Robin McKinley (13 page)

She was not surprised when they arrived at a small clearing and Ponty was waiting for them. He appeared entirely unperturbed by the fire; he had been dozing, and calmly raised and turned his head to watch them approach.

She did not ask her Master why he had left before any of his people saw him; she knew why.

His people—his own people—would not like it that their Master, who was still too visibly a priest of Fire, was the first person there when lightning set fire to a wood. This did not—could not—trouble her as it might trouble them, but for her own reasons she had to ask, “How did you know? How did you know the storm would come, and lightning strike, and strike here?” She did not add, And Ponty is no racehorse.

Ponty was wearing a rope halter, but when the Master had lifted the loop from the tree-stump it was tied round and gave it a tug, the headstall fell apart. If the Master had been wrong about his ability to stop the fire’s advance, Ponty would have been free to flee as soon as he tried. She wondered if a Fire-priest also had a charm to enable a slow, elderly pony to outrun a forest fire.

Would the folk with the spades have dug a fire-break in time to save the Chalice’s cottage and her bees?

“I didn’t know,” he said. “If I had guessed wrong I might not have been here—somewhere—in time. But lightning is often mischievous, and I did hear this storm coming toward us and the lightning”—he hesitated—“bragging. I knew it would strike somewhere in Willowlands, and—

we are not so far from the ruin of the old pavilion here, you know. I thought it might be drawn here.”

“The pavilion did not burn by lightning,” she said.

He hesitated again. “It holds the memory of fire,” he said at last. “Lighting is young and strong and thoughtless, but it could also wish to visit the site of some particular victory of one of its kind—as a young soldier recently commissioned might visit the scene of some great battle—and leave some token in memory of the members of his regiment who fought and died there.” With a hand on Ponty’s withers he moved the pony into position beside the tree-stump, clambered ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html awkwardly up the stump and then eased himself onto the pony’s bare back. For another of those unexpected moments, as he settled himself, he looked fully human: someone accustomed to riding, and fond of his mount. The angle of Ponty’s ears, as they tipped back toward him, said that he found his strange rider agreeable. “May Ponty and I save you a walk home?” said the Master, as near to light-hearted as she’d ever heard him. “I—er—I don’t weigh as much as you think. Fire doesn’t, you know,” and he wasn’t light-hearted any more. “Ponty would find you no burden.”

“I—oh,” she said. Her first impulse was to refuse, but then she thought, I’m tired, and—why not? Ponty was built as if from oak; he wouldn’t mind a second rider even if the Master did weigh as much as a human man. “Thank you.” Nonetheless she slid gingerly behind the Master, trying to keep a little distance from him, difficult without a saddle. Her exhaustion overcame her and when Ponty stopped outside her cottage door and she groggily dragged herself awake again she found herself snuggled comfortably against the Master’s back. The rain had stopped, but she was cold from weariness; the unusual warmth of her riding companion was very pleasant, although her cheek felt chafed from the peculiar fabric of the Master’s cloak, and possibly from the heat beneath it. It was a bit like being pillowed against a frying pan.

When she took a deep breath her throat and lungs felt as they always felt. Even her eyes were no longer sore. And there was a faint, lingering dream-sense like the memory of the ecstatic sweetness of the Master’s healing of her hand.

It took her a moment to get herself down—long enough for Ponty to turn his head to watch, which made her laugh. “Good night,” she said. “Good night and—thank you.”

“I am sorry for tonight,” he said. “I was clumsy. It should not have been necessary to frighten you.”

“I should not have been frightened,” she said. “You had said you would protect me.”

“It is to be an exchange of compliments between us again, I see,” he replied. “Therefore I will say that your courage astonished me.”

“Courage,” she said. “I was too frightened to run away. If there was any safety, it was to stay with you.”

“It was your presence as much as the water and honey from the Chalice cup that enabled me to do what I did.”

“You put out the fire.”

“You came. Alone with a pot of honey.”

