The Fifteen Words

Tove keeps eight hive boxes on the north track, past the second well, and she has never needed a second pair of hands out there. She can tell the weight of a full frame before it clears the rim. She can hear a hive change its mind half a tone before it does anything about it. What she cannot do — and will not pretend to do — is put any of it into words.

Then the village asks her to take an apprentice, and sends her a girl who narrates everything.

Pip is the miller’s niece. She arrives at a run with a notebook already out and a pencil on a string, and she has an opinion about the gate latch before she has touched it. She also keeps a column nobody has noticed, in which she counts every word her teacher spends on her.

Tove tries. On the second morning she teaches the way she has been asked to — in sentences, out loud, the full explanation — and the hive answers in the only language it has. Two stings. One cracked frame. Honey running down the side of a box, going nowhere, and nobody’s doing but her own.

What she finds afterwards is not a better explanation. It is the one hour a day the hive itself demands quiet, and everything she knows waiting inside it — in her hands, where it had been the whole time.

A cozy fantasy short story of Nine Ashes: an elven village of long lives and short conversations, where autumn arrives in the trees first and worries about the weather later, where a goat named Cask surveys the common from his wall, and where nobody makes an occasion of a second stool appearing beside the first.

No quests. No villains. No raised voices. Eight boxes, one girl, one season, and fifteen words.

For readers who loved: Travis Baldree, Becky Chambers, T. Kingfisher, Heather Fawcett, and Katherine Addison.

Nine Ashes Short Stories are standalone cozy fantasy short stories. Read in any order.