CAPTAIN BLACKTHORN HAD BEEN with Admiral Jamison, Head of Security, and was late. Or so she felt, as she walked briskly up the avenue towards the last fountain and the gap in the shrubbery that led to a cool oasis of calm. Alice-land she now called it.
It was difficult not to be irritated and not for the obvious reasons. Something was amiss, and she couldn’t put her finger on it, yet. Jamison had paged her last night to arrange an early morning meeting, one, which, in the end, had taken, up most of the morning and had gone, quite frankly, nowhere.
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BLACKTHORN NEVER DID find out the woman’s name that afternoon—where she shared a couple of hours eating bread and honey—nor over the next few days. Somehow the woman always managed to skilfully change the subject, divert her attention elsewhere or just plain ignore her entreaties altogether, all with that same soft smile.
Infuriating, disarming, persuasive. She had come up with a number of adjectives with which to describe her enigmatic bee charmer, and some she wouldn’t even repeat in polite company.
My bee charmer?
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FORAGING DOWN RIVER from their makeshift camp, Delilah gathered black wild brambleberries from a tangled thicket near the water’s edge, piling the delicate fruit into a crude bark cone. Her head snapping up, alert, when she heard muted voices. Men’s guttural voices, arguing. There was a harsh barked laugh followed by a shrill shriek of a woman, which was quickly cut off by other indistinct muffled sounds. A horse whinnied across the river, to her left.
Someone else was making camp for the night. Two men, possibly more, and certainly one woman.
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