i. Brine
When the steam curled up from Reach the Sky, Harawai’s last shreds of optimism drifted away with it.
She had held onto the hope that the situation was less serious than it appeared for far longer than the rest of the Circle. After the last Circle meeting, she had heard Weatherauger murmur to Keepfast, “The naivety of youth. She’ll learn,” and Keepfast had answered, “She had better learn fast.”
Perhaps it was her youth, or perhaps it was just Harawai. The cause didn’t matter; what mattered was that the volcano had woken, and Harawai had to face the crisis.
It’s too soon, her heart cried. The Chalice had only come to her in the rainy season. Or too late. If this had happened a year ago, when her master was still alive…
Then, of course, Harawai could not stop herself from wondering if the eruption would (could?) have happened at all under the last Chalice. Auntie Para had been strong and wise, the most beloved Chalice in generations. Probably the island would never have stirred this way while Auntie Para held the Chalice firm for Brightshell.
But there was no use dwelling on that, Harawai reminded herself every time her thoughts strayed in that direction. Each time, she scrubbed the tears from her face and held back her shoulders in the way Auntie Para had always reminded her.
“Plant your feet, hold yourself strong,” she used to say. “The magic will flow better, and you’ll fool yourself into confidence.”
Now, however, she curled in on herself as she looked up at the smudge rising above the mouth of the volcano. There was no denying it now.
The other signs should have been enough. The nets returning empty one day out of three. The fronds falling dry and brown from the palms. Big Brother Falls slowing to a trickle. The pearl divers coming up from the beach with empty hands. Sign after sign after sign.
Then, there was the way the East Village’s taro fields spat up the seed pieces again and again. The rockslide by Mother’s Skirt Cliffs that she and the Master had only just managed to keep from reaching the outskirts of the South Village. How the Cup of Balance had cracked in her hands when she tried to quiet the shaking of the land near the banyan grove.
And now, Reach the Sky had woken.
The Master’s husband met her at the door of the Longhouse, their youngest child crying on his hip, his face grim.
“He’s up at the overlook. He’ll be waiting for you.”
The overlook was just down the path from the Longhouse. As Harawai crested the rise, she saw a slender silhouette against the blue sky and felt something in her chest ease. The Master knew what he was doing. He had been Master for almost ten years now, and he had been even younger than her when the mantle had come to him, but the people had full confidence in him—he had earned it. He was not a large man, but somehow he seemed as steady as Reach the Sky.
Or, as Reach the Sky had been, until now. Harawai’s throat tightened as she stood beside the Master, staring up at the mountain.
“It’s only steam yet,” he said. He had a rich voice, for all his slightness, one that Harawai normally found reassuring. Right now, it touched her not at all. “We have time.”
“Not if we don’t know what is causing it.” As soon as the sharp words were out, Harawai flushed. She couldn’t bring herself to look at him. “Apologies. I—”
“No need for apologies. I understand.” Weariness entered his voice, but when she found the courage to glance at him, he gave her a firm nod. “First thing first. Quiet Reach the Sky. After that, we’ll find the cause.”
Harawai wasn’t so sure. For months now, the two of them and all the other members of the Circle had been trying to determine the cause of Brightshell’s disquiet. So far, they had discovered nothing, though they had tried everything Harawai knew to try.
But it helped that the Master smiled at her.
“Go. Fetch your things. We’ll set out right away.”
The trek up to the top of Reach the Sky was not long, but it was challenging, the path so rarely used that it sometimes disappeared altogether. Auntie Para had never had to make this journey, Harawai knew, though the Chalice before her had, when the Master’s two sons had fought for the right to the name of Heir. Chalice Mahala had died before Harawai was born, but Auntie Para had told her so many stories about the older woman that she could almost picture her now, walking beside her: strong despite her white hair, the coral scar on her face, the beads of her temple braids clacking as she went. It helped, a little.
By the time they reached the rim, Harawai was covered in sweat and weighed down by her pack, which had seemed light when they started. The Master wiped perspiration from his forehead and handed her the water gourd he carried; she drank her fill, then he did the same.
“What do you need me to do?” asked the Master.
Harawai felt the little frisson of fear that always shot through her whenever she had to take the lead. Soothing, pacifying, aligning, binding. These were the Chalice’s tasks. In this, the Master could only help.
