Robin McKinley - Chalice

Or if he had been here before her, as she suspected he had been elsewhere. But she knew almost at once that the earthlines here had spoken to no one recently. If he had tried here, he too had failed.

She left her candle where she had been standing while she lit all the rest. She had never felt so feeble and ineffectual as she mixed a driblet of every kind of honey she had brought with the last of her Ladywell water and went round the base of the hill, scattering the drops with her fingers, murmuring, Be thou one and one-hearted. She climbed the hill and scattered the last of her sweet water around the ruined walls. The flicker of her candle flames seemed to fall on her like drops of honey.

Last she knelt and lit her one remaining fresh candle, and put herself into the mind frame where she became a part of the earthline system herself. After the last six days this was much easier than it had ever been, while at the same time she was bruised and chafed and aching with the effort of repetition, as bruised and chafed and aching as her legs and back were from too many hours in a saddle. As a bloodright bearer she had always been able to listen to the earthlines, but when she had become Chalice she had had to invent her entrance among them, where they might listen to her, because there had been no one to teach her how. And she suspected she hadn’t done it very well. The soreness was probably the result of her awkwardness; shouldn’t the Chalice find the earthlines as familiar as the shape of her own hands on a goblet, the contact as sleek as flowing water? She was still much more familiar with the shape of a honeycomb, of knowing worker brood from queen cells, of recognising when the drones’ idle flying on a warm summer day suddenly takes on purpose because they have sensed a young queen on her maiden flight.

She was trying to hold that sense of peace and comfort and the hopeful future of a vigorous young bee queen on a warm summer day, trying to take it with her, into the troubled murk of the earthlines beneath the old knoll. She was gripping warmth of summer and daylight so hard that she lost her sense of cold and winter and darkness. She didn’t feel the snow starting again, drifting down against her face. The soft touch of the flakes felt a little like bees’ feet. And she was so tired….

Sitting up, she fell asleep.

And dreamed.

She dreamed she was walking down a long dark corridor with many branching passages, and the sound of mournful voices all around her, so she could not tell from which direction they came. She seemed to walk in the dark for a very long time; the sense of a circulation of air told her which way to walk, and kept her from bumping into the walls. She was glad not to turn down any of the other ways, both for the eerie sound of the sad voices, and because the darkness in all but the corridor she followed seemed absolute. The corridor began to climb, and the darkness lessened till it was no more than twilight, and at last a bright spot slowly cohered out of the twilight, and became the end of a tunnel.

When she emerged, blinking, into the daylight, there were many people around her, and a gallery or summer-house made of tall poles with flowers woven into ropes hung between them. A wedding party. She didn’t want to know who was getting married. She turned around, but the tunnel had disappeared; there was only grass and sunlight, and poles and flowers and people. She saw the little group of priests, waiting to perform the various rites necessary for a grand wedding: by the number of poles and flowers as well as the number of priests, this had to be a very grand wedding. The priests were too far away for her to see any of their faces clearly. She also saw the back of the man waiting for his bride. She recognised him as the bridegroom, as she recognised the priests, by the clothes he was wearing. She saw several members of a Circle; these too she recognised only by the badges they wore.

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…