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“Forgive me,” he said.
She heard him say “forgive me” and had a sense of dislocation and preposterousness almost as great as she had had on the day the Circle came to tell her she was chosen Chalice. She sat down with a thump as abrupt as the Grand Seneschal’s had been.
“I guessed that,” he went on, “yesterday, when Zi
Unwillingly she thought: And he carried our demesne for seven months while I staggered blind and stupid in his wake; certainly our Prelate gave him little help, and the rest of the Circle little more. How could he not resent me, even though it was not my fault? Willowlands has been lucky to have such a Grand Seneschal—Willowlands who so gravely needs a little luck.
“I even believed that the most I could do for an inexperienced Chalice was to—to spare her the weight of a Grand Seneschal’s advice. I know that my ma
“I knew you supported our Master. I knew it because you never said one word about the burn on your hand. That is why I guessed—finally—yesterday, about what had really happened.” He smiled again. This time it lasted long enough to be identified as a smile, but it was more wintry than the snowflakes still drifting down outside the library window. “Let it be, perhaps, set in my favour that it was my support of your silence, at the begi
She whispered, “He cured my hand. The Master. It would not heal, and he healed it.”
The Grand Seneschal put his hands on the table, palm up. “I beg you give me leave to tell that story.”
She thought of Kenti and Tis, and her conviction that Kenti wanted to believe that same story, that a priest of Fire can cure as well as harm. “Will it help?” she said. “Will it help us keep our Master?”
“Yes—it will help. I do not think it will help enough.”
He looked up at her, and the grief was still in his face, but it was a different grief. “We should have had this conversation months ago—when we first knew that Fire would give him back to us. No”—he put his hand up against her, although she had made no attempt to speak—“you need not reproach me; it is my blame that we did not. I know. I know. What I do not know is what to do now. And whether or not it is too late.”
“It ca
Then he did smile, a real smile, if still a sad one. “Then we will not let it. I must think. We will begin—I will tell it that the Master healed your hand; there is nothing to gain by pretending the accident did not happen, since everyone knows it did. And you—you must find a subtle way to tell everyone you can that the time you spent with Horuld…dispirited you; that you felt compelled to it because…because everyone of our demesne must bind themselves together in every way possible, to support our Master; the Heir must not feel shut out, however unworthy the Heir might be; that the situation at Willowlands is not traditional and so tradition is little help.”
“I can’t say that—be subtle, you say?—gods of the earthlines, how do you expect me to say that subtly?”
But the Seneschal only said grimly, “Those books you read—I have read some of them, and it has given me a distaste for reading, because it seems to me that most of them are full of unpleasant things said pleasantly. I’m not sure what else dead written words can teach you except the trickiness of words. Find a way to say this unpleasant thing pleasantly, from your books. I do not deny that I am asking you to walk the edge of a knife blade; you must condemn the Heir, who is human, that our Master, who is not, be seen as the better choice; and how to condemn him when at least the whites of his eyes are white and his clothes hang on his body the way clothes do hang on a human frame? And yet you must also condemn him in such a way that you may still welcome him if the worst happens and he becomes Master.”
He stood up again. “I am sorry. I am older than you; I should have…”
He didn’t say what he should have, and impulsively Mirasol said, “You were Grand Seneschal for our Master’s brother. What…” And then she could not think of a way to ask what she wished to ask. “I—I—you see, I am not good at subtlety. I do not want to ask about the bad times, about the end. Only what it was like, having a—an ordinary Master.”
The Grand Seneschal stood silently for some moments. “I wonder if there has ever been an ordinary Master. No—I think I do know what you are asking. But I don’t think I can help you. I had my apprenticeship, you see. I learnt to hear and feel what a Seneschal must hear and feel of the demesne, to best serve his Master: I learnt this because the Seneschal who was daily, hourly, thus listening and feeling taught me and watched over me as I learnt. I was apprentice under the Seneschal for our Master’s father, and indeed my first years as Seneschal were under him, under a Master who had held the land steady for fifty years and more. And in those years the Circle was also a Circle. Then our old Master died and his elder son became Master and all began to change, to…” He stopped. “But now, with this Master…a Master who is struggling to engage with his land without hurting it, as he hurt his Chalice when she gave him the welcome cup…there is nothing in my experience for that, any more than, I guess, there is in your books.” He looked at her. “I daresay an apprenticeship—having had an apprenticeship—is better than no apprenticeship, even in these circumstances. Because I know that it does not help the situation I find myself in—I know the situation is not the fault of my ignorance. But that does not change the situation.”
“It is the fault of my ignorance that I have been seen to sanction the Heir, when that is exactly what I did not want to do,” she said bitterly.
After a pause the Seneschal said, “I came here to tell you that, yes. But I wonder…we have had a strong harvest. The Wildwater ru