Ingredients:

Bramblewilde’s honey was famous, not just in their own village, but in every village their village traded with. It was warm and sweet as late summer sunlight, and some said the smallest taste would cause you to forget all your cares and woes.

Others said too large a taste would lead you to forget your own name, and more besides, and so it was better to stick to the honey sold by the local goodwives and leave the fairy’s alone—even if Bramblewilde’s was the sweetest in the shire.

The villagers often speculated about what made Bramblewilde’s honey so fine. 

Some claimed the fairy sang to their bees, or told them stories, bending over the three hives behind their cottage like a doting parent. Others thought Bramblewilde had brought the bees over with them from Faerieland—that they were fae bees, raised on a diet of magic.

Whatever the true reason, the honey they produced glowed like an amber sun, brought joy to the heart, and healed cuts in a day. But not all in the village trusted it.

Just as not all in the village trusted the fairy.

Two to three heads of dried lavender, grown in the soil of Faerieland. Half a cup of dark brewed tea. A half cup of sugar. The scraped contents of one vanilla bean…

In the spring, Bramblewilde stood in their garden and frowned.

Every year their village held a May Day market, but if Bramblewilde’s plants did not rally, they would have nothing to sell.

The tangle of blackberry and rose vines covering their cottage’s stone walls had struggled to put out blooms, and those they did were pale and anemic. The daffodils and peonies in the front beds took their time, the daffodils’ yellow heads bent, the peonies’ buds tightly furled.

Only the lavender had done well.

Bramblewilde’s bees bobbed and hummed among its purple heads, searching for sustenance. Bramblewilde hummed too, spreading dark, rich earth—gathered on a full-moon night from the edge of the Wood behind their cottage, the Wood at the border of Faerieland—over the beds.

“What is it with you?” Bramblewilde scowled at their plants. Bramblewilde’s blue shift and long curls billowed and danced in the spring breeze. Their bare toes dug into the earth.

It was cold, still, but not too cold for Bramblewilde.

“The sun is shining. The rain falls softly in the night. Things are not so bad.”

But the rain did not fall softly in the night.

It battered. It lashed.

It poured.

Bramblewilde’s peonies melted almost before they bloomed, and every morning their bees were sodden and grumpy.

And so Bramblewilde gathered what blooms they could salvage, and cut and dried lavender to make up for the rest, muttering lines of poetry from when they were a fairy-child.

“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying…”

The day of the market, they held conference with the bees, who chose one of their number for this year’s outing. Bramblewilde wriggled their nose and sneezed—one, two, three!—and the bee became a milk-white mule. A thimble tossed in the air became a cart.

Bramblewilde filled the cart with blooms and hitched it to the mule, and together the three marched into town, Bramblewilde going before and crying “Flowers fresh, flowers fine!” at the top of their lungs.

The villagers heard Bramblewilde’s cart before they saw it. Bramblewilde’s husky voice and the chiming of the cart’s fairy bells wove between the market stalls, which were set up in one of Squire Rothchild’s empty fields. The scent of lavender, likewise, drifted in on the cool spring breeze, twining among the scents of freshly baked bread, livestock and beer, cured meat. 

The villagers turned their heads at Bramblewilde’s approach, and Bramblewilde’s voice dimmed under their stares.

An uneasiness pervaded the market this year. Goods, Bramblewilde noticed, were much less plentiful than children and livestock. The bookseller’s wife cast a worried glance at the dripping nose of her youngest, a toddling boy of three or four with blonde curls and perpetually sticky hands. Men muttered about the bad weather, their worries for a hard year ahead; women swapped remedies for colds and tips for sweating out a fever. 

“Pan must be out of temper this year,” Bramblewilde said.

At the grocer’s stall, Bramblewilde traded bundles of dried lavender for small quantities of sugar and tea, a single precious vanilla bean. The grocer’s daughter weighed and measured the goods with brisk efficiency. Her dress and apron were clean and carefully mended, her dark hair tucked under a linen cap, though her face was lean and wary.

When Bramblewilde threw in a rose, gallantly pinning it to her cap, she smiled.

…Two eggs, preferably of red hens, freshly laid and still warm. A cup and a half of milk, from cows fed on a diet of moonlit clover. A generous pat of butter, softened in sunlight…

In summer, the grocer’s daughter sweated under the glare of a harsh sun. Despite the relentless spring rain, the village wells had run low of fresh water and streams dried up in drought. Every day she was sent to fetch water from a spring in the Wood—the only one of her family brave enough to venture beneath its green canopy.

