Free Robin McKinley by Chalice Page A

object.” There were bees in the foxgloves near the chairs, and Selim glanced at them uneasily.
    Most of Mirasol’s visitors glanced at her bees uneasily; they were unusually large, and they had the disconcerting habit of coming, as if to say hello, to Mirasol and—even more disconcertingly—going on to investigate any company Mirasol might have. But Mirasol’s honey was the best in the demesne; several people had told her that they thought it was even better than her mother’s.The bees like you, they said, and bore with the bees’ discomfiting behaviour.

    As if they had heard, two or three bees broke off from exploring the foxgloves to fly toward Mirasol. They settled first in her hair and then walked down to her shoulders. Two or three more bees joined them, strolling down her arms and then creeping over the rim of her tumbler to taste the brandy. As well as being unusually large, only their bellies were striped yellow; their backs were a black as velvet-glossy as a fine horse’s. One bee flew on toward Selim. Selim made a ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html noise.

    “Don’t worry,” Mirasol said mildly. “They’re not going to say ‘what are you doing with my honey?’ and be angry. The most amazing honey they’ve ever made was after I put some mead out for them one winter when I’d got some other stuff wrong and didn’t have anything else to give them. Put your hand over your glass if you don’t want bees walking in it.”

    Selim nervously put her hand over the rim. The bee flew round Selim twice without landing, and went back to the foxgloves. Selim was accustomed to ordinary bees—many people had a hive or two tucked away in a corner for their own use, including Selim’s nearest neighbours—but no matter how often she visited Mirasol she never quite adjusted to Mirasol’s bees. “You have been stung, haven’t you? Even you,” she said.

    “Of course,” said Mirasol. “Every beekeeper is stung. Hasn’t your cat ever scratched you?”

    “That’s different,” said Selim, but she sat back in her chair.

    Mirasol found the hum of her bees soothing—bees and honey were two more things that went on and on—but neither sunlight, stone nor bees could distract her long. Distantly she still felt the land lamenting its loss—an almost tangible drumming under her feet. The earthline that ran through her meadow had the restless, unhappy, unseeing manner of a horse pent and pacing in its stall when it is used to being able to run loose outdoors. “What—what will happen now?”

    Selim knew she was asking about the news Selim had brought. She shrugged. “I don’t know.
    Branda said he’d see Gota today.” Gota spoke to the House for all the woodskeepers, because his woodright contained Willowlands’ ancient willow coppices and was thus the most important of all the demesne’s woodrights. “So if there’s anything to know Gota will tell us.”

    “The Master’s brother…” Mirasol began, and didn’t know how to continue.

    After a pause Selim said, “Yes. We’re all thinking about him. But nobody comes back from the Elemental priests. He’s been there seven years; that’s too long.” She didn’t have to add, Down-brook was given an outblood Master sixty years ago, and it has still not recovered from the shock of the change. Nor did she have to add, And Willowlands was already under strain, from seven years of an increasingly bad and careless Master and a Chalice who put no check on him.

    And when, almost immediately after Selim’s visit, things had begun to go wrong for Mirasol, the truth never occurred to her. She guessed it was to do with the devastating loss of Master and Chalice, but assumed that equally strange and punishing things were happening to everyone in the demesne.

    She lived in a small cottage in that corner of Willowlands’ old forest which she tended; whose tending was