughed, and Cob turned around, and the laugh stopped.

"She's standing," Cob said. "Up by the Last Cairn, in the hollow under the scree. She's standing on her four legs with her head up, and she's froze through. Solid. I put my hand on her and she was hard as a gatepost. There's frost on her fleece. Frost. In the sun. It's been hot as an oven up there all day, and she's got frost on her like it was midwinter, and it's not melting."

"Somebody's playing a trick," Hobb said.

"Who? Who's going to carry a frozen ewe up the high pasture in August to make a fool of me?"

Nobody had an answer to that.

"There's more," Cob said. He looked around the room, and his eye found Wren on the platform, and stayed there. "There's the ground round her. It's white. There's rime on the grass in a patch as wide as this room, and it's cold. You step in it and it's like stepping into January. And in the rime there's prints."

"Sheep prints," said Garret.

"Boot prints," said Cob. "A man's. Walking. Coming from up the Stair, from above the cairn where nobody goes, and walking down past my ewe." He swallowed. "Going east. Toward the valley."

The fire cracked, and out in the dark, down by the river, a dog was barking and would not stop.

"And the prints are frosted too," Cob said. "Every one of them. Like whoever made them was colder than the ground."

Wren walked home near midnight with Tansy on her arm and the fiddle case on her back. The lane was dark under the hedges, and the stars were thick above the valley, and the air smelled of cut barley and dust. It was a warm night, as warm as any in August.

Tansy had kept silent at the inn. She had sat in her corner while the valley argued. Some said Cob had been at the cider. Some said it was a hard frost come early, a freak of the mountains, nothing more. Hobb said that the Stair had always been an odd place, and that his own father had seen lights up there once, and that the best thing anyone could do was to stay down in the valley where things were sensible. Cob said that he'd bring the ewe down tomorrow on a sledge and they could all come and look at her themselves.

Tansy had listened to all of it. Then she had got up, taken her stick, and said, "Wren. Home."

Now she walked slowly, leaning hard on Wren's arm and on the stick. Her breath came short on the slope. She did not complain about her hip, which was how Wren knew she was thinking about something else.

"You don't think it's a trick," Wren said.

"I think Cob Hedley's too stupid to play one."

"Then what?"

Tansy didn't answer. At the gate of Fallowmere she stopped with her hand on the top bar and stood a moment looking up at the dark shape of the mountains. There was no moon, but the snowfields at the top of the Cloudwall gave off a faint gray light of their own.

"Get the lamp lit," she said. "And bring me the box."

"Now?" Wren said.

"You heard me."

In the kitchen Wren lit the big lamp and set it on the table, then took the oak box down from the dresser. It was heavier than she expected. She set it in front of her grandmother, and Tansy drew the cord over her head and fitted the key to the lock.

"It's not spring," Wren said.

"I know what month it is, child." The lock turned with a hard click. "I don't like frost in August."

Under the lid the Waybook lay on a bed of old linen. It was bound in dark leather, worn pale at the edges by three centuries of hands, and closed with a brass clasp. Tansy lifted it out with both hands and laid it on the table and opened it.

Wren came around and stood at her shoulder.

The pages were thick and soft and brown with age. The first was almost blank. At the top, in a clear old hand, someone had written the single word For, and then drawn a line after it, and left the line empty. Tansy turned past it without a glance, and after that came the maps.

Wren had forgotten how beautiful they were. They were roads, drawn in black ink, with tiny careful marks beside them: a cup for a well, a little roofed square for a way-house, a flame for a beacon, a curved line for a bridge. There were rivers drawn in blue, faded nearly to gray. There were names in the margins of places she had never heard of: Scarrow, Coldharbour, Cael Meddan. Some pages showed only a single mile of road, with every stone of a bridge drawn in. Some showed a whole country, laid out small and exact, with the mountains of the Cloudwall running down the middle like a spine.

Tansy turned the pages quickly, not looking at the maps, all the way to the back of the book, and laid her hand flat beside the last written page.

"There," she said.

The last page was different from the others. There was no map on it, only writing: a short block of lines in a cramped, hurried hand, very black, pressed so hard into the paper that the pen had nearly torn it in places. Wren had seen this page before, at the spring oiling. She had never been allowed to read it. Tansy always turned past it, fast.

She could not read it now either. The words were in the old script of the Survey, which nobody in Dall could read but Tansy. But she could see the ink.

It was fading.

The top lines were still black. Halfway down the page they went brown, and the last lines had turned the pale gray of old ash, and the very last line was so faint that it was hardly there at all. It looked as though someone had taken a wet cloth and wiped it.

"Has it always done that?" Wren said.

"No."

"When did it start?"

"I don't know. I last had it out at the spring oiling. It was black then. Every line."

Tansy put her finger on the last gray line and did not quite touch it. Her hand was steady, but her face in the lamplight wore a look Wren had not seen there before. It took her a moment to find the name for it, because it was so strange to see.

Tansy was afraid.

"What does it say?" Wren asked.

"It's about the Stair."

"What about it?"

"It says it's shut." Tansy closed the book. She did it gently, both hands on the cover, and then she sat with her hands resting on it, looking at the lamp. "It's the last thing he wrote. The man who brought the book over the mountains. My grandmother told me that when I was a girl. She said the book had to be kept, and the last page had to be kept most of all, and that if it ever went pale, I was to worry."

"And are you worried?"

"Don't be clever." Tansy looked up at her. "You'll go up with Cob in the morning. I want to know what's in that hollow, and I want to know it from somebody with more sense than a sheep. Take Dorrit. She's not afraid of anything but bees."

"All right."

"And take a torch."

"It'll be broad day," Wren said.

"Take a torch anyway. Take two. Lit, or ready to light."

"Why?"

Tansy put the Waybook back in its box, on its bed of linen, and closed the lid, and turned the key. She hung the cord back around her neck. Then she sat with her hand pressed over the key, under her shawl, as if it were a sore place.

"Because my grandmother told me to," she said. "Whenever anyone went up above the cairn, she said, take fire. I asked her why once, and she told me not to be clever. So I never asked her again." She looked toward the dark window, toward the mountains. "I'm sorry now. I should have asked."

Outside, the night was warm and still. The bees were quiet in their hives. And on the kitchen window, in the bottom corner of the glass, where the lamp did not reach, a thin white fern of frost had begun to grow.