The Honey-Wife's House

I. The Smell on the Wind

Samhain had come and gone. The fires had burned down to ash, the dead had been fed and lighted home, and the Wheel had carried the hall at the edge of the pines over the threshold into the dark half of the year. The sun walked deep in Scorpio now. The moon was waning toward her dark, and each evening came on a little earlier than the one before.

It was Saturn's day, a week after the great feast, cold and still. The Sound-Weaver had gone out walking with the Star-Reader at his side and Gweeny ahead of them, as they often did when the hall felt too small. The sand of the path was cold even through his boots. The pines stood quiet overhead, and the fallen needles gave under every step with a soft, damp hush. Somewhere a nuthatch was working its way down a trunk, talking to itself in small tin-horn notes.

Then Gweeny stopped.

The Sound-Weaver heard it before anything else: the quick tick of claws on the path cut off all at once, then nothing but a long, careful snuffling. He knelt and found the little dog with one hand. Gweeny's whole long body was pointed off the path into the trees, nose high, trembling from his ears to the tip of his tail.

The Sound-Weaver lifted his own face to the wind and breathed in. Under the resin and the cold and the wet needles there was something that did not belong to the forest at all. Honey. Then ginger, and clove, and warm butter, and the dark, toasted smell of something baking.

"Do you smell that?" he said.

The Star-Reader breathed in beside him. "Someone's baking," she said. "Out here?"

"Not someone," the Sound-Weaver said. "Something."

He listened. Beneath the hush of the pine crowns, so faint he could not be sure of it at first, came a ringing, high and clear and broken into many small voices, like glass bells hung in a wind.

II. The Bells in the Pines

They left the path. Gweeny led, low to the ground, stopping now and then to be sure of the trail before trotting on. The Sound-Weaver followed the ringing, and the Star-Reader kept her hand light on his arm where the ground grew rough.

The pines thinned. Older trees took their place, broad oaks whose dead leaves still clung and rattled, and holly growing thick between them. The Sound-Weaver brushed a holly leaf and drew his hand back from its points. Holly stays green through the cold. It belongs to the dark half of the year and to the Holly King who rules it until Yule, and he took it as a sign that they were going the right way.

The ringing grew. Now he could pick out its notes, and he stopped so suddenly that the Star-Reader nearly walked into him.

"They're in tune," he said.

"What are?"

"The bells. Whatever they are. Listen." He hummed the lowest note under his breath, then the one above it, then the next, building the chord. "Every one of them sits with the others. Someone tuned them."

Then the ground changed under their feet. The soft needles gave way to something that crunched with every step, fine and sharp and loud in the quiet, like frost on a winter morning. The Sound-Weaver crouched and pressed his fingers into it. It was dry and gritty and not cold at all. He brought a pinch to his tongue.

"Sugar," he said, and laughed. "The path is made of sugar."

Gweeny had already worked that out. He was licking the path with great seriousness.

III. The House of Sweet Things

The house stood in a clearing among the hollies. The Sound-Weaver knew it by the change in the air: the wind broke around it, the sound of their footsteps came back to them off a wall, and the smell of honey and spice was so thick he could almost lean on it.

"Tell me," he said.

The Star-Reader was quiet a moment. "It's small," she said. "A cottage. The walls are brown, the brown of chestnuts, dark and glossy, laid in bricks. The mortar between them is white as the first snow. The roof is golden. There are icicles all along the eaves, clear ones, catching the light. And the windows..." She drew breath. "Every pane is a different colour. Amber, and rose, and pale gold, and one that's almost green, like a pear. The light comes through them onto the sugar path in little patches of colour."

He went to the wall and laid his palm flat against it. The brick was dense under his hand, a little tacky, faintly warm, as if the sun had been on it, though there had been no sun all day. Its face was glazed as smooth as a river stone. He ran his thumb along the seam to the next brick and found the white mortar hard and gritty, piped in a neat ridge. He leaned close and breathed in honey and clove and orange peel.

