“Not all of them,” she flashed back at him. “Not I. Not the Grand Seneschal.”
“That is two against nine,” he said gently.
“And the twelfth?” she said. “What of yourself? Would you truly say against yourself?” She paused, and a dreadful thought occurred to her: “Do you miss your Fire so much?”
“Miss Fire,” he said musingly. “I don’t know. Isn’t that strange? Do you miss your woodskeeping?”
“Yes,” she said immediately. “Especially—” She fell silent.
“Especially now?” he said. “Why were you asleep on Listening Hill on a night too cold for human flesh and blood?”
She jerked as if he had struck her when he said “Listening Hill.”
He waited, but she made no answer. “I do not think you would come here for the sake of recent ghosts,” he said at last. “And I remember it had an oracular name, when it was still called Listening Hill. What foretelling was worth the risk—was so urgent it could not wait—with the snow falling?”
Almost at random she said, “I miss woodskeeping because I knew how to do it. The Chalice is a bloodright, like the Mastership is, but it seems to me much like finding water. The rods in the dowser’s hands draw down till they crack, and when the hole is dug the water springs up, but one must still brick in the well or the channel or the pond, or the water will spread itself out and sink back into the earth again and be lost. I do not know how to brick my channel. I feel—I feel as if I am trying to hold back a river with my hands. The Chalice energy is strong…and I am weak and foolish. At first, when it only seemed to be about mixing cups and standing in doorways, I thought I could learn enough to—to appear to be Chalice. That part even made some sense to me: water is the basis of all things, the thing of all things we need to stay alive, and whenever I was in doubt I put a little honey in; and there were books that told me the usual, the standard mixtures for the usual, standard gatherings. By narrowing it down to the most visible, the best-known, of the Chalice’s work—the bit where she dresses up like a mummer and stands around holding a big flashy cup with enamel and jewels on it—I could think about trying to learn it, despite the daily—hourly—sinking of the heart at the size of the task. Don’t think about it; just put something in a cup and stir.
“At first, after your brother died, the demesne was in such disarray that the least gesture toward coherence seemed a great one. But disarray has its own destructive inertia and those small gestures have meant less and less; and my faith that I am learning to make them correctly is too slow and slight a thing to set against…and I have made a terrible error from ignorance.”
His silence was a waiting and listening silence. And would he not have heard the story already, from someone else? Might not the thought that his own Chalice preferred the Heir have further urged him to consider ceding Mastership? What if he thought her someone who would say one thing to him—as she had just done—while saying, and doing, something else entirely when he was not there? And so at last she said, draggingly, “The Heir came to me. I spent time with him, as Chalice, as a way of keeping distance between us, because I did not want to spend time with him at all, and I did not know that the Chalice could send the Heir away. The Grand Seneschal told me—told me that I could have sent him away. I would not have known else.
“The Grand Seneschal told me that the Chalice had been seen alone with the Heir and had thus indicated her championing of him. I did not know. It is what I did not want—of all things what I did not want. The Grand Seneschal said it was a result of my lack of training; but that is something there is no cure for. I see no comfort—nor useful penance—there. The Grand Seneschal has said he will try to counter the damage I have done with a tale of my shameful ignorance, and that I must—must make up—some tale in support. But I cannot see that the revelation that your demesne’s Chalice is inept and imprudent is going to be seen as a satisfactory situation in a demesne struggling for balance—for its life.” Again she stopped.
After a pause he said, “I am worse than you, because I have spent useless days in the company of various members of my Circle, knowing that as Master I could send them away, but not able to believe in my Mastership enough to do so.”
“That is only kindness,” she said. “You will lose nothing in anyone’s eyes for kindness, and something, I think, you will gain.”
“That is a remark the Chalice would make,” he said, “a Chalice wishing to affirm her Master’s binding to his bloodright.”
“You are bound,” she said. “As am I.”
“Yes,” he said, “I am. But binding cannot necessarily quiet that which has been bound. My people fear me. They fear me and they fear my touch—with justice, as you know. They flinch away from me when I walk among them.”
At the unfairness of this she cried out, “You have only burnt one person! And you were tired near death and only just returned from Fire!”
Gently he said, “I know this too. As does my Circle—as do my people. But they also know that there is always a hesitation—sometimes so slight that were they not looking for it they would not see it—before I touch anyone or anything. If I know the need is coming for me to lay my hand somewhere, I can prepare. A sudden grasp—I cannot do it. A stair banister, a dinner plate, even Ponty’s mane—no harm. But if I touched bare human flesh suddenly, I would still burn it.”
She did not know this. She could say nothing; think of nothing to say. No…she had guessed as much. Guessed that it was not only the Master’s continuing physical awkwardness that caused all those brief pauses. She had sometimes thought that they came from his having to remember what he was doing, what gesture he needed, what action he had next to perform; a kind of physical translation, as from one language to another. But she had still known, though she had not wanted to know, that while that was a part of it, it was only a part. She must say something, but what reassurance could she offer? It had been over half a year since the Master had come home, and still Fire ran in him this strongly? Perhaps the priests of Fire had been right that he could not return.
“By the fourth level,” he said sadly, “an Elemental priest can again go into the world, if he so chooses, because his metamorphosis is complete.”
She knew of the temples in the cities where the priests’ abbeys lay, where the Elemental priests occasionally came to hold rites for ordinary humans. The priests were described as superhumanly beautiful, miraculously graceful and utterly terrifying. “But they mostly choose not to come,” she said. “And they cannot stay, because they can no longer live among humans. Among us. A fourth-level priest would never have been sent home to be Master of his demesne. And I have never heard of one stopping a forest fire.”
Thoughtfully he went on, as if he had not heard her, “Occasionally I have seen one or another of my people creep up to Ponty—when I have been some safe little distance away—and pat him, quickly and as if surreptitiously, as if checking that he is real horseflesh—or as if he were a charm against his rider.”
“Ponty,” she said. “Ponty must do you good among the people of Willowlands; who could fear Ponty?”
“It is not Ponty they fear,” he said patiently, as if she were a student who was refusing to learn her lesson.
She shook her head. She did not want to say yet more against his brother; but what she was thinking of were the increasingly wild, trampling horses her Master’s brother had chosen to ride round his demesne, as if he were trying to frighten his own folk—as if he were trying to hammer the earthlines into passivity, into acceptance of his misuse of them. But he did not burn human flesh if he thoughtlessly touched it. Did it matter? Her Master touched the earthlines softly—she knew this; more and more she could read the influence he was gaining over the solid earth and invisible air of his demesne; those parts of his Mastership which he could not burn. Had a demesne ever had an inhuman Master before?