Chapter 5: Bees Get Organized

The hogs were mercifully still contained within the village, though Lilith did see what appeared to be what was left of one of them down by the river banks, a few particularly nasty-looking skale pecking at the carcass. She decided against further investigation. Her breath was short by the time she had chased them all back into their pen, which, Lilith noted, looked like it was possibly a better place to sleep than her pen. She hoped it was at least a particularly nice pigs' pen.

Dirk was true to his word and handed her off all twenty-five gold, with which she was able to purchase the tools she needed to turn the feather into a quill. Now all she needed was an inkwell and some parchment and hopefully that would be good enough for Osric. And then she still had to find some way to get that message delivered to the warmarshal without losing her head...Maybe Osric could be persuaded to do her a favor if he liked the gift well enough? Unlikely, he was a powerful noble, he made whatever demands he liked on slaves, and he had no more reason than Dirk to believe she was a former noble. Maybe she could get a peasant, though? She hadn't realized until just now, but she could, in fact, bargain with them. But, how would a peasant convince the warmarshal of what had happened? Peasants were afforded a good deal more respect than slaves as the foundation of the kingdom, but being a peasant wasn't any protection from accusations of spying.

Every few minutes, Lilith glanced back towards the hiding spot where she had hidden the quill and the message. She was very good at finding hiding spots, seeing as how her ragged slave's outfit didn't have much in the way of pockets. That was by design, of course, since actual slaves had a tendency towards theft.
Pockets and belt pouches weren't something you ever missed until you didn't have them anymore. And trust.

Something caught Lilith's eye. A huge object barely submerged beneath the river waters. She squinted towards the mysterious object, trying to determine what it was, and slid down the riverbank for a closer look. A massive clam sat submerged beneath the current, nestled amongst many smaller ones. These were fairly common, Lilith knew, producing enormous pearls, used for sculpture more often than jewelery due to their typically being nearly as big as one's head. Not extremely valuable on their own, and she couldn't sculpt, and in any case she was pretty sure sculpture took a lot of time, but this was still way more valuable than anything she'd planned on running into.

"Hey, there, lass, what are you doing on my property?" someone asked from behind her. Lilith spun around. This was the trouble with Ashford Village just past noon. It was so busy. You never had time to do anything sneaky. A broad-shouldered peasant man spoke, flanked by a pair of lankier farmhands.

"Sorry, sir," Lilith said, wading towards the bank, "I was just washing the dirt off of myself, I didn't know it was private property."   

“Did you think the fence was just there to inconvenience travelers?” the man asked.

“I'm sorry, sir, I wasn't thinking,” Lilith said, “I'll leave right now and I won't be back, I promise,” she started climbing up the riverbank, thinking to herself how she would be back to violate her promise and get at that pearl. If she could hollow it out it would make a good inkwell for Althea to go with the quill, and her own blood would make for good ink. A “black” pearl was fairly purpley all things told, get some proper parchment to go with it...

“Not so fast, lass,” the heavyset farmer grabbed her by the shoulder and spun her around. “Do you know what the penalty for trespassing is?”

“Please, sir,” Lilith said, wishing that just once someone would give her a break, “forgive a slave's foolishness, I'll be on my way.”

“That doesn't answer my question, does it?” the man asked.

“Yeah, answer his question,” one of the farmhands said. Just what this bully needed; lackeys.

“It's...Ten lashes, for a slave,” Lilith said, swallowing, “and possibly removal of a hand if it's suspected something's been stolen. Please, sir, I didn't mean any harm.”

“Oh, I'm sure,” the man said, “if you're so terribly benign, what don't you prove it? Do me a little favor?”

Oh, great. A peasant who knew how to extort labor from a slave. And she had walked right into it, quite literally by blindly stepping onto his property. “What do you want?” Lilith asked.

“Well, I've got this problem,” he took Lilith by the arm and led her towards the mill, his mill, presumably. “I was going to make myself some honey-infused flour, you see, something sweet. But it haven't worked quite right, and now I've got a terrible swarm of bees in my mill.”

“So, you want me to...?” Lilith asked. Summon a swarm to kill the bees? Did he know she could do that? That would not be good.

“Well, anytime any of us tries to get close, we end up stung,” the farmer (or perhaps more accurately, miller) said.

“Yeah, stung bad,” one of the farmhands said, rolling up his sleeve to reveal several large lumps from the bee stings, “these bees are nasty ones, they are.”

“You see, my farmhands refuse to go into the mill to get the honeycomb that's attracting the bees, say I'm not paying them enough,” the miller said, “and I can't blame them for knowing their worth, so's I looked around to find someone worth a little less.” The miller grinned, “and look who I find come walking in to do me a favor.”

Lilith glanced at the mill. Even from outside she could faintly hear the buzzing coming from within. There were a lot of bees inside...She suppressed a shudder, both at them and at the renewed squirming from within her as the plague locusts wriggled beneath her skin. Somehow their tiny bug brains knew it was about time to come out. “If I get rid of the bees and the honeycomb, you won't mention this to the Guard?” Lilith asked.

