Robin McKinley (11 page)

As she had done the morning he healed her hand, she heard herself asking a question she had no intention of saying out loud: “Do you see differently?”

“With my red eyes?” he said, equably enough, and blinked. His eyelids stayed closed a fraction longer than a usual blink, and when they opened again that sense of burning embers was even stronger, in a face that seemed itself to flicker slightly, like a hot fire burnt low. “I’m not sure.

It’s a gradual process, being taken by Fire. I still see the leaves of the trees as green, and a cloudless sky as blue. But I see heat, in a way I remember I did not, when I…before I entered Fire.”

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“You see heat,” she said, not understanding.

“You are warmer than the surrounding air,” he said. “I see—or read—that. I read Ponty as a warm space too. A warm solid space—a Ponty-shaped space. His heat outlines him, and inside…within that outline there is movement, swirls, billows, like a stream in wild country over a rough rocky bed…the movement of his life force. It moves clearly and strongly in him, like clear water. It is rarely so strong or so clear in humans. There is a rabbit in the brush over there; I see the curled and curling shape of its warmth, its body, behind the leaves, which screen it, I think, from your sight.” He looked around. “You can probably pick out the singing birds in your trees by tracing the sound; I can see the silent ones. I can see the ones invisible on their nests, and I can see how many eggs they sit on, for this late brooding. I can see where there is no life inside a shell, that it will not hatch.”

“And the bees?” she said, fascinated.

“Yes. The bees are tiny golden sparks, as of fire.”

“Of honey.”

“Yes. Of honey. The hives glitter with the movement of the bees.”

“I wish I could see them like that,” she said wistfully. “It must be very beautiful.”

He made no answer and—again as she had done that morning before he had first asked her to stand by him—she suddenly recalled to whom she spoke, and looked at him quickly, her mouth already open to apologise. But he was looking at her with what seemed to her was surprise. Her mouth stayed open, but no words came out.

“It is very beautiful,” he said.

She looked down, at her tray, at the little lopsided jar of glittering honey.

“I don’t know much—I don’t know as much as I should—about Chalices,” he said. “Isn’t their usual susceptibility to water?”

“Or wine,” she said. “Occasionally beer or cider or perry. Perhaps once every other century a woman who is pregnant or nursing when the Chalice comes to her finds that she holds her Chalice in milk, but that is not considered lucky for the demesne. Occasionally in a demesne near the sea it has been brine. I’ve read about the finding and naming of many Chalices now and I’ve not read of another one whose gift was honey. Never honey. I suppose that’s one of the reasons that it never occurred to me what was happening, in the beginning, after…” She knew she was talking too much, but it seemed to pour out of her, like honey from a jar: it wasn’t only the overwhelmingness of her life that made it lonely; it was that she had no one to share with how enormously interesting it also was. “And the coming is not usually so…melodramatic. That will have been the unsettled state of the demesne, I know, but…. You do get things like wells ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html overflowing, but it was mead and honey everywhere here, and my goats were fountaining milk, and usually it’s not quite so…You know the Lady of the Ladywell was our first Chalice—that was her house well originally—her well overflowed, but all that happened, according to the records, is that it was the herald of a drought ending, and so very welcome.

“This demesne has usually had water Chalices—maybe because of the willows. The last Chalice, the one who—who died”—she glanced up at him briefly and away again—“she was a water Chalice. I think that may be part of why…and part of why I…” She had babbled on too much already, but she did not want to stop there. “There’s a very old story about a blood Chalice.

She must have had a horrible time. But she brought her demesne through a series of wars that destroyed the demesnes around her, according to the story, so maybe it was worth it to her. I’ve never found any record of her, though, only the story. In the story her demesne is called Springleafturn, and there isn’t one.”

“‘Part of why,’” he said. “Part of why she and my brother died?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I should not have mentioned it.”

“You have the right to know how your predecessor died.”

