Sect Year 8 · third month · night of day 3 · the silent life: the store-room and the hive yard, his twenty-second year
The store-room was the coolest room in the house. It had one small window high in the back wall and a door that stood open in summer, and it held the honey the way a jar holds water, quietly and for many years. Wooden trays of comb lined the shelves from floor to beam. A scale hung from the beam on a hook. Its brass pan was dark with use, and the room smelled of wax and thyme so strongly that Ossel could taste it at the back of his throat when he came in from the sun.
Each comb he lifted got a notch. He had begun in the spring, when the first new combs came out of the boxes heavy and pale. Anwen had watched him cut the first mark into the store-room wall with the point of his knife, one short stroke for each comb. By midsummer the marks ran in rows. By the end of summer they ran the full length of the wall from the door to the shelf, and they looked, Anwen said, like the ribs of a sheep laid out on a board.