She frowned as she trudged along the dusty cart track leading out of town, tucking the empty pail more securely under her arm. The grocer’s daughter often frowned when she was deep in thought.

Today she was thinking of all the things she knew (how to set a broken leg, the cost of a pod of vanilla from the south, who in the village was good for a debt, and who would drink their money away before paying) and all the things she didn’t (the scent of the sea crossed by the ships that brought the vanilla beans, why her mother’s brow creased in worry when she looked at her, how to mend her friend’s broken heart).

Her friend—Mary Cicely, the tailor’s daughter—had her heart set on the baker’s son, who had eyes only for Squire Rothchild’s rosy-cheeked ploughman, and nothing anyone could say would stop her mooning.

Just that day, the grocer’s daughter had said, “Suppose, a few years from now, you and I set up a shop together. We could sell sweets and bolts of cloth and beautiful ribbons, and sleep upstairs together in a little poster bed. You could charm the customers, and I’d keep the books and handle the funds.”

But Mary Cicely had had only sighed.

The grocer’s daughter sighed too she bent down to scoop water from the bubbling stream. It was cooler beneath the boughs of the trees, though her neck prickled as if someone watched her. She murmured a few words of thanks as she straightened, the pail balanced carefully, so not to splash.

She wished she knew the real words, the proper words—the sort of subtle spells that would gently change the world around her.

She looked down at her chapped hands.

On her way back home, she paused as she passed Bramblewilde’s cottage, which sat at a distance from the rest of the village. The windows were all open—in desperation, she supposed, to catch some sort of breeze—and on the windowsills perched Bramblewilde’s heat-struck bees, sipping from dishes of honeyed water.

She could see Bramblewilde in their kitchen, churning milk into butter.

The grocer’s daughter touched her cap, as if thinking of something past, and then she continued on her way, humming lines of a song she couldn’t remember where she’d picked up: “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying...”

…Two and a half cups of flour. A pinch of salt. One and a half cups of honey, from bees who have fed on a diet of stories and dreams.

In autumn, there was wheat blight. And hop blight. And a bone-aching cold that moved in almost before the firewood had been chopped.

The apples rotted on the trees, good for nothing but bitter applesauce and cider.

“God is angry at us,” the Reverend Merriweather warned from the village pulpit. “We must repent.”

Bramblewilde thought there might be something in that—though they had never seen Him angry at a certain set of humans specifically.

“Still, He brings the rains and controls the winds,” Bramblewilde muttered, “and in His hoofprints all things grow.”

Bramblewilde was lucky enough to secure a precious pound of stone-ground flour from the village mill, trading a jar of their honey.

The honey they’d harvested carefully, murmuring to their bees all the while.

“I will leave you enough to make it through winter, never fear. And when you are huddled together sleeping in your hive, and the wind roars and the snow piles high all around, I will drag myself away from the fire to whisper you stories.”

Until then, the bees joined Bramblewilde in their kitchen, overseeing the stockpiling of their meagre winter stores.

Outside, hungry children in bonnets and pinafores pressed their faces to Bramblewilde’s wicket gate, eager for a glimpse of the fairy. Bramblewilde noticed the bookseller’s child among them, his sticky hands wrapped around the wickets, his nose running faster than ever.

The village fairy was a wonder to be spied upon, Bramblewilde thought, but not a neighbor to come to for assistance in hard times. Oh no!

Wind howled through a chink in the door. Bramblewilde stopped it up with a handy book of spells, grumbling.

“The only thing this twaddle is good for.”

Once, Bramblewilde had had an apprentice—the eager young son of the Squire Rothchild—and the blue book of spells had been the child’s favorite. But as he grew older, he’d come by less and less, adopting the village’s wariness of the fairy. These days, Bramblewilde heard he preferred the study of Latin and history, the pursuit of horses and hounds.

“Young popinjay,” Bramblewilde sniffed.

Perhaps one day, Bramblewilde thought, a girl would come to the cottage—a wise and efficient young girl like the grocer’s daughter—and Bramblewilde would teach her what they knew of flowers and magic and bees.

Perhaps she would stay awhile, long enough for trust to grow between them.

Perhaps she would marry or yearn for the wider world and leave.

You’re lonely, said the bees. And: Old Time is still a-flying.

“Nonsense!” Bramblewilde stuck their pointed nose in the air. And: “Don’t you quote poetry at me!”

Do you ever regret leaving?

Bramblewilde gazed out of the kitchen window, towards the brown Wood that bordered Faerieland. They had left of their own accord, though they were forced to operate under a geas in the human world. One part of the geas stated they could never return—not until certain conditions were met.

