The Grand Seneschal said, “I am assuming—no, I am pretending to assume—that to stay near our Chalice, whose particular gift, as we know, is honey, which is unusual and we suspect unique in the long complex history of the Chalice—I am pretending to assume that to stay near her is the second-best protection against an invasion of bees. The first, of course, is to flee, which is what everyone else has done.”
She did sit up then.
“They are your bees? The House bees—well, the House bees have never had a Master called to faenorn before, so perhaps strange behaviour might be expected of them too. But they are your bees?”
She couldn’t see them clearly enough from where she was, but she felt still too weak and shaken to stand up and go closer. Even then the chandelier swarm would be far above her head if she stood directly under it, but a few bees were idly circling it, as if scouting the room for an appropriate nest site. Absurdly she put her hand out—and a bee came and landed on the back of it immediately. Perhaps the one that had been climbing over her hair had not gone far. A second one joined it, and then a third. She could sense the Seneschal stiffening. “Yes, these are mine,” she said. She did not add, They are more beautiful than any other bees on the demesne, because she did not think he would find this information either interesting or reassuring. Especially, perhaps, because with their additional beauty they were unusually large.
Very, very gently she put a finger out and stroked the striped velvet back of one bee.
She took a deep breath. “Where is…where are…”
The Seneschal said, in a rather too level, too dry voice, “After you fainted there was a bit of a commotion. I do not think the Overlord anticipated any rebellion—or let us say, significant response—or perhaps he merely assumed that everyone would be too stunned to do anything at all. But for you, Chalice, he was right. And whatever he might privately believe, he can find no public fault in a Chalice trying to bind her demesne together against the cruellest of odds. But as he appears not to have planned for either your courage or your presence of mind, his leave-taking was perhaps not quite the dramatic triumph he had no doubt hoped for.
“The Master disappeared at this point, but Sama says she saw him enter his rooms, and the door to them is now locked. While he makes no reply to knocking, I believe that is where he is. Maury and Dar picked you up and brought you here, and I have risked curse and calumny by bringing your goblet, since I thought leaving it lying at the foot of the stairs was a worse blasphemy than touching a Chalice’s chalice. without permission. At this point the bees began arriving. I hope this had nothing to do with my transgression. I managed to extract some wine and honey from Maury before he too fled.”
“If I leave, perhaps they will follow.” She drew her legs up and turned to put her feet on the floor. The bees on her hand flew away. When she tried to stand, her head swam, and if the Seneschal had not stood up with her, and grabbed her as she swayed, she would have fallen again.
“Sit down,” he said. “They are not doing anything but—hanging there,” he said with a wary glance upward. “And the doors into the rest of the House are closed.”
“No,” she said, still standing, holding on to the Seneschal’s other arm with both hands. “No. I must go home. There is—so much to do in the next seven days. Oh, I—” She stopped, overwhelmed.
“Much to do indeed, and all of it useless,” said the Grand Seneschal. “It was a good thing you did just now, but it will be to no purpose, come the day.”
She almost could not bring herself to ask: “This is not about…my blunder with the Heir, is it? That is not the straw that tipped the balance?”
“No. I would say the Overlord has had this in his eye since the first report of our new Master came back to him. I guess Horuld will have been discomposed by losing someone he believed an ally—I saw the look on his face as you shouted out your binding—and the Chalice is a very important ally indeed. But Horuld does what the Overlord tells him to.”
“Planned,” she said. “Planned.” She heard the disbelief in her own voice as if someone else was speaking. She said what she had told herself just after the worst had happened. “Even this Overlord would not have planned.…” And then she remembered how she had hated him at first sight. That was not only me, Mirasol, she thought. That was also the Chalice in me. Would the Chalice waste such hatred if there were nothing she could do?
“If, as we approach our final extremity, you will permit me a great impertinence…. This is why I have found it so difficult to accept you as Chalice. You are a quick study in the rituals of the Chalice; I have admired your skill very much in this, and never more so than this afternoon. As a seer into the darkness in human hearts you are…a keeper of bees who has lived all her life in a small corner of woodland, who sees but few people, and they clear and straightforward as she is herself. Forgive me, if you can, for speaking to you so, but if the demesne is to survive Horuld….” The Seneschal’s voice stopped.
I will have to marry him, you know. She tried to make herself say the words. The “you know” would make it sound careless, not despairing. But she did despair, and she could not say the words.
“The faenorn—I don’t think I know….” Her voice trailed away. She’d been sure, when she’d heard Horuld and the Overlord speak Willowlands’ doom, she knew nothing about a duel between Heir and Master called faenorn. But there was a memory trying to surface. It was another of those things she hadn’t wanted to know existed, and when she’d read about it she’d turned the page or laid the book down and taken up another one—or possibly gone to answer the door to someone else wanting honey or help.
“It’s another of the grisly lingering remnants of our demesne’s early history,” said the Grand Seneschal. “I don’t know much either—little more than what most of Willowlands now knows. It happened often enough in the early days, I believe, but rarely since. I know…” He hesitated. “I know our Master’s brother threatened his father with it, but the old Master just laughed.” The look of hopeless weariness Mirasol had seen before on the Grand Seneschal’s face reappeared. “That’s how I heard of it. I knew one or two of the old fireside ballads about bloodletting between Master and Heir; I hadn’t realised they might be true, that there was something called faenorn with a name and a heritage. My own master—he who was Grand Seneschal before me—was very worried about it, but the old Master just laughed again, said that it was boyish high spirits, that every son needed to rebel against his father. My master tried to warn me…at least he never knew how right he was.” The Grand Seneschal rubbed a hand over his face, as if to wipe away the hopelessness and weariness. “There is some irony in our Master being called to the faenorn, but I do not feel we are in a position to appreciate it.”
She released the Seneschal’s arm. “I must go. I must go.” The urgency was there; now all she needed was a plan to go with it. She stooped—slowly—to pick up her goblet, and noticed with regret that it was dented at the lip; that would have been when she dropped it, trying to pour. It amazed her how little, now, it weighed. It was perhaps appropriate that she had dropped it, though she would never have deliberately dropped a Chalice vessel. But the cup had been mixed for the meeting of the Master, Overlord and Heir, not for the treachery of the last two. To bind properly, the mixture must match the circumstances. Were there any records of a Chalice binding a demesne against her Overlord? But the new dent in the lip of a centuries-old goblet was a sorrow and a pity. It was, she thought, only the first small pebble, heralding the avalanche.