Preface

sweetness and salves
Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at http://archiveofourown.org/works/46936030.

Rating:
General Audiences
Archive Warning:
No Archive Warnings Apply
Category:
F/M, Gen
Fandom:
Chalice - Robin McKinley
Relationship:
Bees & Mirasol | Chalice (Chalice), The Master | Liapnir/Mirasol | Chalice (Chalice)
Character:
Mirasol | Chalice (Chalice), Bees (Chalice), The Master | Liapnir (Chalice)
Additional Tags:
Post-Canon
Language:
English
Collections:
The Sufficiently Advanced Exchange 2023
Stats:
Published: 2023-05-04 Words: 1,676 Chapters: 1/1

sweetness and salves

Summary

The bees return slowly, but they return.

sweetness and salves

The mason bees return first. They’ve returned to their burrows in the mortar between the stones beneath her kitchen window, Mirasol notices when she has a moment to visit her cottage. Such visits are rare: she’s been busy both at the House and traveling through the demesne by the Master’s side, doing all she can to set Willowlands to rights and heal its wounds. The results of her labor are heartening—the Circle’s bonds strengthen day by day, the plain folk are embracing their newly-human Master, and the earthlines no longer scream in pain but only throb and moan now and then with aftershocks. But there is so much to do to stabilize their hard-won victory that she can’t return to her cottage nearly as often as she would like, and only then with the excuse of needing a different jar of honey.

She could move her honey stores up to the House, to have them nearer at hand—Lilat in the kitchen generously offers a small pantry—but she needs these brief visits to the only other home she’s ever known. She breathes more fully there, of air redolent of clover and new-cut grass (and—still—honey), the smells of her childhood, when she was only Mirasol and had no thought of ever being anything more. She can’t go back to that, and she wouldn’t even if she could. But it is good to visit.

Sometimes Liapnir comes with her, and she takes an unexpected pleasure at his presence in her home. She could never have imagined the last Master comfortable in a place so plain, nor the Master of her childhood either. They would have clashed with her simple furniture, chafed at the small space. But Liapnir’s square hands fold familiarly around even the most lopsided of her clay mugs, his weather-beaten boots rest comfortably on the rush-weave of the footstool her father made, and there’s something about the fire in her little hearth that turns the color of his eyes from willow-green to honey-gold.

She recognizes, too, the way that tension eases out of his shoulders when they’re at the cottage, the way his smiles are wider, how he sprawls as he never does in the House.

“We can’t live here,” he says, and though that should be so obvious as to not be worth saying, there’s a hint of wistfulness in his voice. “But we should come down often. It won’t hurt Willowlands if we spend a few nights here and there away from the House, and it will do us good.”

She would have thought that this a concession to her, but it’s clear that he is becoming almost as fond of the cottage as she is.

It’s not that either of them are uncomfortable in the House. There is a kind of rightness to being there, and it increases with every day that passes. She’s chosen a new room, simple, with lots of light, near the library and overlooking the kitchen’s herb garden; it suits her, and she will stay there until the wedding, when she will move into the Master’s rooms with their generous windows and beautifully-carved cabinets. Liapnir has already started to make those rooms more homey, removing the elegant furnishings his brother bought from the Overlord’s city and replacing them with items crafted by the people of Willowlands: colorful tapestries and rugs from a local weaver, the warmest quilts made by a succession of goodwives, a table carved from one of the willows that give the demesne its name, even a rocking chair. These rooms, too, feel like a place she can live and still be herself, and that is a blessing she had not known to hope for.

She finds to her surprise that she is slowly beginning to love the House for itself, for its rootedness, the history etched in its stones, the sprawl of it where each new generation has made an addition or change according to its needs. Her intimidation falls away as she realizes it is very much like a beehive: all the Housefolk living together and bustling through its golden-stone hall on their own business. After years of solitude in her cottage, it takes some getting used to, but whether the House is making room for her or all that she has been through has created room in her heart for it, she is finally getting used to it after all. (Or maybe, she thinks, the last wisps of disorder and malice the last Master had left behind have finally been swept away.)