Bramblewilde had since adopted this village as their own, and though they had lived there a century—long enough no one remembered when they had come—they had never truly been accepted the way they’d hoped to be.

“I didn’t realize,” Bramblewilde said, “how exhausting it would be.”

Instructions:

Harvesting honey was simple.

Each year, Bramblewilde carried the wooden frames of honeycomb into their kitchen, a few of the bees following to lap up the sticky drops that dripped onto the flagstones.

Using a long, flat knife, Bramblewilde scraped the honey and wax from the frames into a bowl lined with cheesecloth. For hours, the strained honey would drop into the bottom of the bowl, like little plinks and plops of sunlight, distilled memories and stories and dreams, leaving the wax behind.

Often, the bees perched on the rim of the bowl to observe.

The strained honey would be scooped into jars sealed with beeswax, the jars squirreled away at the top of Bramblewilde’s cupboard like a hoard of jewels.

Due to its magical properties, it was only ever used sparingly, and bartered away at great cost.

Sweep your cold hearth clean and make a goodly fire, letting the wood burn away to hot coals…

Even the grocer’s daughter’s grandmother agreed: that winter was the harshest in memory.

The cold came fast and hard—a bone-cracking, ice-popping cold that blackened her little brothers’ fingers and toes and killed livestock in barns and animals in their hollows.

Hard on its heels came hunger, her neighbors who ventured outside bundled so tightly in furs they waddled like the fattest squire, while their sunken cheeks and hollowed eyes told a different story.

Behind the hunger came the wolves, slinking out of the Wood, out of half-remembered stories and fears and nightmares. They snatched geese and chickens, killed calves and lambs, and the girl who laid the fires and swept the shop said they even poured through the unsealed chinks in a wall or around an unlocked doorjamb to take the children in their beds.

And that was not all.

On the backs of the wolves rode a sickness—a fever that swept through the village. Though the grocer’s family was so far spared, horrible stories were traded over the counter like coins: Those who were ill sweated in bed, though the snow rose to the windowsills and the wind howled through the cracks. For seven days and nights they were delirious, while their families looked on, helpless, touching a damp cloth to their forehead, spooning broth into their mouth. 

And then they vomited out all the contents of their stomach.

Those who kept enough water down lived.

The bookseller’s fair-haired child was the first lost. The grocer’s daughter sewed black armbands for the funeral. When it came time to dig the child’s grave, the frozen ground was too hard.

The villagers built a cairn of stones instead.

The grocer’s daughter had no more time to loiter outside Bramblewilde’s cottage, dreaming of a different life. Not when there was so much work to be done. And the Wood was unsafe now, with or without the proper words and spells.

And even if she had them, would good would they do?

Miles away, Bramblewilde asked the same thing.

“What am I good for?” Bramblewilde cried, pacing back and forth in front of their hearth. “What good is my magic? The villagers will not trust me to help—and even if they did, I know no spells to counteract this! What good are flowers and honey against cold and fever and wolves? Stupid!” Bramblewilde tugged their curls. “Useless!”

They regretted offering no help to their neighbor with a sickly cow.

They regretted not feeding the children at the gate from their meagre stores.

And yet, had the shoe been on the other foot, what would the villagers have done? No one, they thought, would have helped Bramblewilde.

Surely the villagers deserved whatever hardships they got.

Or did they?

The lines of their poem ran through Bramblewilde’s mind: Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying; and this same flower that smiles today, tomorrow will be dying.

Bramblewilde went out to the hives to ask the bees’ opinion, slipping their bare feet into snowshoes.

Why would you want to help them? the bees buzzed, a thousand voice as one. There was something of a mocking tone to the buzz. Haven’t they rejected you? Distrusted you?

Bramblewilde kicked at the hives with their snowshoes and hissed in frustration. “You know they have!”

The whir of the bees’ wings, from inside the hive, sounded almost like laughter.

“They are stubborn and distrustful, yes. And stupid too, sometimes. And yet—

“And yet, yesterday I saw old Mrs. Rackham pushing through the snow, bundled in wool up to her eyeballs. She was carrying a pot of soup to the Greene children, who lost their parents to the sickness. She had the warm pot wrapped in a linen cloth, embroidered by her own hands.

“This past spring, the Greene children danced circles around her at market day and called her a hag!

“So you see, I must do something. I chose this village. For good or for ill, I chose it. But what good am I? What could I possibly do?”

True, the bees said. What could you do? What good are flowers and honey against cold and fever and wolves?

What good is warmth and sweetness and light?

The bees were silent for a long time.

“Well?” Bramblewilde thumped the roof of the nearest hive.

