"Right," Midas said grimly. "My turn."

He was already looking in the direction of the beehive, having watched his brother's feat with rapt interest and a measurable amount of horrified trepidation. It meant he didn't get to make a dramatic turn to face his fate, but he had other things on his mind. Like how to replicate his brother's actions without provoking the bees' righteous fury.

"I just have to touch it?" he confirmed.

Frjokorn nodded. "As I said. Just touch it."

"But then, once I've touched it, how will we know who's won your challenge?"

Frjo regarded his brother with undisguised scorn. "If you touch it, there's still your challenge for us to do. But it looks to me as if you're trying to find excuses not to take your turn, so maybe it doesn't matter what happens if you manage to touch the hive."

There was nothing implied about that insult, and Midas bristled at it. He wasn't being cowardly or trying to get out of taking his turn. He just wanted to make sure he knew the rules. Frjo was such a stupid jerk. Midas really hoped that he didn't end up as the leader of the Order. Which meant Midas would have to complete this task and come up with a better one that Frjo couldn't outdo him at.

Thinking about the task he would put to Frjo after this helped him keep his nerves steely as he made his way to the bee tree, slinking on his stomach for much of the journey. The bees had been stirred up by his brother and their buzzing had taken on a decidedly angry tone. He preferred to stay below the grass and below their notice up until it became unavoidable.

Watching, Frjo did not fail to notice that the bees were considerably more aggressive in investigating his brother's progress than they had been with him. He wondered if that was his fault and decided that probably he had something to do with it. He hoped Midas either succeeded quickly or gave up quickly. If he took too long at this, Frjo had no doubt he would be badly stung. Having experienced the gut-clenching terror involved in this task, he found himself regretting having put his brother at risk by coming up with it in the first place.

"You don't have to do this," he called after Midas, who had just made it to the base of the tree trunk. If Midas had heard him, he gave no indication.

In fact, Midas had heard his brother, but in order to reply he would have had to open his mouth, and there was no way the cub was doing that with all these bees flying around. Like Frjo, he was keeping his eyes closed as much as possible and flattening his ears to his skull. He found the idea of bees getting in his ears just awful, but his mouth would be nearly as bad.

Also like Frjo, Midas circled to three to determine the best way up, but he reached a different conclusion to his brother's. His way would be more direct, getting him to the branch more speedily, but also involving more of a risk, since he would have to jump from a lower branch onto the one the hive hung from. It was risky, but he was pretty sure it would be faster and it would get him away from the bees that much faster. Especially if he could just manage to tag the hive as he jumped and not even have to bother with its branch.

The climb was more challenging than he had anticipated though. The tree was more or less crawling with agitated insects and every so often he would find one wriggling up between his toes. He wasn't even halfway to his jump-off branch when the first bee stung him. From there, it seemed like the rest of them had simply been waiting for someone to take the lead, because they seemed to fly into him and land on him with increasing regularity, and he earned another three or four stings. It took a huge effort not to cry out at these, but he remembered how horrible it would be to have bees in his mouth.

From his distant vantage point, Frjo had no idea that his brother had been stung. He could only see that he was accomplishing the task more quickly. At least it seemed to be faster. Maybe it was just that time had slowed down during his own awful turn with the bees, and he had really been every bit as quick as Midas, but there was no good way to say. He began to wonder if maybe they shouldn't have brought in an impartial outsider after all.

What happened next kind of happened in a blur. Midas hauled himself onto the lower branch that was his target, sitting up for the first time since he began his climb and exposing a good amount of underbelly that had previously been mostly protected by the tree trunk. The bees began to gather together. Frjo called out. Midas didn't hear him over the buzzing and jumped for the hive, paws outstretched to bat it.

The bees swarmed, hundreds and thousands of them spiraling out of their falling hive. They went after the cub who had struck their hive and dislodged it from its branch. Frjo couldn't even see his brother with all the bees surrounding him. It was almost like he had transformed into a cloud of bees, except he hadn't. That was his brother under all those insects.

Beneath the carpet of angry, stinging bees Midas was in agony. It was like being burned alive as every part of his body fell prey to their stings. When he lost his battle to not scream, they flew into his mouth and a few even stung his tongue and his gums. One of them nearly choked him as he fell to the ground, his ambitious leap completely ruined by their attack.

Frjo kept screaming. He couldn't stop. But he didn't freeze or flee. Instead he raced to his brother and bit through writhing insect bodies to grasp the ruff of Midas's neck and begin dragging him away. For his troubles, he was stung, too, but somehow he found the determination to keep dragging his brother and swiping bees away whenever he could.

Even so, things looked grim for the pair, and probably would have turned out even worse if a so-called fey-born witchchild and his b*****d nephew hadn't turned up and put into action a plan that could only be described as heroic. The b*****d roared to momentarily attract the enraged bees' attention, and then began deliberately rolling their hive like a ball to ensure he held it. It didn't take long for the bees to switch targets, abandoning the much-stung cubs to pursue the white lion, who set off into the forest at speed while his fox-furred uncle hastened to tend the cubs.

Word Count: 1,173