Although Selim had been living with the news for a day and a half, telling it over still shook her so badly that she had to sit down. “Branda brought the news to me,” she said, “and I told Marn yesterday. She said she would tell Kard….” Her voice trailed away. She watched Mirasol moving as if blind around her own kitchen, as if trying to remember what you did when you had a visitor, and said, “If you’re going to offer me something to drink, Mirasol, tisane would be nice, but your mead would be better.”
Mirasol shook her head to clear it—it didn’t clear—and then tried to smile and didn’t do that much better. She’d brought Selim indoors and put her in a chair before her news had really sunk in, and, now that it had…she found herself standing, staring at her hands, which had frozen on the cupboard door handles, the cupboard where the mead lived. She opened the door and reached in—hesitated—and instead of mead, took down the honey brandy. She stared at the bottle. She had put down the mead that had become this brandy nine years ago: Her parents were still alive and so was the old Master, and the folk of the demesne were worrying what kind of Master his elder son would become. Her hands were shaking. The Master and Chalice both dead! No wonder the groaning of the land had been keeping her awake at night—giving her nightmares that followed her around during the day and hid in the shadows.
She managed to pour two fingers of brandy for Selim and herself by holding the wrist of her right hand with her left, and then said abruptly, “Let’s go back outdoors again. The sunlight still falls unchanged.” And there are fewer shadows for nightmares to hide in, she thought, but did not say this aloud.
They sat on the worn stone chairs some forebear of Mirasol’s had built several hundred years ago, when the family had first moved to Willowlands and been granted this woodright. The chairs had been among Mirasol’s favourite things all her life, and she felt she needed their solidity now. She dropped a cushion on one of them for Selim but settled on another one herself without; she didn’t mind the hardness of the stone and liked the way the seat seemed to have been worn to a shallow human-buttock-shaped cup. She liked to think this was from all the years of sitting but it was more likely her ancestor had had the luck or foresight to choose saucer-shaped stones. She thought of hundreds of years of rain and sun falling on these chairs…. In all those years they would have seen the deaths of many Masters and Chalices…but never both at the same time. And never in such a terrible way.
Selim was watching her ironically over the brim of her glass. “You nestle into that seat like a cat on a blanket—your dad and his mother did the same. I’ve always thought the family name that ought to go with this woodright is Hardbutt.”
Mirasol laughed. She knew she was supposed to—the Hardbutt joke was very, very old—but she was grateful to Selim for dusting it off and bringing it out on this occasion, when there was so little to laugh about. Laughter went on and on, like sunlight and stone, even if the human beings who laughed did not.
Selim sipped a little of her brandy and gave a great sigh and stretched out her long legs. “Thank the gods for honey,” she said. “Your honey in particular. Just so long as your bees don’t decide to object.” There were bees in the foxgloves near the chairs, and Selim glanced at them uneasily. Most of Mirasol’s visitors glanced at her bees uneasily; they were unusually large, and they had the disconcerting habit of coming, as if to say hello, to Mirasol and—even more disconcertingly—going on to investigate any company Mirasol might have. But Mirasol’s honey was the best in the demesne; several people had told her that they thought it was even better than her mother’s. The bees like you, they said, and bore with the bees’ discomfiting behaviour.
As if they had heard, two or three bees broke off from exploring the foxgloves to fly toward Mirasol. They settled first in her hair and then walked down to her shoulders. Two or three more bees joined them, strolling down her arms and then creeping over the rim of her tumbler to taste the brandy. As well as being unusually large, only their bellies were striped yellow; their backs were a black as velvet-glossy as a fine horse’s. One bee flew on toward Selim. Selim made a noise.
“Don’t worry,” Mirasol said mildly. “They’re not going to say ‘what are you doing with my honey?’ and be angry. The most amazing honey they’ve ever made was after I put some mead out for them one winter when I’d got some other stuff wrong and didn’t have anything else to give them. Put your hand over your glass if you don’t want bees walking in it.”
Selim nervously put her hand over the rim. The bee flew round Selim twice without landing, and went back to the foxgloves. Selim was accustomed to ordinary bees—many people had a hive or two tucked away in a corner for their own use, including Selim’s nearest neighbours—but no matter how often she visited Mirasol she never quite adjusted to Mirasol’s bees. “You have been stung, haven’t you? Even you,” she said.
“Of course,” said Mirasol. “Every beekeeper is stung. Hasn’t your cat ever scratched you?”
“That’s different,” said Selim, but she sat back in her chair.
Mirasol found the hum of her bees soothing—bees and honey were two more things that went on and on—but neither sunlight, stone nor bees could distract her long. Distantly she still felt the land lamenting its loss—an almost tangible drumming under her feet. The earthline that ran through her meadow had the restless, unhappy, unseeing manner of a horse pent and pacing in its stall when it is used to being able to run loose outdoors. “What—what will happen now?”
Selim knew she was asking about the news Selim had brought. She shrugged. “I don’t know. Branda said he’d see Gota today.” Gota spoke to the House for all the woodskeepers, because his woodright contained Willowlands’ ancient willow coppices and was thus the most important of all the demesne’s woodrights. “So if there’s anything to know Gota will tell us.”
“The Master’s brother…” Mirasol began, and didn’t know how to continue.
After a pause Selim said, “Yes. We’re all thinking about him. But nobody comes back from the Elemental priests. He’s been there seven years; that’s too long.” She didn’t have to add, Down-brook was given an outblood Master sixty years ago, and it has still not recovered from the shock of the change. Nor did she have to add, And Willowlands was already under strain, from seven years of an increasingly bad and careless Master and a Chalice who put no check on him.
And when, almost immediately after Selim’s visit, things had begun to go wrong for Mirasol, the truth never occurred to her. She guessed it was to do with the devastating loss of Master and Chalice, but assumed that equally strange and punishing things were happening to everyone in the demesne.
She lived in a small cottage in that corner of Willowlands’ old forest which she tended; whose tending was her inheritance from her father. Ordinarily she saw Selim or Kard or Marn at least every few days; their woodrights bordered on hers, and the woodskeepers were a close group throughout this and every demesne. Two days after Selim’s visit Kard had stopped only long enough to tell her that despite the unlikelihood of any result, the Grand Seneschal had written to the priests of Fire about the younger brother of the dead Master.
Kard had looked worried and preoccupied, and had been in a hurry, and Mirasol asked no questions. She was worried and preoccupied too, and also in a hurry, because things had already begun to go wrong. And after that some time passed when she saw no other human soul. But she was too busy—and too distressed—to go in search of someone to talk to. The loss of Master and Chalice would have thrown all the demesne’s workings into confusion, but she soon felt that she did not want—did not want to risk—telling anyone what was happening to her for fear that she would be one of those whose landrights did not survive the current wreck.