Has the cold stopped up your brain? Must we spell it out for you? What do you have? What have we given you?

“Honey?” Bramblewilde frowned thoughtfully.

What is needed, after such a year? What comes at the end of every story and dream?

What is forgetting, stretched and baked golden and subtly changed?

…Mix the wet and dry ingredients separately, then mix wet into dry. When no lumps remain, scrape batter into a round tin and bake until risen and golden brown. Warning: cake should be fragrant enough to receive surprise visits from neighbors…

“Honey,” Bramblewilde muttered as they riffled through their cabinet. “Flour, eggs…Yes, yes!” They placed the ingredients on the bare wooden table. “Milk? A bit. Vanilla. Sugar, yes!”

When everything was collected, it did not look like much. A few remaining handfuls of flour. A jar of honey. The last of the milk and butter and eggs. A collection hardly big enough to fill the center of the table.

“Something so small—what good could it do?” Bramblewilde murmured to themself. “Surely it won’t change anything?”

But they stoked the fire in the kitchen hearth and fetched their wooden bowl and spoon all the same, and soon the honeycake was baking in the coals.

By this time, it was late March—and yet, from the snow and ice piled against Bramblewilde’s window, anyone would have thought it was the height of winter still. Thirteen cairns had joined that of the bookseller’s child—fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, siblings and spouses alike.

No longer content to devour only the poor, the sickness had touched even the highest in the village, and it was rumored that at the manor, Squire Rothchild’s son tossed and turned with fever.

When the cake was finished, Bramblewilde cut it into twelve equal pieces, and then they wrapped it in a cloth, strapped on their snowshoes, and sallied forth.

In the tailor’s apartments at the back of his shop, Mary Cicely lay dying.

The family huddled around a blaze lit from the last of the firewood, while the mother bathed her daughter’s red face with a cloth dipped in snowmelt.

When Bramblewilde pushed their way into the cramped rooms, they found the grocer’s daughter there, white fingers clenched in those of her sick friend. Bramblewilde nodded to her in greeting, and she gave the fairy a tight smile.

The family was initially hesitant to accept help from Bramblewilde. But the grocer’s daughter—her name was Athena, a fanciful name for a girl with chapped hands and mended clothes—spoke above their hard silences, like the sun cracking ice.

“Bramblewilde,” she said, “has always been fair in their dealings with me.” And she gave the fairy another smile. “They have a kind heart. And are stubborn enough to refuse to leave, if we do not comply.”

And after all, the scent of the honeycake—warmth and sweetness and light—did much to persuade. The family shared a slice, even slipping a bite between Mary Cicely’s lips. And if Mary Cicely did not wake or open her eyes, at least she passed into a peaceful sleep.

When Bramblewilde left their rooms, they thought they heard one of the children break into a piping laugh.

Bramblewilde visited many such rooms in the village that day. It was true some slammed the door in the fairy’s face, and others crossed their arms in stony silence, but many accepted a slice of honeycake, and felt their hearts lighter when the fairy left.

At Squire Rothchild’s manor, the butler showed Bramblewilde upstairs to the room of his young master, and Bramblewilde bent over the feverish young man, seeing in his red cheeks and blue eyelids and dark curls the boy who had once sat at their kitchen table reading the book of spells.

“Here is a spell for you,” Bramblewilde said as they fed the young man a few bites of honeycake. “May you gather rosebuds while ye may, for Old Time is still a-flying.”

Share.

There was one slice of honeycake left.

Bramblewilde carried it back to their cottage and sat down at their little wooden table, planning to eat it themself. The sweet scent of honey filled the room.

But then Bramblewilde remembered what Reverend Merriweather had said about God, and the harsh weather the village had had all year, and they gazed out of their kitchen window, past the obscuring ice and snow, to the Wood.

If He was anywhere to be found in the village, He would be there.

Bramblewilde was not allowed to return to Faerieland—not yet—and the Wood was its border.

And yet.

The Wood was not Faerieland—not Faerieland itself. If they tramped through it—if they zig-zagged back and forth, now here, now there—would it really count?

Bramblewilde looked at the golden slice of honeycake and sighed. And then they wrapped it in a clean cloth and strapped on their snowshoes again, and they carried it into the Wood.

Winter still gripped the Wood in an iron fist. The swish of Bramblewilde’s snowshoes was loud beneath the bare, dark boughs—shh, shh. The air was clear, the ground covered in a blanket of snow.

Nothing stirred. Nothing moved.

Sound carried strangely in the Wood. Bramblewilde zig-zagged back and forth—now here, now there—following a song on the edge of their hearing.

