Chalice

PART THREE

Two days after the fire the Overlord’s agent came to the House, and another man with him. She already knew she did not like the agent, Deager, and she disliked the new man immediately, although at first she could not be sure she disliked him for any reason other than the company he kept.

He gave her reason soon enough, however, in the proprietorial air with which he looked round. He was introduced to her with a tremendous flourish, although no reason was given for his presence; which, with the air and the flourish, was explanation enough, and her heart plummeted. By the time the Grand Seneschal informed her, stiffly, that this was the Overlord’s choice for the next Master’s Heir, she didn’t need to be told, and in her anger and frustration she said, “That is hasty,” before she remembered to whom she spoke, and she bit her lip, waiting for the rebuke. But none came. She was so surprised she looked into his face. He scowled at her at once, the familiar contemptuous, disapproving scowl, but when she ducked her head and then glanced back again a moment later, his face had relaxed into what looked a lot like sadness.

The new man’s name was Horuld. She paid little attention to his breeding, that several of his forebears’ lines ran directly from Willowlands, and several more had crossed in the ensuing generations, and which Deager was very eager to tell out, over and over and over, even to such unworthies as the demesne’s shabby and erratic new Chalice, who was herself one of the indications (Deager didn’t say this but he didn’t have to) that the demesne was still in trouble, over a year after she had taken her place in the Circle.

So far as she knew no Chalice had ever been deposed. But she had never seen any record of a Chalice chosen when there was no Master to hold the land steady while the Circle did its work either. It had very occasionally happened that an apprentice died with or before her Chalice; but then too there had always been an experienced Master. And there were stories of Chalices who had not been able to bear the work they were called on to do—even those who had had their proper apprenticeships—and broken under it. There were only a few of these stories, but one was too many, and there was more than one. She believed that one such Chalice was the Chalice she herself followed.

She was surprised—even more surprised than she had been at the Grand Seneschal missing a chance to reprimand her—when Horuld seemed disposed to talk to her. There were other, more prepossessing and conversationally skilful members of the Circle he could address himself to; demesne hierarchy declared that Chalice was Second of the Circle, but that had to be remembered only when there was work to be done. Her Circle recollected it only when they had to, as did the Overlord’s agent—or they always had done previously. She was, as Chalice, compelled to be present for the agent’s visit, and—as Chalice—she would serve whatever Master fate set over Willowlands. That was enough. Perhaps the training she hadn’t had would have included how to hold superfluous discourse with people she would rather avoid. When she was standing Chalice or performing a ritual she did not have to chat; but Horuld’s first visit was informal. In other circumstances this would have seemed friendly and considerate; as it was it seemed ominous and coercive.

Deager, having proved to his own satisfaction, if not all of his audience’s, that Horuld’s bloodlines were an excellent choice, wished to make it clear—he said—that the Overlord was merely anxious that an unambiguous Heir should be in place, after the recent disaster. If such an accident should happen again, the demesne might fall apart entirely. It had been without a Master for seven months; it could not survive this a second time.

She tried to tell herself that a declared Heir was a sensible precaution; their present Master was the end of his family. The previous Master should have declared an Heir when he sent his only brother to Fire. She wondered why the Overlord had not obliged him to do so; she had only been a small woodskeeper then, and small woodskeepers heard little about Overlords’ decisions. The demesne gossip said merely that the Master was a young man, and hale, and he would produce Heirs—had probably produced a few already, the uneasy joke went. But they would be bastards, and prohibited. By the time the ordinary folk of the demesne had begun to realise that their young Master seemed to have no intention of marrying and producing a proper Heir, especially in combination with his increasingly alarming general behaviour, the fear of what this meant also meant that no one wanted to talk about it.

And then the worst had happened.

Perhaps she should try to believe that the Overlord was merely doing the responsible thing—the responsible thing he had failed to do before—but again she wondered. It was too soon to tie an Heir to the present Circle; Willowlands was still too precarious. However necessary an Heir was, forcing him upon them now would unbalance it further. Would the next thing be that she was obliged to take an apprentice? She had no energy for the binding that would entail. Leaving aside that she had nothing to teach one.

Perhaps it was only her dislike of both Deager and Horuld that made her feel the agent was making it clear that Horuld was being introduced to Willowlands as the Heir only after he had made something else even more clear, if not in so many words: that the Overlord would like to see Horuld taking up this inheritance soon. She was too quick to feel she needed to defend the Master, she told herself. But what she had taken from the agent’s description of Horuld’s bloodlines was that if he was the best that could be done for her poor demesne, the Overlord should be straining every muscle to support the present Master. Did the Overlord want to break Willowlands entirely? Surely not. The disruption would damage the Overlord’s grip too…no. He would be counting on riding it out; might he, more, be betting on the huge increase of his own power the successful changeover would produce? She knew almost nothing of the politics among Overlords. Demesne folk did not travel to the crown city nor visit the court of the king; and as practising Chalice she was furthermore indissolubly tied to her land.

But whatever else she knew or thought of the Grand Seneschal, he would not have kept such a piece of news as a visit from the Heir from the rest of the Circle; and Deager glossed, or slithered, over the question of why Willowlands had not known who was coming with him, which made it plain that there had been no message that had gone awry.

She had mixed the cup she would offer to the company before she came. She had mixed it for the visit from the Overlord’s agent, and that was all. That was how it was done; that was why it was important that a Chalice know in advance who would drink from her cup, and for what reasons. Last-minute changes were destabilising, which was why battlefield cups, which were perforce rare, were also notoriously volatile.

It should not have been a good omen, that a Master’s Heir should be left out of the first cup he received from the Chalice. Perhaps the Overlord, or some other of his plotters, had decided that being left out was better than a Chalice throwing her weight against him, which a loyal Chalice might be suspected of doing upon the presentation of any outblood Heir. Chalices were parochial by definition; of all the Circle, only the Chalice could not set foot across her demesne’s boundaries. Some of the oldest records called the Chalice the Landtied—and because of this literal overidentification, the Chalice’s response to outbloodedness in any member of the Circle was considered crucial. This perhaps explained why Horuld was interested—indeed eager—to talk to her. Perhaps she could be disposed to include him kindly in her mixture for his next visit, after he had been careful to make a good first impression. She would not need to be disloyal. Any Master’s Heir was an important part in the demesne structure; most accepted Heirs attended at least some Circle gatherings; and under the present circumstances the only possible Heir was an outblood. A Chalice must at least punctiliously include her Master’s Heir in any cup he was present for; of course it would be better if she felt at least benign toward him, or even generous.

But she did not feel benign or generous. She listened, smooth-faced, when the agent pronounced some blather about how the surprise of presenting Horuld unannounced would create “clarity” in an awkward situation; that he would be more able to see where he would best fit into difficult circumstances if no one was trying to soften the truth. She knew that a properly schooled Chalice would have some matching blather to offer in return, but she was not a properly schooled Chalice, and it gave her a little meagre pleasure that her silence discomfited the agent, and by his discomfiture he exposed that he knew his action had been dishonourable.

Did she loathe Horuld because Deager was a toad? No. Sunbrightener was a toad, and his antics merely made her feel tired and sad. Or because the Chalice was repelled by outbloodedness? She looked at Horuld and every particle of her recoiled. No. She bore the Chalice, she was not engulfed by it.

Mirasol had arrived a little late at the House for the meeting with Deager. Just as she was leaving her cottage a young mother had burst into the meadow carrying a wildly weeping child. Mirasol knew them, Kenti and her daughter Tis; they were neighbours. Tis had pulled a kettle of boiling water over. Fortunately it had only been half full, but the child still had a badly burned arm; and the local herbswoman, Catu, was gone to a lying-in, Kenti did not know where. Mirasol hadn’t spoken to Kenti or her husband Danel properly since she had become Chalice, in spite of the fact that Danel and she had grown up together; she had been jealous when he had been apprenticed to a ploughman, for the horses.

Kenti said breathlessly, “Can you do anything? Can you help?” Her eyes went to the back of Mirasol’s right hand, which was holding the edges of her cloak together over the cup of congruence in her left hand, and then hastily rose to Mirasol’s face. But she couldn’t meet the Chalice’s eyes the way she had many times met Mirasol’s, and they dropped away again. Poor Tis was weeping in a miserable, exhausted way that was painful to hear.

Mirasol brought them into the cottage and took down a small pot of the honey especially good for burns and smeared it carefully over Tis’ arm. The little girl cried out at the first touch but by the time Mirasol had finished she had fallen silent, and leant back against her mother’s body staring at Mirasol with huge still-wet eyes. Even as Mirasol looked back at her the eyelids drooped, and Tis was asleep.

And then Kenti burst into tears. Mirasol led her to the big soft chair by the fireplace where Mirasol did much of her reading and let her collapse. “It was my own carelessness—I know what she’s like—I let myself be distracted—it was only a moment—and then I heard her scream—and I knew Catu was away—I didn’t know what to do—it was awful” and then she couldn’t say anything for a while.

Mirasol made a tisane—a spoonful of her soothing honey with a spoonful of the calming herbs she’d had from Catu herself; in the early months of her Chalicehood she’d drunk it by the bucketful. When she brought a cup to Kenti, Kenti laid Tis tenderly down beside her on the chair, sticky arm uppermost, and took it. She breathed in the steam and gave a little half laugh: she recognised Catu’s mixture.

“I’ve used honey for littler wounds—your mother taught me that when I wasn’t much older than Tis—but this one was so dreadful. And then I remembered—I remembered your hand. I thought, if your—if the Chalice’s honey can cure what a Fire-priest can do, then perhaps it can cure Tis’ arm.”

Mirasol said gently, “The Master cured my hand.”

“He—?” said Kenti unbelievingly, and Mirasol saw the fear in her face, the same fear she saw in the Housemen’s faces before they bent nearer their Master to slide the chair under him as he sat down; the fear she saw in the faces of most of the others of the Circle when their part in a rite brought them too close to him—the fear of him that made the Master leave the burnt grove before any of his people saw him there.

“Yes. He.” She wanted to say, Tell Danel. Tell your mother. Tell all your friends. But she watched Kenti’s face and knew that she would tell the story—if she believed it. Kenti’s face said that she wanted to believe it—she wanted that hope, not only for herself, but for her demesne.

Kenti sat looking at her daughter for a long moment and then said wonderingly, “Look—the mark is already fading. Your mother’s honey could not have done so much so quickly. It is the Chalice in you, I know, but perhaps—perhaps—perhaps it is also that we have a Fire-priest for Master….” Her voice had sunk to a whisper.

Mirasol was still thinking about the hope in Kenti’s face when she walked up to the House. She knew she was late, but it was only Deager, the agent, coming for a—snoop, she thought uncharitably. Overlords’ agents were supposed to visit their Overlords’ demesnes, but she didn’t like the way Deager’s nose twitched, the way his eyes darted around, as if he were hoping to smell something rotten, to see someone doing something illicit or disgraceful.

And then she arrived, and there was a surprising number of people churning around in the big hall behind the front doors, and a youngish, weaselly-faced man she had never seen before standing a little too close to Deager’s elbow.

The situation was uncomfortable enough to begin with, when it was only Deager and Horuld, herself and the Grand Seneschal and the Seneschal’s apprentice Bringad, and four of the minor Circle (the others were hastily sent for when Horuld was revealed as the Heir) plus the attendants the visitors brought and their own Housefolk. As the word spread about Horuld, more and more people streamed in, and both the noise and the tension level, it seemed to Mirasol, rose, and the ever-worried Bringad looked more worried than she had ever seen him. But when the Master arrived…she did not know how to understand it, explain it, even to herself. It was as if the level ground tipped a little in one direction and the high curving sky changed its arc just a little in some other direction.