“I have theright to have been apprenticed to the Chalice I was to succeed! I have theright to have known I was her heir! You have theright to have lived here and supported your brother as Master and learnt what you needed to know as his acknowledged Heir! Our land has theright to be cared for by a Master and a Chalice who know what they’re doing and—and are able to do it!”

“And Willowlands is in trouble because these rights were not honoured.”

“Yes,” she said wearily. “Yes.” She did not say, And it is why two—lame, faulty, unfit, what do you call a priest of Fire exiled from his Fire? What do you call a small woodskeeper suddenly ordered to be great?—unsuitable, unready people were made Chalice and Master, and why they cannot make a damaged land whole. It is all wrong; and the frame, the pattern, the yoke that holds us all, is not yet broken, but it is breaking.

“Tell me why you said what you did. That being a water Chalice was part of why they died.”

She was silent a moment. At last she said, “They died of fire and wine. I—I guess—and it is only a guess—she might have shaped the way better if she had had more strength for wine.

Willowlands has always been very—” She tried to think of an adjective that would fit. The only ones that came to her were “pure” or “clean” or “clear” or “simple” and she could not say any of them to the brother of the man who had made it not so. There were other demesnes whose strength was not in clarity or purity, but she did not know how to make her own another of them, even to heal it. She thought, If the land chose me, then it cannot want to go that way. The only thing I have to offer is simplicity—dumb, harassed simplicity.

“He was holding one of his—parties—I guess. Yes, he had begun them before he sent me away; indeed it was because of them that he did send me away, because I could, or would, not keep ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html silence about them. No, no one has told me this, but it was the old pavilion that burnt, and it was there I know he held his first assemblies, because it suited his purposes. How can a Master and his Chalice be so insensible as to be overcome by fire, in their own demesne, unless they are drunk—or drugged?”

Quickly she said, “At least we did not lose the House.”

“The House would not have borne such usage as his carouses were,” he responded just as quickly. “He had to hold them elsewhere. I am sorry the pavilion was not stronger.”

“But—” she said. “The—the old magic, before the demesnes were made, the old magic still lives close under the earth there. You know this—you must have felt it too. The pavilion was power to use, for good or ill, without rule.”

Another silence, while he looked at his hands. “I apologise for the violence of my words. I did not—do not—hate my brother. The bitterness I feel is the bitterness of my own frustration—my own lack of power to pull our land together again. Or rather, the power is still there, but it has been turned to, or into, Fire, and I cannot turn it back, however I try.” Savagely he clapped his hands together, and when he opened them, a pillar of fire roared up from between them—he closed them again and the fire disappeared. “That is only a trick to frighten children, here. Here I cannot be sure, if I reach out to grasp a goblet, that I won’t miss, and grab the air, or burn the hand of her who holds it out to me. It is the same when I reach for the earthlines. I miss, or do harm.”

“You healed the burnt hand of the woman who held the goblet for you. It is not all tricks to frighten children,” she said, hoping he had not seen that she had been frightened just now. “I hear the earthlines too—I not only must, as Chalice, but by being Chalice I cannot help it—and I have felt no harm done lately.”

He raised his eyes and looked at her. “Would you? Would you feel it? Could you say to yourself, ‘Yes, here is a break—a roughness, a troubling—that was not here a sennight ago’?”

She returned his look and refused to look away. “I don’t know. That is what you are pressing me to say, is it not? I don’t know because I don’t know what the earthlines should feel like, should sound like—what they would feel like if the land were settled and content—whether their constant plaintive murmur would at last fall silent.I don’t know . It is only one of a thousand thousand things I don’t know. But I know the land lies quieter now than it did a year ago—than it did six months ago. I know the earthlines lie softer than they did.”

He shifted his gaze away from her, as if looking through the woods to the House and then beyond, across the long leagues of the entire demesne. She sat staring at him, and was so far away in her thoughts that when he looked back at her she did not move her eyes quickly enough.

“What do you see?” he said.

