Tamsin Nectarveil was born in a pocket of forest where the trees leaned close together to gossip. The elders called it Nectarveil because dawn arrived there early, as if the sun liked the place enough to show up ahead of schedule. Tamsin grew up small even for a gnome, all bright eyes and restless hands, the kind of child who could be trusted near a kettle, but not near a cupboard of interesting jars.

Her first teachers were bees.

Not in the storybook way, with tidy lessons and moral conclusions. In the real way: patience, distance, and the unspoken rule that every sweetness has a sting built into the fine print. Tamsin learned to read weather in the angle of a flight path. She learned that fear has a taste and anger has a heat. She learned that lies cling to the tongue like scorched sugar.

Her family kept hives the old way, tucked into hollow logs and covered with carved lids that looked like sleeping faces. They tended them with smoke and songs, with herbs hung under eaves, with respect that was half devotion and half apology. When Tamsin was old enough to carry water and keep her footing in the thick grass, she was given a veil and a promise.

“Be gentle,” her mother said, tying the knot under her chin. “Not because the world deserves it. Because you do.”

Tamsin took that promise seriously, the way gnomes take serious things: by making it practical. Gentle hands. Gentle words. Gentle bargains. She learned the folk remedies first, the ones every forest household needs: honey for burns, yarrow for bleeding, thyme for lungs, willowbark for pain. She learned how to set a bone with steady fingers, how to soothe a child with the rhythm of a lullaby tapped on a jar lid. The honey always helped, but it didn’t feel like magic yet. It felt like work, and work felt like home.

Then came the year the blossoms didn’t return.

The spring arrived on time, but the orchard trees held their buds as if they’d forgotten how to open. Wildflowers stayed tight-fisted. The hives woke hungry. The bees flew out and came back furious, carrying nothing but the taste of wrongness.

Something had changed in the deeper green.

Tamsin followed the swarm one misty morning, stepping over fallen branches and moss-soft stones, listening for that particular shift in the hum that meant they’d found something. The bees gathered at the roots of an old oak that no one in Nectarveil approached unless they had a reason and a witness. It was the kind of oak that made a person feel like a guest in their own skin.

There, in the shadow of the roots, was a small door in the bark, half hidden by lichen. It had always been there, the way old secrets are always there once you’ve noticed them. The bees circled it in a slow, measured pattern, not frantic, not aggressive. Expectant.

Tamsin did not knock. Knocking is for doors that want to pretend they aren’t listening.

She spoke instead, soft as smoke. “Please.”

The door opened with the quiet confidence of something that had never once been forced.

Inside was not a hollow but a room, and inside the room was not a throne but a presence, beautiful in the way storms are beautiful. The Queen Under the Old Oak did not wear a crown. The oak itself did that for her, branches arched overhead like antlers made of dusk.

“You carry my little heralds,” the Queen said, voice like leaves brushing together. “What do you want, honey-tongue?”

Tamsin swallowed. The air tasted like wild nectar and iron.

“Our blossoms are closing. The bees are hungry. Something has… soured.”

The Queen regarded her, and for a moment Tamsin felt every thought she’d ever had sit up straighter. “And what will you offer, small keeper, for a remedy you cannot brew?”

This was the first time Tamsin understood, truly understood, that the world was made of bargains. Even kindness had terms.

She should have run. She should have fetched elders and lanterns and prayers.

But her bees were hungry. Her neighbors were coughing. The orchard trees were failing.

So Tamsin made the gentlest bargain she could think of.
“I will carry your sweetness into the world,” she said. “I will heal where rot has taken hold. I will keep your name safe. And in return… you will open the blossoms. You will let the bees live.”

The Queen smiled, and the smile had no warmth in it at all. “A fine offer. But incomplete.”

“What else?” Tamsin asked.

“A secret,” said the Queen. “A small one. Something you have never spoken aloud.”

Tamsin’s hands clenched. She thought of all the tiny truths tucked inside her. The petty envies. The quiet fears. The little hopes she’d never dared to name.
And then she offered the one she could least afford to lose.

“I am afraid,” she whispered, “that one day I will not be gentle.”

The Queen’s gaze sharpened, delighted. “Perfect.”