A Master was not expected to greet a mere agent on his arrival; the Grand Seneschal did that. But as the representative of his Overlord, a Master would be churlish as well as foolish not to see him at some point during his visit. She assumed the Grand Seneschal had despatched a message to the Master about Deager’s unexpected companion; it was impossible to read any trace of surprise or disquiet on the Master’s shadowy black and strangely mutable face when he made his entrance. Mirasol heard with what was beginning to be a familiar sinking of the heart the conversation falter and then stop as he was noticed, before the head Houseman announced him. Perhaps all Masters are greeted with a respectful hush, but she doubted that most demesne folk drew together as if for protection when their Master appeared.

When Deager (his voice positively quavering as he addressed the Master) described Horuld as the Overlord’s candidate for Heir, the Master merely bowed his head. There was a disagreeable pause, and then the agent rushed to begin telling Horuld’s bloodlines over again, speaking too loudly and too quickly, and at first forgetting his flourishes. But when a Master has no son nor other suitable close relative, the meeting between the Master and the Master’s newly declared Heir was as laboriously and ponderously formal as centuries of tradition could make it, including, in this case, the tradition that an unexpected situation should be treated even more formally than the same situation when everyone knew what was happening. The Grand Seneschal managed to insert an orotund phrase or two (rather like a pole through the spokes of a wheel, Mirasol thought) into the agent’s barrage of genealogy, which had a steadying effect. When Deager finally fell silent, his concluding bow was as elaborate as if he were being presented to the king. But Mirasol found herself thinking that the Master had bowed his head so very ceremoniously indeed that perhaps he had somehow known of Horuld’s coming before the message from the Grand Seneschal.

Most of the initial gestures among any group that required the presence of the Chalice were stylised, just as her offering of the cup was, but during Horuld’s first visit to Willowlands they all seemed to move as if they were puppets in a puppet show, their limbs made of wood, the pulling of their strings performed by a puppeteer. If there had been an audience Mirasol felt they would not have found the performance convincing. Although Deager had insisted in a manner that was obviously meant to be magnificent but came over as merely presumptuous, that this first informal meeting with the Heir should proceed as it would have if Horuld had not been there, this was not possible, as Deager would have known it was not possible. Furthermore any meeting involving the Circle to which the Chalice stood should be precise about the number of people present, the number of people who would be offered the Chalice’s cup—which Deager would also know.

And the Willowlands folk were doubtless awkward with surprise. They had known an Heir would be chosen, and Mirasol had held Chalice during the gathering when the Master had acceded to the Overlord’s wish, as presented by Deager, that the Overlord do the choosing. But that had only been a few weeks ago, and they had heard nothing of the progress of the search. She had begun reading about the meeting of a Master with an unknown Heir, so she knew that if it had been a proper meeting she should offer her cup first to the Master and second to the Heir. After a moment’s invisible dithering behind the face she tried hard to keep in an expressionless Chalice mask she did so anyway: let Deager assume this was a manifestation of magnanimity and support; she considered it buying time.

The contrast between the Master and an ordinary human had never been so marked, she thought, as between the Master and his Heir when she took the cup from one and offered it to the other. She had directed them to stand on either side of her—which would also have been the correct form for a planned first meeting between the two of them: she could see Deager smiling with satisfaction, but she ignored him. The Master seemed to tower over her, and his natural heat, as she stood close enough to him to hold a cup to his lips, wrapped itself around her as if claiming her—and briefly and disconcertingly she remembered riding home with him after the fire in the Onora Grove. Horuld, who was no more than average size, seemed puny and frail in comparison; and the fact that he was obviously struggling not to flinch away from the Master added to this impression of weakness.

She might have helped him, as she often helped the Circle members who were still reluctant to approach the Master, by stepping toward him, by allowing him to maintain a greater distance; but she did not. She offered the cup to the Master with a bent arm, and then turned and offered the cup to Horuld, again with a bent arm, and waited, forcing him to step close, not only to her, but to the Master. He did not try to take the cup from her, but he did raise a hand to grasp it, and she could feel him trembling. There were beads of sweat on his upper lip which she doubted were only from the heat. Before she took the cup on to Deager and the rest of the Circle, she bowed, to the Master, and then to Horuld. The Master must receive the deeper bow, of course, but the Heir might have had one nearly as deep; her bow to the Heir was only enough more than perfunctory not to be offensive. She let her gaze pass as if carelessly over Deager, and saw that he had stopped smiling.

She could feel, before she had got halfway round the Circle, that it was not a good binding. When she made her final bow it was almost difficult to stand upright again, and she was exhausted. She had to make a great effort to meet the eyes of Horuld and Deager; the Grand Seneschal’s eyes looked glassy and unfocused, and the Master’s were as unfathomable as they had been the first day, when his hand had slipped and burnt her, and his face was only blurred shadows. She tried to remember the sudden surprising joy of his healing of her hand, of talking to him about what he saw, about her bees being tiny golden sparks in his strange vision—of the night that she had helped him put out the fire in Onora Grove, and the ride home after. But she remembered these things as she might remember something out of a book, a story told of someone else.

Even if, by some extraordinary accident, the Chalice had not known beforehand all those who would drink, a well-mixed cup should have had a more positive effect than this. Perhaps she had mixed it injudiciously; that was likeliest. Even without his bringing an unannounced Heir, her dislike of Deager made it onerous for her to mix a cup that she would have to offer to him. But even if a more experienced Chalice might have done better, it was still true that introducing an Heir without proper advance warning was like throwing a boulder on one side of a delicate scales and expecting them still to balance.

But perhaps the lack of binding and balance in this gathering was because Horuld was wrong…wrong for the demesne, wrong as Heir, wrong even to be here. It had been known in the past that an outblood Heir was rejected by the demesne, however carefully the humans had tried to make the best choice. Perhaps the Overlord had overplayed his game by giving the Master and his Chalice no forewarning that the Overlord’s choice was coming to be introduced to his hoped-for inheritance.

By the end of the day, when she could leave the House and make her way back to her cottage, she was shaking and sick. She pulled her hood over her head and held it bunched round her throat with her hands, feeling that what she really wanted to do was disappear: if she wrapped the ends of her cloak around her tightly enough and then tighter still, eventually there would be no one left inside…. Usually the gentle thumping of the empty Chalice cup against her hip was comforting: another ritual got through. Today it was not; she felt that she—they—Willowlands had indeed not got through the ritual of the introduction of the Heir. She concentrated on the thought of sitting in the last of the daylight in the clearing by the cottage, listening to her bees.

She was still ten minutes’ walk from the cottage when some of her bees came to meet her. She stretched out her arms to them and they landed on her hands and forearms, stroking her skin as if the tiny hairs were sepals they expected to secrete nectar for them. She shook her hood back, and several landed on her face and neck; out of the corners of her eyes she could see more landing on her shoulders. As she walked the last few minutes to the cottage she found herself thinking that her head felt strangely heavy, and that the hum of the bees was unusually loud; and then when she came out of the tree-shadowed path into the sunny clearing around the cottage she saw a great cloud of bees lifting away from her and dispersing, and she realised that she had been wearing a hood and cloak of bees. She watched them scatter about their proper bee business, and wondered.

Horuld came twice more in the next few weeks with Deager, and then a third time he came alone. When he came with Deager their visits were announced in advance; but now as the acknowledged Heir, he might come as he pleased—and stay as he pleased. She was in the House library when he came that third time, and the first warning she had was a shadow falling across the open door; she was deep into her research and would not have noticed, except that a half-familiar voice said, “Chalice,” and her body had recoiled before her mind had recognised who it was.

She turned the recoil, she hoped, into a mere startle, and stood up at once to make a ceremonial sign of greeting, saying, “Forgive me, my mind was lost in what I was doing.”

He said smoothly, “And I have interrupted you; forgive me.”

She bowed her head and waited, hoping his appearance was a formal signal only and that he had no business with her. The demesne’s folk were growing used to their new Chalice, and they were now coming to her more and more; this was a relief in some ways, and she knew she must be grateful for the good this was doing Willowlands, but she often had to put aside what other work she had planned on doing. She had fled to the House library today and was hastily reading up on the behaviour toward and reception of outblood Heirs. Part of her problem, she thought, as she had thought many times since the Chalice had come to her, was that she was not by nature a formal sort of person; she found that side of the duties of the Chalice so difficult as sometimes to feel incompatible with her private self. She wondered if this was anything like trying to live in the human world when you were a priest of Fire.

She had waited what seemed rather a long time with her head bowed, hoping that he would go away, waited until she began to worry that there was some ritual gesture that was now hers to make that he was waiting for. She raised her head at last, reluctantly, and found him staring at her with an intensity she disliked a great deal.

“I hoped,” he said with a diffidence she was sure was feigned, “that you might have a little time for me.”

Involuntarily she glanced at the book still open on the table. The driest record of a thousand-year-old court award ceremony would have been preferable to spending time with Horuld, and what she was reading did not merely interest her but drew her almost feverishly. She had not seen the Master for private speech since his first meeting with Horuld, although she often felt his presence in the earthlines, and she wondered what he thought of his Heir, and what he was, or wasn’t, doing to make his Heir acceptable to the demesne. She realised in the shock of Horuld’s unexpected and unwanted presence that part of her feverishness to learn about outblood Heirs was that she suspected the Master of trying to persuade the demesne to find Horuld satisfactory, even desirable. This was only what a responsible Master would do, but….

“Of course,” she said, after too long a pause. “Chalice and Heir must”—she stumbled over her attempt to find words she could bring herself to say—“be acquainted.”

And she went with him. But when he offered her his arm she pretended not to see, and instead folded her own arms in the ritual shape of a Chalice without a chalice. elbows tucked closely in, wrists crossed and hands loosely clasped. It had only ever been something to do with her hands on those fortunately few occasions when the Chalice was expected to attend but with no cup to present; today it felt like warding.

He had nothing to say to her; nothing of substance. She kept waiting for him to reveal his purpose—the purpose that was keeping her away from her reading—and answered as briefly as possible, almost falling into monosyllables and then remembering with an effort that she had to be polite to him; trying to prevent her mind wandering from his pointless remarks about the weather, about the picture or ornament in this or that hallway of the House, about that bird which had sat singing outside the House when he arrived. At each new topic she would jerk her attention back to focus, expecting to hear what he wished to speak about at last. The weather? Was there an omen in it? There were those who could read the future in the shape of the clouds, or said they could—although the Weatheraugur, whom Mirasol thought wistfully she rather liked, said this was nonsense. The painting of the yellow fruit outside one of the lesser meeting rooms—she’d always thought it rather dull herself—had it perhaps belonged to the forebear Horuld could trace his Heirship to, and he was suggesting that it should be more prominently displayed? The bird—he couldn’t be talking about a redsong, could he? Redsongs were commoner than mud in a wet season. If he was trying to imply that a redsong singing for his arrival meant the demesne welcomed him, he was a fool.

He went on and on. As Chalice—and she did not plan ever to be Mirasol for this man—she could not be asked to sit and chat, so they had to stand or keep moving. They paced slowly through the House and then he took her for a stroll around the gardens, remarking on a shrub or a flower as if imparting some new perception, while she felt half mad from boredom, and from his extreme ignorance of plants. It occurred to her to wonder if anyone so ignorant could be Master; no garden would flourish under the weight of such ineptitude, which would put a greater burden on the gardeners and the rest of the Circle. And yet Horuld’s animation seemed to increase the longer he held her prisoner. He caught her eye every opportunity he had—and she felt she had to meet his eyes occasionally—and smiled as if he believed she was happy in his company.