“That's about the size of it, lass, take it across the bridge,” he pointed towards a bridge about a hundred feet away that crossed the river, “and I'll keep quiet, though if you drag your feet about it I might report you anyway.”

It was all the encouragement Lilith needed. She tugged open the heavy wooden door and the miller and his help backed away as a few bees flew out. They were not an angry swarm, but instead buzzed about Lilith, perhaps out of curiosity. It wasn't until she stepped inside that they started swarming. She winced and stifled a moan of pain as the angry bees stung at her while she was closing the door behind her. Once inside she let out a scream and the plague locusts rushed out from inside her, erupting from her mouth and crawling from every other orifice across her body. Distantly she could hear the miller's booming laugh. Her deathly swarm did bloody battle with the bees through the mill, bees filling the locusts with enough poison to kill them in a heartbeat, and locusts tearing the smaller insects in half with ease.

Lilith grabbed the honeycomb and shoved the door open again, racing across the ground as a small army of bees broke off from the main swarm to chase after her, still large enough to make a fair-sized cloud. The miller and his help ran, and the bees did not pursue. Soon they were watching and jeering again. Lilith's headstart didn't last long; her entire body came alive with pain as the bees caught up and stung. They were desperate, Lilith knew, it was the lifeblood of their nest she had stolen. But she was desperate too, and the stupid bees could make a new nest across the bridge.

The first few stings were only annoying, but soon the embers of pain were fanned into flames of agony; Lilith wondered how much of her blood ran with poison by now. By the time Lilith crossed the bridge, the honeycomb seemed to leap from her hands of its own volition, her body demanding that she get rid of the thing. Then she screamed, a banshee's wail that sent the bees into a mad frenzy. The buzzing in the area grew louder, they crawled across her body, but they had ceased their attack. They crawled inside her now, into her mouth and nostrils and ears and everywhere else they could fit, and when there was no more room the bees calmed, and settled onto the honeycomb and began rebuilding.

Lilith crawled a few feet across the bridge, pulled herself to her feet, and then began walking. The miller and his farmhands still chuckled at her as she made the trip back to them. If the thirty seconds it took to run to the bridge had seemed stretched into minutes by the cloud of angry bees that had followed her, the minutes it took her to walk back, gingerly avoiding stepping in ways that agitated the stings on her feet, seemed like hours. “That's it, then?” Lilith asked, “you won't tell the Guard?”

“Well, let's see, then,” the miller said, stepping towards his mill and poking the door open. Lilith remained behind on the road for fear that the miller would accuse her of trespassing again. The miller stepped in, every muscle on his body taught and ready to run, looked about, relaxed. After a while he came back to her, and gave her a pat on the back, which of course caused pain to race through her body again as he agitated a dozen stings. The bee's stingers had punched straight through her thin, ragged clothes. “Looks like they're about gone already,” the miller said, “I'll keep quiet about it, this time, at least. Come on back if you ever want to do me another favor!” The miller grinned.

Lilith glared back, but said only “yes, sir” on auto-pilot, and began walking away. She didn't think the stings were lethal but she really wasn't sure. The ratio of poison to blood certainly felt like it might kill her, and every second it grew just a little bit worse. She knelt down besides her hiding spot and pulled out the knife, slitting her wrist. She knew from her studies of the dark arts as a noble where to cut to get the most blood out, but she'd die of bloodloss long before she expunged the poison from her system. The important thing was less getting rid of poison, and more making room.

By the time she reached the riverbank, she was too weak and half-paralyzed besides to climb properly, and instead tripped and fell down the bank. The skale snacking on the dead pig hissed and backed away; this wasn't their territory, they had only come here to munch on the pig. Summoning up the last reserves of her strength, Lilith lunged for the throat of the closest one. What she got was its leg, but there were arteries in a leg. Her fangs slid out and she bit down, the other two fleeing as she sucked the blood from the skale, rejuvenating herself. The wound on her wrist sealed over. The swelling on her body went down, soon had almost vanished. Her limbs unlocked themselves. With a satisfied sigh, she pulled away from the drained corpse of the skale.

She waded along the river's edge, beneath the bridge, and cautiously peered up towards the mill. No sign of the miller or his lackeys. Submerging herself, she swam towards the shore, feeling blindly in front of herself until she found the clamshell, and then slid the knife between its lips, ripping it open. She could feel something very round inside, but curiously grainy. Pearls always felt less smooth than they looked. Cutting it free of the clam, she swam back, and did not resurface until she was under the shade of the bridge, gasping for air when she broke the surface. She examined the pearl in her hands. About as big as her closed fist, a beautiful sort-of metallic purple color. "Getting somewhere," she whispered, and climbed back up the bank to hide the pearl and the knife again. They could make her talk like a slave, but they weren't going to make her roll over and die like one.