The Apiarist of Cathedral Ring

About this book

For two hundred years, seventy thousand people have lived inside Cathedral Ring, a sealed stone city that believes it needs no one. Hestrine Orbec keeps its bees, and her weight ledgers say what nobody wants written down: the stores are falling, the great Mother Hive's queen is failing, and raising a new one is a capital crime. Then her lost swarm leads her out onto the ash-flats to a half-frozen stranger the bees have kept alive all night — a man with a grafting knife in his boot and a craft no one inside the Ring is allowed to learn. He comes from the country her city insists does not exist. Every lamp in the Ring burns honey. Every dose in the infirmary is honey. Hestrine has one season's weight left, and only one law she can break.