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.