Once or twice she caught him looking at her in a way…she had to be imagining it; no Chalice and Master, nor Master’s Heir, could…but the look made her long for the heavy camouflaging Chalice’s robes, when ordinarily she was extremely grateful to be free of them for a day.

She finally managed to stop at one of the gates to the garden and resist being swept any farther. She did not know how she could take leave of him; she’d been clutching the formality of the Chalice to her with her clasped hands against her breast and therefore had to maintain the Chalice’s character. She was sure a Chalice could not dismiss an Heir, but she didn’t know how to get rid of him, and he gave the impression that he would cling to her forever if she did not. So she stopped and stood and bowed her head and refused to meet his eyes for several minutes—her heart beating in her throat in fear of the terrible insult she might be offering—and at last he thanked her for the noble condescension of her company—ugh, she thought, keeping her face blank—and bowed several times as he backed away from her. Backed away from her, she thought, troubled, when he finally seemed to have gone away and left her alone, and she risked raising her head again. Backed away. What had she given him that he was so pleased with?

She half ran back to the library, but her concentration was gone. She read a little more, about mixtures to be thought of when dealing with outblood Heirs, when the Master was present and when he was not, how both to delimit and to integrate such an Heir’s place in the demesne. And then she shut the book and picked up another, smaller book that she could take with her back to her cottage. Perhaps reading within the sound of her bees would help bring her mind back to her business again; she would be positively glad of some ordinary unexpected visitor hoping for help or honey…. She didn’t understand why she felt such a sense of doom. All that had happened was that she had lost two hours to a nonentity…except that he wasn’t a nonentity. He was little enough in himself, but he was the Overlord’s pawn and a danger to her demesne, and to her Master.

The walk back to her cottage settled her nerves a little; enough, at least, that she could open her new book and begin to read it without missing every other word. The amount of reading she did now was yet another of the strains of being Chalice. Her mother had taught her to read, and she had a few record books of this little corner of the demesne’s woods (she kept telling herself she should pass these on to the new keepers, but she never quite got round to it), her father’s account books, and one of the lives and meanings and symbolism of the trees of the demesne. She had used this when she had planted trees for her bees—birch, beech and hawthorn, but also a parasol tree. There hadn’t been a parasol tree outside the House gardens in generations, but the one at the edge of her meadow was already twice as tall as she was, and her bees adored its flowers.

Most important she had her mother’s receipt book, which had been her grandmother’s and her great-grandmother’s before that. It contained brisk notations of three generations of beekeeping which backed what her mother had taught her and therefore made some of the inevitable moments of learning by experience a little less overwhelming. It furthermore included things like how to tan leather and how to mix clay and straw for bricks and then how to bake them, useful things that any member of the small folk of the demesne might want to know.

But barring a little burst of winter weeks when she had studied the tree book she had never spent real time reading. Till she became Chalice. Her eyes were often tired now, but worse her mind was tired; she felt that the shape of her memory had been laid down when she’d learnt bees and woodcraft, and that neither shape readily held books or Chalice. She was not old, but she was old for learning something that should have begun when she was young.

It was cold early this year. She got up to close the door and the windows and to light the laid fire. Other years she might have worried that her bees would stop producing honey too soon, and that she would have difficulty bringing them through the winter. Perhaps there were advantages to being Chalice after all. But then bees which had (apparently) stopped building combs for their honey so as to let it pour out for their Chalice might not remember how to start again in time to manufacture sufficient winter stores. She would have to count how many colonies she was taking honey from and do some sums. I don’t think I have enough shelf space for that much honey, if I have to feed them, she thought, let alone enough jars.

The memory of the time she had spent in Horuld’s company still lay like a burden on her. But would it have been any better if she were still only a woodskeeper who also kept bees? She had always cared passionately about the demesne. Not all its folk did; some of them figured demesne business was for the Master and the great folk of the House and the Circle, not the ordinary small folk of barn and field, woodright and lake, even House kitchen and stable. But then many of the ordinary demesne folk did not feel the earthlines as she always had—as her parents both had, although not as strongly as she did. If she had not become Chalice, she would have been one of the people standing around the House doors the day the new Master had come home from Fire.

And she would not have liked the look of the Heir, even as a woodskeeper. And as a woodskeeper she could have done nothing about it. The problem was that she doubted there was anything she could do about it even as Chalice. Why did this afternoon with Horuld lie on her so, as if it would stop her breath? She shivered.

She went to the door and opened it. She could not hear her bees any more; they had wisely withdrawn into their warm hives. She took a deep breath of the suddenly winter air. There were even a few snowflakes falling, nearly a month earlier than usual. She found herself worrying whether the early cold had anything to do with a new Master who used to be a priest of Fire.

She went back indoors again and moved the kettle over the centre of the fire. She’d have hot water with a little mead and a little honey in it, which she liked better than any tisane, and keep reading. The terrible need to learn—to learn something, she did not know what—about Heirs continued to pull at her. She didn’t know if she had brought the right book with her, but it had been the book her hand had fallen on, and she’d come to follow such signs, now she was Chalice, having no mentor to give her better guidance.

It was late when she found it. She should have gone to bed over an hour before, but in her mind there was still the little nagging voice telling her to keep on, that she hadn’t found it yet, that she had to find it. And so she kept on. She was so blind to everything by then—blind with reading, blind with anxiety, blind with a too-narrow focus of concentration—that she almost missed it.

And so it was that the Heir was installed to great rejoicing amongst all the folk of the demesne, and all saw that the choice of Heir had been a wise one, for all that his outbloodedness had been great, and there had been those who had doubted he could be made of the demesne as a Master must be. But the Overlord had chosen his seers well, and they had read the earthlines truly, and the earthlines had told him where to look, that the Heir-blood ran to this man and not some other. And the demesne flourished from the moment his hand was laid upon it, and there was no hindrance nor turbulence, no discontent in tree nor well, no revolt in beast nor human. And the Overlord was pleased, because this gained him both praise and power, that he should have chosen so perfectly; but there were those who had watched and considered all, who said that it was less to do with the sagacity and good judgement of the Overlord and his seers than with the profound pragmatism of the marriage of the Heir to his Chalice. This convention is not well known, for it is so awfully and fearfully against what is well known, which is that the Master must not marry nor otherwise fondly touch his Chalice in any analogous manner, for the Chalice’s power is to bind and the Master’s to rule, and mixed they create an abominable disharmony, for they make weight and stillness when there should be lightness and motion. But in a state of disharmony, as an outblood Master conjoined to a demesne, such a tie is the pair’s highest work, and creates a small harmony from a larger disharmony, from which a larger harmony may grow, in the shape of the child of their coupling who shall next be Master, and who shall call from the demesne by the strength of his inbred harmony the perfect Chalice to complement him.

She had already begun to study the directions for the preparation of the cup that would enable such a connection to be made between Master and Chalice when it finally sank in what she had read.

Marry Horuld!

That was the reason Horuld wished to speak—had been directed to speak to her. That was the reason he had looked at her—

She went to the door again and opened it, and half flung herself out into the cold clean-smelling darkness, away from the warmth of the cottage and the book she had been reading, which she suddenly felt must smell rotten, must be polluting the room it lay open in. She went back inside just long enough to shut it, tipping its cover over with the end of one finger, as if greater contact might make her ill. Then she wrapped herself in both her shawl and her cloak and went outdoors again, and walked, walked away, any way at all….

There was still snow in the air. She guessed it had been falling lightly, laconically, since she had first noticed it, but the ground was still too warm for it to lie. Some of the trees had a dusting of snow on their leaves. There had been no clear signs of a hard winter, and the harvest had come in safely with no more than the usual number of sudden storms. Thunderstorms, so long as they were not too destructive, were a sign of good luck; the very violence of them showed the strength in the harvest they raged over. In a harvest season with no storms the saying was that the crops were weak, and would give little nourishment. Fire of all things, she felt, was strong; she in common with many other of the Willowlands folk had feared too many storms at harvest rather than too few.

The only lightning-set fire had been the one at Onora Grove.

She lifted her face to the snowflakes and let them brush her skin—they felt a little like the feet of her bees—till they had swept away the murk of too much reading, till she felt like herself again. Marrying Horuld was no worry of hers. The demesne had a Master.

She turned around, returned to her cottage, put an extra blanket on her bed, and slept dreamlessly.

In the morning she tucked the book under her arm as if it had no power over her, and took it back to the House. There were other books to read, and she still needed to know as much as she could about outblood Heirs. The fearful little voice that had driven her to keep reading the night before had fallen silent; what she now wanted to know was if there was a way for a Chalice to say “sorry, I’m busy” to an outblood Heir who wanted to waste her time.

When the shadow fell again across the door of the library, she gave an involuntary shiver, nearly a spasm, of revulsion—not again! But it wasn’t the Heir. It was the Grand Seneschal.

It was no good reminding herself that a Chalice had only to stand for a standing Master; she had scrambled to her feet before she’d thought anything but uh-oh. Once standing all her possible ceremonial gestures deserted her and she merely blinked at him and tried not to worry. The Grand Seneschal did not like the library. This was a fact well known to the Housefolk, who also knew they were therefore unlikely to be caught up for it if the books were not tended properly. The result was that Mirasol had to wipe the dust, and occasional spiders, off almost every book she took down. Fortunately the House cats had no such reservations and there were no mouse nests (at least that Mirasol had found) behind decapitated bindings. She stood and blinked some more. If the Grand Seneschal had come to the library there must be some unexpected urgency for the Chalice. Uh-oh.

But he only stood in the doorway and looked at her while she stood and looked at him. She was tired—she had had a very late night the night before—and she always had trouble dragging herself out of anything she was reading back into the real world, perhaps because reading was still difficult for her, or perhaps because, since she had become Chalice, she liked the real world less than she had. Eventually she tried a small bow. She’d never known him not to address her with grimmest formality, and here he was only standing there, as if he did not know how to begin. She finally thought of a suitable gesture, and touched her fingertips together and held her hands out toward him, in the ritual giving of first speech to another.

Still he hesitated. At last he said, in a curious, almost jerky way, as if the words were ripped out of him, as if he had not chosen to speak at all, “I had thought you…concurred in my choice of Master. In my attempt to bring our Master home. Even that you welcomed him. That despite his formidable priesthood his true blood as the younger brother of the former Master was proof that he was yet best for our demesne….”

She was so amazed at the Grand Seneschal saying I and my and you to her that it took her a moment to translate what he was saying. The Grand Seneschal had never spoken to her directly before; he spoke forbiddingly and exclusively in the third person when he had to address her at all, and had never—she felt—let it be anything but clear that he only addressed her because she had somehow, incredible as it seemed, become Chalice, and the Grand Seneschal was, unfortunately, too often compelled to address the Chalice. And now he spoke to her directly—and as if in great grief.

In his choice of Master? Those very early days of her Chalicehood were vague in her memory, with an overwhelming confusion and disbelief that even in retrospect made her wince and wish to avoid them. The Grand Seneschal’s letter had already been written and sent by the time she had begun to bear Chalice to the gatherings of the Circle, but even in her dazed and muddled state she’d been aware that not all the other Circle members had agreed with the Grand Seneschal’s decision. She could only remember hearing Prelate and Sunbrightener say as much aloud, but she was sure they were not the only ones. Perhaps the Grand Seneschal had been in the minority—he might, she thought, almost amused, be the only one, and had won his victory by mere force of character. The Grand Seneschal ranked third in the Circle hierarchy, after the Master and the Chalice, but he could not overbear the other nine—unless they let him.

She had been surprised to discover that the Grand Seneschal had written to the priests of Fire, because it was not a level-headed, dispassionate thing to do. In other circumstances it might have made her like him. But there had been no level-headed thing to do, because the Master should not have died with no Heir. What else was there to do but seek his nearest blood relative?