“Wait,” she said, and set her pack down on a waist-high boulder. She had brought both the Cup of Balance and the Cup of Tranquility with her, and she pulled out one without looking at it. It was Tranquility, its clay sides studded with cowrie shells, the contrasting textures grounding under her hands. She unplugged her own gourd, this one full of water drawn from the Black Sand Bay before they set out. The salt of it cut through the sulfur smell hanging thick around them. She added ilang-ilang for continuity, tiaré petals for calming, then the shells—a sea snail shell, a mollusk, and a cake urchin—that stood for balance, understanding, and sweet dreams. After a moment’s hesitation, she added crushed hibiscus calyces and a dab of taro paste for hope and solidarity. Then, though she could not have said why, she dropped in a single needle from the ironwood tree, for a promise.
“Be one, be one,” she murmured as she stirred, just as she had watched Auntie Para do a thousand times. “Blend well, blend well, and bind and soothe.” How often had she heard Auntie Para’s gravelly voice speaking those words, the simplest, oldest ones for mixing a cup?
“Hold it as firm as you can,” she said, and the Master planted his feet waist distance apart, and crossed his arms over his chest in the traditional way. Harawai held the bowl of the cup in the position that meant steadfastness, and turned her attention to the island.
When she opened herself fully to them, the roaring of the earthlines almost drove her to her knees. She had to reach out with her mind for the steadiness that was the Master, clinging to it as a child learning to walk clung to her mother’s legs. The Master had planted himself like a standing stone; it was only his staunchness that held Harawai upright.
For Reach the Sky was convulsing, like a woman wracked with labor pains, shaking the crossed earthlines like wind shook palm fronds. For the first time, Harawai understood that the island of Brightshell was not mourning, or frightened, or in pain. It was angry.
Reach the Sky was the heart of the island, its highest and holiest spot. Brightshell only existed because Reach the Sky had thrust its head out of the ocean and said, Here will be land. Reach the Sky was Brightshell. It made sense, Harawai realized, as she fought to keep her feet and her sense of self, that it was here that Brightshell’s true feelings would be revealed. The rest of the island was, in essence, reacting only to Reach the Sky’s understanding. The mountain was old and wise and patient, and, Harawai saw now, had been holding onto hope just as she had.
But now Reach the Sky was showing its anger, and it had thrown up the cloud of spitting, sulfur-scented steam so that all of Brightshell would know.
Why? Why are you angry?
Grief or fear or pain could come from many things, but in all the tales and songs Auntie Para had shared with her, Harawai had only heard a handful that spoke of an island’s anger. When greed had driven Palmheart to cut down more trees than the island could bear. When the Master’s twin sons here on Brightshell had feuded over the title of Heir. And once, long, long ago, when a Master had struck his Chalice, and Sunsetclouds had almost plunged back into the sea before the matter was made right.
Anger came only when the people of an island had betrayed it somehow, putting their own desires ahead of the good of the island. It rarely happened that someone with enough power grasped at more. But it was happening now, on Harawai’s island, and her own anger leapt up to meet Brightshell’s, though she did not know who to aim it at.
I will find out. I will find out, and set it right. She lifted the Cup.
She had planned to speak the incantation of calm, the one she had been using all over the island for the past weeks. It had not worked well, only taking the edge off the upheaval around her, but the other incantations she had tried had done even less.
It had never occurred to her to conjure a vow instead.
But she did so now, speaking words she barely remembered. Auntie Para had taught them to her, of course; she had taught Harawai any tool she had ever heard of a Chalice needing. But Chalices rarely had to make a vow to their island, and Auntie Para had only drilled her on it a few times.
Still, it had been enough. The words came now, halting, but there when she reached for them.
“Brightshell’s heart will be soothed when the balance is corrected. All things will be made right. This Brightshell’s Chalice swears.”
So saying, she flung the Cup’s contents out into the cloud that was rising from the dark heart of Reach the Sky, pouring all her determination and love for her island with it. She put all her heart into the vow, and she could feel the Master doing the same. Their magic twined together and became greater than its parts as it dove down into the misty chasm at the center of Reach the Sky, at the center of Brightshell.
Through the vertigo, a memory rose in Harawai’s mind: the Prelate, tossing the rods again and again and again, and shaking his head sadly as, each time, their revelation proved inconclusive.
