“And would you please let Daisy and her calf, and the man in there with them, climb out safely,” said Mirasol, and flung more water and herbs and honey. The stones rattled; there was not much of her mixture left.
She saw the head of the cow emerge from the darkness; then her muddy body and finally her lashing tail. She staggered and stood, head low and feet braced. The horses halted, and someone moved to release her. The horses stepped forward again, but the second rope came easily, and a tiny, equally muddy version of Daisy popped out, like a terrier from a hole; and then someone—Faine—was lying by the crack, and reaching his arms into it, and there came the man who had gone into the trench to tie the ropes around Daisy and her calf, and he was the muddiest of all.
“Thank you,” said Mirasol. “You can finish now, please,” and she emptied the last dregs of her cup into the closing crack, catching the stones in her other hand. Perhaps she should not have run forward so quickly and eagerly; when the last of it closed, it closed with a tremor so violent that one of the horses stumbled and whinnied, and the man at their heads fell down.
But it closed. The field was a field again, with nothing to show for what had happened but a slender ragged ridge where the ravine had been, where the grass now grew at peculiar angles. Daisy turned abruptly, and began vigorously to lick her calf. Faine still had an arm around his muddy brother, and Mirasol realised he was laughing.
The words then came to Mirasol; perhaps she had read them somewhere, or perhaps the earthlines had whispered them to her after all. She said them softly, but Faine and his family turned and stood motionless, listening with the earthlines: Lie thou there, thou earth. Stiller than starlight, stiller than silence, stiller than darkness, stiller than death.
She thought of that day as she plucked at the fraying, grubby margins of the bandage on her hand. She changed the dressing every day, but wrapped it up again in the same cloth (which she had finally learnt to do one-handed). She should change it; a grimy bandage did not reflect well on the dignity of the Chalice. She sighed. A grimy bandage on the hand of a beekeeper would make no difference.
She wondered what Faine had said of the occasion. And she thought: nothing. He will have said nothing. It should not have happened; in a demesne not teetering on the edge of disintegration it would not have happened. It was less important to acknowledge that the Chalice had dragged them all back fractionally from that edge than it was to pretend that they were not that close to it in the first place. But this was, she thought sadly, extremely hard on the Chalice.
She recognised that she wanted this Master to succeed for reasons that were also to do with herself, Mirasol, within the Chalice, whose only apprenticeships had concerned bees and woodscraft. She wanted him to succeed because she knew how difficult accepting the Chalice had been for her—and how difficult it was for her now to put out fires and drag back from edges and be ignored. She wanted her Master’s help—help because she was Chalice but also because she was Mirasol. Help to put their demesne back together so that the earthlines would never again cry, Broken, broken. Help to lead Willowlands home. But she recognised the exhaustion in the Master’s strange eyes because she knew it in herself. And as the weeks passed after the new Master’s arrival, she recognised something else in his eyes, though she had a harder time putting a name to it.
When she had been a woodskeeper, things like Chalice and Master—and Grand Seneschal, Prelate, and Overlord’s agent—were impossibly beyond her. Even when everyone in the demesne knew that their former Master was out of control and his Chalice pulled in his cataclysmic wake, the ordinary folk, herself included, felt only anxiety and fear. There was no task or duty a beekeeper or woodskeeper could take on that would change the situation. The isolation of the Chalice was certainly on account of all the Chalice needed to know that no one else knew, all the tasks the Chalice needed to perform that no one else could perform; but she had never minded hard work, and her father’s woodright and her mother’s beehives had always been attentively kept because she would rather be doing something than not. It wasn’t the work of the Chalice she minded. It was the vast unfathomable burden of its responsibility. She still felt the Chalice was incomprehensibly beyond her—even wished that it were incomprehensibly beyond her, so she could give up. In despair, perhaps, but because she had no choice. She felt that something of this same despair was in the Master’s eyes now, and perhaps only she could read it there.
And perhaps it was her duty to report it to the Grand Seneschal, or the Overlord’s agent. Because even above the Chalice’s duty to the Master was the Chalice’s duty to the demesne. But she would not report it, any more than she would report herself. She was not a good Chalice, but she was all they had. The Chalice had come to her, and it remained with her: and as Chalice, her judgement was for the new Master. She clung to this thought sometimes, when her mind blundered like a shying horse among all the shadowy, threatening-looking things she didn’t understand, or like a bee caught indoors, bumping into walls and windows, looking blindly for a way out of this bewildering and inexplicable new landscape. Despair was a private weakness she could not afford to indulge.
But when she remembered that day at Faine’s farm—or those many, many other days that she’d put out a fire or darned a sock or propped up a fallen fence—she didn’t remember that she had succeeded. She remembered that she had had no idea what she was doing, and no idea why it worked. It did not feel to her, remembering, like an indication that she was learning her job, evidence that she was, after all, fit to be Chalice. It felt like something she had got away with, that she might not get away with again.
But there was something more that troubled her, something that troubled her most of all about the accident on the day of the Master’s return—the accident that everyone believed was a sinister portent to begin the new Master’s reign. She wondered if anyone but herself knew, or would remember, that it was a capital offence to injure a Chalice, even for a Master. She especially wondered if the Overlord’s agent knew of this old law. In the early, barbaric days of the demesnes, at least one Master had been put to death for it.
She’d read about the execution in one of the oldest records available to her. Some of the Willowlands Chalice records were unique, she just didn’t know which ones; and this one was obviously a copy, although there was no telling if any other copies still existed. Perhaps no one else knew that the law had ever been enforced. Most of the cruellest laws were no longer put into practise, but there were unpleasant traces of those old ways still. And the presumption remained that a law that had once been used, however rarely or long ago, was stronger than even a recent law which had never been anything but words in someone’s mouth or written on a page. Much worse was the lingering belief that a law with blood on it was somehow live. Forever.