"Lebkuchen," he said. "The honey cakes of the old country. The whole house is built of them."

He followed the wall to a window and found the shutter folded back beside it. It was a thin, flat biscuit, crisp at the edges, and across its face ran raised shapes pressed in from a carved mould. He read them with his fingertips the way he read his runes. A stag with branching antlers. A ship with three masts. A woman seated at a spinning wheel, her thread running out from her hand. On the next shutter, a hound, long in the body and short in the leg.

"Someone has been expecting us," he said, and the Star-Reader made a small sound that was almost a laugh.

The windows themselves were clear boiled sugar, cold and smooth as glass, set in frames of white icing. When he touched one with a fingernail it rang, and that was the bell he had followed through the pines. He tapped the next pane and it rang a fourth above the first. The wind moved through the clearing, and all of them sang together, softly, in the chord he had hummed among the hollies.

He reached up to the eaves and found the icicles. They were sugar too, long and tapering, and they chimed against each other like tiny wind bells. Above them the roof was laid in shingles of honey cake, soft and springy under his fingers, overlapping like the scales of a fish and glazed so they shone. The chimney rose from it in a stack of small round spice biscuits, and from the top came a thin smoke that smelled of applewood and anise.

The door was a single thick slab of gingerbread, carved in a pattern of twining leaves. Its handle was a round slice of candied orange, sticky and bright. Gweeny had found the doorstep, a broad block of shortbread, and was licking it with his whole tongue.

The Star-Reader's stomach rumbled. So did the Sound-Weaver's. He thought of the old tales of children lost in the woods, breaking pieces off a house that was not theirs, and he thought of the older rule beneath all of them. Never eat from a stranger's table in the deep woods until you are invited to it.

So he did not break off a shingle. He lifted his hand and knocked.

IV. The Honey-Wife

A voice came from inside, warm and creaking with age and very pleased with itself.

Who comes walking through my wood,

knocking where the sweet things stood?

The Sound-Weaver knew a call when he heard one, and a call wants an answer. He sang it back on the notes of the windows.

Weaver, Reader, small black hound,

bringing song for what we've found.

The door swung inward, and warm air rolled out over them, thick with honey and smoke. Someone laughed, a big round laugh that set the windowpanes ringing.

"Well answered," said the voice. "Knocked, too, instead of nibbled. Hardly anyone knocks." A hand found his. It was small and dry and very warm, dusted with flour, and the palm smelled of cinnamon. "Come in, come in, before the heat gets out."

Inside it was close and warm. He could hear a fire breathing somewhere at the heart of the house, deep and steady, and the slow tick of brick taking heat. The floor under his feet was wood, worn smooth. He smelled beeswax, and dried orange, and a great many jars of spice.

"She's old," the Star-Reader murmured to him. "Short. Her hair's white and pinned up with a sprig of holly, and her apron is covered in flour. She has the kindest face."

"I can hear you, dear," said the old woman, delighted. "Kindest face. I'll take that. Sit."

She sat them at a table and set in front of them, as if she had been waiting all afternoon, warm milk and pancakes with sugar, and a bowl of apples and nuts. The Sound-Weaver turned an apple in his hand and smiled, for he knew which old tale that meal came from, and that in this house nothing was hidden behind it.

Gweeny had planted himself at the old woman's feet, ears up, body trembling with hope.

"Not the honey cakes for you, little guide," she told him. "Clove and nutmeg are no friends to your kind." She bent down, and the Sound-Weaver heard the soft tear of fresh bread. "But I keep these for familiars." It was a sweet roll, split open and heaped with whipped cream. Gweeny took it with all the care of a priest receiving an offering, and then ate it with no care at all.

"Who are you?" the Star-Reader asked.