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may…

A lilting song, but a sad one.

Bramblewilde found Him in a clearing.

One moment His body filled the space—curving horns snagging in the bare branches overhead, hairy limbs thick and knotted as tree trunks—and the next He was small as man. He crouched, goat’s hind limbs sunk hock-deep in the snow, gazing at something small and dark in the hollow of a snowdrift. He looked up briefly when Bramblewilde crept forward, and in His green eyes Bramblewilde felt the warmth of a glade in deep summer.

Tears dripped down His face and fell hissing into the snow.

“My lord,” Bramblewilde said, “what is it?”

“Come here, my child.” Pan stretched out one immense, brown hand and pointed.

A sparrow, fallen in the snow.

“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” Pan sang, “Old Time is still a-flying; and this same flower that smiles today, tomorrow will be dying.

“It must have returned from the south too soon, and been surprised to find its home still covered with snow. It froze in one of the trees above and toppled to the ground.” Pan’s voice was the rich rumble of roots reaching beneath the earth. The sparrow’s round eye stared up at the cold blue sky above. “Is it not said: Not a sparrow falls but He does not know?”

Pan, alone among the pantheon, had no companions but those He cared for. He tried to care for them well.

But it had been a hard year.

That spring, his favorite glade of bluebells had washed away in the heavy rains; in the summer, streams whose courses He’d followed all His life had dried up in drought. A fire, in the Wood, on the hottest, driest day, had consumed trees who stood for centuries and suffocated a family of rabbits in their dens.

And autumn—autumn had brought a cold snap that froze unprepared animals; winter brought the wolves.

“I didn’t know,” Pan said, “how exhausting it would be.”

“I thought you might be angry,” Bramblewilde said.

“Angry?” Pan looked at them, tears swimming in the green pools of His eyes. “It is lonely,” Pan said, “what we are.”

“Yes.” Bramblewilde crept closer, daring to place one long-fingered hand on Pan’s flank. “Yes, sometimes it is.”

Pan was silent for a long time.

“Sometimes,” Bramblewilde said. “Sometimes the rain does not fall softly in the night. Sometimes it batters. It lashes. It pours.

“But look!” Bramblewilde gazed up at the sky. “The sun is shining. And I have brought you something, my lord.” They folded back the green cloth covering the last slice of honeycake. “Perhaps you would like to try a bite?”

“What is it, little one?” Pan asked.

“Hope,” said Bramblewilde.

Pan looked at the small slice. “Hope,” He repeated. “And what of you? Will you not try a bite?”

And so Bramblewilde broke off a small bite of the honeycake for themself. As they chewed, the sweetness of high summer filled their mouth.

“The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,” Bramblewilde continued the song, “the higher he’s a-getting.”

Pan lifted the slice of honeycake to his rosy lips and took a sharp-toothed bite.

“Life is not a race to be run,” Bramblewilde improvised, “the joy is in the living!”

A smile spread over Pan’s face.

He raised his green eyes to the sun.

Postscript: Save some for yourself.

That year, spring came to the village all at once.

The ice cracked in the ponds and the snow melted almost overnight.

Green burst from the hedges—and then flocks of birds, roosting and squabbling noisily, singing in the fragrant morning air.

The rain fell softly in the night.

The wolves slunk back to colder climes. Those who had been sick recovered in the new balmy weather. Squire Rothchild’s son opened his eyes and asked for a book, and in the village High Street Mary Cicely the tailor’s daughter could be seen, bravely dressed with ribbons in her hair as she leaned shakily on Athena’s arm. The cairns were dismantled, and those who had died during the freeze were buried in freshly turned soil.

In the Wood, the skeleton of a sparrow decayed beneath the snow melt, and if it did not grow feathers and fly away, at least it was used by those who lived in the soil, and went on to feed flowers and trees—plants that in their turn fed others.

And so life went on.

At Bramblewilde’s cottage, the rose and blackberry vines blushed green—and soon had put out the first yellow and pink buds. The bees hummed busily among the blooms in a self-satisfied sort of way.

One day in late April, a few days before the May Day market, a young girl showed up at Bramblewilde’s door.

She carried a gift in her basket—packets of tea and a sandy cone of sugar—and though usually she was brisk and efficient, when Bramblewilde came to the door she looked down and shuffled her feet.

When she looked up, there was something in her face it took Bramblewilde a few seconds to name.

Hope.

“Will you teach me?” Athena said.

 

(Editors’ Note: Jordan Taylor is interviewed by Caroline M. Yoachim in this issue.)

© 2024 Jordan Taylor