I raised my shoulders. “Papa has the recipe for sugar cakes written down in one of his journals. We’ll look it up and see for certain, but I think it’s about ten pounds per hive.”
Merry whistled out a low note through her teeth. “Where are we going to find thirty pounds of sugar?”
“I don’t know. I just…” Hot acid burbled up from my stomach, scalding my throat and choking my words. “I don’t know, Merry.”
“We could ask around town, see if people have any they’d be willing to let us buy?”
“With what? Papa took the harvest money with him, and Sam took the honey. We don’t have anything to buy or trade with. Certainly not enough for thirty pounds of sugar.”
Sadie chewed on her lip. “What about Uncle Ezra? And Thomas? Maybe they have sugar. Or would know what to do.”
The thought had crossed my mind. You were supposed to be able to lean on family in times of trial. But Ezra wasn’t exactly family. Not yet, at least.
“Maybe,” I said half-heartedly. “But we don’t know them well. It’s best not to count on them for anything yet.”
Sadie’s eyes were dark with worry. “So…what are we going to do, then?”
“I don’t know,” I repeated, hopelessness casting a bleak shade of gray over everything. I bit my lip, drawing blood, and ground myself into that pain. I would not lose control in front of my sisters. I would stay strong. “I don’t know.”
* * *
Later that night, I lay in bed while my sisters slept, hopefully lost in sweet dreams and heedless of my stumbling plight. I’d been able to hold back the rushing eddies of panic through dinner and cleanup—we’d even read the story of Jonah and the whale before bed, one of Merry’s favorites—but the moment I closed my eyes, worry swept over me, dragging me down, down, down into its dark abyss.
I had to get out.
It was too hot.
Too stifling.
I felt as though the house would collapse under the weight of my distress, crushing me into a dismal grave I’d never escape.
I raced out the door and ran into the night, clutching at my chest and gasping for air. My rib cage felt too small by half, squeezing and tightening until I feared I’d snap in two. I drew breaths in as deeply as I could, but they weren’t enough. Dark stars spun before my eyes, and some small functioning part of me wondered if I was about to pass out.
The frigid night air was a shock to my system, but even it couldn’t stop such unchecked hysteria. I couldn’t keep still. My feet itched to be in motion, and carried me out into the burnt fields, where I paced like a madwoman.
Sadie and I had gone through every possible thing of value we could sell or trade, while Merry had gone door-to-door, pleading for sugar. She’d returned home with downcast eyes, misery written across her face.
There wasn’t a single sack of sugar to be had in Amity Falls—not at any price.
I sank to the ground now, staining my nightdress with remnants of old ashes and frost.
Our only hope was the supply run.
I’d tried reassuring myself that surely someone would think to bring sugar back with them, but my mind wouldn’t leave well enough alone. It wasn’t a guarantee. I couldn’t assume that would happen and relax. I needed a backup plan. There had to be some way of getting out of this mess. If only the waves of panic would recede long enough for me to be able to think.
I’d run through the absolute worst scenarios that could occur—all three hives starved, leaving us with only two boxes. Two wouldn’t produce enough of a honey surplus. Not with all our savings being handed over to a faraway hospital. We needed more bees.
It was possible to lure a swarm of wild bees in, come spring. Papa had certainly done it before, but I didn’t have the slightest idea how to go about such a thing. Bees swarmed at the beginning of spring, as flowers burst into bloom and their nectar flowed heavily.
But our fields, usually so tempting to bees, were decimated, our supply of seeds burnt to ashes.
Even if I knew how to catch a swarm, I had no way to draw them to the farm.
I needed to find a way to feed the bees we already had.
“Ellerie?”
The voice came out of the darkness, cutting its way through my haze of despair, almost as if the night itself had spoken to me. When I glanced about the barren fields, it seemed I was alone. I shifted my eyes toward the tree line and the watchful gaze of the ever-present pines. The shadows there shifted, lightening into a form, and for one horrible moment, I feared it was the thing I thought I’d seen racing across the fields the night before.
“What on earth are you doing out here in the cold?” Whitaker asked, stepping free of the forest’s grasp. Unlike me, he was dressed for the chilly night, with a heavy wool coat. His rucksack was thrown over both shoulders and stuffed impossibly full, making him look like a turtle moving about.
“I—I don’t really even know,” I admitted, a shiver slicing through my words. “I just couldn’t stay inside the house any longer.”
In an instant, the bag was off and he slipped free of his coat and wrapped it around my shoulders. His body heat lingered, warming and surrounding me with his scent—leather and tannins and something green, like freshly cut grass. It was an intoxicating combination, and it wasn’t until I took a deep, savoring breath of it that I realized the tightness across my chest was gone. The panic had ebbed away, soothed by his mere presence.
“Thank you,” I said, tugging my braid over my shoulder in an attempt to cover the split neckline of my nightdress. I burrowed deeper into the coat’s sleeves. “You’re traveling awfully late. How was your hunting trip?”
“Awfully early,” he corrected me, pointing to the moon’s position in the sky. “Birds will be up soon. Couldn’t sleep?” he guessed.
“It—it’s been quite a whirlwind since you left.”
He plopped himself down in the middle of the field, heedless of the dirt, the dark, or the cold. “Is that a fact? Tell me about it.”
I explained the emergency town meeting, the poor harvest and black rot, and the necessity for a late-season supply run.
“Sam volunteered to go out with the party,” I ended, and his expression grew grave.
“He left you and your sisters all alone?”
“Even worse—he decided to harvest more of the honey before he left. I guess he wanted to try to sell it in the city? He took it from the bees’ reserves, and now they won’t have enough to get through the winter.”