How could the Grand Seneschal think she did not support their Master?

She dropped her hands. “But—I do—I would have no other Master.” She glanced at the book she had been reading, much as she had done when Horuld had interrupted her the day before; but she was not thinking that she wished to dismiss the Grand Seneschal because he disturbed her, only that she had not yet found a way to dismiss the Heir if he disturbed her again.

“It is all over the demesne that you spent the day with the Heir yesterday.”

“The day,” she said, appalled. “It was two hours—it felt like a century—if it had been an entire day I—I would have run away from Willowlands before sunset.” She did not think of how irresponsible (and impossible) a thing this was for a Chalice to say; only how best to express her revulsion against the Heir.

Something that might almost have been a smile appeared on the Seneschal’s face, but disappeared again immediately, and the grief seemed to deepen. He did not sound accusatory when he spoke, only sad. “And that you held your hands clasped, as Chalice.”

“Ye-es,” she said. “Yes—but I—I did not want to be Mirasol with that—man,” although as she said her own name she wondered if the Seneschal even knew it, or if he might think that Mirasol was some strange low slang common among minor woodskeepers.

As if he did not know what else to do, the Seneschal wandered over to the table next to the one she stood beside, pulled out a chair and sat heavily down. She was clearly not bearing Chalice, so anyone might sit down in her presence without consequences, but this was still as out of character as the I and the you. Also the Seneschal always behaved with great precision, and he sat down with a thud, as if exhausted.

“I feared it might be something like this,” he murmured. Louder he said, “Why did you not merely send him away?”

“Send him away?” she said. “Send away the Heir? I only wish I could—that I knew how.” She looked at the book again. “I was hoping some book would tell me how, in case he comes back.”

“How could you send away the Heir?” the Grand Seneschal said, almost gently. “By telling him to go. You, Mirasol, are Chalice. He is only Heir.”

“But—”

“By spending time in his company—as Chalice, as you did—you were giving him your favour—your warranty. He will have gone away to send word to the Overlord that the Chalice of Willowlands supports him. Do you not know—you spend so much time reading”—and in his voice at last was the tone she was used to hearing when the Grand Seneschal spoke to her—“can you possibly not know that there is a move to put our Master aside and set the Heir in his place?”

“No!” she cried—although she had feared as much. “No, no—how could you think it? I would myself die, if it were necessary, to keep our Master; but the only story of a Chalice doing so, it was at Stonehollow, twelve generations ago, and it did not work and so…” Without thinking, she turned to glance up at the shelf where the book that had told her that story stood, and when she turned back again she was suddenly angry. “Reading. Yes. Yes, I do spend a tremendous amount of time reading—I should have known that I was giving that lizard Horuld my blessing? How was I to know it, please? When did I serve my apprenticeship, and with whom? Who speaks to me at all, since I became Chalice, except those who must?” She glared down at the sitting Seneschal. “I am far too strange and grand now for my old friends, even if they knew that a Chalice might send away an Heir with no form but the bare words of command—which I rather doubt they do know. All I have is reading. The books do not scorn or avoid my company, and they tell me plainly what they know.”

“Forgive me,” he said.

She heard him say “forgive me” and had a sense of dislocation and preposterousness almost as great as she had had on the day the Circle came to tell her she was chosen Chalice. She sat down with a thump as abrupt as the Grand Seneschal’s had been.

“I guessed that,” he went on, “yesterday, when Zinna brought me the news of the Chalice and the Heir—followed by Dora and Mallie and Sim bringing me the same news. I guessed that you did not know. You are right. I have blamed you often for the things you did not know. My only excuse, and it is no excuse, but I have only seen that now, last night and this morning”—and she realised, looking at him, that he had probably had even less sleep than she—“my only excuse is that I too have felt beleaguered by events. It is hard enough to lose a Master; harder yet to lose him unexpectedly and in such a way…. There are not even any folk-tales of how a Seneschal may best fulfil his obligation when his demesne has neither Master nor Chalice.” Softly, draggingly, almost dreamily he added, “The last years of our Master’s brother’s Mastership taught me only to rely on no one; it did not teach me how to be a Grand Seneschal with a broken Circle; it did not teach me to lead when there was no leader….”

Unwillingly she thought: And he carried our demesne for seven months while I staggered blind and stupid in his wake; certainly our Prelate gave him little help, and the rest of the Circle little more. How could he not resent me, even though it was not my fault? Willowlands has been lucky to have such a Grand Seneschal—Willowlands who so gravely needs a little luck.

“I even believed that the most I could do for an inexperienced Chalice was to—to spare her the weight of a Grand Seneschal’s advice. I know that my manner is not—is not cordial. But I could leave—try to leave—her—you—free to find your own best way. Our Circle has never been a true Circle. Our previous Chalice could not bind us and we grew more separate still, less aware of each other, under the—the curious strains of the last Mastership. Those of us who were very—involved with the old Master have I think never quite…” His voice trailed away. More strongly he went on, “It had not occurred to me, till yesterday, that there might be things a Grand Seneschal would know that would be useful to a Chalice struggling to invent her own apprenticeship. That, for example, a woodskeeper become Chalice might not guess an Heir might seek her validation for his own power.

“I knew you supported our Master. I knew it because you never said one word about the burn on your hand. That is why I guessed—finally—yesterday, about what had really happened.” He smiled again. This time it lasted long enough to be identified as a smile, but it was more wintry than the snowflakes still drifting down outside the library window. “Let it be, perhaps, set in my favour that it was my support of your silence, at the beginning, that enabled you to go on being silent. Deager wanted to declare that by that wound the Master was no fit Master.”

She whispered, “He cured my hand. The Master. It would not heal, and he healed it.”

The Grand Seneschal put his hands on the table, palm up. “I beg you give me leave to tell that story.”

She thought of Kenti and Tis, and her conviction that Kenti wanted to believe that same story, that a priest of Fire can cure as well as harm. “Will it help?” she said. “Will it help us keep our Master?”

“Yes—it will help. I do not think it will help enough.”

He looked up at her, and the grief was still in his face, but it was a different grief. “We should have had this conversation months ago—when we first knew that Fire would give him back to us. No”—he put his hand up against her, although she had made no attempt to speak—“you need not reproach me; it is my blame that we did not. I know. I know. What I do not know is what to do now. And whether or not it is too late.”

“It cannot be too late,” she said passionately. “I—we—we won’t let it be too late.”

Then he did smile, a real smile, if still a sad one. “Then we will not let it. I must think. We will begin—I will tell it that the Master healed your hand; there is nothing to gain by pretending the accident did not happen, since everyone knows it did. And you—you must find a subtle way to tell everyone you can that the time you spent with Horuld…dispirited you; that you felt compelled to it because…because everyone of our demesne must bind themselves together in every way possible, to support our Master; the Heir must not feel shut out, however unworthy the Heir might be; that the situation at Willowlands is not traditional and so tradition is little help.”

“I can’t say that—be subtle, you say?—gods of the earthlines, how do you expect me to say that subtly?”

But the Seneschal only said grimly, “Those books you read—I have read some of them, and it has given me a distaste for reading, because it seems to me that most of them are full of unpleasant things said pleasantly. I’m not sure what else dead written words can teach you except the trickiness of words. Find a way to say this unpleasant thing pleasantly, from your books. I do not deny that I am asking you to walk the edge of a knife blade; you must condemn the Heir, who is human, that our Master, who is not, be seen as the better choice; and how to condemn him when at least the whites of his eyes are white and his clothes hang on his body the way clothes do hang on a human frame? And yet you must also condemn him in such a way that you may still welcome him if the worst happens and he becomes Master.”

He stood up again. “I am sorry. I am older than you; I should have…”

He didn’t say what he should have, and impulsively Mirasol said, “You were Grand Seneschal for our Master’s brother. What…” And then she could not think of a way to ask what she wished to ask. “I—I—you see, I am not good at subtlety. I do not want to ask about the bad times, about the end. Only what it was like, having a—an ordinary Master.”

The Grand Seneschal stood silently for some moments. “I wonder if there has ever been an ordinary Master. No—I think I do know what you are asking. But I don’t think I can help you. I had my apprenticeship, you see. I learnt to hear and feel what a Seneschal must hear and feel of the demesne, to best serve his Master: I learnt this because the Seneschal who was daily, hourly, thus listening and feeling taught me and watched over me as I learnt. I was apprentice under the Seneschal for our Master’s father, and indeed my first years as Seneschal were under him, under a Master who had held the land steady for fifty years and more. And in those years the Circle was also a Circle. Then our old Master died and his elder son became Master and all began to change, to…” He stopped. “But now, with this Master…a Master who is struggling to engage with his land without hurting it, as he hurt his Chalice when she gave him the welcome cup…there is nothing in my experience for that, any more than, I guess, there is in your books.” He looked at her. “I daresay an apprenticeship—having had an apprenticeship—is better than no apprenticeship, even in these circumstances. Because I know that it does not help the situation I find myself in—I know the situation is not the fault of my ignorance. But that does not change the situation.”

“It is the fault of my ignorance that I have been seen to sanction the Heir, when that is exactly what I did not want to do,” she said bitterly.

After a pause the Seneschal said, “I came here to tell you that, yes. But I wonder…we have had a strong harvest. The Wildwater running over its banks after the seed went into the ground this spring—shortly after our new Master came home—looked like a bad sign. But the second sowing grew better than the first sowings have for several years. The Onora Grove has given us firewood and timber; it was not an area of the wood Oakstaff had thought to open up, but you know the Circle has decided it will open well. And we were lucky with it; even from the House the sky was red with the fire, and those who were there say there was a sudden heavy downpour that lasted just long enough to put it out. The earth tremors have all but gone; I can’t remember the last report of a wall being knocked down—or of chasing animals so terrified they will break through a fence themselves. And no other demesnes—not even those who share a boundary with us—have been troubled. It has not been an easy transition. But even blood Masters have done worse, when the change has been sudden or unexpected. And outblood Heirs have done very much worse, I think.”

Mirasol smiled a little. “Flood, fire, famine and war. I could tell you stories.”

“Perhaps you should tell them.”

“But subtly.”

“Yes…but what I am thinking now…we have had too many disasters in too short a time, and we have begun to think in disastrous terms. When the Onora Grove burned, I wondered if it would take the demesne with it; and yet instead we have a new meadow with a pond where the stream bank fell in, and most of the trees are still fit for good use, in the hearth, or under axe and lathe, or…. Perhaps this disaster comes to you for you to shape.”

“The only lathe I know is the feel of turning pages,” Mirasol said forlornly. But she thought of the things she knew that even the Seneschal apparently did not. If anyone might have ferreted out the truth about the fire in the Onora Grove, she felt it would have been the Grand Seneschal; but he gave no sign of knowing it. He would have mentioned, she thought, the law that a Master can be put to death for harming a Chalice, if he knew of it; he would have mentioned that an outblood Heir might marry his Chalice to prevent the demesne from tearing itself apart from the stress of the blood change. She shivered. “Has the Grand Seneschal—have you had your disaster? And have you shaped it?”