"Folk call me the Honey-Wife," the old woman said. "My name is Hollin. Every year, when Samhain is done and the dark half begins, I build this house somewhere in the pines, and I keep it standing until Yule. The nights are long between those two fires, and cold, and hungry for some. So anyone who wanders in the dark half can follow their nose to something sweet."

"And the price?" the Sound-Weaver asked, because there is always a price.

Hollin laughed again, and the windows rang. "Clever. The price is this. A song for every bite. And whatever you eat of my house, you help me bake again. The house wants to be eaten. That's what it's for. But it must be whole by Yule, so the next traveller finds it whole."

V. The Oven at the Heart

So they ate of the house.

Hollin took them outside and broke a shingle from the low edge of the roof for each of them. The honey cake was soft and dense, sweet and dark with spice, with a thin crackle of glaze on top. The Star-Reader broke a rose-coloured pane from a high window, and it rang one last clear note in her hand before she bit into it. It tasted of raspberry. The Sound-Weaver ate a shutter, the one with the ship on it, and paid for it with a sailing song, and the windows took up the harmony around him.

Then they went back inside to pay the second part of the price.

The oven stood at the heart of the house, a great dome of brick so broad the Sound-Weaver could not span its face with both arms. Its mouth was closed with an iron door, and the heat that came off it pressed against his skin like a hand. Hollin had built the fire inside it at dawn and let it burn all day, so the brick would drink the heat and hold it.

On the table she had set a bowl of dough, dark and stiff and smelling of everything good in the house. "I mixed this last Yule," she said, "and let it rest a full turn of the Wheel. The old dough is the best dough. Honey keeps. Honey keeps nearly forever."

"Saturn's day," the Star-Reader said slowly, "for a dough that's kept a year. Saturn rules time, and patience, and the things that last."

"She knows her stars," said Hollin, pleased.

They rolled the dough flat and cut it into shingles and bricks and shutters. Hollin pressed the shutters in her carved wooden moulds and gave one to the Sound-Weaver to hold, and he traced the stag again, sunk into the wood this time, waiting to be raised. As they worked, he named the spices by their smell and the Star-Reader named the planets that ruled them, as the old herbals teach. Cinnamon, for the Sun. Ginger, hot on the tongue, for Mars. Clove and nutmeg for Jupiter, the generous. Honey and sugar for Venus, lady of every sweet thing.

"When do they go in?" the Sound-Weaver asked.

Hollin went to the oven and opened the iron door. "You tell me," she said. "You've the ears for it."

He listened. Earlier in the day, he guessed, the oven would have roared. Now the fire was down to a bed of embers, and it spoke in small sharp ticks and a low, steady breathing, and under that the brick itself gave off a faint high singing as it settled. He listened a long while, and the singing of the brick dropped, slowly, by a fraction of a tone.

"Now?" he said.

"Not quite," said the Star-Reader, before Hollin could answer. "Wait for the last hour of light. On Saturn's day the last hour belongs to Venus. Let the honey go in with her."

So they waited, the three of them and the dog, sitting against the warm brick while the light outside, the Star-Reader told him, went from grey to gold. When the hour turned, Hollin raked out the embers with a long iron rake, swept the floor of the oven with a broom of wet green holly that hissed and steamed, and slid the trays in on a broad wooden peel. Then she shut the iron door.

The smell filled the house, then the clearing, then, the Sound-Weaver suspected, half the pines. He sat with his back against the warm wall and sang the cakes up, the way he sang his feasts, a slow rising song with honey in the melody. The windows sang it back, and Hollin hummed along in a voice like a kettle not quite at the boil.

When the Star-Reader said the edges had gone the colour of chestnuts, Hollin drew the trays out. They let them cool a little, then carried them outside, and the old woman showed them how to set the new shingles where the old ones had been broken off and seal them with white icing from a cloth bag. The Sound-Weaver piped the seams by touch, following each edge with the fingertips of his other hand. The Star-Reader set a new rose pane in the high window, still warm and soft enough to shape. Gweeny supervised.

