Robin McKinley - Chalice

When the Master was halfway down the stairs, the door of the Overlord’s carriage opened, and the Overlord appeared. He stood at the foot of the carriage steps and stared steadily at the Master till he reached the ground in front of the House.

Then the Heir emerged from the same carriage, and behind him another man carrying a long thin box. Two more men in the Overlord’s livery came forward to open it with all ceremony; it contained, of course, two swords.

She didn’t hear what the Overlord said; he said it in a powerful voice he wished to make sound sad and regretful, but all she could hear was the barely contained delight in his successful stratagem behind the false regret, and she remembered the Grand Seneschal saying to her, long ago in another life, that her understanding of the human love of power was the understanding of a small solitary woodskeeper.

There were only the motions of this token battle to be gone through now, and then the Overlord would have won. She was perhaps some shadow over his pleasure, but he would assume that her spirit would be broken—if it was not already, then soon. She thought of the Master gently holding the bee that had stung him and telling her not to struggle, and she thought she could feel her spirit breaking now. She thought, I need no cup. I am Chalice. I am filling with the grief and hurt and fear of my demesne; the shattered earthlines weigh me down; I am brimming with the needs of my people. After the faenorn I will be stuffed too full to move; I will be too heavy to lift a foot.

Without noticing she was doing so, she raised her hands in the first ritual gesture of the Chalice holding a goblet.

The candles were still twinkling in the hands of the crowd, and at the top of the House steps the smell of warm honey and beeswax was sweet and strong. She thought she saw the Overlord register what he was seeing and—perhaps—some brief narrow look of annoyance. What were the little people getting up to? This demesne was his now—or would be in but a few minutes more—to do with what he wished. He wanted no foolish clinging to the old; no rebellion, however small. But his face cleared immediately, if it had ever clouded. She might have imagined it. Candle flames were fire: but perhaps he smelled the honey and beeswax too, and decided the people were wisely putting their trust in their Chalice. The ordinary folk did not care for the politics of Overlords, and knew their Chalice, still young herself in that role, would have to hold the demesne together through the next difficult years.

And she would be married to Horuld.

She would have to marry him. Marry the new Master, and bear his child.

The Overlord looked up at her, at the Chalice, standing at the top of the House steps, and made her the least possible bow: just enough of an acknowledgement that he should be seen to be acknowledging her.

She prevented herself from closing her eyes, met the Overlord’s gaze steadily, and made the tiniest of bows in return. Whatever he had in mind for her later, he needed her now. And would a short life be bad, if she were Horuld’s wife?

The Master was offered the choice of the swords. He still wore his billow of cloak, and the sleeves tangled with the filigree around the case’s edge. He needed both hands to lift his sword—his choice was merely the one that lay nearer. She thought she saw him hesitating before touching the hilt, perhaps so that he would not burn the fine lining of the case.

Horuld, stripped to his shirt, stepped forward and seized the other sword with a flourish. Holding it aloft in a gesture she disliked intensely, he too looked up to the head of the House stairs, and his bow was as flourishing as his grasp on the sword. But when he straightened out of his bow his gaze too seemed to go above the heads of the Chalice and the Grand Seneschal, and the sword wavered slightly. She thought, He knows he is not fit to govern this or any demesne. She gave him the same tiny acknowledgement she had given the Overlord. She would have preferred to give him no acknowledgement at all. But if he won…when he won, when this grotesque charade was over with….

Two of Horuld’s—or the Overlord’s—folk paced out and stood at two of the corners of the area where the faenorn would take place. There was a brief pause, and the Master seemed to shake himself. He began to say something—and then two of the demesne folk came forward and bowed awkwardly; she could see the gestures—equally awkward—of asking leave to speak to the matter at hand. At first she recognised neither of the men, and strained to see, because they were finely dressed, like members of the Circle, but with none of the individual marks and badges that identified each Circle member; that and their strange gracelessness with the ritual gestures…. One of them was Lody the shepherd, and the other, the butcher for the House kitchens; Gess? No, Gresh. Although he was still a young man, he bought honey from her for his aching knee—a hunting accident, he had told her.

She glanced at the Seneschal, who gave a tiny nod. “They volunteered,” he said. “They have no families.”

Little to lose, she translated silently. Little to lose, and courageous with it, and briefly her eyes blurred with tears.

The Overlord’s men carried tokens for north and south, tree and fruit; the shepherd and butcher held those for east and west, the sun and the earth. Mirasol suddenly became aware of her hands in their empty cradling; and almost without thinking, she pulled the bag over her shoulder forward, and opened it. Still watching the people on the ground, she groped for the shape of a particular jar and lifted it out. It wasn’t till she looked at it that she realised what she was doing—or rather that she didn’t know what she was doing—but her hands seemed to know, her Chalice hands. The jar her hand had chosen—and it was an odd old wooden jar, a recognisable crooked shape under her fingers, a reject because it would not sit straight on a shelf, the only empty jar she could find when at the last minute she’d decided to take a little more honey on her journey, a little of the mysterious honey, the honey that seemed to suggest laughter and joy and a long bright horizon, the strong-tasting honey whose distinguishing source she could not identify.

She’d almost laughed when she decanted it because the bigger crock it lived in was also very crooked, not merely a reject but so lopsided that her mother had kept trying to throw it out, and her father kept rescuing it; and when her father died her mother kept it after all, for those memories of him. Mirasol had thought, as she carefully poured, that perhaps this honey had an affinity for those who do not sit securely, who do not rest peacefully, who limp instead of walk. She hadn’t quite been able to laugh, but she’d been smiling when she tucked it into its corner of a saddlebag, and the smile had been as refreshing as cold water on a hot day. This was the honey that had given her energy in the sennight past when she had none, the honey she had put last into the cup for her last-of-all stop on the pavilion hill. It was the honey she had given the Master, the day he had come to her cottage, and a bee had stung him.

She opened it because why else would she have taken the jar out? The smell of it made her think of the last dream she had had, on the pavilion hill.

It was not easy to arrange her hands in any Chalice grasp on a small round crooked wooden pot, but she managed. She held the little fat shapeless thing against her breast, beneath her chin, and the smell of the honey, even in these circumstances, still tried to make her smile. She was not thinking of her bees, but as she fitted herself into the Chalice stance, composing herself to stand true and straight and still, like a statue on its plinth, several bees landed on the backs of her hands, and several more on her hair—and one on the end of her nose. Again she tried to smile—as if there is a smile here, as real as a bee, trying to make me wear it, she thought, as I am trying to hold—to wear—being Chalice. Even with no chalice. to hold as evidence. “Welcome, my little friends,” she whispered. “Do you remember your Master, who saved your sister?”