His look was bleak. “I am shaping it now. My disaster is that I did not speak to you long before. If I hadn’t—as I should have—when the priests of Fire first agreed to send our Master back to us, then I certainly should have spoken after he burned you and you said no word against him. Bringad has thought well of you from the beginning: I should have listened to him. And, Mirasol, it is not that you are—were—a woodskeeper. My grandmother was the daughter of a kitchen maid—got by the Master’s fourth son. My great-grandmother was turned off the demesne before the baby was born, because it was the fashion in those days to do so, because the child might be able to cause trouble if it wished, on account of bearing the Master’s blood. The Master I had my apprenticeship under—our Master’s father—learnt of the story and set his Seneschal to track the line, and bring them home. My mother and father and I came here for the first time in the back of an ox-cart, and were shown into the Grand Seneschal’s office smelling of dirty straw and too many weeks on the road, carrying a few ragged bundles that were our only possessions. I was eight, and could barely stand or speak, because I was overwhelmed by my first experience of my landsense, which had met me at the boundary of Willowlands. I had no idea what was happening to me; I thought I might be dying. When I turned nine the Seneschal took me to apprentice. I do not know why the earthlines speak in your blood so strongly, but that they do is all that matters. But I had twenty years’ apprenticeship. You’ve had a year of reading—and of bearing Chalice perforce.”

“You have held the demesne together, while I read.”

“You have been Chalice since the day the Circle came to you. Your presence in the earthlines is strong; you were easy to find. This is why I hoped I could convince you to live at the House. We’ve needed your strength whether you knew how to use it or not. But I’ve come to realise that your bees were right not to let you go; a honey Chalice should live among them.

“Come to me if I can help you.” He smiled again through his bleak look. “I will talk to you.” And he turned and left the library.

It was snowing harder when she walked home that afternoon. She had not had a great deal more time for reading about outblood Heirs. There had been several messages for the Chalice—dragons take it, she thought, they’re learning to look for me in the library. One, however, was an interesting query from the Housekeeper about the Chalice’s beeswax candles. She knew that the Chalice put a little honey in her candles—you could smell it when they burned (and very pleasant it was, added the Housekeeper punctiliously) and she had furthermore heard that the Chalice also had different honeys which she used for different purposes. The Housekeeper wondered if she applied this to her candle-making? Might there, for example, be candles that, burning, helped you stay awake, if you were, perhaps, up late over your accounts?

“I haven’t the least idea,” said Mirasol. “But it’s an intriguing thought. I shall experiment, and bring you the result, and you can tell me what, if anything, happens. Thank you.”

The Housekeeper, looking slightly bemused (I daresay Chalices aren’t supposed not to have the least idea, thought Mirasol), bowed herself out.

The last message was a reminder that her presence was necessary tomorrow evening for a meeting of the Circle with the Master, here at the House. If the weather continued as it was she might have to stay overnight there. She had done this several times when she was first Chalice, and more inclined to take other people’s suggestions, because she found it difficult to say no—to keep saying no—to other people’s advice. But she had learnt very quickly that she slept badly away from her own cottage, as if it were the one safe quiet place in a world suddenly in pandemonium.

She remembered one of the few times—before today—that the Grand Seneschal had showed her, she thought, any understanding. The Chalice moved from one person to another, but they were all Chalice; and as little changed outwardly as possible. And so a new Chalice took up residence in the old Chalice’s rooms. The rooms were stripped to the walls and cleaned from ceiling to floor before the equally purged and polished furniture was replaced. When she was first shown the Chalice’s rooms the walls positively glittered, and the sheets on the bed crackled with, she guessed, not merely washing and ironing but sheer newness; she’d never had the luxury of new sheets herself. Even in the midst of her own crisis she had been able to wonder at the time spent, in the middle of the demesne’s crisis, on the task of scrubbing the Chalice’s rooms. She supposed it showed respect—even for an unapprenticed woodskeeper Chalice—or perhaps terror: cleaning might be the only thing the Housefolk could do to clear the residue of the catastrophic end of the previous Chalice and help the new one to find her way.

But despite the shining walls and spotless furniture and new bedsheets the Chalice’s rooms had been haunted. Mirasol had barely been able to stay alone in them long enough for the footsteps of the Housewoman who had showed her there to fade away down the corridor. She never so much as sat down. She left and went in search of the Grand Seneschal; she thought the head Houseman might have been enough, but he was new in his job too, and she did not wish to get him in trouble if he were not authorised to requarter a Chalice. So she looked for the Grand Seneschal. It had been less than half an hour since the end of the meeting, and she had left him still arguing—or rather listening and refusing to argue—with Prelate and Landsman. He could not be asleep yet, although she did not relish the thought of knocking on the door of his private apartments. But she had found him—despite the lateness of the hour—in his office.

She thought she did well not to stammer or squeak when she said she could not remain in the Chalice’s rooms and that if he could not offer an alternative it was still not so late (it was past midnight) that she could not walk home, which was probably the best idea after all, but she did not wish to leave without informing him. She hadn’t stammered or squeaked, but it had all come out in a breathless rush, like a small woodskeeper forced (for some inexplicable reason) to speak to a Grand Seneschal.

He stared at her in the blank, forbidding way she was already accustomed to, but his answer, when it came, was in no more oppressive a tone than usual: “You may have the Yellow Room.” She had followed the Housewoman (a different one) in a daze. In the first place she had expected some dispute, even a silent one, when the Seneschal let her know that while he would accede to the Chalice’s wishes, she as the woman within the Chalice was (again) failing to bear her new responsibility in a seemly or becoming manner. Furthermore, only the most important rooms at the centre of the House had colour names—suitable perhaps for the housing of a true, a satisfactory Chalice (supposing the Chalice’s rooms had been somehow infested by tigers or chimeras, and uninhabitable), but…. As she thought about it now—the memory of their recent astonishing conversation at the front of her mind—the Yellow Room had since then not only been kept for her, but it was the most conveniently placed of any of the private rooms to the library. Either he had already noticed her spending every minute she could in the library, or he guessed that, unapprenticed as she was, she would have to. No—that her best choice was to learn what she could from the library’s dead written words. Perhaps he had been trying again to influence her. She grunted a laugh. The wind was in her face, and several snowflakes fell on her tongue.

There were a few bees huddled under the peak of the little overhang that sheltered her front door. They flew, or fell, to her shoulders, and clung there. “It is too cold for bees, you silly things,” she said. She hadn’t meant to light a fire—only to go straight to bed—but her loyalty had its limits and while she didn’t want to dump her bees to fend for themselves when they were already stupid with cold, she drew the line at taking them to bed with her. And so she stirred the banked embers and added kindling till a log would catch, and then sat down in front of the hearth to let it warm her and the bees still sitting bemusedly on her shoulders. As the fire began to work on them she had to help one or two free themselves from the tangling weave of her shawl, which made her think of the Master, the day he saved the life of the bee who had stung him.

She had to think what to put in the cup for tomorrow, and which cup to use. That the Heir would not be there meant she wanted to mix something binding—and exclusive. No longer did she have the luxury of merely wishing to make any gathering move as smoothly as possible; she wished to tie this truculent Circle and this singular Master together as tightly as she could, whether they moved comfortably and effectively within those confines or not…and then she had to hope that any such successful tie as she might create did not instead only rouse its members to split themselves more thoroughly apart.

She stared into the flames and thought, I am playing with fire.

She must have fallen asleep, because she dreamed. She was standing on the knoll where the pavilion had stood, the pavilion that had burnt to the ground, killing the Master and the Chalice and a dozen others, including the Clearseer and the head Houseman. The ruins were black and cold around her, and she felt nothing of those recent deaths, not even that of the previous Chalice. What she felt—or remembered—instead were the stories of what that place had been before the pavilion had been built on it. It had been a place of power since before the demesnes were made, and its power had been both used and subverted by the folk who lived here, and their Masters. But in her dream she remembered something she had not known she knew. Perhaps the lost knowledge was brought forward by the conversation she had had with the Grand Seneschal about the dreadful mistake she as Chalice had made in her behaviour toward the Heir. Perhaps she had never known this before, but the conversation and the urgency behind it had opened a way for the earthlines to speak to her directly.

Because, centuries ago, when the power of that place was still allowed to be what it was, and had not yet been dammed or forced into some channel it was not meant to be barred and bent by, it had given prophetic dreams to anyone who slept a night on it. It could not tell everything, and about some things it did not always tell the truth, or at least it told the truth so obscurely that it was easily misunderstood. But on a few subjects it most often spoke clearly: it would tell a man if his wife was faithful. And it would tell a woman whom she would marry.

And while the old usage had fallen into neglect, the power was still there.

Mirasol snapped awake. She could know now, at once—by morning—if her error in being gracious to the Heir was a critical error or not. If the oracle went against her…she couldn’t remember if the story stipulated if, having learnt what the oracle would tell you, you could change your fate or not: keep your wife by persuading her to give up her lover, refuse to marry the man you did not want, whether the man you did want appeared or not.

Did Chalices ordinarily marry? In her confusion of mind she could not at present remember. Chalicehood was not passed down from mother to daughter as Mastership passed from father to eldest son, but it did sometimes run in families; a bloodline that matched well with the Masters’ would find the Chalice returning to it again and again. The Chalice before her…the Chalice before that had been that one’s aunt, Mirasol thought. So far as she knew, her own family, on neither her father’s nor her mother’s side, despite the fact they had long been of this demesne, had ever produced a Chalice, although her father’s had produced both a Landsman and an Oakstaff many generations ago. But did Chalices marry and have daughters? Occasionally the Chalice came to a woman who was either pregnant or nursing, who then held her Chalicehood in milk; was the fact that this was considered bad luck for the demesne an indication that Chalices were encouraged to remain single and celibate? It was a clue to her state of mind, she thought, that she could not remember having read anything about this—although she knew she had not deliberately sought the information. She had never been in love, and her parents had not tried to force a husband on her; and since she had become Chalice, there had always been too much else of more immediate, more drastic relevance….

She struggled to her feet, feeling dizzy and stupid, her mind still half in its dream. She pulled her cloak and shawl up over her shoulders again; they had slipped off as she slept and in front of the fire she had not needed them. She looked vaguely around for the bees that had come in with her, but saw no sign of them; perhaps they belonged to the hive tucked next to the chimney breast. She could feel the finger of cold draught that told her that the bee door she had hollowed out of the window-frame was still open.

She went to her own human door and opened it. The snow had stopped, although it was still cold. Much too cold to sleep—to try to sleep—outdoors. But the night was at least half over, she thought; she only needed to sleep long enough to dream. She needed only to dream of one face—or of no face at all. How might the oracle tell her she would not marry? She shook her head. It would find a way. But she had to go now. She could not wait—not even till tomorrow night. The cold weather seemed to have settled in, so it would be just as cold tomorrow night; and she’d already spent half of tonight warm, indoors, in front of a fire.

She pulled on one of her oldest, shabbiest winter woodskeeper’s dresses, snatched up her shawl and cloak again before she had time to change her mind and left, closing the door gently behind her. Since it had stopped snowing the temperature had risen again; the wind against her face was almost warm. It was the week of the dark of the moon or she might have tried to guess what time it was. But she had to have slept a few hours by the fire, or she wouldn’t have woken so fuzzy-headed.

It was a longish walk to the knoll of the old pavilion. She knew the way, although no one, herself included, went there any more—not since the death of the old Master. The grove that had burned was more to the east; from lightning’s point of view it was close to the pavilion, but from a walker’s it was not; from Mirasol’s cottage there was a long detour round a rough scarp. One of the main footpaths of the demesne ran quite near it, and the heavy use it had was evident; the turn-off to the pavilion, which had once been just as wide and worn, was now mossy and overgrown; Mirasol had to duck under young branches and flounder through banks of nettles.

She paused at the edge of what had been its parkland. It was rapidly reverting to meadow; from where she stood she could no longer see the carriage drive that had led to it from the House, on the side opposite the wood. She could still see the knoll, however, and the ruin of the pavilion; the grass and the fast-growing saplings seemed to avoid it.

Her walk had warmed her, but she still shivered, looking at the knoll. She waded through the autumn-brown grasses, and the crackling noise this made seemed to announce her presence…to what? Seedheads popped and flung their contents over her like the audience cheering a victor of some contest on a fete day…. Again she shivered, although she was not cold.

