“It is very beautiful,” he said.

She looked down, at her tray, at the little lopsided jar of glittering honey.

“I don’t know much—I don’t know as much as I should—about Chalices,” he said. “Isn’t their usual susceptibility to water?”

“Or wine,” she said. “Occasionally beer or cider or perry. Perhaps once every other century a woman who is pregnant or nursing when the Chalice comes to her finds that she holds her Chalice in milk, but that is not considered lucky for the demesne. Occasionally in a demesne near the sea it has been brine. I’ve read about the finding and naming of many Chalices now and I’ve not read of another one whose gift was honey. Never honey. I suppose that’s one of the reasons that it never occurred to me what was happening, in the beginning, after…” She knew she was talking too much, but it seemed to pour out of her, like honey from a jar: it wasn’t only the overwhelmingness of her life that made it lonely; it was that she had no one to share with how enormously interesting it also was. “And the coming is not usually so…melodramatic. That will have been the unsettled state of the demesne, I know, but…. You do get things like wells overflowing, but it was mead and honey everywhere here, and my goats were fountaining milk, and usually it’s not quite so…You know the Lady of the Ladywell was our first Chalice—that was her house well originally—her well overflowed, but all that happened, according to the records, is that it was the herald of a drought ending, and so very welcome.

“This demesne has usually had water Chalices—maybe because of the willows. The last Chalice, the one who—who died”—she glanced up at him briefly and away again—“she was a water Chalice. I think that may be part of why…and part of why I…” She had babbled on too much already, but she did not want to stop there. “There’s a very old story about a blood Chalice. She must have had a horrible time. But she brought her demesne through a series of wars that destroyed the demesnes around her, according to the story, so maybe it was worth it to her. I’ve never found any record of her, though, only the story. In the story her demesne is called Springleafturn, and there isn’t one.”

“‘Part of why,’” he said. “Part of why she and my brother died?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I should not have mentioned it.”

“You have the right to know how your predecessor died.”

“I have the right to have been apprenticed to the Chalice I was to succeed! I have the right to have known I was her heir! You have the right to have lived here and supported your brother as Master and learnt what you needed to know as his acknowledged Heir! Our land has the right to be cared for by a Master and a Chalice who know what they’re doing and—and are able to do it!”

“And Willowlands is in trouble because these rights were not honoured.”

“Yes,” she said wearily. “Yes.” She did not say, And it is why two—lame, faulty, unfit, what do you call a priest of Fire exiled from his Fire? What do you call a small woodskeeper suddenly ordered to be great?—unsuitable, unready people were made Chalice and Master, and why they cannot make a damaged land whole. It is all wrong; and the frame, the pattern, the yoke that holds us all, is not yet broken, but it is breaking.

“Tell me why you said what you did. That being a water Chalice was part of why they died.”

She was silent a moment. At last she said, “They died of fire and wine. I—I guess—and it is only a guess—she might have shaped the way better if she had had more strength for wine. Willowlands has always been very—” She tried to think of an adjective that would fit. The only ones that came to her were “pure” or “clean” or “clear” or “simple” and she could not say any of them to the brother of the man who had made it not so. There were other demesnes whose strength was not in clarity or purity, but she did not know how to make her own another of them, even to heal it. She thought, If the land chose me, then it cannot want to go that way. The only thing I have to offer is simplicity—dumb, harassed simplicity.

“He was holding one of his—parties—I guess. Yes, he had begun them before he sent me away; indeed it was because of them that he did send me away, because I could, or would, not keep silence about them. No, no one has told me this, but it was the old pavilion that burnt, and it was there I know he held his first assemblies, because it suited his purposes. How can a Master and his Chalice be so insensible as to be overcome by fire, in their own demesne, unless they are drunk—or drugged?”

Quickly she said, “At least we did not lose the House.”

“The House would not have borne such usage as his carouses were,” he responded just as quickly. “He had to hold them elsewhere. I am sorry the pavilion was not stronger.”

“But—” she said. “The—the old magic, before the demesnes were made, the old magic still lives close under the earth there. You know this—you must have felt it too. The pavilion was power to use, for good or ill, without rule.”

Another silence, while he looked at his hands. “I apologise for the violence of my words. I did not—do not—hate my brother. The bitterness I feel is the bitterness of my own frustration—my own lack of power to pull our land together again. Or rather, the power is still there, but it has been turned to, or into, Fire, and I cannot turn it back, however I try.” Savagely he clapped his hands together, and when he opened them, a pillar of fire roared up from between them—he closed them again and the fire disappeared. “That is only a trick to frighten children, here. Here I cannot be sure, if I reach out to grasp a goblet, that I won’t miss, and grab the air, or burn the hand of her who holds it out to me. It is the same when I reach for the earthlines. I miss, or do harm.”

“You healed the burnt hand of the woman who held the goblet for you. It is not all tricks to frighten children,” she said, hoping he had not seen that she had been frightened just now. “I hear the earthlines too—I not only must, as Chalice, but by being Chalice I cannot help it—and I have felt no harm done lately.”

He raised his eyes and looked at her. “Would you? Would you feel it? Could you say to yourself, ‘Yes, here is a break—a roughness, a troubling—that was not here a sennight ago’?”

She returned his look and refused to look away. “I don’t know. That is what you are pressing me to say, is it not? I don’t know because I don’t know what the earthlines should feel like, should sound like—what they would feel like if the land were settled and content—whether their constant plaintive murmur would at last fall silent. I don’t know. It is only one of a thousand thousand things I don’t know. But I know the land lies quieter now than it did a year ago—than it did six months ago. I know the earthlines lie softer than they did.”

He shifted his gaze away from her, as if looking through the woods to the House and then beyond, across the long leagues of the entire demesne. She sat staring at him, and was so far away in her thoughts that when he looked back at her she did not move her eyes quickly enough.

“What do you see?” he said.

“I remember seeing you once when you were a boy,” she replied, not adding that she was trying to find that boy in his face now, and failing. “You trotted past my mother and me, and nodded and smiled at us. It could have been Ponty’s dam you were riding; I always noticed horses when I was a child, and Ponty looks much the same as that pony did. Your brother had cantered on ahead.”

An expression crossed his face so fleetingly that had she not been staring at him she would have missed it: it was the expression of the little brother whose older brother had just cantered on ahead of him—again. For that tiny, fleeting moment not only did he look fully human, but she saw the boy he had once been, and knew it was the same boy she had seen that day with her mother.