“No,” she said, still standing, holding on to the Seneschal’s other arm with both hands. “No. I must go home. There is—so much to do in the next seven days. Oh, I—” She stopped, overwhelmed.
“Much to do indeed, and all of it useless,” said the Grand Seneschal. “It was a good thing you did just now, but it will be to no purpose, come the day.”
She almost could not bring herself to ask: “This is not about…my blunder with the Heir, is it? That is not the straw that tipped the balance?”
“No. I would say the Overlord has had this in his eye since the first report of our new Master came back to him. I guess Horuld will have been discomposed by losing someone he believed an ally—I saw the look on his face as you shouted out your binding—and the Chalice is a very important ally indeed. But Horuld does what the Overlord tells him to.”
“Planned,” she said. “Planned.” She heard the disbelief in her own voice as if someone else was speaking. She said what she had told herself just after the worst had happened. “Even this Overlord would not have planned.…” And then she remembered how she had hated him at first sight. That was not only me, Mirasol, she thought. That was also the Chalice in me. Would the Chalice waste such hatred if there were nothing she could do?
“If, as we approach our final extremity, you will permit me a great impertinence…. This is why I have found it so difficult to accept you as Chalice. You are a quick study in the rituals of the Chalice; I have admired your skill very much in this, and never more so than this afternoon. As a seer into the darkness in human hearts you are…a keeper of bees who has lived all her life in a small corner of woodland, who sees but few people, and they clear and straightforward as she is herself. Forgive me, if you can, for speaking to you so, but if the demesne is to survive Horuld….” The Seneschal’s voice stopped.
I will have to marry him, you know. She tried to make herself say the words. The “you know” would make it sound careless, not despairing. But she did despair, and she could not say the words.
“The faenorn—I don’t think I know….” Her voice trailed away. She’d been sure, when she’d heard Horuld and the Overlord speak Willowlands’ doom, she knew nothing about a duel between Heir and Master called faenorn. But there was a memory trying to surface. It was another of those things she hadn’t wanted to know existed, and when she’d read about it she’d turned the page or laid the book down and taken up another one—or possibly gone to answer the door to someone else wanting honey or help.
“It’s another of the grisly lingering remnants of our demesne’s early history,” said the Grand Seneschal. “I don’t know much either—little more than what most of Willowlands now knows. It happened often enough in the early days, I believe, but rarely since. I know…” He hesitated. “I know our Master’s brother threatened his father with it, but the old Master just laughed.” The look of hopeless weariness Mirasol had seen before on the Grand Seneschal’s face reappeared. “That’s how I heard of it. I knew one or two of the old fireside ballads about bloodletting between Master and Heir; I hadn’t realised they might be true, that there was something called faenorn with a name and a heritage. My own master—he who was Grand Seneschal before me—was very worried about it, but the old Master just laughed again, said that it was boyish high spirits, that every son needed to rebel against his father. My master tried to warn me…at least he never knew how right he was.” The Grand Seneschal rubbed a hand over his face, as if to wipe away the hopelessness and weariness. “There is some irony in our Master being called to the faenorn, but I do not feel we are in a position to appreciate it.”
She released the Seneschal’s arm. “I must go. I must go.” The urgency was there; now all she needed was a plan to go with it. She stooped—slowly—to pick up her goblet, and noticed with regret that it was dented at the lip; that would have been when she dropped it, trying to pour. It amazed her how little, now, it weighed. It was perhaps appropriate that she had dropped it, though she would never have deliberately dropped a Chalice vessel. But the cup had been mixed for the meeting of the Master, Overlord and Heir, not for the treachery of the last two. To bind properly, the mixture must match the circumstances. Were there any records of a Chalice binding a demesne against her Overlord? But the new dent in the lip of a centuries-old goblet was a sorrow and a pity. It was, she thought, only the first small pebble, heralding the avalanche.
Beneath the humming of the bees she could still hear the lament of the earthlines. What did they grieve for? The coming of Horuld, the loss of the Master—or only the destruction of the change?
“At least let me send you with a pony,” said the Grand Seneschal.
Her face was almost too stiff to smile, but the corners of her mouth did turn up at last. “And what pony will be happy trailing hundreds of thousands of bees?”
The Seneschal replied, “Ponty has carried the Master when he still smells of fire and char. I think Ponty might bear a few bees.”
“What—what happened?” she said timidly. “What happened, that the Overlord…I did not see. I was indoors, I was eating,” she said, as if this were a shameful thing, “and—”
The Seneschal interrupted. “They will have planned for it to have happened in the one moment the Chalice may rest herself in a long day of holding witness. That is not your fault either. In a way it should not have signified, because the Chalice was not there; the meeting was not whole nor held. But it was done to create this break, and no one, I think, could say that the Overlord was not within his entitlement to react as he did—indeed some would say he was required to do so.
“The Overlord stumbled. That is all. He stumbled while he was turning to ask—to say to the Master—I don’t know what. His mouth was open; I saw that. Perhaps he was taking care not to say ‘Watch carefully now, I am going to ruin you.’ He stumbled—does he seem like a man who stumbles easily to you?—and the Master should have caught him. He was standing next to the Master, and no one else was near. The Master had to catch him. But the Master stepped back, and the Overlord fell.”
The law was the law. The Master might as well have broken a blade under the Overlord’s nose and dropped the pieces to the ground as what he did do. It did not matter to demesne law that this Master had been a priest of Fire less than a year ago.
There is always a hesitation 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. There were many reasons she did not like remembering the snowy night on the pavilion knoll. Frustrated she cried out, “But he is so much better! Think of when he first arrived—I don’t only mean—” She stretched out her right hand and held it palm down. “When he arrived he could barely walk.”
The Seneschal shook his head. “He can control it. But there is a pause before he touches anything, even now. The pause is shorter, but it’s still there. He does not control it well, or for long, I think. If he had caught the Overlord instinctively—if he had let himself catch the Overlord instinctively—he would have burnt him. And in a sudden urgent moment like that, when you seize something harder, perhaps, than you mean to, simply to grasp it at all—how badly might he have injured him?”
She thought of what that momentary glancing touch had done on the day of the Master’s arrival; and then she made herself think clearly of the night on the pavilion hill, when Fire had caught her away from cold death, and held her for some time. Last and unwillingly she remembered the conversation they had had that night, a conversation she had refused to think of, with its talk of ceding the Mastership. With the Master admitting he could not remember his own birth-name, but only his name in Fire.