Robin McKinley by Chalice Page B

and looked at them. She looked at them too; the tips were not ember-red today. “It is a capital offence to harm a Chalice, even for a Master,” he said thoughtfully.

    She said sharply, “I think no one else knows. Do not tell them.”

    “You are the only one I have hurt,” he said. “I knew I was tired, but I did not know…remember…how delicate human skin is. I should have; I knew that the two young apprentices they sent with me could not touch me, and that the coachman avoided me. But I was…overwhelmed by the world. I had not seen it in seven years. I did not know how much I had changed.

    “And the first thing I did upon arriving at my demesne, where I had come to hold as Master, is burn my Chalice when she gave me the cup of welcome.”

    “It was an accident,” she said fiercely. “Anyone can have an accident, from a king to a scullery maid.”

    There was a pause. “Chalices are usually great believers in fate and omens,” he said at last. “As are Elemental priests.”

    She didn’t notice that she had reached out both her hands and seized his cloaked arm. She did not notice the oddness of the texture of the fabric beneath her palms—the fabric that could contain a Fire-priest’s heat. “I am probably a bad Chalice,” she said. “Certainly the three men who greeted you first on your arrival believe I am. It is true that I have only been Chalice eleven months, and that I was plucked out of my woodright without warning and without training. But the Circle’s finding rods chose me and I have not seen nor heard of any record anywhere of a Circle finding the wrong Chalice. I’m sure the Grand Seneschal at least has tried to find such a record, for he would be rid of me if he could. Chalices feel the pull of the land strongly, you know—more strongly than any of the rest of the Circle save the Master himself. With nothing to shape itself to, that pull was tearing me apart when the Circle came for me, eleven months ago. I wonder sometimes if I feel it the more strongly because I had no training—because I went from woodskeeper to Chalice with nothing between. So I ask you to listen to me now. Iknow it is better for you to be Master of this land, blood Master, than to have the Overlord’s this year’s favourite set in your place, to unshape the land in grief and pain and chaos, and reshape it to a frame that is not its nature.” She paused to catch her breath, saw her own hands on his arm, as if they belonged to someone else—and jerked them away.

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    “Master, forgive me,” she said. “I speak out of turn.”

    “I thank the Fire you have spoken so, whether it is out of turn or not,” he replied. “I—I am here to learn to be Master and I am failing even to relearn to be human.” He glanced at the fire again, and it gave a little leap and flicker, like a smile and a wave. “It is not surprising no one can treat me as human, for I am no longer human. But what the people of Willowlands and I still have in common—should have in common—is Willowlands itself; and yet I hear nothing anyone says to me, about the great work of Willowlands, consultation after discussion after ritual after debate—
    I hear nothing, except as if clumsily translated from a foreign language. I see my Circle’s mouths moving and I hear the clatter their tongues make: and I understand nothing. Till I have begun to believe that I have indeed forgotten the language—the language of the land. I cannot be Master here if I cannot hear my people; when I can barely remember to say ‘yes thank you’ when a table servant offers me food.” He murmured something she could not quite hear, full of hissing syllables, which she guessed was the language of Fire, and then he continued, “Any Elemental priest would say we are all one beneath the three humours of the world; but the priests of each