So she had beeswax candles to sell again too. Her mother had made beautiful ones, but the Chalice didn’t have time. But she made them, and put a little honey in them too—a little of the honey Chalice’s honey—and sold them. Beeswax candles were even more valuable than honey.
She had always been aware of the influence of the seasons on her bees’ honey, but in the year since she had become Chalice she had begun to realise that the individual hives’ honey had qualities which seemed to remain constant through the different seasons of nectar-producing flowers. She’d always tasted her honeycomb as she divided it up, so the different flavours—and colours and textures—over the year as different plants came into flower were familiar to her, as was the fact that these differences were quite marked enough for marked preferences, so for example the honey she liked best on bread was spring honey, and the honey she wanted with a winter stew was the last rich almost chestnut-coloured honey of the autumn.
It had also seemed to her for some years that different families of bees seemed to specialise in different flowers, and in different flying ranges to look for their preferred flowers, and that this tendency too had grown more pronounced this year. All honey was good for wounds and burns, but there was a lengthy folklore of specific honeys which declared, for example, that oak honey was the most nourishing for invalids and lavender honey was an appropriate gift from a lover to his or her beloved—and the honey from Willowlands’ willows was for wisdom and decision-making. (She used a lot of this in her Chalice mixtures and wondered sardonically how much worse the Circle’s relationship might be if she didn’t.) It was this honey she had put in the Master’s welcome cup. But this year the difference in taste and other qualities of the Chalice’s bees’ honey seemed much more extensive and distinct.
The majority of her honey was still just honey (although to a beekeeper honey is never just honey), so that when someone wished to buy some she didn’t concern herself about what else she was selling besides golden sweetness. But she began to taste what came out of her bowls more attentively and discovered that there was the honey that made her feel sleepy and the honey that made her feel full of energy. There was honey that cured headaches—she’d tasted it the first time when she had a headache, which had snapped off like a branch breaking, which inspired her to taste it again the next time she had a headache and it had had the same effect.
But more and more she had somehow felt what a honey was good for as she bottled and labelled it; and as she grew accustomed to the discipline of—she called it listening, as she thought of listening to the earthlines—to the honey, she often heard quite complex things. There was a honey for stomach-aches and a honey for baldness; the stomach-ache honey was also good for bed-wetting and night terrors in children, and the honey for baldness was also good for too-heavy bleeding during a woman’s monthly and for persuading a broody chicken to stop plucking her breast feathers out and get back to laying eggs. (This particular combination made her laugh.) And there was a honey that was particularly good for burns and wounds. There was also a honey to stop a well going dry, to stop a dog barking and to make fruit trees crop more heavily; and one that seemed to be to make the weather hold long enough to get the hay cut, dried and stacked. She stood looking at the last of these and wondered how it was supposed to be applied: did the farmer eat it, or put it in a bowl by the threshold of his house or his barn, or drop it in the corners of his hayfields, or did the scythesmen rub it on their scythes? The next time a farmer’s wife bought honey from her, should she send her home with the haymaking honey?
And all of them tasted glorious on bread.
Still her mind kept reverting to the fact that her honey, which had never before failed her, had been able to do nothing for the burn the Master’s touch had caused. She tried to tell herself that that had happened before she’d discovered there was a honey that was particularly good for burns. But she found herself doubting that it would have succeeded either. Maybe she had not yet discovered which honey was best to counteract a Fire-priest’s touch? She thought of this when she remembered their conversation: that he himself had said he was no longer human. Was there a honey that could cure that?
She was thinking about the Master again one afternoon when she noticed the hum of her bees changing its note. It was a warm sunny day, so she was outdoors, with her books and papers scattered over the old stone chairs. She’d absorbed without really identifying the information that, since she had become a honey Chalice, the bees’ note changed not only when they were angry or frightened but when they were making some kind of comment…. She resisted thinking that they were telling her something, but perhaps they were telling themselves something. She hadn’t yet figured out (or perhaps let herself figure out) if different notes meant different things.
In this case she looked up and saw the Master coming toward her.
She stared at him blankly for a moment, believing he must be a mirage of her thoughts; perhaps her bees’ next trick was creating three-dimensional pictures. She blinked, but he remained the Master and did not dissolve into nothingness, or into a cloud of bees. She did not think even her bees could create the blackness of him.
She jerked to her feet, for you cannot remain seated in the presence of a standing Master, even in your own front garden, and even when he arrives unexpectedly. She didn’t think the Master was supposed to come to the Chalice; he was supposed to call her to come to him. But then she should be living in the House with him, where a message sent and answered involved no more than a few corridors and a flight of stairs or two.
She looked behind for the cart and driver which must have brought him, for she knew he could not walk so far, and saw a face she knew: old grey Ponty, who might have retired years ago, except he went on being sound and healthy and happy to see his tack appear—and as steady a pony as had ever carried a rider. He gave dogcart rides on feast-days to children who were fascinated by a smaller, quicker, more graceful version of the big farm horses most of them knew best. He looked fat and sleek and untroubled as he browsed the edge of her little clearing for savoury grasses. As she looked at him he raised his head and took a step forward into the sunlight as if appreciating the warmth, or as if to say to her: “All is well.” She couldn’t see his eyes through his thick forelock, but his ears, themselves barely visible, were pointed straight at her.
“Ponty,” she said stupidly.
“Most horses prefer to avoid me,” said the Master. “Ponty came straight up to me and asked for apples, which I have been careful to provide since then. He is also the image of his mother, who taught me to ride.”
A memory she had no idea she had rose in her mind’s eye: she was a very little girl going to the House with her mother—possibly for the first time, which was why it came to her so clearly. Her mother was carrying the pack Mirasol still used for transporting honey; when it was full of jars, you walked slowly enough for even quite a little girl to keep up with you, if she was a good walker, and Mirasol was, because her father often took her with him when he tended his trees. As they reached the drive from the forest track two older boys on horseback came trotting round the far side of the House and turned toward them.
Mirasol and her mother had already turned toward the back of the House but Mirasol had wanted to stop and watch; she liked horses, and knew the names of the work-horses and occasional riding pony whom she saw when she was out with her father. These two were from the House stables, and the one in the lead was very beautiful, although it threw its forelegs out in a nervous way. The boy on it suddenly gave it its head, and it shot forward, the boy easy and graceful in the saddle. It galloped past them, and Mirasol noticed that the boy was beautiful too. They made a splendid picture; but there was something in the way he ignored them that, young as she was, she did not like. It was not arrogance, but a kind of deliberate performance: he knew the effect they made and gloried in it. She turned her attention to the other boy. He was younger, and the horse he rode was only a pony. He followed the first boy, but remained trotting, and as he passed them he smiled and nodded, neatly but unshowily balancing the gesture against the motion of the trotting horse. He was ordinary-looking but he also looked—nice, Mirasol thought, a little wistfully; she missed having other children to play with. He was older than she, and he was from the House, but for a moment she had felt they might have been friends.