“I remember seeing you once when you were a boy,” she replied, not adding that she was trying ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html to find that boy in his face now, and failing. “You trotted past my mother and me, and nodded and smiled at us. It could have been Ponty’s dam you were riding; I always noticed horses when I was a child, and Ponty looks much the same as that pony did. Your brother had cantered on ahead.”

An expression crossed his face so fleetingly that had she not been staring at him she would have missed it: it was the expression of the little brother whose older brother had just cantered on ahead of him—again. For that tiny, fleeting moment not only did he look fully human, but she saw the boy he had once been, and knew it was the same boy she had seen that day with her mother.

“Yes, he would have cantered on ahead. He was an excellent rider from the first time he sat alone on a pony; but any horse he rode immediately wanted to gallop. He had a similar effect on everyone. Except perhaps me. He overwhelmed his Chalice.”

It was not a question. She could think of nothing better to tell him than what she guessed was the truth. As Chalice, her guess came from sources no one else had, although her conclusions were no different from what everyone knew, whether they spoke it aloud or not—which they did not. She stood to all the important meetings of the House and the Circle. Neither they nor their new Master spoke in the terms he and she spoke in now. “He—chose—her to be flexible. To be responsive. The old Chalice was old before he became Master, and your father was a man who—

who deeply believed in tradition.”

“Narrow-minded and intolerant,” he said. “The trouble did not begin with my brother.”

“I guess,” she said slowly, “that the land did feel some—imprisonment, under your father. And your brother wished to open the prison door. He knew his—his own mind soon enough that he was able to—to will the land to choose a—a supple young girl when the Chalice wished to take an apprentice. A girl who would grow into a Chalice who would help him unlock the door.”

“My brother wished to run wild with no hindrance from anyone or anything.”

“He helped create a Chalice who would accept his lead.”

“Who would provide no obstacle to his self-indulgences.”

She was silent. She would have liked to disagree, to honour the memories of the Master and the Chalice they had received their sovereignties from, but…Master and Chalice were always grievously hard burdens to bear. What she and her Master had been given wasn’t even the onus of building bricks without straw; the bricks had existed and been shattered. You can’t make bricks out of broken bricks.

“By wine and fire,” he said slowly. “Therefore the land would have a Chalice neither of water nor of wine. And it drew me back from a place farther into Fire than anyone has returned from.”

“I am not strong enough,” she said. She had never said this aloud to anyone before—anyone but ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html her bees. “I know too little, and I do not learn fast enough. And there are not enough hours in the day.” And the land has been bent away from true too far and for too long.

“I do not believe that,” he said. “At least—it would not be if you had a Master you could rely on, who could sustain you as a Master should.”

“I do not believethat, ” she said firmly. “I—”

“No,” he said. “Let us not have another exchange of compliments. You have chosen to support me, and I tell you that I support you. I do hear our land about some things, and I feel it respond to you—it responds as a frightened horse does to the rein in a kind hand, when the brute that hurt it has gone. It is skittish and uneasy yet, but it listens to you. It is listening hopefully. There is good heart in our land; it will return to us if it can.

“So I suggest there be a pact between us—that we accept that we are Master and Chalice here—

and that we are each other’s Master and Chalice. Will you assent to this?”

While they were talking the bees had, as usual, come to see who Mirasol’s visitor was. But a more than usual number of them had settled on him, and had not flown away again. This was not their usual behaviour, but she was too disturbed and confused by the conversation to have paid proper attention; nor had she noticed that their humming note had changed. “Oh—I did not think,” she said. “The bees—they probably do not like the smell of fire on you.”

He made a sudden movement—exactly the sort of sudden movement you should not make when surrounded by half-agitated bees. His hand had gone to his forearm, bare above the wrist, and she realised one had stung him—stung theMaster . Several thoughts flew frantically into her mind simultaneously: this was why a Chalice was never of honey; but no Master had ever smelt of fire as this one did; what law was there about a Chalice who caused injury to her Master?