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My grandmother was killed for being a witch.

Not that her executioners were entirely wrong.

Annabel De Meath was a bee whisperer, a rare kind of nature witch with the ability to speak to, charm, and control bees. Her honey was the finest you could find in any county from Kirk to Donegal. A spoonful could heal the sick. A poultice made from the comb could ease aches and bruises. If you rubbed a little bit on a teething infant’s gums, he or she would stop fussing and go right to sleep, and when hardened into candy, it could soften the heart of even the crabbiest curmudgeon.

She was kind, and beautiful, the type of girl in her youth who turned heads wherever she went. Yet she wound up married to Merle Hayes, a ne’er-do-well five years her senior with greasy black hair and a disposition meaner than a wet hog, after he knocked her up in the backseat of his old jalopy the summer after her senior year of high school.

They had a shotgun wedding, then Merle moved onto the croft, where he took to drinking himself into an early grave while my grandmother continued her beekeeping. Nine months later, my mother was born.

I don’t remember much about my grandmother, save for flashes of red curls poking out from under a sun bonnet and a laugh sweeter than sugar cane. I was only two when she died. But my mother had told me the story of that fateful night enough—normally after I begged her until I was blue in the face and she relented—that it felt like I had been there.

How the townsfolk had come for her after a mysterious disease wiped out all their crops one harvest. They’d needed someone to blame for their misfortune, and our family was an easy target.

They dragged her out of bed in the middle of the night, kicking and screaming. My mama managed to get the two of us to safety, climbing down into the old stone well and pulling the hatch closed, where we hung until the men gave up looking for us and left with my grandmother. Barefoot in her nightdress, hair hanging unbound over her shoulders, they hauled her in front of the magistrate.

He spit on her and pronounced her guilty of cavorting with demons. Said that people had reported seeing her talk to bees, telling them not to fertilize the fields so that the crops would fail. Her familiars, he called them.

The constable didn’t even wait to give her a proper hearing—not that there would have been anyone willing to speak for her if he had—before he tied a rope around her hands and feet so she couldn’t escape then locked her inside a barrel filled with tar. They hauled her through the streets behind a team of horses until she was dead, then burned her body inside its wooden tomb. My mother said they celebrated around the flames long into the next night, dancing and drinking. Three days had passed before she was able to go collect her parent’s ashes.

It was only later, when Annabel’s death failed to bring back the crops, that the villagers admitted they may have made a mistake. Perhaps the poor harvest had not been the bee whisperer’s fault at all, but rather the result of the massive heat wave, which the southern part of Ireland had experienced that year. After all, our county wasn’t the only one with farmers who’d lost their crops. They even wrote an official pardon for my grandmother, delivered to our door by courier on fancy stationery.

My mother didn’t even bother reading it before she threw it in the fire. No amount of words on paper, she told me, would bring my grandmother back.

Nor did it stop the more superstitious folks in the village from being prejudiced toward our family—hurrying to the other side of the street when they saw us coming and making the sign of the cross if we said hello. As if we wore the mark of what we were on our chests like scarlet brands, and getting too close, much less speaking to us, would result in bad luck.

I have never thought them to be right, until now.