Ah.
Reach the Sky and the earthlines calmed slowly around her, like the sea after a storm. Harawai blinked and dropped her exhausted arms as she surfaced from her immersion in Brightshell’s earthlines. The Master watched her, dark eyes steady and sorrowful.
“Brightshell has been betrayed,” he said.
“Yes, Master. But I swore as Chalice that we would find the traitor. I think you swore as Master, too.”
“You should call me Kele,” he said. “And yes, I swore it, too. We have much work to do, but now we know the way forward.”
Yes. Was it relief or was it the exhaustion of a hard-fought binding that made her legs rubbery and uncertain beneath her? She set the Cup down on the boulder before she could drop it and sank down to the ground, back against the stone. She would get up soon, and walk that way. The path down the mountain, the path to saving Brightshell. But first…
“I just need a moment.”
Kele’s smile was exhausted as he sat down beside her. “Yes. We both do.”
The steam and sulfur scent were dissipating already, and when she fell asleep, it was against Kele’s shoulder.
They found the pearls in a gourd buried beneath Prelate’s longhouse. When the rest of the Circle turned on him, proof in hand, he tried to make them believe that it was only for security, for the sake of the whole island. But by then a crowd had gathered, and Tivo, the best of the open-sea far-way sailors, stepped forward and admitted that he had agreed to take the Prelate to the High Island before the rainy season returned.
Then the whole sordid plan came out: the Prelate had been hoarding pearls that should have belonged to all of Brightshell, forcing the pearl divers to hand them over with the weight of his title. What he planned to do with them when he reached the High Island was unclear, but it didn’t matter. Brightshell and Reach the Sky would not stand for greed, for hoarding — for a Prelate plotting to abandon his island.
The law was clear. They put Prelate in a canoe with a single jug of drinking water, and pushed him out to sea.
Harawai stood beside Kele, watching the dark blot of the canoe bob on the turquoise water, wondering whether it would lead him to land before a storm arose or he ran out of water. hat was up to the sea and sky, fate itself. That was beyond her, the Chalice landtied to Brightshell.
Reach the Sky rose silent and steady behind her, and no hint of sulfur hung in the air. But there was a new Prelate to find, and much healing to do. Harawai’s work had only just begun.
ii. Milk
When the messenger knocked on the door, Orra was pulling on her cloak. She winced at the sound, subdued as it was, but Cam just rolled over and kept snoring. He had no landsense, that one—he’d not know that anything was amiss. She hoped he slept through the night; he was always slow-moving the next day when he’d had a bad night’s sleep, and all the more so as they aged. There would be many nights of interrupted sleep for Orra over the next few years; she knew that at least. It would affect Cam: life was not easy for the husband of the Chalice. But she hoped that this night would be a restful one for him, despite the earthlines weeping.
Thistle’s bleat when Orra opened the door to the goats’ lean-to was louder than the knock had been, but no goat would ever wake Cam, not after all these years. All the goats had woken when the earthlines gave their first heartbroken cry, but Myrtle had already fallen back into sleep, and Juniper was nursing her kid, a chore Orran would never interrupt. So it was to be Thistle, then. If Thistle was the one who was ready to go, then Thistle was the one who should go. Orra had long ago learned to listen to her goats.
The pair of goblets had been sitting on the sideboard for some weeks now, waiting. They were cool in her hands as she wrapped them in a scarf and stored them in her bag. She’d set aside some herbs, too, and the appropriate stones. Flasks held water from the Deadwell and the Highspring, and they too were ready to her hand. Orra had expected this. The whole demesne had expected this.
It was Betha from the House at the door, snowflakes gilding her lashes and the shawl she’d thrown over her head. Orra was glad it was a woman who had come for her; a man would have banged on the door with no consideration, and then banged again when Orra took her time getting to it. A woman could be patient.
Betha wasn’t surprised that she was ready to go; she had some earthsense too, and her family had produced several first Housemen and a Weatherauger in the past century or two. The mourning of the earthlines would have woken her, too—if any in the House had slept at all this night.
“He went easily?” Orra asked, leading Thistle out into the cold and pulling the door shut behind her. She knew he had; there had been no shrieking in the earthlines as there had been ten years ago when the last Heir had fallen. The earthlines were keening, now, but of course they were.
