Free Robin McKinley by Chalice

the blow when the old Master and the old Chalice had died, but that was hardly surprising. Almost everyone had felt so extreme a calamity to the land, even those families who had moved to Willowlands in their own generation. And her landsense hadn’t told her what had happened, only that some great and terrible cataclysm had occurred. When Selim had come to tell her the news she had not only been shocked and appalled but astonished.

    Although Selim had been living with the news for a day and a half, telling it over still shook her so badly that she had to sit down. “Branda brought the news to me,” she said, “and I told Marn yesterday. She said she would tell Kard….” Her voice trailed away. She watched Mirasol moving as if blind around her own kitchen, as if trying to remember what you did when you had a visitor, and said, “If you’re going to offer me something to drink, Mirasol, tisane would be nice, but your mead would be better.”

    Mirasol shook her head to clear it—it didn’t clear—and then tried to smile and didn’t do that much better. She’d brought Selim indoors and put her in a chair before her news had really sunk in, and, now that it had…she found herself standing, staring at her hands, which had frozen on the cupboard door handles, the cupboard where the mead lived. She opened the door and reached ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html in—hesitated—and instead of mead, took down the honey brandy. She stared at the bottle. She had put down the mead that had become this brandy nine years ago: Her parents were still alive and so was the old Master, and the folk of the demesne were worrying what kind of Master his elder son would become. Her hands were shaking. The Master and Chalice both dead! No wonder the groaning of the land had been keeping her awake at night—giving her nightmares that followed her around during the day and hid in the shadows.

    She managed to pour two fingers of brandy for Selim and herself by holding the wrist of her right hand with her left, and then said abruptly, “Let’s go back outdoors again. The sunlight still falls unchanged.” And there are fewer shadows for nightmares to hide in, she thought, but did not say this aloud.

    They sat on the worn stone chairs some forebear of Mirasol’s had built several hundred years ago, when the family had first moved to Willowlands and been granted this woodright. The chairs had been among Mirasol’s favourite things all her life, and she felt she needed their solidity now. She dropped a cushion on one of them for Selim but settled on another one herself without; she didn’t mind the hardness of the stone and liked the way the seat seemed to have been worn to a shallow human-buttock-shaped cup. She liked to think this was from all the years of sitting but it was more likely her ancestor had had the luck or foresight to choose saucer-shaped stones. She thought of hundreds of years of rain and sun falling on these chairs…. In all those years they would have seen the deaths of many Masters and Chalices…but never both at the same time. And never in such a terrible way.

    Selim was watching her ironically over the brim of her glass. “You nestle into that seat like a cat on a blanket—your dad and his mother did the same. I’ve always thought the family name that ought to go with this woodright is Hardbutt.”

    Mirasol laughed. She knew she was supposed to—the Hardbutt joke was very, very old—but she was grateful to Selim for dusting it off and bringing it out on this occasion, when there was so little to laugh about. Laughter went on and on, like sunlight and stone, even if the human beings who laughed did not.

    Selim sipped a little of her brandy and gave a great sigh and stretched out her long legs. “Thank the gods for honey,” she said. “Your honey in particular. Just so long as your bees don’t decide to