When it was done, the Star-Reader told him the house was whole. He tapped the new pane with a fingernail, and it rang true, in tune with all the others.

VI. The Road Home

By the time they finished, the sun had set and the stars were coming out over the hollies. Hollin wrapped a whole honey cake in a cloth and pressed it into the Star-Reader's hands.

"For the two who keep your hall while you wander," she said. "And a corner of it for your hearth spirit, on the stone."

Then she took the Sound-Weaver's hand and folded it closed around a small packet of spices. "And this is for you. I know about that cauldron of yours. The patient one."

He raised his eyebrows. "How?"

"I'm a hearth spirit too, in my way. We talk." She patted his hand. "Not every hall has an oven like mine. But a cake can be steamed as well as baked, if the vessel is patient. Use the honey and the spices the way I showed you, set it in your cauldron over water, and you'll have a piece of my house at your own table whenever you need one."

"Will we find you again?" the Star-Reader asked.

"Every year," said Hollin. "Somewhere in the pines, between Samhain and Yule. You'll know me by the bells."

They walked home through the dark, the sugar crunching under their feet and then the soft needles again, and behind them the windows of the Honey-Wife's house rang and rang in the night wind until the pines swallowed the sound. Gweeny walked close at the Sound-Weaver's heel, his belly full, smelling faintly of whipped cream.

At the hall, the two companions met them at the door, and the honey cake was unwrapped on the table and shared out, a slice for each of them, and a corner set on the hearthstone for the spirit of the house. The Sound-Weaver sang one more song, a short one, in thanks.

And far out in the pines, so faint he could not be sure of it, the bells answered.

Blessed be.

The Recipe: Instant Pot Honey Spice Cake

Serves eight. Lebkuchen spices in a soft, steamed honey cake, made in a 6-quart Instant Pot with a 7-inch round cake pan and the trivet. Steaming gives a moist, tender cake rather than a crisp biscuit.

Ingredients

• 1½ cups (190 g) all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• ½ tsp baking soda
• ¼ tsp salt
• 2 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1 tsp ground ginger
• ½ tsp ground cloves
• ¼ tsp ground nutmeg
• ¼ tsp ground allspice
• ½ cup (170 g) honey
• ⅓ cup (70 g) packed brown sugar
• ⅓ cup (80 ml) neutral oil or melted butter
• 2 large eggs, at room temperature
• ½ cup (120 ml) milk
• Zest of 1 orange (optional)
• 1½ cups (360 ml) water, for the pot

Glaze

• 1 cup (120 g) powdered sugar
• 1½ to 2 tbsp lemon juice or milk

Method

1. Grease the cake pan and line the bottom with a round of parchment.
2. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and all the spices.
3. In a second bowl, whisk the honey, brown sugar, oil, eggs, milk, and orange zest until smooth.
4. Pour the wet mixture into the dry and fold just until no dry flour remains. Don't overmix. Scrape it into the pan and smooth the top.
5. Cover the pan tightly with foil so condensation can't drip onto the cake.
6. Pour the water into the Instant Pot and set the trivet in it. Fold a long strip of foil into a sling, set the pan on it, and lower the pan onto the trivet.
7. Lid on, valve to Sealing. Pressure Cook on High for 35 minutes. Let the pressure release naturally for 10 minutes, then quick release the rest.
8. Lift the pan out by the sling and remove the foil. A skewer pushed into the centre should come out clean. If it's still gummy, re-cover and cook 5 more minutes on High.
9. Cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a rack and cool completely.
10. Whisk the powdered sugar with the lemon juice or milk until thick but pourable, spread it over the top, and let it set.

Like the Honey-Wife's dough, this improves with keeping. Wrapped well, it tastes better the next day and keeps several days at room temperature.

Nutmeg and clove are not safe for dogs, so keep the cake away from any four-legged familiars and offer them a plain sweet roll instead.