Sometimes the demesne’s disquiet manifested as literal tremors of the ground, when the trees shook as if in a high wind, plates flew off shelves, and fences didn’t merely fall down but burst apart. Usually she could hear these in her mind if they were too far away for her feet to feel them. Sometimes the Grand Seneschal sent her a message. (She tried to tell herself this was an indication of some measure of approval, but she feared it was only that as Seneschal he knew what she, who was Second of the entire Circle, second to the Master himself, ought to be capable of. The Grand Seneschal was only Third: but she never remembered this when he was glaring at her, or when another of his brusquely worded messages arrived.) The rest of the Circle were little use. The violence of the deaths seven months ago had damaged and disrupted all their abilities as it had damaged and disrupted everything to do with the demesne; only the Grand Seneschal had pulled himself together again to take the full weight of his place in the demesne framework.
Once, only a few days before the homecoming of the new Master, a farmer, Faine, had come thundering up to her cottage on the back of one of his work-horses, still wearing its ordinary harness and looking as wretched and confused as its master. She’d heard the commotion and come outdoors—even her bees had scattered out of the way of these tumultuous visitors. She knew Faine; he was almost a neighbour. Possibly he had come to her because she was Chalice; much likelier he had come to her because of all the Circle she was nearest.
“Can you come now?” he said breathlessly.
She thought his eyes weren’t focusing on her face: perhaps seeing the thing that he had left behind him. “There’s a great cut opening in one of my fields,” he said. “I’ve left my brothers getting the beasts away—it’s big enough for one to fall in. And it’s growing.” He was speaking as if past her, as if looking at someone standing behind her. He was old enough, she thought, to remember the Chalice before the last one—she who had been Chalice to the father of the new Master and his brother. That Chalice had been much loved; Mirasol’s father had consulted her once about a stand of trees that did not thrive as they should. “There was something wrong about the air around them,” he’d said. “You could smell it as soon as you stood among ’em. I tried Oakstaff first, but he hadn’t the time for the likes of me—but Chalice herself came.” Mirasol knew of her own experience that these trees were now among the finest in what had been her father’s woodright.
That Chalice would have known what to do. But that Chalice had never had to grapple with her demesne in the conditions Mirasol faced.
“A moment,” she said, and flew back indoors. A tremor so ferocious it had ripped the mundane ground apart? She had no idea what she should do, but she had to try to do something. She snatched up the cup of balance, three of the Chalice stones that worked well with it, a handful of herbs, and thrust two pots of honey in the pockets of her cloak. She hesitated over her book of basic incantations; but basic incantations did not include crevasses opening in fields, and watching her fumble uselessly through a book would be good for neither Faine and his brothers nor herself. Her best hope was that the earthlines might tell her something she could use.
The journey to Faine’s farm was so uncomfortable, holding on to the hip strap till her fingers were sore to keep herself from being jolted off by the big horse’s bone-breaking trot, that she managed to avoid thinking about what she could do when they arrived. She didn’t know what she could do. She might as well think about her sore fingers and bruised seatbones.
It was worse than she imagined and, she thought, glancing at Faine’s face, worse than it had been when he had left to fetch help. A great ragged cleft had torn its way through the flat grassy pastureland; the red-brown gash looked eerily like a wound in flesh. Part of the awfulness of it was that the rest of the scene seemed so normal: the sun shone, the birds sang in the trees. The end near them was perhaps only two hands’-breadth across, but Mirasol could see it widened swiftly farther down the field. As she slid stiffly off the horse and her feet touched the ground, the ground shivered, like a horse’s skin shedding flies; the tuft of grass at the end of the trench rocked wildly and then parted with a sound like tearing cloth, and the trench was suddenly a hand’s-breadth longer. The birdsong faltered, and then took up again. Mirasol barely noticed; she was listening to the earthlines. Two passed through Faine’s field, and they were weeping like children.
She looked around, and broke a small twig off an oak tree, thanking the tree for its help. She always preferred to find something she could use at the location itself, and she liked oak for Chalice work. She brushed her fingers over its leaves and murmured a few words of dedication. The now-familiar ritual was a little soothing—but what next?
Two men and a woman had seen them coming, and met them at the edge of the injured field, but the keening of the earthlines in Mirasol’s ears was so loud it was almost impossible to hear human speech.
“…the rest of them out,” one man was saying.
“…Daisy’s calf ran in the wrong direction, and Daisy followed,” said the other man. “They’re…”
And then, as if the moaning of the earthlines was a curtain and they had parted it for her, Mirasol could hear the frightened bellowing of the trapped cow.
“Get a rope,” Mirasol heard her own voice saying. “Two ropes. You may have to drag them out. Your horse has a yokemate, I assume? Fetch him. How has this—rift—opened? Does it stretch from one end, or out from the middle?”
“The far end,” quavered the woman. “It began there. Where Daisy is.”
“Good,” said Mirasol’s voice again. “That makes it easier.” It does? thought Mirasol. The earthlines whimpered. “Where is your spring?” Every farm in Willowlands had a spring; she hoped this one would be a strong one, and near at hand. “Bring me a flask of the water—freshly drawn—as quick as you can.”
The woman turned and ran.
Mirasol walked to the edge of the field, took a deep breath, and climbed the fence. She was immediately deafened by the lament of the earthlines. It was not only the two in the field who spoke; the earthlines in the entire quadrant echoed their distress. She walked slowly along the length of the cleft; would she notice in time, she thought, if it decided to widen suddenly? She fished the cup of balance out of her pocket and rubbed her fingers over it; it was very difficult keeping her own balance between the strange space where the earthlines moved and spoke and the fact that if the crack opened under her feet in the mundane world, she’d fall into it. She tried to listen through the earthlines’ misery for any sign or guide: What was the cut doing here? Why was it here in this field rather than in some other field? Why was it here at all?