had

months Shael had seldom heard him use more than three words in his rare sentences.
Shael was already busy loosening the man’s collar. She looked at the ring on the hand the bee master was holding up. The fingers were already so swollen that the gold edges cut deep into the white flesh. They were not a working man’s hands. Too soft and too white, with the nails clean and exquisitely manicured. It was enough to make her look twice at the ring with its small engraved claw clutching at a tiny solitaire diamond. She felt the blood drain from her face as she stood up, looking carefully at the features obscured by the black sting points and the beginning of swelling.
The cry that was torn from her was not just fear: it was also loaded with misery. “They’ve found me!” The beekeeper and his wife stared at her in astonish­ment. It wasn’t what she said. It was just that after nearly nine months of silence they no longer expected her to speak.
In the beginning it seemed the easiest way to avoid talking of her origins until she left. After a week Shael had decided that if it meant keeping quiet for the rest of her life she would do it. She had by luck, and poison ivy, stumbled on a nest of security and hap­piness she never wanted to leave. The beekeeper and his wife were simple folk. People who, a month before, she would have dismissed as nonentities, whose way of life would have bored her to the screaming point in minutes. It had taken dispossession and terror to give her the parents she’d never had. She felt the tears start behind her eyelids, and instinctively turned to the reaching