Bella

A humanoid bee who fights like a boxer and asked the wrong man out at the worst possible moment.

What she is

Translucent wings, compound eyes "that reflected the world in fragments", and antennae that twitch when she is nervous. She produces honey from her hands and can fight in the air (ch. 28).

She narrates ch. 28 and ch. 29 in the first person.

What she was before Kael

Alone. Every human she met looked at her with disgust and fear, and she had accepted being the weirdo everyone said she was, sitting in a park corner with wilted flowers around her.

Her note on him is the volume's clearest statement of what the war destroyed:

It seemed odd to me how magnificent a human seemed to me, a monster (ch. 28)

The fight

Kael goes down with a blade through him and she attacks anyway, against something she knows she cannot beat.

Her style is pure boxing: a textbook cross, a spinning elbow, jab, hook, uppercut, "each punch precise, each movement flowing into the next like a deadly dance". Her wings are used for lift and braking rather than flight, which lets her hop a sweep and springboard off a tree.

Her one clean hit is honey, coating Jade's arms and chest, and it is eaten:

JAD: Clever, but darkness devours everything, little bee. Even light itself.

She is beaten badly. Split lip, cracked ribs, torn wings, doubled over and about to vomit, and she gets up.

JAD: Just lie down and die, bee. You're only prolonging your suffering. BEL: Never.

She is stepping forward for a last attack when a hand pats her head and Kael tells her he has it.

The question

Asked in the quiet moment before everything goes wrong, with the camp emptied and only the two of them left:

BEL: Could we go out sometime? KAL: For sure! I'd lo... cough

Then the blood, and the blade. The answer is never finished.

The family

Ch. 57 opens on the household, years after the war, told by Kael in the first person from the cottage they share with gauze curtains.

Maya, seven. She has Bella's wings and compound eyes, honey-coloured hair, and Kael's taste for entrances. She makes crystallised honey the size of a marble that glows when she thinks happy thoughts, and Kael's reaction is a measurement: "At her age, Bella had barely managed simple honey-shaping. Maya was already creating things Bella never even dreamed of."

Zeph, four. Eyes "impossibly deep and eerily familiar", because they are his father's. He has been slipping through the edges of reality for months. Things go missing into shadows that were not deep enough to hold them.

The two parents split the teaching along their own lines. Bella works with Maya on turning raw magic into art. Kael sits with Zeph under an oak and teaches him the dark:

It's like swimming. You don't fight the current. You flow with it.

But what if I go too deep?

Then I'll come get you. [...] I've lived in the dark, Zeph. You won't get lost while I'm here.

They are accepted, barely. Mrs. Elderwood next door is fine with them, possibly because her grandson talks to trees. The narration is careful about how thin that is: monsters were "slowly becoming accepted [...] or at least harder to ignore", and Bella still carries "the memory of being feared, not celebrated".

The night they are taken

Kael and Bella walk to the village tavern and come back near midnight. The cottage is undisturbed. The front door is open a crack, and they always lock it.

But there was no sign of struggle. No broken furniture. No overturned chairs. Just silence. Too much silence.

Maya's room? Empty. Bed made.

Both children are gone. That is the whole engine of Kael's arc in Acts 4 and 5: ch. 58 has him leave before dawn while Bella sleeps in Maya's bed holding one of Zeph's toys.

Open questions

• Whether she is one of the Fourteen. Nothing says so, and the timing is centuries too late.
• What her trait is called. Honey, flowers, and wings are described, never named.