“What can the Chalice do for you?” she said gently.
“Save our demesne,” he said immediately. “I don’t care how you do it. But I know what the faenorn means. And I never heard that an outblood Master was anything but loss and ruin to any demesne. Whatever else our Master is, he’s the right blood.”
Despairingly she thought, Are his people are turning to the Master at last, now that it is too late? Or have I not noticed this happening because I have been too aware that his Circle still turns away from him? For a moment her mind went blank with grief and regret. But then she thought: It does not matter—even if all the people in a demesne stood together against him, an Overlord would still win out over them. There was never anything any of us could do to stop what this Overlord wills.
“I—I will do what I can,” she said. “Before and after the faenorn.”
A second pony was led up, its saddle creaking and clattering with flasks and bottles.
“Is there aught else I can do for you, missus?” said the stablemaster.
“Pray for me,” she said. “Light a candle. Do you have a honey or a beeswax candle?”
“Yes, missus,” he said. “We all have one of yours, up here at the House.”
“Do you?” she said, surprised.
“For luck,” he said. “We know our Chalice is a honey Chalice—and that none has been such before. And we need all the luck we can find since the old Master, and the old Chalice, died. We, most of us, we can’t afford beeswax candles, but we all have one of your candles, missus. We don’t burn ’em. We keep ’em, for luck.”
“Burn them now,” she said. “Burn them over the next five days, between now and the faenorn.”
“I will, missus,” he said, and dropped his hands to his sides. “And I’ll tell the others to do the same.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“May the gods of the land and the earthlines bless your journey,” he replied.
She took the ponies straight back to the cottage and spent some time—too much time—arranging, rearranging and agonising. She needed rest so she might think more clearly; she did not have time for rest, and the ponies were fresh. But she would not come back here; what she took with her now would have to do.
They left at sunset, the ponies mildly puzzled at setting out again so late, but too polite to protest still wearing their harness when they wanted to graze and doze. They were lucky in the moon; she would be full in four days, and if they were lucky in the weather as well there would be light enough to see by for most of the dark hours. She pointed the ponies’ noses southwest; they would go to the Great Tor, and the ponies could rest while she did a more elaborate ritual there. Then they would go to the Ladywell; she did not have much of her water left, and she must have enough for the next five days. They would stop long enough there for the ponies to rest again, but they would have to go on as soon as Mirasol was finished. They needed to begin the Circle points by tomorrow noon.
They did more than fifty leagues in the five days left to them. She had not looked at a map of the demesne since she had first been found as Chalice, though there were many maps at the House. She knew she could find her way around the edges, along the boundaries, because the earthlines would tell her where they lay; what she had not expected was how ragged and whimsical some of those boundaries were, or had become, over the centuries, as Willowlands learned to fit comfortably against its neighbours. It was like bodies in a bed, she thought, each trying not to put an elbow in another’s eye. The old woodskeepers’ map had showed the boundaries as being regular and straight, except when one followed a stream; at least the stream boundaries, she found, still ran through the streams, where the map showed them. The rest curled and curved, bent and dented. That made the way longer. And many of the places she wanted specifically to secure were not on the boundary itself, but a little way inside.
Also she thought of several places that as Chalice she should open and speak to, which she had not thought of when she made her plans, that the binding over all should be stronger, like extra fence posts in a fence. And then there were those small, anonymous dells and hollows or meadows and mounds which slipped into her mind like bees through a window as she passed them, and when this happened she turned off to go to them. When she slid off her pony and put her hands on the earth or the tree or the stone or in the water it seemed to her that something came to her, the something that had called her. Be thou one-hearted, she said. Thou art Willowlands, each and all of you. She thought they listened. She hoped they listened.
There were many of these. And they made the way longer yet.
Gallant, she found, was better at obeying her legs and heels while she scattered the sweet drops from her flasks as they walked, and so she rode him more often than Ironfoot; but remembering that Gallant might not let her know he was tiring till he was half foundered, and knowing that she wasn’t paying enough attention to anything but what the earthlines were telling her, sometimes she got off and walked too. She only stopped at the places that needed more than a few drops from the tips of her fingers: the places whose attention she had to catch first—or those who had caught hers—or where she needed the opening or the binding to be particularly strong—the fence posts for her fence, the cornerstones for her House.
Other than these she only stopped when the ponies needed rest, and while they rested she mixed more mead and honey and Ladywell water from her flasks, and added herbs or didn’t, and dropped in or took out stones; and topped the result up with whatever local water she could find. Occasionally the ponies had quite a long rest—or no rest at all—because she could not find a water source that suited her. Some ponds had lain in their beds and dreamed for too long; some streams rushed in spate for the love of the violence of it. Sometimes she could balance a sleepy or a riotous water with a particular honey, but sometimes she knew she did not want to try.
There were bees with them always.
Once, on the third day of their journey, the only water she could find—and Willowlands was very rich in springs—was a reedy pool so languid she was half afraid of letting the ponies drink from it, that it might give them a dislike for the long and weary work they were in the middle of; she stared at it, forlornly, with her empty flask in her hand, near where she had unloaded the saddlebags. A few of the accompanying bees circled past her face and then went and clustered on a particular bulge of one saddlebag. It contained a pot of honey she’d added at the last moment. Not all honey—she had concluded—had a specific use beyond what all honey is good for, sweetness and salves. But this honey, it was somehow so strong that it must be for something, though she had still not learnt what it was. The best she had come to was that this honey was for joy; it didn’t seem suitable for such desperate work as this sennight was, but the seeming vigour of it heartened her, and she’d brought it so as not to have left any potential resource behind. It was the honey she had given the Master the day he had come to her cottage.
“Very well,” she said to the bees. When she put her hand on that saddlebag, they all flew away. She filled her flask with the indolent water and added more honey than usual, from that particular pot, then tasted the result, which was also not something she usually did. And she felt a vast uplift of her sagging mood, as if her spirit had grown wings and soared into the sky. She didn’t use that honey again to counter sleepy water, but she used it on herself when the road ahead seemed unbearably long, and she dropped it on the ponies’ meagre nightly handfuls of corn.