When she came to the crest of the knoll, the walls of the fallen pavilion seemed suddenly high and claustrophobic, shutting her in, though the highest of them were no taller than the top of her head, and most of them came no higher than her knees. It had been a curious shape, circular at the centre, but with arms like a star. It sprawled over the knoll as if it had been flung there; now that there was no level roof tying all together, the way the arms crept down the slope from the central plateau looked strange and eerie, and the few splintered stone stair-steps that had survived the fire looked like the teeth of lurking earth-monsters.

At first she was at a loss; she only knew you had to sleep on the knoll. But what part of the knoll? Did she have to lie down and close her eyes in the centre of the old pavilion? For a third time she shivered, and this time she told herself crossly to stop it. It wasn’t that cold, and the knoll was empty. But it wasn’t empty; or if it was, it was no use to her. She stiffened against the next shiver, and pretended it hadn’t happened. What if what had occurred here a little over a year ago had broken the power of this place? What if she was here on a fool’s errand?

She sat down on the top of the knoll, which was not, she thought, precisely at the centre of the pavilion. This was obscurely comforting. The tallest of the standing walls created a corner, and protected her from the prevailing wind. She lay down and curled up on her side, bending one arm beneath her head as pillow. She was not cold; she only had to sleep for a few minutes; it would be dawn soon, and daylight would wake her, daylight and birdsong. Surely the birds did not avoid this knoll….

She was asleep when the temperature dropped and the snow started again.

It was not at all the dream she was expecting.

First she dreamed of a man, no longer young but not yet old, in heavy boots and leather gaiters and a farmer’s smock, walking along a tree-shaded road, whistling. She could not make out his face clearly through the changing leaf-shadows, but she thought it was an open, friendly face. Who is this? she thought, but she was strangely unreassured that this man was not Horuld. He stopped by a well, and unhooked the bucket, and dropped it into the well, and wound it up again; in her dream she could hear every creak and splash, and the faint puff of the man’s breath as he raised the bucket. He reached for the dipper, which hung next to the peg he had taken the bucket off. It had been an ordinary dipper—hadn’t it?—he must have thought so too, because he didn’t merely pull his hand back when he saw what he was reaching for but stepped back from the well itself. What now hung on the dipper’s peg was a cup that looked like a Chalice’s goblet, heavily worked in silver; dreaming, she tried to see what the forms and figures were, but could not, only that the work was so ornate it threw its own shadows across the bowl. No ordinary roadside well should have such a thing. The man looked at it for a moment longer, laughed, shook his head, and drank directly from the bucket, which, when he hung it back on its peg, he did so very carefully, that his hand should not brush the mysterious goblet.

No, she thought. Perhaps this man might have courted a beekeeper with a woodright, but he will have nothing to do with a Chalice.

As the man walked on down the road, she seemed to remain behind; and the shadows of the trees grew thicker and darker till she was in a cold grey place where she could no longer move her arms and legs; and then she thought, though she was not sure, the figures on the well goblet had come to life, and she was surrounded by the faces of angry, frightened men and women. She recognised none of them, nor did any one pause for her to memorise it so that she would recognise it if she saw it again, when she woke, if she was to marry an angry, frightened, unknown man. She struggled to wake or to move, and as if she had broken some invisible bonds, she seemed suddenly to be free; and now she seemed to be walking at the edge of a field under a night sky. The field seemed to be familiar to her but it was hard to tell in the dark. The almost sweet, slightly dusty smell of a ripe cereal crop was in her nostrils, and she knew it would be a good harvest. The stalks came to her shoulders, and she could see over them, to where someone else seemed to be walking at the edge of the same field at a little distance from her; as she brushed her fingers through the half-soft, half-bristly awns, she thought in surprise, They’re warm.

And then the dream had shifted again, and she was surrounded by redness and heat. Where was the face of the man she would marry, or some sight of herself standing alone in an embroidered robe carrying a cup? She could see nothing but the peculiar undifferentiated redness. Not quite undifferentiated: there were streaks in it, fluttering, trembling, golden streaks, and a gentle thumping noise near her ear. Just one ear, as if her cheek rested against something that brought the echo of the sound to her.

She was still curled up, but she didn’t seem to be lying down any more, and her head was resting against this gently thumping thing, her wrists bent round each other and hands clasped under her chin as if she were bearing herself as Chalice. Except that she wasn’t bearing herself at all; something was holding her. Her legs were folded under her as if she were sitting in a chair at home, the chair whose seat had lost most of its stuffing, so you had to sit on the frame edge, with your legs bent under you, or half disappear down the unexpected well….

There was redness all around her, redness and gold; they blended together, and they did not blend, for the red was hard and restless and spiky, and the gold was smooth and supple and flowing. She seemed to breathe it; her right nostril drew in red, and her left gold. Her Chalice-cradling hands instead cradled a rope of red and gold, whose individual threads wove in and out between her fingers, the red through the fingers of her right hand, the gold through the fingers of her left. She felt that the very hair of her head had gone red and golden, that the hair on the right side fell coarse and harsh and red, and on the left, fine and soft and golden. She wondered if the strangeness of what she saw, the way everything seemed both too shallow and too deep, was that her right eye saw only red and her left only gold, and they somehow could not put the two together as they had done all the ordinary things in her life till now…. She felt dizzy, except that she was being securely held, and could not fall. She thought she should be frightened, for she knew the world was not red and gold; but she did not feel frightened. The red and gold were very beautiful. She wondered if what she was held by was a red thing or a golden thing.

She didn’t know when she realised that the Master was holding her in his lap. The chair-well was the space between his knees—she supposed—as he sat cross-legged. The thump was the beating of his heart. (Did priests of Fire still have hearts that beat?) His arms were around her, one round her waist, and the second gently holding her bent head against his chest. She wanted to tell him that she was awake, that he could let her go, that it was very nice of him to warm her like this—it was rather cold to be sleeping outdoors—but it wasn’t necessary. But she found she couldn’t. Indeed she couldn’t move, even to drop her hands out of the Chalice clasp.

It is good that you are awake. But do not try to move yet.

What?

You are still dangerously cold. Do not try to move.

I—I’m not cold!

You are held by Fire. Let it do its work.

I…don’t understand.

I found you half dead of cold. I do not understand either.

She stopped puzzling over the strange immobility of her body and tried to remember what had happened before she woke up. The warmth she felt now reminded her of waking up by her own fireside with the understanding that she had to go to the old knoll—suddenly she remembered that its old name had been Listening Hill—and go to sleep there long enough to dream. She needed a dream from Listening Hill to tell her if she was to marry Horuld.

This was not something she wanted to tell the Master.

She was beginning to be able to feel her breath going in and out. Her elbows were tucked so close to her body that they moved as her rib-cage expanded and contracted. She could feel her own breath on the backs of her hands, she could feel the long bone of her right thumb pressed against the bottom of her lowered chin…and at that point she found she could let her clasped hands drop. The red and the gold seemed to dim into the shadows, till all she saw was shadows. For a moment she grieved for the red and the gold.

The Master let go of her gently. She tried to sit up, and swayed a little. He uncrossed his legs and knelt behind her, his hands now under her elbows, and as he stood up he drew her with him. He’s stronger, she thought fuzzily—no; he would say that Fire was helping him. But her thought added stubbornly, And his limbs seem to bend in all the ordinary human places, and he seems solid—like flesh, not like fire. She tried not to stagger. The billows of his cloak fell down between them. She couldn’t remember now what she had been leaning against while he—and Fire—held her: his shirt? His bare skin? Is it only his face and hands that are black—is he red and golden under his clothes, like fire? But no hearth fire ever looked like what she had seen. Had he become Fire again to save her? She thought, I’m not burnt, I’m only warm.

Once she was standing unaided he bent and picked something up off the ground: her shawl, and then her cloak. He wrapped them round her, though at the moment she was so warm she did not want them. They were comforting, though, comforting in their familiarity. It hadn’t been frightening when she woke up, but now that he had released her the idea of having been held by Fire was terrifying. She touched her hair; it felt as it always did. She held her hands out in front of her where she could see them, and they looked just the same as usual. They were not black, and the tips of the fingers did not glow red. And he had learnt not to burn human flesh. He had only burnt her the once, when he had only recently left his Fire, when he was exhausted by a journey he was no longer fit to endure.

It was only then that she noticed that it was still dark. Since they stood on open ground there was enough light to see by despite the cloud cover. She turned to look at him. His blackness was a silhouette against the grey sky; he seemed to grow out of the silhouettes of the broken stones of the pavilion. But she could see his red eyes, looking down at her.

“How did you find me?” she said.

He looked up, away from her. “I often try to read the earthlines at night, when the world is quieter, and most human beings are asleep. This last week I have been walking—with Ponty’s help—the line that runs from the Ladywell to the crossroads by the golden beeches, but tonight I could not concentrate. Fire is very aware of heat and cold; I thought for a while that it was only dancing with the snow. Eventually it occurred to me that it would not—not—I don’t know how to explain—at last I looked where it would draw my attention and saw one of my folk dying of cold on the pavilion hill. My Chalice. And so I came here.” He looked at her again. “You were not…you were not trying to destroy yourself, were you?”

“Oh, no,” she said, appalled. “No. Absolutely not.” Was I? Would I rather die than marry Horuld? A tiny thought added plaintively, Who would take care of my bees? If I died, or if I married Horuld? she thought back at it, but there was no response.

He let out his breath in a long sigh that crackled like fire. “I thought, perhaps…being Chalice to such a one as I…might be too great a strain.”

“Gods of the earthlines,” she burst out, “no.” She thought, And how would a Chalice who cannot bear her Master’s Fire choose to kill herself? Very possibly by freezing.

He was silent for a moment and then said, “I have also thought, lately, that perhaps, it would be as well if I…removed myself. Ceded the Mastership to Horuld, presumably, as he has been chosen by the Overlord.”

“No,” she said again, but he did not seem to hear her this time, and there was a lump in her throat so large she could not immediately say it again. She put her hands to her throat as if to squeeze the lump away and let her speak. “No—think of the hardship—even the annihilation—of any demesne when the bloodline is broken and another family must establish itself.”

“That is only when the bloodline is broken. I do not know if anyone has ceded a Mastership before. My thought is that if the old Master can create a way for the new, there may be little disturbance. Less, perhaps, than the disturbance caused by a priest of Fire trying to become Master of a demesne, even if he is of the old bloodline.”

“What disturbance has been so great that you must think this way?” she cried. “Do you know—do you not know—that the demesne has been in trouble for years? Perhaps no one will tell you—very well, I am your Chalice, I will tell you—your brother had been trying his best to shatter Willowlands upon the rock of his egotism. He grew much worse after you left—after he no longer had to pretend to explain himself to you. He could no longer be bothered even to listen to the earthlines, let alone walk them. He was fully absorbed in what he called his researches. I know very little about this, even now, because I was a small woodskeeper when your brother was Master, and such as I was only heard rumours, and since then I…

“But I can tell you what the small folk of the demesne experienced, the last years of your brother’s Mastership. Mortar would not hold and walls fell down. Roof-trees cracked when they were sound and without woodworm. Saplings well-planted withered; seed put in the ground did not sprout. Sheep rarely had twins; cows were often barren. And every season there were fires. Brush fires, till the farmers who were accustomed to burning off their redberry moors no longer dared do so; chimney fires; lightning fires. The same year we in the east saved Cag’s barn, two lightning-struck houses in the north and the west burnt to the ground. But the heat of your brother’s energies beat out from the pavilion, night after night after night, till they too caught fire and burned.”

