She could not answer that. She looked down at her own hands on the straw. They were brown and rough, and there were two stings healing on the back of the left one, and a line of old propolis under the nails that no amount of scrubbing would ever get out. They were not the hands of the girl in blue silk he had danced with.
"I am not the person you danced with, Your Grace," she said. "You've come all this way for somebody who isn't here anymore."
"I know." He said it without any hurry. "I watched you take a swarm off my lime tree with your bare hands. The person I danced with was pretending to be a companion. She was never very good at it."
A bee got under his cuff then. She saw it go. She saw him feel it and go still, and she saw the sting go in on the inside of his wrist where the skin is thin. He kept drumming. His eyes never even went to it. He only let out a breath very slowly through his nose and kept the beat as steady as a clock.
It was Isabel who stopped. She reached across the tub, took his hand by the wrist, and turned it over. The sting was still in him, with the little pulsing bag at the top of it. She scraped it out sideways with her thumbnail, the way Kezia had taught her, without squeezing.
"You must never pinch it," she said. Her voice was not quite steady. "It pumps the rest of the poison in."
"I didn't know that."
"Nobody does."
She was still holding his wrist, and she kept hold of it. She could feel his pulse under her fingers, going quite as fast as her own.
"It will swell. By tonight, it will itch like a nettle."