“I am Chalice,” she said simply. “You came too. You are Master. What else could we do?

Thank you for the ride home.”

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“My pleasure,” he replied, after a pause, and she wondered if he was talking about the fire, or the ride, or the conversation. He added, “I will see you tomorrow at noon, for the clearing of the well.”

“Oh—the Journey Well. Yes. Yes….”

He nodded, once, his red eyes eerie gleams in the darkness above her head, and Ponty took a step away.

“Won’t they”—she hesitated, not sure how to ask what she wanted without saying bluntly “if they knew you were at the fire they might think you set it”—“won’t they miss you? Have missed you?”

“I go out often at night,” he said. “With Ponty. It is—it should be no worse that I was out the night of the fire than any other night.”

Two days after the fire the Overlord’s agent came to the House, and another man with him. She already knew she did not like the agent, Deager, and she disliked the new man immediately, although at first she could not be sure she disliked him for any reason other than the company he kept.

He gave her reason soon enough, however, in the proprietorial air with which he looked round.

He was introduced to her with a tremendous flourish, although no reason was given for his presence; which, with the air and the flourish, was explanation enough, and her heart plummeted.

By the time the Grand Seneschal informed her, stiffly, that this was the Overlord’s choice for the next Master’s Heir, she didn’t need to be told, and in her anger and frustration she said, “That ishasty, ” before she remembered to whom she spoke, and she bit her lip, waiting for the rebuke.

But none came. She was so surprised she looked into his face. He scowled at her at once, the familiar contemptuous, disapproving scowl, but when she ducked her head and then glanced back again a moment later, his face had relaxed into what looked a lot like sadness.

The new man’s name was Horuld. She paid little attention to his breeding, that several of his forebears’ lines ran directly from Willowlands, and several more had crossed in the ensuing generations, and which Deager was very eager to tell out, over and over and over, even to such unworthies as the demesne’s shabby and erratic new Chalice, who was herself one of the indications (Deager didn’t say this but he didn’t have to) that the demesne was still in trouble, over a year after she had taken her place in the Circle.

So far as she knew no Chalice had ever been deposed. But she had never seen any record of a Chalice chosen when there was no Master to hold the land steady while the Circle did its work either. It had very occasionally happened that an apprentice died with or before her Chalice; but ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html then too there had always been an experienced Master. And there were stories of Chalices who had not been able to bear the work they were called on to do—even those who had had their proper apprenticeships—and broken under it. There were only a few of these stories, but one was too many, and there was more than one. She believed that one such Chalice was the Chalice she herself followed.

She was surprised—even more surprised than she had been at the Grand Seneschal missing a chance to reprimand her—when Horuld seemed disposed to talk to her. There were other, more prepossessing and conversationally skilful members of the Circle he could address himself to; demesne hierarchy declared that Chalice was Second of the Circle, but that had to be remembered only when there was work to be done. Her Circle recollected it only when they had to, as did the Overlord’s agent—or they always had done previously. She was, as Chalice, compelled to be present for the agent’s visit, and—as Chalice—she would serve whatever Master fate set over Willowlands. That was enough. Perhaps the training she hadn’t had would have included how to hold superfluous discourse with people she would rather avoid. When she was standing Chalice or performing a ritual she did not have to chat; but Horuld’s first visit was informal. In other circumstances this would have seemed friendly and considerate; as it was it seemed ominous and coercive.

Deager, having proved to his own satisfaction, if not all of his audience’s, that Horuld’s bloodlines were an excellent choice, wished to make it clear—he said—that the Overlord was merely anxious that an unambiguous Heir should be in place, after the recent disaster. If such an accident should happen again, the demesne might fall apart entirely. It had been without a Master for seven months; it could not survive this a second time.

