“Beautiful,” he says. I assume he’s talking about the flower.
“You shouldn’t steal flowers from people’s gardens,” I say. “Especially not this close to the Midsummer Festival garden competition. If they catch you, heads will roll.”
“I’m a master cat burglar; no one’s going to catch me. I’ll just say you did it. Oh, look, dahlias!” He skips off down the road.
Soon, we’re both breaking off flowers and handing them to each other to smell. He tucks his favourites behind my ear, and I loop mine through his belt, so we both look like we’re filming a cottagecore influencer video. My bees dance happily around us, their buzzing almost as loud as the humming in my veins. Rafe points out his favourite cattish nooks and the territories of his friends and foes. Bythe time we reach my garden gate, he has me viewing the village completely differently.
“This is my cottage,” I say. “Wait here, I need to tell the bees about you.”
How quickly I’ve started to think of the cottage asmine, instead ofours.
I leave Rafe at the garden gate and step along the path until I reach my hives. The bees with me rejoin the swarm, which buzzes in greeting, looping and murmurating around me.Look, Mamma’s home,they seem to say.
“Hello, I see you’re all busy. I just wanted to tell you that I’m bringing a visitor into the garden. He’s going to help me carry my mead bottles away, but this is good news. If you’re nice to him, there might be a treat in it for you. Are we good?”
The buzzing rises half an octave.
“Good.” I turn back to the gate and wave to Rafe, who takes several steps back, runs at the gate and leaps over it, clearing the iron rungs by mere millimetres. He lands crouched in the lavender bush.
“The gatedoesopen,” I grumble as I pull him out.
“Force of habit.” He grins, cracking his knuckles. “I keep forgetting I have opposable thumbs again. No latch will outfox me now. Take me to your meader. Get it? It’s take me to your leader but with mead?—”
“Yes, Rafe, I know how puns work. The mead is?—”
“Hello, bees!” Rafe bounds over to the hives, waving his arms. The bees startle, racing back to the hives.
“Careful, you don’t want to get stung.”
But as I watch in amazement, the bees don’t attack. Worker bees land in his hair and on his shirt, climbing over him as if investigating him. He grins wickedly at me as bees climb over his face.
“Hey, they tickle!”
His tailspriongsout of his trousers, pointing jauntily skyward. The end kinks like a periscope.
“The bees like you.” I hold out my hand, and several workers land on my palm. I shouldn’t be out here without my bee suit. I’ve beenusing it even though I don’t need to because Warrick doesn’t want me to draw attention to my powers. I know the bees won’t sting me unless something surprises them, but if Harry looks over the fence and snaps pictures of me commanding the bees, he’ll be able to convince people I’m a witch.
“What’s not to like?” Rafe makes a kissy face at one on the end of his finger. “I think they’re flirting with me.”
“You are ridiculous. You know worker bees are sterile.”
“That doesn’t mean they can’t appreciate such a fine specimen of manhood. Hey!” He screws up his face as he reaches into his trousers and shoos out some bees. “That tickles. You stay away from the family jewels unless you’re offering a dowry. Maybe we should do the mead now. These ladies are getting a littletoofriendly.”
I lead Rafe away from the bees before he gets a stinger where no stinger should ever go. I throw open the door to the large potting shed my grandmother built.
“The barrels are enchanted.” I lower my voice, in case Harry’s listening over the fence. “They’ll automatically refill. I’m going to try to work the enchantment backwards, so that when the inspectors come, they’ll appear empty. But we need to move my current mead stores to Celeste’s shop in case the enchantment goes wrong. This is my brewing bench, and it’s also where I process the honey from the hives.”
“What happened here?” Rafe kicks the dark stain on the ground.
“I tripped and spilt a honey harvest.” I make a face as I quickly usher him past. “That’s a sticky mess you don’t want to see. Here’s where I keep my bottles.”
I show him the second, smaller room at the back of the shed, where my grandmother used to lock away some of her more dangerous spell ingredients. The entire room is filled with bottles stacked in plastic tubs, each tub labelled with the batch and honey botanicals.
“Wow. Were you storing it so you could drink your way through the apocalypse?”
“Something like that.” I feel the blush warming my cheeks. Thetruth is, when I made mead, I always imagined myself surrounded by friends, drinking and singing and telling stories and having a wonderful time. But it’s a silly dream. I don’t have friends. “There used to be more, but Warrick took some as gifts for his clients. He even took a crate to a friend of his in the liquor industry. He thought they might be interested in licensing my recipes. But they weren’t.”
I smile, to show him that I’m not sad about any of that, but my voice trips over the final word, and Rafe frowns. He starts to say something, but I can’t handle the way he’s looking at me, so I cut him off. “There are two wheelbarrows behind the shed. You fill them while I do a little magic.”
