The Honey Way

Fifteen winters in

Wenh says the plants do not care what we think about them.

A leaf can save you, even if you hate its taste. A root can pull your fever down, even if you call it foreign. A mushroom can open your mind, even if you swear you will never drink it again.

I believe her. I can feel the truth of it in my hands when I grind herbs and the smell rises—sharp, bitter, alive.

What I cannot understand is people.

Today a mother refused a tincture for her child. She kept saying: “We already tried broth.” As if broth and lungs are the same thing.

Wenh did not argue. She waited. She asked the mother what she feared.

The mother said: “I don’t want to owe you.”

Wenh came back looking older than her years, and she is already older than almost everyone I have ever known.

Tonight, alone, I keep thinking: if the medicine works, why must it also be a battle?

Nineteen winters in

An elder refused Wenh’s medicine three days in a row.

Not because he didn’t believe it worked. Not because he didn’t need it. He said the quiet part out loud.

“I don’t like how it tastes.”

And then, even worse:

“I don’t like admitting weakness.”

I watched Wenh do what she always does—patient, steady, relentless. She got him to drink. He lived.

But afterwards I felt sick. Not from his fever. From the shape of it.

People will choose pain to avoid shame. They will choose danger to avoid indebtedness. They will make healing into a contest, and call it dignity.

At home, the kitchen smelled like comfort and hunger and safety. My mother Brenh was slicing dried fruit. Kyrphenh was tasting a brine and making a face that meant: almost right.

I said, without planning to: “What if the medicine tasted like something they want?”

Yemotos laughed his toothless laugh and said: “Then they will ask for it.”

He said it like it was obvious. Like there was no sin in cleverness.

I don’t know if it is obvious. I only know I felt my whole chest loosen when he said it.

Twenty-six winters in

Something fermented on accident, and I did not throw it away.

That is the whole story, really. A mistake kept long enough to become a discovery.

The grain mash was sharp when I tasted it—alive, biting, unfamiliar. And then the warmth arrived like a small sun in my chest.

A new kind of vessel. Not pottery (though Yemotos started making jars just for this), but time itself. Time holding transformation.

I began to add herbs in careful amounts. Chamomile. Valerian. The things Wenh uses, but hidden under honey and wildflowers.

The first person who tried it asked for more.

No suspicion. No negotiation. No battlefield truce.

Just: “That tastes good.”

I don’t know if this makes me a healer or a cook or a liar.

Wenh watched the way people smiled when they drank. She said quietly: “You found the path around resistance.”

Thirty-two winters in — the week before the Cave Game

There is a visiting elder who refused Wenh’s tinctures three winters ago.

Tonight he drained his cup, sighed like a man who forgot he could be comfortable, and asked me for more.

He does not know why his joints hurt less. He does not need to know. He only needs to keep moving.

I used to think knowledge had to be spoken plainly to count as truth. Serapnenh would disagree. Wenh would smile and wait for me to learn. Yemotos would laugh and call me young.

Now I see it: truth can be carried in flavor. In a ritual. In a vessel. In a pattern repeated until the body remembers it.

In seven days I will mark my pattern on the wall:

IGNORANCE → LEARNING → WISDOM

And below it, a vessel with a small flame inside. Pleasure holding medicine. Time holding transformation. A shortcut that still arrives.

Sometimes I worry it is manipulation.

Then I remember the mother who refused help because she did not want to owe it. The elder who refused help because he did not want to be seen needing it.

If the doorway they can walk through is sweetness, then I will make sweetness.

Thirty-four winters in

A successful tribe asked me to teach them everything.

They were polite. They were grateful. They were hungry for it in a way that felt like taking.

I taught them anyway. I wanted to be magnanimous. I wanted the pattern to spread.

Three moons later I tasted their mead.

It was rushed. Harsh. Sometimes it made people sick.

And they claimed it was theirs.

Yemotos said: “You learn who deserves your knowledge. And who deserves your silence.”

So here is my rule, written where I cannot forget it:

I will share the result widely. I will teach the method narrowly.

Everyone can be fed. Not everyone gets the recipe.