Robin McKinley by Chalice Page A

inhale sharply, and in his strange voice she heard surprise as he said, “Honey!”

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    “It is good for burns,” she said simply, trying to hold both her hand and her voice steady. She did not add: and this is the first wound, since I first learnt beekeeping from my mother, that it has failed to soothe, even when it could not cure.

    His fingers closed on the skein of fire, and it sank, or subsided, or melted, and its colour grew less red and more golden. He picked the much-reduced nub out of the crook of his elbow and squeezed. When he opened his hand again, something thick and amber-coloured lay there. It looked rather like honey: perhaps a little too viscous, a little too ruddy. But it looked far more like honey than it did like fire.

    He moved his hand till it was over hers, and turned the palm, so that the honey-fire ran off the edge and onto the back of her wounded hand. It had a hot sweet smell….

    Her hand stopped hurting the moment the honey-fire touched it. But that wasn’t…that didn’t begin to describe what happened. It was exhilaration, exaltation; it was the finest, purest, best moment of her life expanded into something unrecognisable and almost unbearably joyous. No rumour of any power of Fire had suggested anything like this.

    She felt as if she came back to herself with infinite slowness, but some fraction of her mind had remained behind in ordinary time and was sure that it was all over in a matter of seconds. Still when she came back she discovered that she was being supported by a hand caught hard up under her left arm, so that her shoulder was nearly at her ear as she raised her head from her breast and gasped for breath.

    “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t taught the proper forms for healing, and I was so afraid of hurting you further.”

    She looked up at him. She recovered her sense of up and down, and where her feet were, and stood on them. He let go of her arm. He had been holding her through both her cloak and the heavy Chalice robes, but there was no smell of singed cloth. She looked at his hand, and then glanced involuntarily at her sleeve.

    “I can control it, a little, now,” he said, understanding her look. “And I guessed you might…. It is one of the things I am trying to learn if I can control enough. Or not. I was…very tired, the day I arrived. But…once you learn to live in Fire, you do not return. I had not, quite, when the summons came. But I had entered Fire farther than I realised. I began to find this out on the trip here. I think I would not have dared, if I had realised.”

    “I am glad you did not know,” she said. “That you came. You are—youare adapting. You are coming back to us. To your demesne. You have just said you can—you can control it.” She could not bring herself to describe what “it” was. “You—you could not have borne so much of my weight, as you did just now, when you first arrived.”

    He said, “Fire helped me, just now. I could not lift the stone bowl at the Lower Water last week.
    Fire had no place there—as it rarely has any place in the functions of the Circle—and I could not call on it.”
    ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html The memory of joy was draining away, leaving her in the too-familiar place of worry and frustration and ignorance and helplessness. She shook her head, to clear it, to shake loose something she could say to him, something that would convince him—something that would draw him further into the human world—where Willowlands needed him. “You are remembering the ordinary things.” As she could not bring herself to describe what “it” was a moment ago, she could not now bring herself to say “the ordinary human things.”

    He bowed his head and spread his black fingers,