The bargain sealed itself with a scent like crushed clover. The room blurred. Tamsin stumbled back into the forest with her veil half fallen and her heart hammering. Behind her, the oak’s door was gone again, and the bees were singing so loudly it felt like a second pulse in her chest.
Within a week, the blossoms opened.

The orchard erupted into pink and white. Wildflowers spilled across the understory like laughter. Nectarveil breathed again. The village called Tamsin a blessing, a prodigy, a miracle.

Tamsin smiled, nodded, and went back to work.
That’s the thing about bargains: they don’t always look like chains at first. Sometimes they look like gifts with ribbons.

Over the next months, Tamsin’s remedies began to change. Honey warmed in her hands and lit from within, gold so bright it left afterimages. Propolis threaded itself into hexagonal wards that clicked into place around doors and beds and lungs. Her smoke, when she chose, could still panic in a heartbeat or calm a rage into quiet tears. People started traveling from farther away, bringing sick children and wounded hunters and old grudges wrapped in politeness.

Tamsin never raised her voice. She didn’t need to. When she said, “Sit,” grown warriors sat. When she said, “Tell me what really happened,” liars found their tongues suddenly heavy. Not because she threatened them. Because the bees drifted close, tasting the air, and the hum went sharp whenever the truth soured.

The first time she realized what that bargain had cost her came on a rainy night at a stranger’s hearth. A man had tried to cheat her, claiming he’d paid when he hadn’t. Tamsin’s bees tasted the lie and spiraled toward his mouth like golden punctuation.

Tamsin looked at him, calm as ever, and felt something in her smile tilt. Not anger. Not cruelty. Something colder: certainty.

“I’m sure you meant well,” she said softly. “You may pay in coin… or in honesty.”

He laughed, uneasy. “What do you mean?”

Tamsin reached into her satchel and took out a tin no bigger than a teacup. Inside was honey so dark it was nearly black, thick as dusk. She had not made it. Not entirely.

The air turned still.

The man’s eyes widened, and the laugh died. “I… I paid,” he said again, weaker.

The bees’ hum sharpened like a drawn blade.
Tamsin did not raise her voice. “Choose.”
He chose honesty. He stammered the truth, cheeks burning, hands shaking as he placed the coins down with reverence. The room exhaled, and Tamsin slid the tin back into her satchel as if it were nothing more than salve.

Later, alone outside under the rain, she held the tin again and stared at her own reflection in the black honey. It did not show her face exactly right. It showed her as she might be if she stopped trying.

That night, she fashioned herself a bee-shaped hairpin from brass and amber, a little charm to anchor her. A reminder: order, purpose, discipline. The bees approved immediately, landing on it like it belonged.

The next spring, The Queen Under the Old Oak came calling, not in person, never in person. Her presence seeped into the world through small impossibilities. A blossom opening out of season. A fox speaking one sentence in perfect gnomish. A shadow in the shape of antlers in the corner of a room with no deer.
And a note, sealed in wax the color of old gold.
Tamsin broke the seal with trembling fingers. The message was simple.

“Carry my sweetness farther.”

So Tamsin built the Amber Ark, a small covered wagon converted into a living hive. It had lantern-hooks and honeycomb drawers and shelves for jars. It had a side hatch for the swarm and a little altar space for wax seals stamped with her sigil. The bees moved in as if they’d been waiting for it.

She left Nectarveil quietly, before anyone could stop her with gratitude.

Traveling suited her. Villages were simpler than courts, and roads were honest about being dangerous. She healed bites and burns, cured coughs with thyme and honey-light, warded barns with propolis sigils. She traded salves for bread, tinctures for stories. She listened more than she spoke, and people, foolish creatures, always filled silence with truth.

That became her real work.

Not healing bodies. Not even warding homes. Collecting secrets.

Because the Queen Under the Old Oak loved secrets the way bees loved nectar. And Tamsin’s bargain had included keeping the Queen’s name safe, and you keep a name safe by feeding the thing that owns it.
Tamsin never stole a secret outright. That would be crude.

She made gentle bargains.

“I can help,” she’d say softly. “But tell me one thing you’ve never admitted.”

