A Tale from Crosshollow
As told by the Keepers of Magical Tales
✦ ✦ ✦
Nessa had kept bees on the south side of Crosshollow for forty years, and when her hands finally made the work difficult her nephew Dael came to learn it. He was a practical young man — a carpenter by trade, accustomed to things that could be measured and explained — and he arrived in the spring with good intentions and a certain amount of private skepticism about the parts of the work he did not yet understand.
The talking to the bees was one of those parts.
He had watched Nessa do it his whole life. Standing at each hive before she opened it, speaking quietly, telling them what she was going to do and what she needed from them and sometimes, as far as he could tell, simply acknowledging that she was there. It had always seemed to him like the habit of a woman who had spent too much time alone with her bees. Harmless. Unnecessary.
On his first morning working the hives alone, he skipped it.
He approached the first hive the way he approached a piece of difficult joinery — directly, efficiently, with the confidence of someone who knew what he was doing. He lifted the lid.
The bees were on him before the frame was out.
Not all of them — not a swarm — but enough. His hands, his neck, twice on the wrist before he got the lid back down. He stepped back breathing hard. The hive was producing a sound he had not heard it make before. Tighter. Higher. Unhappy.
He went to find Nessa.
✦ ✦ ✦
She was in the garden with Liss, who had come by that morning on some errand and stayed, the way people sometimes stayed in Nessa's garden without quite meaning to. They were sitting by the low stone wall when Dael came through the gate holding his wrist.
Nessa looked at him. Then at the hive. Then back at him with the expression of someone who had expected this and was not going to say so.
She went to the shelf inside the door and came back with a small clay pot. She opened it and the smell came out — sharp and green and something underneath that was harder to name.
"Sit," she said.
She worked the salve into the stings on his wrist and the back of his hand with her thumbs, unhurried. Then his neck.
"This is strong," she said when she was done. "A little goes a long way. By morning you won't know they were there." She put the lid back on the pot and looked at him steadily. "You didn't speak to them."
"No," Dael said.
"Try again tomorrow," she said. "Say the words."
He wanted to argue. His wrist still throbbed and he was in no mood for mysticism. But Nessa had already turned back to Liss and something in the set of her shoulders made clear the conversation about the words was finished for today.
✦ ✦ ✦
The next morning Dael arrived at the garden gate and Liss, who had found herself returning again without quite planning to, was already there. He came through looking at his hands with the expression of someone checking something he expected to be wrong.
"Gone," he said. He held out his wrist. The stings from the day before had vanished almost entirely — no swelling, barely a mark. "All of them. Whatever is in that salve."
"A little goes a long way," Nessa said, the same words as before, as though she were reciting something.
Dael shook his head slowly in the manner of a practical man who has been surprised by a remedy and doesn't quite want to admit it. "It's remarkable," he said. Then he went to the hives.
That morning he stood at the first hive and said the words. He told the bees what he was going to do. He said he was Nessa's nephew and that he was learning. He felt foolish. He did it anyway.
He opened the hive.
The bees were still unsettled — not as badly as before, they did not come at him — but the sound was wrong and the frames were difficult. He was thinking about whether the words were working and the bees, it seemed, could tell.
He got through it. He came back to where Nessa and Liss were sitting.
"Better," Nessa said.
"Not much," Dael said.
"What were you thinking about while you were talking to them?"
He considered. "Whether it was working."
Nessa nodded as though he had said something she expected. "Tomorrow," she said, "think about them."
✦ ✦ ✦
On the third morning Dael stood at the first hive for longer than he had before. He looked at it. He thought about the winter they had come through, the spring now asking something new of them. He said the words, but this time the words were the shape of what he was actually thinking. Not a formula laid over the top of it. An acknowledgment.
He opened the hive.
The bees moved around his hands the way they moved around Nessa's.
He worked through all three hives without a single sting. The frames came out clean. The sound was the low even hum from the lane he had known his whole life — a colony going about its business without alarm.
When he was done he stood in the middle of the garden for a moment, slightly stunned.
Liss had watched from the wall. She looked at Nessa.
"What changed?" she asked.
"He did," Nessa said.
Liss looked at the hives. "So it wasn't the words."
"The words changed him," Nessa said. "Which changed everything he did after. Which the bees felt." She paused. "Whether there is something else as well — whether the bees receive something in the words themselves — I have kept bees for forty years and I cannot tell you. I know that when he is anxious they are anxious. I know that when he is present they are calm. I know the words make him present." She looked at the hives. "That is enough to keep saying them."
Dael was quiet for a moment. "So I'm not doing it for them."
"You are doing it for both of you," Nessa said. "That is not less. That is more."
He nodded slowly. Then he went to clean his tools, and Nessa and Liss were alone in the garden.
✦ ✦ ✦
For a moment neither of them spoke. The bees moved in and out of the hives in their long purposeful arcs.
"Can I tell you something?" Nessa said.
Liss looked at her.
Nessa picked up the small clay pot from the bench — the same one she had used on Dael's stings two mornings ago. She turned it in her hands.
"I have been making this for twenty years," she said. "My mother's recipe. Beeswax, three herbs from the garden, a little oil. And a pain powder I used to buy from the healer in town. The powder was the part that was supposed to do the work. The rest was just to carry it."
She set the pot down.
"Three winters ago I made a batch and something distracted me. I finished it and put it on the shelf and used it all that season. My stings, my hands, the children who came to me from the village. Everyone said the same thing Dael said this morning." She paused. "At the end of winter I was cleaning the shelf and I found the packet. Still sealed. Still sitting where I had left it when the distraction came. I had made the entire batch without the medicine."
The garden was quiet.
"The salve had worked perfectly for an entire season," Nessa said. "Without the ingredient that was supposed to make it work."
Liss looked at the pot. "What did you do?"
"I sat with it for a long time. I thought about everyone I had treated that winter. All the stings, all the relief they reported, that I felt myself on my own hands." She paused. "And then I thought about the three herbs and the beeswax and what each of them actually does. And I thought about the trust people bring when they come to someone who has been doing this for twenty years. And I thought about the expecting of relief and what that does to a person before the salve has even been opened."
She looked at the pot.
"I never bought the powder again," she said. "Three winters now without it. It works just as well." She looked at Liss. "I don't know which part is doing it. The herbs, perhaps. My hands. The trust they bring. Some of all of those. I stopped needing to know." A small pause. "I just stopped paying for something I had proved I didn't need."
Liss was quiet for a long moment.
She thought about Dael's wrist this morning — gone, he had said, all of them — and about the three mornings at the hives, and about the words that hadn't worked when he was thinking about whether they were working and had worked when he was thinking about the bees. She thought about the packet still sealed on the shelf and the salve that hadn't known the difference.
She had come to this garden the first morning asking a question she thought had a clean answer. She was beginning to understand that the questions she most wanted clean answers to were the ones that didn't have them. And that this was not the same as the answers not existing. It was more that they were larger than the shape she'd been trying to pour them into.
"So you don't know," she said finally. "Which part works."
"No," Nessa said. "I know that something works. I know that showing up faithfully and doing the practice honestly is part of what makes it work. I know that forcing it doesn't." She picked up her cup. "The rest I have made my peace with not knowing."
Liss picked up her basket. She said goodbye and walked home by the long way, down the lane that ran beside the river.
She was thinking about a great many things. Not all of them were about the bees.
✦ ✦ ✦
In Crosshollow, Nessa's salve is known as the finest remedy for stings in the valley. People come from the farms east of the mill to buy it. Nobody knows exactly what is in it. Nessa has never seen any reason to explain.
