Nobody in Fyodrovka sets a hive within sight of the birch ridge after the first frost, and nobody sweeps the threshold of the apiary on a Thursday. The beekeepers will say only that the thin ones in the trees keep their own count of the honey, and that a swept doorstep looks like an answer.
Grigor Vesnin keeps forty hives on the south slope, and his day runs on that arrangement. He is up before the light is useful, lifting lids with a knife blade and a pinch of smoke from a pot of dried juniper. By the time the sun clears the ridge he has pulled six frames, left four full ones untouched, and set a clay saucer of dark comb at the stone wall where the slope meets the birches. The saucer is always empty by the next morning, washed clean as if with a tongue, and a single beech leaf lies in it, folded twice. Grigor stacks the leaves in a jar. He has eleven years of them and cannot read any of them.
I have seen the elf twice. The first time it stood among the birches at the midday break, when Grigor was eating bread on an upturned crate. It is tall and narrow, a long wedge of a body, with hands too large for the arms that carry them. The ears are cut with a notch near the tip of the left one, an old clean nick like a ewe's mark. Its skin is the gray-green of lichen on slate, and it wears a coat of overlapped birch bark pinned with a fishbone. It watched the hives for the length of a slow breath and then was simply not there. The second sighting was at the flume above the pasture, where it crouched and drank with its face a hand's width from the water. Its eyes are a hard, bright amber, and in shade they hold light that the sky does not supply.
Something has changed since I first came to the ridge: the old shrine post at Pelcovo, two valleys east, has been pulled down, and the hill people now leave their saucers at Grigor's wall as well. The saucers number five where there was one. I could not confirm whether the elf takes them all or whether others have come to the slope, because I never saw more than the one at a time. Grigor works the hives, fills the saucers, and wipes his knife on his sleeve. He still has not decided whether the folded leaves are payment, receipt, or complaint, and no one in Fyodrovka can say who the elf is counting the honey for.
- Classification
- Sylvan humanoid, fae kin
- Habitat
- Birch ridges and forest edges
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 7 ft tall, narrow as a fence rail
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Birch Marches
- Binomial
- Sylvanis aurelian
- Diet
- Honeycomb, birch sap, mushrooms
- Temperament
- Watchful, aloof, exacting