“Slipped away not an hour past,” Betha said, reaching out to take the heavy bag from Orra. Orra surrendered it gratefully; the path they walked was not long, but it was steep. Some old women held onto their pride all the tighter as they aged, but Orra had never had much of that to begin with.
She don’t have the elegance of a Chalice, the people had said back when Malise had taken her as apprentice. And it was true that Orra had been small and round and plain-faced even then, nothing like Malise’s austere magnificence.
“Someone’s woken Lorna?” Her own apprentice was a quiet, pretty young woman who had something of Malise’s height and dignity—her grandmother had been a cousin of Malise’s.
“Bruis was knocking on her door as I left,” Bertha said. Lorna had been given her own room in the House some years back.
“And the little one?”
Betha hesitated, the gravel of the path crunching under their feet. Tob, one of the Housemen, kept this path in good order, using only the finest gravel to line it. He was a good boy, Tob. One of Orra’s sons-in-law.
“He was trying not to cry.”
Orra sighed, painting a cloud of fog in front of her mouth. “Poor wee bairn.”
They didn’t speak for the rest of the short way, though Thistle let out a bleat now and then. The light of the lantern Betha held jumped and flickered, and Orra was careful of each step of the familiar way. In the darkness tight around her, she felt the impression of the granite boulders on either side of the path, the few weather-twisted trees raising their bare branches against the lighter shadow of the sky. The air smelled of snow and smoke and the sharp scent of larch and pine.
But mostly, Orra was aware of the cry of the earthlines, a sad, strange drone like the pipes that would be played at the funeral. All of Rockstrewn—stone and stream, cairn and craig, tree and beast—was mourning its Master.
The lanterns on either side of the door were lit, and when Orra knocked, the huge, carven wood door swung open with a groan. The hinges needed greasing, though Orran understood why that had slipped Alpin’s mind of late.
The warmth of the House reached Orra’s cheeks first; it would reach her toes last, but she was a mountain girl, raised in the House itself, the daughter of a baker and a doorkeeper. She was accustomed to the cold.
She let a solemn-faced Bruis, the head Houseman, take her cloak but she kept her shawl and took the bag back from Betha and hung it from her shoulder. Then she moved her fingers in the appropriate gestures for a Chalice in a time of mourning.
“Comfort and solace and memory upon this house of mourning,” Orra murmured, and Bruis and Betha made the customary signs of their own. In the greater light of the entryway, Orra could now see that Betha’s eyes were red.
Their feet rang on the flagstones as Bruis led her into the House, Thistle’s loudest of all. How Calgin, the old doorkeeper, had scowled when Orra had first brought her goats into the House. He had come to grudgingly accept it, though it had taken years before he stopped glowering at her every time she did. But he had never said a word about it. Where the Chalice of Rockstrewn went, there went her goats.
There was a group, silent and head-bowed, outside the Master’s door, a few Housefolk and all of the Circle who resided in the House. Lorna was there as well, and the shadows under eyes that stood out so against her pale face said that she had not slept either. The Grand Seneschal, Mackin, a rawboned man the same age as Orra’s oldest son, stepped up to her as she neared and took her hand, very much as he would have taken his own mother’s.
“I will go and prepare the boy,” he said.
“Prepare the Master,” Orra corrected, noting the tension in his face. Mackin, at least, had not slept at all.
“Yes.”
Orra acknowledged the mourning gestures of the others before going into the room, Lorna falling into step behind her. She had visited these rooms several times over the past few weeks, though in the half-light of candles—no lamps or lanterns allowed in a room of death—the tapestries on the walls took on strange shapes. There was only the slightest chill in the air—the fire in the hearth would have been banked only when the Master breathed his last, and the cold had not yet had the time to set in. Orra’s aging bones were thankful for that, at least.
Lorna positioned herself by the bed, ready to observe. One day, perhaps, she would have to perform these same tasks. Or perhaps not. The new Master was so very young.
Orra laid her bag upon a table and took out the things she would need. The Cup of Farewell. A handful of herbs, the stones for mourning and light in darkness. The flask of water from the Deadwell. And then she bent to milk Thistle.