Still, there’s a part of her that will always belong to that little cottage, which she has been allowed to keep even as she handed her woodright over to a neighbor. (“I’ll keep your right well for any of your children as wants it,” Dara said with a wink, which made Liapnir laugh, a round, rich, human sound, and Mirasol has never been one for blushing, but she blushed then.) She’ll keep her honey there, she decides, and will visit whenever she can to fetch it. It will always be waiting for her.

And it’s to the cottage, not the House, that the first bees return.

There have been no bees in Willowlands since the day they sacrificed themselves to save the demesne. And so Mirasol’s heart catches when she sees the first one wafting on an errant breeze, though when she reaches it, she finds that it is an iridescent black and green, not a homey golden.

These mason bees are only the cousins of her honeybees, producing no beeswax or honey and so of little use to humans. She’s always thought of them more as acquaintances than the friends (family) her honeybees are, feeling barely more affection for them than for ladybirds or spiders. But she had found a few of their tiny bodies among the larger corpses of the honeybees and bumblebees in the aftermath of the faenorn and was moved. Mason bees are almost never aggressive, and their sting is mild in comparison to their cousins’. But even though they contributed little to the defeat of the usurper, they had still done what they could to protect the demesne.

So she takes it as a good sign when she finds a few of them buzzing around the hollyhocks below her kitchen window. A hopeful sign, after weeks of still air undisturbed by that familiar, homey drone. She holds out her hand, and a single insect lands just on the scar Liapnir had left all those months ago. It feels like a blessing.

She checks her hives on every visit, and their gaping emptiness reflects the grief in her heart. No one else understands that grief—the whole of the demesne has been giddy with relief, joy, and the exhausted aftermath of so much tension. She shares their gratitude for the unexpected deliverance, but she cannot agree with the words she’s heard spoken so many times, expressed in various ways since the faenorn: Willowlands didn’t suffer a single loss!

Willowlands has suffered losses, thousands—hundreds of thousands—of losses, each no bigger than Mirasol’s thumb. Cumulatively, they are a loss as large as any she has ever known. But she has no energy to try to make anyone else understand what has been lost, why she grieves—every waking moment is focused on binding the land, and soothing the earthlines, and ironing out the wrinkles in the Circle. But she knows that bleak grief sometimes shows in her eyes, and for all their new understanding of each other, Nicandimon seems bewildered by that grief. Liapnir is so kind and sympathetic, but she knows that even he can’t stop himself from thinking, They’re only bees.

Perhaps it is absurd for her to mourn them. But that absurdity is part of what makes her herself. And she is Chalice. She will honor every part of Willowlands, no matter how insignificant.

 

When, on a midsummer afternoon, she comes up the path from the House and sees a few black specks drifting around one of her basket hives, she breaks into a run, heart hammering in her throat. It could be any number of other insects—the proximity to the hives could be coincidence—-

But they are bees. Her honeybees. Only three of them, and she could swear that there is a confused note in their buzzing, but they are there. She wipes the happy tears from her cheeks, and that night, she and Liapnir eat fresh bread spread with her favorite honey in celebration.

Every time she returns, there are more and more bees. Still so few, compared to how many there were before, but the number is growing, and there will be honey and beeswax come the fall flow. Whenever she has a spare moment, she sits in the stone chair and basks in the sun and lets the bees crawl over her face and arms and neck and hair, giggling sometimes at the tickle. When he’s with her, Liapnir laughs with her, and those stolen moments are what carry her through all the work of summer. It is easier to add drops and drizzles of honey to her Cups without anxiety now that she knows that her stores will be renewed again.

The bees are returning to the Willowlands, and the Honey Chalice’s Cups will not run dry.

On her wedding day, as she stands with her husband in front of the Grand Seneschal, with all the beloved folk of Willowlands watching, and Mirasol is joined to Liapnir and Chalice is joined to Master, she sees the first bumblebee, huge and glossy gold, floating like a scrap of sunshine—like a bit of amber—like a dollop of honey in the tawny late-summer air. It lights on her cheek, gentle as a kiss—as the nudge of a kitten’s fuzzy head—as the brush of a warm breeze, and she smiles, wide and sunny, when Liapnir reaches out and strokes it with the back of his finger.

It is, all of Willowlands agree, an auspicious sign.

Afterword

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