She tried to tell herself that a declared Heir was a sensible precaution; their present Master was the end of his family. The previous Master should have declared an Heir when he sent his only brother to Fire. She wondered why the Overlord had not obliged him to do so; she had only been a small woodskeeper then, and small woodskeepers heard little about Overlords’ decisions. The demesne gossip said merely that the Master was a young man, and hale, and he would produce Heirs—had probably produced a few already, the uneasy joke went. But they would be bastards, and prohibited. By the time the ordinary folk of the demesne had begun to realise that their young Master seemed to have no intention of marrying and producing a proper Heir, especially in combination with his increasingly alarming general behaviour, the fear of what this meant also meant that no one wanted to talk about it.

And then the worst had happened.

Perhaps she should try to believe that the Overlord was merely doing the responsible thing—the responsible thing he had failed to do before—but again she wondered. It was too soon to tie an Heir to the present Circle; Willowlands was still too precarious. However necessary an Heir was, forcing him upon them now would unbalance it further. Would the next thing be that she was obliged to take an apprentice? She had no energy for the binding that would entail. Leaving aside that she had nothing to teach one.

Perhaps it was only her dislike of both Deager and Horuld that made her feel the agent was ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html making it clear that Horuld was being introduced to Willowlands as the Heir only after he had made something else even more clear, if not in so many words: that the Overlord would like to see Horuld taking up this inheritance soon. She was too quick to feel she needed to defend the Master, she told herself. But what she had taken from the agent’s description of Horuld’s bloodlines was that if he was the best that could be done for her poor demesne, the Overlord should be straining every muscle to support the present Master. Did the Overlord want to break Willowlands entirely? Surely not. The disruption would damage the Overlord’s grip too…no. He would be counting on riding it out; might he, more, be betting on the huge increase of his own power the successful changeover would produce? She knew almost nothing of the politics among Overlords. Demesne folk did not travel to the crown city nor visit the court of the king; and as practising Chalice she was furthermore indissolubly tied to her land.

But whatever else she knew or thought of the Grand Seneschal, he would not have kept such a piece of news as a visit from the Heir from the rest of the Circle; and Deager glossed, or slithered, over the question of why Willowlands had not known who was coming with him, which made it plain that there had been no message that had gone awry.

She had mixed the cup she would offer to the company before she came. She had mixed it for the visit from the Overlord’s agent, and that was all. That was how it was done; that was why it was important that a Chalice know in advance who would drink from her cup, and for what reasons. Last-minute changes were destabilising, which was why battlefield cups, which were perforce rare, were also notoriously volatile.

It should not have been a good omen, that a Master’s Heir should be left out of the first cup he received from the Chalice. Perhaps the Overlord, or some other of his plotters, had decided that being left out was better than a Chalice throwing her weight against him, which a loyal Chalice might be suspected of doing upon the presentation of any outblood Heir. Chalices were parochial by definition; of all the Circle, only the Chalice could not set foot across her demesne’s boundaries. Some of the oldest records called the Chalicethe Landtied —and because of this literal overidentification, the Chalice’s response to outbloodedness in any member of the Circle was considered crucial. This perhaps explained why Horuld was interested—indeed eager—to talk to her. Perhaps she could be disposed to include him kindly in her mixture for his next visit, after he had been careful to make a good first impression. She would not need to be disloyal.

Any Master’s Heir was an important part in the demesne structure; most accepted Heirs attended at least some Circle gatherings; and under the present circumstances the only possible Heir was an outblood. A Chalice must at least punctiliously include her Master’s Heir in any cup he was present for; of course it would be better if she felt at least benign toward him, or even generous.

But she did not feel benign or generous. She listened, smooth-faced, when the agent pronounced some blather about how the surprise of presenting Horuld unannounced would create “clarity” in an awkward situation; that he would be more able to see where he would best fit into difficult circumstances if no one was trying to soften the truth. She knew that a properly schooled Chalice would have some matching blather to offer in return, but she was not a properly schooled Chalice, and it gave her a little meagre pleasure that her silence discomfited the agent, and by his discomfiture he exposed that he knew his action had been dishonourable.