A binding was always stronger when the milk was fresh. She had had to figure that out herself, for milk Chalices were rare enough that there was little writing on them and less still that made its way to a demesne as remote as Rockstrewn. Thistle was accustomed to being milked at any odd moment and stood patiently as the stream rang against the metal of the cup. Orra didn’t need much, not for a cup like this.
She mixed it while murmuring the familiar incantations of farewell, adjusted only a bit for the grandeur of the Master.
“Go easy, go soft, go fully, beloved of Rockstrewn. Let go, and know your Heir is there to receive. Join your ancestors, and bring them the tidings of a new Master come to hold the land steady.”
After that, it was a simple thing. The cold body lying on the bed could not sip, so Orra dipped her fingers into the cup and smeared the liquid on the lips, parted with their death-breath. She closed the glassy eyes, just beginning to go milky with age, and anointed the paper-thin eyelids with more from the cup, chanting further conjurations as she did.
Then, just for herself, she bent and kissed the weathered old cheek. He had been good to her, her Master. A gruff man, but kind under that. He had trusted her completely, even when it became clear that she was a milk Chalice.
Some of the others of the Circle had eyed her with suspicion; it had taken years to win them over. Orra understood that; everyone knew that milk was unlucky.
“It’s a sign that Rockstrewn’s fate is already unlucky, not a cause that makes it unlucky,” Dileas the Talisman had said. That had seemed like a distinction without a difference at the time, to a twenty-year-old big with child and mourning her master.
But with the Master’s steady acceptance, she had almost been able to believe it. When the baby came, her first, only two months into her Chalicehood, she named him Kenat, after the Master.
She would miss him, this man she had worked alongside for more than three decades. But she would take time to mourn tomorrow. Tonight, the new Master needed her.
Lorna looked even more solemn than usual when they emerged into the light. Orra patted her cheek and let her take the bag as they passed the gathered Housefolk. Bruis and Alais would go in now to prepare the body. And tomorrow—
Tomorrow would be a very long day.
“The earthlines,” Lorna said, quiet as always, her voice almost lost in the high-ceilinged hallways.
“What have you noticed?” Orra asked in the voice she always used when teaching. The familiarity of such an exchange would soothe the girl; Lorna was a steady girl, but to Orra’s eyes, even she looked shaken now.
“They mourn like the pipes,” she said. “It’s a dirge. No. A lament.”
“Yes.” Lorna had always been particularly sensitive to the earthlines. Her family was an old one, their shepherdright perhaps the most established in Rockstrewn.
“But there’s no anger. No fear.” Not like when the last Heir died, Lorna didn’t say—but Orra knew she was thinking it. Lorna had been a child then, Orra’s apprentice for only a year, and Orra could clearly remember how terrified she had been as the earthlines shrieked and howled like the fiercest of winter storms. That had been a terrible time.
“No. This will be a smooth transition, if we of the Circle do our jobs right.”
“And the boy—the new Master? Will he be strong enough?”
Lorna was the first person who had voiced that question, though Orra knew the whole demesne was wondering, and had been since it became clear that Master Kenat would not make it through the winter. But that was Lorna’s way: she didn’t say much, but when she did speak, she didn’t cavil.
“He is young.” And that was the crux of the whole thing, wasn’t it? Twelve was far too young to become Master. “He is young, but he is a good boy, eager to learn, and he loves Rockstrewn already. He will do well.”
But Leven appeared even younger than he was when he looked up at their entrance. He was tidily dressed, his black hair combed back from his face, his dark-lashed eyes enormous. Poor wee bairn, indeed.
Lorna set down the bag and tucked herself into a corner to observe. When Orra made the gesture of greeting from Chalice to Master, she saw him swallow hard. But he pulled his narrow shoulders back and made the appropriate response. He was a bit clumsy, despite his care, but then, children’s hands weren’t made for this kind of thing. He would grow into it.
“Chalice greets the Master. I can hear your heart’s cry—mine cries in tune.”
That latter wasn’t traditional, but it needed to be said. This boy had just lost his beloved grandfather, the one who had raised him after his mother died in childbirth and his father, the last Heir, died in that dreadful accident when he was still small. Kenat had been his whole world, and though the old man had done his best to pass on all his wisdom, especially in these last few months, Leven would be overwhelmed.
Well. At least he would have a well-established Circle to help him. Even with the new Talisman only in her place since spring, the binding was going well. And gods of the earthlines knew that Orra had years of experience to draw on. She would help him all she could.
