She hoped she did not know who the bridegroom was. She stared at him with dread as he began to turn around.
But he wasn’t turning to look toward her at all. Everyone was looking up, and some people were backing away, and there were a few exclamations of dismay. And she registered what she had not yet noticed in the bewilderment of where she found herself: the birdsong of a bright summer day with poles and flowers for birds to perch on was being drowned out by an increasingly loud humming noise.
And then her bees dropped down on her like a dark cloak, and wrapped her round, lifted her up and bore her away.
She woke on the pavilion hill. All the candles had burnt themselves out, it was nearly dawn, and the hill was white with snow. She was covered with a thick blanket of bees, and the snow lay upon them in bright broken spangles. She sat up in distress—bees cannot survive hard cold outside their hives—but they seemed to shake themselves, twisting their bodies back and forth almost like tiny dogs, only with six legs, wings and striped fur; and then they all flew up together in a huge thrumming swirl, and she found out how warm they had been keeping her, because she shivered violently in the shock of the sudden cold. There were many more bees than there had been for the five days of their journey.
Five days.
It was the eighth day; the sennight was passed, and it was the day of the faenorn. She could not pause to think about the bees, nor about whether she had done any good on the old hill or anywhere at all during the last exhausting seven days, nor about anything else. Just for a moment longer she sat where she was, and pressed her hands against the cold earth, and listened. Were the earthlines more tranquil than they had been, or was it only her foreboding about the day ahead that made them seem so?
She gave them a quick rite of blessing and peace, and then ran down the slope and began saddling the ponies in haste. They were standing nose to tail in a little windbreak made by half a dozen saplings, and seemed perfectly content; they looked like hairballs, but their ears were warm, and they sighed as they felt the girths tighten. She gave them the last handfuls of corn, and set out. She allowed time for them to finish waking up, and to digest their paltry breakfast, and then—since it was the last day, and they could have a real rest soon—she asked them to trot.
Perhaps they knew they were going home at last; and they did not fear the faenorn. Their heads came up and they went forward with a will, Ironfoot even leaning on the bit and asking to go faster. Her saddle sores burned, but she barely noticed; and she let the ponies canter, Gallant with his ears pricked, keeping pace beside Ironfoot when the way was wide enough, and clinging to his heels when they had to go single file. The flasks and bottles and panniers that had jingled and clanked with emptiness when she rode back to her cottage from the House’s horseyard six days before jingled and clanked with emptiness again.
The ponies had nonetheless had a long journey, and when she asked them to slow down before they came to the edge of the parkland around the House, they fell back to a walk almost with a thump, dropped their heads and blew. She patted them absently; she would not have been able to do what she had done without them, but that was over now; what she could do was either done or not done. The final catastrophe was on them, if it was a catastrophe, if she had done nothing to avert it—if she had not done enough.
But she knew she had not done enough. There was no magic in the Chalice that could make the Master fit to stand against Horuld—that could make this Master capable of standing against any able-bodied adult human. She had not saved the Master—nor herself. She had to tell herself again and again (repeating it with the thud of the ponies’ hooves, as if sturdy drumming could drive it into her) that she was Chalice, that it was the demesne that was her concern. If the demesne was to bear an outblood Master without tearing itself apart, she must do everything in her power to hold it together—that was what she had spent the last sennight doing. If the Master had been helping her, as she was half sure he had and half sure he hadn’t, then that would have been his objective too: to do everything he could to make his demesne strong and whole, before he…
Everything in her power. Including going on living. Including bearing a son to Horuld.
Everything in her power….
She did not notice that the sky behind her was darkening with bees.
The faenorn would be held on the open drive in front of the House. It was where the original insult had occurred which caused the faenorn to be called; it was also where the new Master had first stepped down from his carriage as Master of Willowlands, and climbed the stair to the front door to be greeted by his Chalice. The place would in itself support the better claim of the two combatants; she realised in despair that she was not even sure who that might be—she was only sure of whom she had chosen, for whom she would do anything, even live on after…
Surely it was the Master who had the better claim? But it was here that the calamity had occurred; should not the land itself have leaped up, to prevent the Overlord falling?
She had not had time to find out the rules or traditions of the faenorn; she had had—she had chosen—other work to do. Now she could only come back to the House to see the end. She had to see it; she was Chalice. She would bear witness to this momentous thing as she was obliged to bear witness to all meetings and events that concerned the unity and accord of her demesne. Her tired mind stumbled, and found itself walking down another path, the path that had become the most familiar of all to her in the last year: What would she mix for this cup?…Her stomach lurched, and for a moment she could neither breathe nor see.
She had no Chalice cup for the faenorn.
When she had packed for the last sennight she had thought only of what she would be doing before the faenorn; it had been cruelly clear in her mind that she would not be able to come back to the cottage before it was all over, and yet she had thought only of what she would need for her clearing and binding, for her journey around the boundaries of Willowlands. The faenorn seemed an absolute, like a vast monolith at the end of her road—like a headsman standing with his axe. She knew that was where she was going, but she could not think about it, she could only try to bear it. And yet—this was the most important, the most urgent and critical meeting that she was likely ever to attend as Chalice. How could she not bear a cup?
The only cup she had with her was the small brass silver-bound and-chased cup she had used for some of the work of her journey; it was a pretty thing, finer than anything a minor woodskeeper would possess, though small and tough for travelling; but it could in no way bear the immensity of the scene to come. She remembered the weight of the goblet she had carried through the aftermath of the Overlord’s fall, her sense that it was filling up with broken earthlines…. It had happened occasionally, in the long history of Chalicehood, that some frightened or incompetent Chalice had misjudged her witnessing so badly that the cup she had chosen shattered under the pressure brought to bear upon it. This had never produced a less than ruinous result; and the faenorn was disaster enough.
How could she have forgotten—how could she not have thought of this?
It was too late now. She had to be there, with the rest of the Circle.
She could see the beginnings of the crowd as soon as she rode past the final hedgerow. What she was not expecting was that most of them turned toward her as the news of her arrival spread. She was also not expecting to see that most of them were carrying candles. Many of the candles were nearly stubs; there were very few fresh ones. As the people noticed her and turned toward her, a few knelt, and their flints came out, and sparks were struck; and once the first candles were lit, they lit their neighbours’, who then lit their neighbours’, and long spreading winding lines of candle flames moved through the crowd till finally a low, twinkling, wavering forest of candlelight was raised to her. “Chalice,” the murmur came; and with the murmur a faint aroma of warm honey. Some of them said “missus.” Some said “Lady.”