"I don't mind."
"You should mind. You're a duke. You're not supposed to kneel in a tub of bees and get stung for a woman who ran out of your house in the night."
He looked at her across the skep. "Isabel," he said.
It was the first time he had ever said her name. He said it as though he had been practicing it for a year and was afraid of getting it wrong.
"I have been a duke since I was nineteen. I have never once in my life been where I was supposed to be. I would rather be here."
She let go of his wrist. She put her hands back on the straw and began to drum again, because the bees had gone quiet and would start down again if she did not. After a moment, he did too.
They drummed for another quarter of an hour without speaking. Then she lifted the top skep. It was heavy. Every bee was hanging in a dark, sleepy cluster from the crown of the new house. The queen was somewhere in the middle of them. The old rotten straw below was empty except for the combs.
She set the new skep on its stone at the end of the row. She stood back. He came and stood beside her, to the side, out of the bees' road. His wrist had already begun to swell.
"Will you tell me why?" he said quietly. "Not now if you'd rather not, but will you?"
She watched the first bees come out of the new door, turn, fly a little way, and come back, learning where they lived.