He answered, “Yes, I have wondered about that fire. You are right that most people—even my Circle; even my Chalice—do not speak to me willingly of what happened since I went to Fire. But I can read, as I find my way slowly through this land that is unexpectedly my demesne, that there had been much fire here in those seven years. As unusually much, perhaps, as there have been unusually many quiet old horses overturning their carts or their ploughs and running away—although any horse may take fright and bolt—or as unusually many Housefolk being turned away for breakages and carelessness, although there are always people who do not pay proper attention to what they are doing, or do not care.

“I have never known why my brother chose to send me to Fire, rather than Air or Earth. Perhaps Fire runs in our blood: I did think, in the heat of my own fury, that he chose Fire from his burning rage against me. But as the priests agreed to take me he must have been right about what there was in me that Fire could fix on, could yoke to itself; they would not have taken me merely because my brother wished to be rid of me. Perhaps—perhaps we were born in the wrong order, and it was he who should have gone to Fire, where the fire that was in him could have been put to better purpose.”

Perhaps we were born in the wrong order was so like what she had often thought that she could not reply. Perhaps his brother would have been a good priest of Fire; but Willowlands had had to live with his being a bad Master.

After a little he went on: “The Circle will not speak to me of what happened in the seven years of my brother’s Mastership, but they speak to me much—if not very clearly—about what has happened since I returned. They will not say it outright, but they would like to see the Overlord’s Heir as Master here.”

“Not all of them,” she flashed back at him. “Not I. Not the Grand Seneschal.”

“That is two against nine,” he said gently.

“And the twelfth?” she said. “What of yourself? Would you truly say against yourself?” She paused, and a dreadful thought occurred to her: “Do you miss your Fire so much?”

“Miss Fire,” he said musingly. “I don’t know. Isn’t that strange? Do you miss your woodskeeping?”

“Yes,” she said immediately. “Especially—” She fell silent.

“Especially now?” he said. “Why were you asleep on Listening Hill on a night too cold for human flesh and blood?”

She jerked as if he had struck her when he said “Listening Hill.”

He waited, but she made no answer. “I do not think you would come here for the sake of recent ghosts,” he said at last. “And I remember it had an oracular name, when it was still called Listening Hill. What foretelling was worth the risk—was so urgent it could not wait—with the snow falling?”

Almost at random she said, “I miss woodskeeping because I knew how to do it. The Chalice is a bloodright, like the Mastership is, but it seems to me much like finding water. The rods in the dowser’s hands draw down till they crack, and when the hole is dug the water springs up, but one must still brick in the well or the channel or the pond, or the water will spread itself out and sink back into the earth again and be lost. I do not know how to brick my channel. I feel—I feel as if I am trying to hold back a river with my hands. The Chalice energy is strong…and I am weak and foolish. At first, when it only seemed to be about mixing cups and standing in doorways, I thought I could learn enough to—to appear to be Chalice. That part even made some sense to me: water is the basis of all things, the thing of all things we need to stay alive, and whenever I was in doubt I put a little honey in; and there were books that told me the usual, the standard mixtures for the usual, standard gatherings. By narrowing it down to the most visible, the best-known, of the Chalice’s work—the bit where she dresses up like a mummer and stands around holding a big flashy cup with enamel and jewels on it—I could think about trying to learn it, despite the daily—hourly—sinking of the heart at the size of the task. Don’t think about it; just put something in a cup and stir.

“At first, after your brother died, the demesne was in such disarray that the least gesture toward coherence seemed a great one. But disarray has its own destructive inertia and those small gestures have meant less and less; and my faith that I am learning to make them correctly is too slow and slight a thing to set against…and I have made a terrible error from ignorance.”

His silence was a waiting and listening silence. And would he not have heard the story already, from someone else? Might not the thought that his own Chalice preferred the Heir have further urged him to consider ceding Mastership? What if he thought her someone who would say one thing to him—as she had just done—while saying, and doing, something else entirely when he was not there? And so at last she said, draggingly, “The Heir came to me. I spent time with him, as Chalice, as a way of keeping distance between us, because I did not want to spend time with him at all, and I did not know that the Chalice could send the Heir away. The Grand Seneschal told me—told me that I could have sent him away. I would not have known else.

“The Grand Seneschal told me that the Chalice had been seen alone with the Heir and had thus indicated her championing of him. I did not know. It is what I did not want—of all things what I did not want. The Grand Seneschal said it was a result of my lack of training; but that is something there is no cure for. I see no comfort—nor useful penance—there. The Grand Seneschal has said he will try to counter the damage I have done with a tale of my shameful ignorance, and that I must—must make up—some tale in support. But I cannot see that the revelation that your demesne’s Chalice is inept and imprudent is going to be seen as a satisfactory situation in a demesne struggling for balance—for its life.” Again she stopped.

After a pause he said, “I am worse than you, because I have spent useless days in the company of various members of my Circle, knowing that as Master I could send them away, but not able to believe in my Mastership enough to do so.”

“That is only kindness,” she said. “You will lose nothing in anyone’s eyes for kindness, and something, I think, you will gain.”

“That is a remark the Chalice would make,” he said, “a Chalice wishing to affirm her Master’s binding to his bloodright.”

“You are bound,” she said. “As am I.”

“Yes,” he said, “I am. But binding cannot necessarily quiet that which has been bound. My people fear me. They fear me and they fear my touch—with justice, as you know. They flinch away from me when I walk among them.”

At the unfairness of this she cried out, “You have only burnt one person! And you were tired near death and only just returned from Fire!”

Gently he said, “I know this too. As does my Circle—as do my people. But they also know that there is always a hesitation—sometimes so slight that were they not looking for it they would not see it—before I touch anyone or anything. If I know the need is coming for me to lay my hand somewhere, I can prepare. A sudden grasp—I cannot do it. A stair banister, a dinner plate, even Ponty’s mane—no harm. But if I touched bare human flesh suddenly, I would still burn it.”

She did not know this. She could say nothing; think of nothing to say. No…she had guessed as much. Guessed that it was not only the Master’s continuing physical awkwardness that caused all those brief pauses. She had sometimes thought that they came from his having to remember what he was doing, what gesture he needed, what action he had next to perform; a kind of physical translation, as from one language to another. But she had still known, though she had not wanted to know, that while that was a part of it, it was only a part. She must say something, but what reassurance could she offer? It had been over half a year since the Master had come home, and still Fire ran in him this strongly? Perhaps the priests of Fire had been right that he could not return.

“By the fourth level,” he said sadly, “an Elemental priest can again go into the world, if he so chooses, because his metamorphosis is complete.”

She knew of the temples in the cities where the priests’ abbeys lay, where the Elemental priests occasionally came to hold rites for ordinary humans. The priests were described as superhumanly beautiful, miraculously graceful and utterly terrifying. “But they mostly choose not to come,” she said. “And they cannot stay, because they can no longer live among humans. Among us. A fourth-level priest would never have been sent home to be Master of his demesne. And I have never heard of one stopping a forest fire.”

Thoughtfully he went on, as if he had not heard her, “Occasionally I have seen one or another of my people creep up to Ponty—when I have been some safe little distance away—and pat him, quickly and as if surreptitiously, as if checking that he is real horseflesh—or as if he were a charm against his rider.”

“Ponty,” she said. “Ponty must do you good among the people of Willowlands; who could fear Ponty?”

“It is not Ponty they fear,” he said patiently, as if she were a student who was refusing to learn her lesson.

She shook her head. She did not want to say yet more against his brother; but what she was thinking of were the increasingly wild, trampling horses her Master’s brother had chosen to ride round his demesne, as if he were trying to frighten his own folk—as if he were trying to hammer the earthlines into passivity, into acceptance of his misuse of them. But he did not burn human flesh if he thoughtlessly touched it. Did it matter? Her Master touched the earthlines softly—she knew this; more and more she could read the influence he was gaining over the solid earth and invisible air of his demesne; those parts of his Mastership which he could not burn. Had a demesne ever had an inhuman Master before?

He said, “And they do not fear Horuld.”

“There is still time,” she said, hearing the emptiness of her own words: was there ever a more useless remark than “Give it time”? “The Chalice has no Heir—no apprentice. And I am not yet fit to take an apprentice—if I ever shall be.”

“Did you ask Listening Hill for a Chalice’s Heir? Or did you ask how to unbind mine, to reveal him as unworthy and incapable?”

It was no more than she deserved. She took a deep breath. “I do not know how to ask an oracle anything. The tale that was once told among us small people—among woodskeepers and beekeepers and shepherds and dairy folk—is that Listening Hill, did you fall asleep on it, would tell a man if his wife were unfaithful, and a woman whom she was to marry.”

He followed her thought, but not far enough. “A Chalice cannot be married against her will.”

She thought of lying to him, but there were too many broken laws and too much harm done to the demesne already by the lies of a Master who had dishonoured his bloodright and a Chalice who had not tried to stop him. Now she was Chalice, and she could not lie to her Master. She knew little enough, as the Grand Seneschal had reminded her, but even she knew that much. “I have been reading as hastily as I can about the treatment of an outblood Heir. It is not only the cups I must give him, it is—everything. It is all that everything that I do not know, that let me make the wrong decision the other day when he sought my company. I accept the responsibility of binding him as Heir as the Chalice must, but I—yes, I wish to bind you, the Master, more. You are Master, and so it is what I must do but I also do not—I do not feel—I do not feel safe with Horuld. The Chalice is not easy in me when he is walking in Willowlands. It may be that the Chalice bloodright only recognises that he is outblood. But it may be something more. I fear it, whatever it is.

“And I read, yesterday, that in the case of an outblood Heir coming to Mastership, the best way for the transition to be successfully made is that the Chalice marry him. It is a small dusty book—but all the books in the library are dusty—I believe it is not well known, that an outblood Heir may marry his Chalice; aside that it is against the usual law forbidding any such bond, there may be other reasons against it that I do not know. Those reasons may even be in that same small dusty book which I can no longer bear to pick up, let alone read. But I am sure the Overlord knows, and Horuld, of this exception, when an outblood Heir inherits. I saw—I wondered—I am sure, now, that this is in their minds—even perhaps that this is their plan. It was more, that day, when I spent that mistaken, irretrievable time with Horuld, than merely that he was currying favour with the Chalice. I knew it at the time; I only did not know what it was. I knew that it made my flesh creep.

“I—I cannot face this. I came to the Chalice too late; my apprenticeship should have begun when I was still a child, so that I could grow up within it—it within me—and it have the chance to shape me. I had inherited my father’s woodright six years before the Circle came to me at my cottage, and my mother’s bees four years before. They came and found a madwoman milking her goats three times a day while her cottage floor ran with mead and the bees were so thick they were like a canopy over the meadow. When I saw them coming I burst into tears. When they told me what they had come for, I could not believe it. I could not. Perhaps it is the Chalice’s duty to marry an outblood Heir, but I cannot.”

There was a long pause while Mirasol wished she could see his face.

At last, musingly, he said, “I had great difficulty when I was first sent away, because I had not wanted to be sent. But the priests are, I fear, accustomed to that, and care only that you are suited to enter Fire at last; the rest, they believe, will come in time. Indeed, when I finally did enter, I felt at home there, at home in a way that I had not been able to feel here, because of my brother. I had been too young to understand much of what the Master did when my father was still Master; the murmur of the earthlines seemed no more to me than the singing of the birds, and rather less than the nicker of my pony when he saw me coming with the bulges in my pockets that meant apples. But when our father died and my brother took the bloodright, I felt it, and felt it very strongly that he was not working in a way best for the demesne…. What I feel now is that Fire taught me what I should be looking to do now, but in some other land, language—dimension. Fire taught me a skill of care and guardianship that I feel I should be able to adapt but somehow I cannot.

