But the attempt had failed, and living at a distance had never made her late or careless of her duties (although it often helped make her short of sleep). She thought too that the time it took her to walk to the House and back again was a kind of mind-clearing, mind-composing exercise…perhaps even a protection. She thought of the weight of the mere air of the House—and of trying to live somewhere not only constantly surrounded by people, but constantly surrounded by people who would not meet her eye. She also thought that the Circle could not have guessed how much easier they would have found it to intimidate her if she lived at the House or they would not have given up so soon.
Sometimes she regretted her odd sources of information nonetheless: one of them had been where she had discovered the story about the Master having been put to death for harming his Chalice. She had read it shortly after the Grand Seneschal had received the letter saying that the priests of Fire were allowing their new third-level acolyte to return home to be Master, while Willowlands waited for his arrival—while she was urgently reading all the crabbed and fusty old records she could lay her hands on, for anything she could learn about Chalices and their circumstances. She had read this tale with a shock, but it had not occurred to her then that it would bear any relevance to her or to her Master. Would I really rather not know the law existed? she thought. Wouldn’t I just have invented something like it—and worried about where I’d finally find proof?
In some ways it was not so preposterous or absurd that she had been chosen; and if she had been chosen as apprentice at ten or eleven, she would have been ready when the Chalice came to her. (She wondered if the Chalice had ever failed to go to the accepted apprentice. That involuntary Chalice would be even less to be envied than herself.) A well-established, well-rooted Chalice was Chalice, and all else about her was forgotten, was inconsequential. It was true that the last three Chalices at Willowlands had been Housefolk; but her family was one of the oldest on the demesne and almost everyone in it had some landsense, and had had for generations, as did all the members of all the old families, those both in and out of the House. She felt the blow when the old Master and the old Chalice had died, but that was hardly surprising. Almost everyone had felt so extreme a calamity to the land, even those families who had moved to Willowlands in their own generation. And her landsense hadn’t told her what had happened, only that some great and terrible cataclysm had occurred. When Selim had come to tell her the news she had not only been shocked and appalled but astonished.
Although Selim had been living with the news for a day and a half, telling it over still shook her so badly that she had to sit down. “Branda brought the news to me,” she said, “and I told Marn yesterday. She said she would tell Kard….” Her voice trailed away. She watched Mirasol moving as if blind around her own kitchen, as if trying to remember what you did when you had a visitor, and said, “If you’re going to offer me something to drink, Mirasol, tisane would be nice, but your mead would be better.”
Mirasol shook her head to clear it—it didn’t clear—and then tried to smile and didn’t do that much better. She’d brought Selim indoors and put her in a chair before her news had really sunk in, and, now that it had…she found herself standing, staring at her hands, which had frozen on the cupboard door handles, the cupboard where the mead lived. She opened the door and reached in—hesitated—and instead of mead, took down the honey brandy. She stared at the bottle. She had put down the mead that had become this brandy nine years ago: Her parents were still alive and so was the old Master, and the folk of the demesne were worrying what kind of Master his elder son would become. Her hands were shaking. The Master and Chalice both dead! No wonder the groaning of the land had been keeping her awake at night—giving her nightmares that followed her around during the day and hid in the shadows.
She managed to pour two fingers of brandy for Selim and herself by holding the wrist of her right hand with her left, and then said abruptly, “Let’s go back outdoors again. The sunlight still falls unchanged.” And there are fewer shadows for nightmares to hide in, she thought, but did not say this aloud.
They sat on the worn stone chairs some forebear of Mirasol’s had built several hundred years ago, when the family had first moved to Willowlands and been granted this woodright. The chairs had been among Mirasol’s favourite things all her life, and she felt she needed their solidity now. She dropped a cushion on one of them for Selim but settled on another one herself without; she didn’t mind the hardness of the stone and liked the way the seat seemed to have been worn to a shallow human-buttock-shaped cup. She liked to think this was from all the years of sitting but it was more likely her ancestor had had the luck or foresight to choose saucer-shaped stones. She thought of hundreds of years of rain and sun falling on these chairs…. In all those years they would have seen the deaths of many Masters and Chalices…but never both at the same time. And never in such a terrible way.
Selim was watching her ironically over the brim of her glass. “You nestle into that seat like a cat on a blanket—your dad and his mother did the same. I’ve always thought the family name that ought to go with this woodright is Hardbutt.”
Mirasol laughed. She knew she was supposed to—the Hardbutt joke was very, very old—but she was grateful to Selim for dusting it off and bringing it out on this occasion, when there was so little to laugh about. Laughter went on and on, like sunlight and stone, even if the human beings who laughed did not.
Selim sipped a little of her brandy and gave a great sigh and stretched out her long legs. “Thank the gods for honey,” she said. “Your honey in particular. Just so long as your bees don’t decide to object.” There were bees in the foxgloves near the chairs, and Selim glanced at them uneasily. Most of Mirasol’s visitors glanced at her bees uneasily; they were unusually large, and they had the disconcerting habit of coming, as if to say hello, to Mirasol and—even more disconcertingly—going on to investigate any company Mirasol might have. But Mirasol’s honey was the best in the demesne; several people had told her that they thought it was even better than her mother’s. The bees like you, they said, and bore with the bees’ discomfiting behaviour.
As if they had heard, two or three bees broke off from exploring the foxgloves to fly toward Mirasol. They settled first in her hair and then walked down to her shoulders. Two or three more bees joined them, strolling down her arms and then creeping over the rim of her tumbler to taste the brandy. As well as being unusually large, only their bellies were striped yellow; their backs were a black as velvet-glossy as a fine horse’s. One bee flew on toward Selim. Selim made a noise.
“Don’t worry,” Mirasol said mildly. “They’re not going to say ‘what are you doing with my honey?’ and be angry. The most amazing honey they’ve ever made was after I put some mead out for them one winter when I’d got some other stuff wrong and didn’t have anything else to give them. Put your hand over your glass if you don’t want bees walking in it.”
Selim nervously put her hand over the rim. The bee flew round Selim twice without landing, and went back to the foxgloves. Selim was accustomed to ordinary bees—many people had a hive or two tucked away in a corner for their own use, including Selim’s nearest neighbours—but no matter how often she visited Mirasol she never quite adjusted to Mirasol’s bees. “You have been stung, haven’t you? Even you,” she said.