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“They won’t.”

“They sting everybody. They stung the Tolley boy three times on the same day.”

“Then they have good taste.”

I open the first hive, and the bees come up in a cloud, buzzing and annoyed, the way they always are when I bother them before noon.

And they go straight for Rowan.

I open my mouth to tell him to run, but they’re not attacking him. They’re landing on him. Dozens of them. Crawling over his shoulders and his arms and his chest, walking along the grain of his skin, and humming. A low, happy hum I’ve never heard my bees make in my whole life.

Rowan stands there with a hundred bees on him and doesn’t even flinch. He just looks down at them, completely unbothered.

“Hello,” he tells them. “Yes. It’s me. Calm down.”

I stare at him through my veil. “Do they know you?”

“Every spring, they lived in my blossoms.” One crawls across his cheek, and he doesn’t blink. “Probably not these exact ones. Their grandmothers, maybe. Bees don’t live very long either. Shorter than humans.”

I think about that. About him standing in the forest, year after year, while my bees’ great-great-great-grandmothers crawled all over him, and I was just a little girl, and then a woman, and none of us had any idea.

“That’s kind of beautiful,” I say.

“It’s very annoying. They tickle.” He lifts one off his nose and sets it gently on the hive. “Do your work, Hattie. I’ll hold them.”

And he does. He just stands there with my bees all over him, keeping them happy, while I pull frames and check the brood and do in half an hour what usually takes me all morning.

When I close the last hive, I look up, and he’s watching me. Not the bees. Me. With that same happy look from this morning, while a dozen bees crawl through his hair.

And I think, girl, you are in so much trouble.

Then I hear somebody gasp behind the fence, and I turn around, and Auntie Bess is standing at the edge of my meadow with a basket of eggs in her arms and her mouth hanging open.

“Hattie Ashby,” she says. “Is that man covered in bees?”

Six

Chapter Six: Rowan

The old woman at the fence is staring at me like I’m the most interesting thing that’s ever happened to her. Which, judging by the size of this village, I probably am.

She’s round and gray-haired, with a basket of eggs on her arm and a shawl tied under her chin, and her mouth has been hanging open for a while now. One of the bees on my shoulder takes off and goes to investigate her. She doesn’t even notice.

“Auntie,” Hattie says, lifting her veil. Her voice is all high and fake-casual. “Morning! What are you doing out here so early?”

“Brought you eggs.” The old woman doesn’t take her eyes off me. “Heard you might need some. Heard there was a lot of noise up this way last night.”

Hattie makes a sound like she just swallowed a bee.

I’ve seen this kind of human before. Every village has one. They know who’s courting who, who’s pregnant, whose cow got out, and whose husband is sleeping in the barn this week. A hundred years ago, there was one who used to sit under my branches every Sunday and tell the whole forest everybody’s business. Different face, same woman.

“That was me,” I tell her.

Hattie whips her head around and stares at me.

“The noise,” I clarify. “It was mostly me. Some of it was her.”

“Rowan!”