“I do not miss Fire the way I missed Willowlands when I was sent away. And the way I seem still to miss Willowlands now.

“The priests would have an answer to that. Indeed I think they tried to tell me before I left. When I came, they said, I was too old; Fire too prefers its apprentices young. But Fire could still bring me to itself, if I let it, and having read me, they believed I would—could—let it. But it is hard to leave one’s…humanity behind. Especially if one is already a man grown. How did you say it? That your apprenticeship should have begun when you were still a child, that you might grow up within it and it within you, and it have the chance to shape you. Yes.” He held out a black hand. “I am blacker than most of the Fire priests, because there was more of me to burn. But perhaps that is also why, even from the third level, I was able to make the attempt to return to the mundane world. I almost did not make that journey, however; I believe I almost died, although the priests did not tell me so.

“And now…it is not Fire that is blocking my way back into Willowlands, but it is perhaps Fire that burned me too well, because I am hollow where I need to be full.

“I cannot promise to remain your Master, even to save you, although I would if I could. I—I cannot think how to say it. The I in Fire is not the same I as in the world, and I am neither the one nor the other. A Master must save his folk as he is able, and able he must be; it is what a Master is for. And a Master treats his Chalice as if she were the finest crystal.”

“The Master’s wedding cup is crystal so delicate that the rule is you may put only two mouthfuls of the drink in it, one each for the bride and groom,” she said dully, as if reciting a memorised text.

There was another pause. “Mirasol,” he said; she looked at him, puzzled. “Mirasol is your name. I…cannot remember mine. In Fire I was Azungbai.”

“Liapnir,” she whispered. “The last Master’s younger brother’s name was Liapnir, the younger brother he sent away to the priests of Fire.”

“Liapnir,” he said. “Liapnir would save Mirasol if he could.”

The next few weeks were hectic. She was almost grateful, despite that it meant she did no more reading about outblood Heirs; at least it meant she also made no more horrifying discoveries. She was almost constantly in attendance at the House or the six and twenty-four fanes and outposts of the Circle; when she was not holding a cup she was pouring patterns of water and mead over the least quiet of the demesne’s hills and dells, copses and meadows. She thought grimly, Now that it is possibly too late, folk are remembering what a Chalice is for. People asked her to lay the restless energies in this or that place that fell within their tending, or that they often walked near, or was where they drew their water. This tradition of the Chalice had fallen away during the last several years of the previous Chalice’s governance. Mirasol did not know whether to be pleased that she was fitting into the role—or at least perceived as fitting into it—or worried that if the folk chose to come to an unsatisfactory Chalice, they must do so because they believed the Master to be more disappointing still.

She thought—she hoped—she could see the ripples spreading from Kenti telling the story of Tis’ burnt arm. She’d had Kenti’s neighbour Vel asking about his well first, where about once a sennight for about a day the water tasted strongly of roses—“It’s nice, the wife likes it, and she’ll be sorry if you take it away, but it’s a little queer and queer is…queer.” She forbore to ask how long this had been happening, and why he was only coming to ask her about it now. After Vel there was Frak, an old mate of Danel’s, asking if she could do anything about a quiet, flat-seeming field where the furrows refused to cut straight; and after Frak was Droman, who worked on the same farm, who wanted something for the ground under a bit of fence that kept falling down and letting the sheep out.

She might, once or twice, have asked one of the others of the Circle to help her—Landsman or Oakstaff, perhaps, with a restless spinney or meadow—but she did not.

At this rate, she thought, I’ll have to take an apprentice just because I need the help. At least I could teach her to take care of bees. She’d have to be able to read; but then maybe she could teach me something about the Chalice…. She surprised herself by considering this possibility seriously for a minute or two, and then thought, No. Not yet. Wait till…but she could not put it into words, even to herself.

But when Catu came to discuss with her the possibility of letting it be known that the Chalice could heal burns and wounds as well as Catu could, she said: “I’d be glad of it; and if you can cure a few stomach-aches too that would be even better; I have more work than Silla”—who was Catu’s apprentice—“and I can do, and I’d rather be birthing babies.” And Mirasol almost replied, “Only if you find me a good girl for apprentice. Silla doesn’t have any younger sisters, does she?”

She said instead, “I’ll help anyone I can.”

Catu looked at her shrewdly. “You aren’t getting enough sleep, are you? Is it work or worry?”

Mirasol shook her head. “Both. Everything.”

“I should have come before—Mirasol, I’m sorry. You know how—confused—everything has been, since the old Master died. I know it’s been a hard transition for you—I know that I can’t imagine how hard a transition—but I’ve been run off my legs myself. The next time I’m going this way I’ll bring you something to help you sleep. The quietening herbs I gave you helped, didn’t they? Oh dear—if it’s work that’s keeping you up, I shouldn’t be adding to it, should I? But—well, it would be good if…” She hesitated. “The Chalice before the last one—she was Chalice almost sixty years. And our Master’s father—he was a good Master but not an easy man—and as is the way of things, most of his Circle was like him. That’s some of the problem now, of course, there are a few of them left, and the others, they took as apprentices folk who were as near like to them as the rods would let them. And so the people went to their Chalice, who was not like the others. Everyone knew her.”

“Yes. Nara is the commonest woman’s name in Willowlands, because it was her name.”

“Yes. In sixty years I hope the commonest woman’s name is Mirasol.”

Mirasol smiled, tiredly. And Nara’s Master was as friendly and approachable as a puppy or your grandmother, compared to the one we have now, and most of his Circle is united only in their aversion to him. What would you think of Horuld as a Master? What would Silla think? What would the mothers of your babies think? “Send me your wounds and burns and stomach-aches then.”

But it was Kenti who brought two little packets from Catu—“this one’s for if you’re lying awake thinking, and this one’s if you’re just too tired to sleep”—plus two loaves of bread and a big jar of potted meat. “I asked Catu—she didn’t think it would be—she thought it would be—she told me these were to help you sleep, that you were working too hard, and I said I didn’t think you were eating properly, I know it’s easy not to when you’re too busy, but even honey isn’t enough by itself….” Her voice trailed away and she looked at Mirasol anxiously.

Mirasol reached out and took the parcels. “It’s very kind of you, thank you,” she said.

Very little money changed hands among the small folk of a demesne; some duty was paid in coin, but most of the economy was based on barter and exchange. The Chalice, like the other members of the Circle, received a stipend for the work she did (disbursed by the Grand Seneschal), and unless there was some very complex ritual involved, ordinary demesne folk were not expected to pay for help from a Circle member. (Given her book-and-paper habit, Mirasol was glad she had honey and beeswax to sell.) But popular Circle members tended to have very well-stocked larders and very well-maintained properties, or known and frequently augmented collections of things on display at the House. Nara had collected wood carvings; there was a dormouse in linden wood in the Yellow Room which had belonged to her that Mirasol was absurdly fond of. Occasionally she took her books and papers to the Yellow Room and when she did she always lifted the dormouse down from its shelf to sit on her work-table.

Mirasol’s hands shook a little as she cradled the parcels. “How is Tis?”

Kenti laughed with an easiness that told Mirasol what she wanted to know. “She’s absolutely fine. Except she gives the stove a wide berth—which is no bad thing. She’s with her cousins today, so that I could get some things done.” She hesitated. “I—I told Danel and my sister what you said about the Master—about him healing your hand. I—I hope you don’t mind.”

“On the contrary,” Mirasol said sincerely, and her heart sang within her.

“It is hard to—to—to like him,” Kenti said, obviously finding words with difficulty, “although I know it’s not liking a Master needs from his people. Danel says his horses aren’t always shying at ghosts any more—any more nor horses always shy at ghosts—especially the young ’uns, and that that’ll be the Master taking hold like a proper Master, and the earthlines quietening under him, and never mind what he looks like. But those red eyes—I can’t—what does he see with those red eyes?”

“He sees warmth,” said Mirasol. “When he looks into a tree where a bird sits singing, where you and I could not see it hidden behind the leaves, he will see the outline of its warmth.”

“But they—But he—”

“You get used to it,” Mirasol said.

Kenti looked at her sidelong. “There’s a story that you spent the day with the Heir. That you…favour him.”

The day, thought Mirasol miserably. She took a deep breath and said, “I—I feel that the Heir’s connection with the demesne is—is not as strong as it might be. If he is Heir, then he must be bound here—for the Master’s sake. Binding is the Chalice’s work. But we have a Master—a good Master. Whatever colour his eyes are. The Heir is only the Heir.”

Kenti’s face was wearing that hopeful, thoughtful look again when she left, the look she had worn when Mirasol had told her about the Master healing her hand. Mirasol hoped Kenti would tell the story of why the Chalice had spent time with the Heir too—and hoped that her sister was a chatterbox. She could not tell—or guess—how much or how little her mistake with the Heir might have contributed to any new restlessness among the demesne’s folk. She heard other reverberations of both her behaviour and the Grand Seneschal’s commentary on it. When she could—since few people asked her as directly as Kenti had, as if healing her daughter’s arm had somehow made the Chalice accessible—she said she had mistaken the Heir’s purpose in consulting her; that she had wished not to embarrass him by revealing his shortcomings. It was the nearest she could come to the Seneschal’s suggestion that she insinuate the Heir was unworthy or unfit. She was afraid that her real revulsion would be exposed if she spoke too near it.

She had, by now, learnt enough to be Chalice when she wished not to be questioned further, and mostly she was as saddened as she was relieved when it worked. She told Selim the truth about that day: that she’d been stupid because she didn’t know any better. She even managed to make Selim laugh by describing her consternation when she looked up and saw the Grand Seneschal standing in the library door. But the laugh stopped too soon and worry took its place. Selim was no fool, and she knew the danger the demesne was in; she was of another old family, and the land spoke in her blood too. Mirasol thought, if there were enough of the old families, perhaps we could drive the Heir away. Perhaps there is a better candidate for Heir right here in Willowlands, disguised as a houndsman or a small woodskeeper…. But what if it is not that Horuld is a poor tool in the hand of the Overlord which might snap from pressure; what if it is that this is the way it is, having an outblood Heir? That the true blood repels it, like iron filings from a magnet?

“Tell it around,” said Mirasol. “Please. The Seneschal warned me what was happening—and Kenti asked me in so many words if I favoured the Heir.”

“I will,” Selim said grimly. “I may leave out the part about your being stupid.”

Mirasol recognised the joke, and laughed.

“I worry about you, Mirasol,” said Selim. “I am happy to trust you with my life—remember the night we saved Cag’s barn from burning down?—but it seems to me that you’ve been thrown in quicksand and told to learn to swim. And the Master—”

“The Master is learning,” said Mirasol quickly. “Remember Danel’s horses.”

“The land and the beasts may be learning to listen to him,” said Selim. “I am not so sure about the people. Would the story of you favouring the Heir have flown so quickly if they weren’t hoping it was true?”

Once Mirasol was so tired that she fell asleep sitting on one of the stone chairs outside her cottage, on an afternoon that was just warm enough to permit the chilly folly of sitting outdoors in the sunlight for a few moments. She had brought another book from the House library back with her to read, but her mind kept turning in spirals very like the ones she trickled from the lip of a Chalice cup. She only closed her eyes for a moment, her face turned up toward the sun, thinking that she could smell the mead and the herbs she had chosen that day for a field where the cattle would not stay…at least there had been no more cracks in the earth…Faine’s wife had bought honey from her for the first time a few weeks ago, and said that Daisy’s calf was a fine strong heifer…here by her cottage she could always smell mead and herbs…when she woke it was twilight, and her nose was cold, but she was warmly covered by a blanket of bees.

She did not see the Master alone again, although he looked into her face with a directness no other member of the Circle did when he accepted the cup she raised to his lips.