Sometimes the confession was small: “I hate my brother’s laugh.” Sometimes it was enormous: “I buried the baron’s son beneath the mill.” Sometimes it was heartbreakingly human: “I don’t think I’m good.”

Tamsin stored those secrets the way she stored honey, in jars sealed with wax. She didn’t read them, not always. But she could feel their weight. The bees could taste their truth.

Over time, rumors grew around her wagon. Some called it a blessing. Some called it a curse. A few called it a moving shrine to a hidden queen.

Tamsin didn’t correct anyone.

She had learned that names were power, and she was careful with power.

Then the rot returned, as rot always does, in a new mask.
In a town too close to the border, a sickness spread that made people tell the truth until they bled. Lies peeled off them like skin. Friendships shattered. Confessions spilled. A priest tried to pray it away and collapsed mid-sermon, sobbing out every secret he’d ever heard.
Tamsin arrived on the third day, set her wagon by the well, and listened. The air tasted like panic and iron. Her bees flew tight patterns, agitated.

This was not her Queen’s work. It was something else: a truth twisted into a weapon.

Tamsin spent the night brewing. She warmed honey until it glowed. She stirred in crushed lavender, rosemary, and a pinch of salt. She added propolis, thick and stubborn. And then, reluctantly, she opened the little tin of dark honey and let one drop fall into the brew.

The mixture went quiet, as if it were listening.

At dawn, she walked the streets with her smoker-wand, releasing a cloud that smelled of thyme and summer. The bees followed, swirling like a cloak. The townsfolk watched, hollow-eyed, as she painted wax seals on doorframes and pressed honey-light into cracked lips.
“I’m going to ask you for something,” she said, voice soft enough to make them lean in. “Silence. Just for today. Let the truth rest.”

Some obeyed. Some couldn’t.

A man lunged at her, spitting accusations, eyes wild. “You’re a witch,” he snarled. “You want our secrets!”
Tamsin did not raise her voice. She did not flinch.
Her bees formed a perfect hexagon in the air between them, and the hum sharpened into a warning that made the man stop as if he’d hit a wall.

Tamsin looked at him with that calm, terrible gentleness. “I already have mine,” she said. “I’m trying to give you yours back.”

She cured the town in three days, not by removing truth, but by sealing it. By teaching it to wait. By reminding people that honesty without mercy was just another kind of violence.

When she was done, she sat on the step of her wagon, exhausted, and felt the Queen Under the Old Oak’s attention settle on her like a hand on the back of her neck.

“You did well,” the Queen’s voice rustled through the leaves nearby.

Tamsin stared into the wildflowers and didn’t answer right away.

“That wasn’t you,” she said finally. “That sickness. That wasn’t your sweetness.”

The Queen chuckled, amused. “No. Someone else is playing with truth. Careless little hands.”

Tamsin’s fingers tightened around her smoker-wand. “Then tell me who.”

“A bargain,” said the Queen, pleased. “Another one.”
Tamsin closed her eyes. There it was. Always the fine print. Always the sting.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“A secret you haven’t collected yet,” said the Queen. “Bring me the true name of the one spreading that rot. Names are delicious.”

Tamsin opened her eyes and felt her fear again, the old one she’d given away years ago. The fear that one day she would not be gentle.

Because this task wasn’t about healing. It was about hunting.

And hunting, even with honeyed words, changes a person.

But Tamsin had chosen her path the moment she’d said please at the oak door. She had built the Amber Ark. She had carried sweetness into places that didn’t deserve it. She had watched lies curdle and truths cut and still refused to raise her voice.

So she nodded once, small and steady.

“I’ll find the name,” she said. “But I decide the price.”
The Queen laughed, delighted. “Brave. Tiny. Dangerous.”
Tamsin returned to her wagon, slid open the hive hatch, and felt the swarm rise around her like a living cloak. The bees formed a spiral in the air, disciplined and bright, tasting the world ahead.

Tamsin Nectarveil tucked her bee-shaped hairpin into place, checked her jars, and took the road.
Somewhere out therae, someone was turning truth into poison.

And if they thought a quiet gnome with honey hands couldn’t be terrifying, they were about to learn a very old lesson.

Sweetness has terms.

(Written by AI – ChatGPT)