“I—Master greets Chalice,” Leven said, and it was so clear how he was trying to hold his voice steady and sure. And then, a small boy who could not hold in the question any longer: “Can I see him?”
“Yes,” Orra said. “I will take you in a few minutes. But first, you’ll drink your first Cup as Master.” She used a different tone now, the one she had used when Flora, her second daughter, had broken her arm and wept and whimpered while the healer set it. A hearty, almost casual voice. The other members of the Circle would be overly solemn and some—the ones unaccustomed to children—would no doubt be condescending. It was better to be straightforward with a frightened child, but encouraging. “Tomorrow will be a very long day, but Lorna and I will tell you everything you need to know.”
The Master licked his lips. “I already know a lot. Grandda told me.”
“Of course he did. But sometimes it’s difficult to hold it all together in your head in the right order, isn’t it? When I first became Chalice, I was worried to distraction that I would forget something.”
“And did you?”
Orra smiled at the question. “Occasionally. And when I did, someone reminded me.” Dileas, or the Master himself. They had eased her way, as she would now do for this small boy. “There was no harm done.”
None that had been beyond their power to set right, anyway. Mistakes were a part of learning the way to your power. But the land was patient when it knew its servants had been chosen correctly. It gave you second chances.
“When will the earthlines stop crying?” he asked. “I can feel them here.” He laid his hand against his chest.
“When your grandda is laid to his rest and the whole Circle has shared a Cup with you, it will ease.”
That was the easy answer. The worst of it would indeed ease after that ritual was complete, but there would be aftershocks for months, perhaps years after. Not large ones, not like after this boy’s father had died. But the demesne mourned as fiercely as any human. And grief always took time.
“After, it will be quieter, and you and I and the Circle will work hard to help it. With any luck, it will get better, day by day.”
At twenty, holding her first goblet, she would have been sure that that luck could not find her, a milk Chalice. But she knew now what that misfortune had foretold. The years after the last Heir’s death had been hard ones, and Orra had felt every bit of her unluckiness. But she and Master Kenat and the others had worked so hard since then. Surely all those years of dedication and love for the land would outweigh any lingering bad luck.
“Now,” Orra said, turning to take the Cup of Easing from her bag. There were several goblets that were appropriate for an Heir’s first Cup, but this one, used in times of transition, had come to her hand. With some dried spring herbs, the same stone of light in darkness that had been in his grandfather’s last cup, and a drop of water from the Highspring, it would make smooth the way for the boy to follow. “If Thistle will stand still for a milking and not kick me, we will begin.”
Thistle never kicked, but the boy’s face lost a little of its tension at her words. He had seen her bring her goats into the House all his life, but he usually giggled when she knelt to milk them inside. He didn’t giggle now, but he came close to watch, and Thistle let him tug at her beard and pat her head when they were done.
He did like to learn, just as Orra had said; the Chalice’s work was nothing he had to worry about, but he watched with interest as she stirred in the herbs and dropped in the stone.
“I have to drink that?” His nose wrinkled just a touch, and Orra felt her most grandmotherly of feelings swell inside her. A good boy.
“Just a sip. It won’t hurt you. I scrub the stones cleaner than Alais does her dishes,” she said, and this time, it almost made the boy smile.
But gravity weighed down his expression as she stepped forward and held the Cup out. For the first time in her Chalicehood, she was glad she wasn’t tall. The Master-that-was had always had to bend for her to hold the cup up to him, she popping up on her toes to meet him. It had been awkward at first, though after a few years neither of them thought anything of it. But she didn’t have to bend at all to hold the cup out to this solemn-eyed boy who was the Master now.
“Do you remember what to say?” she asked, and he nodded.
“I practiced.”
“Good. You’ll do it just right. And if you don’t, we can do it again. Chin up!”
He lifted his small, pointed chin and squared his shoulders like a boy pretending to be a soldier.
She arranged her hands in the way that invited the Cup’s recipient to touch her hands if he liked. She lifted it up towards the ceiling.
The words were so simple. Straightforward and strong and older than almost any other. As old as the first words she had spoken as Chalice, all those years ago.
“Master of Rockstrewn, drink the first Cup of your people. Drink, and bind yourself to the land of your bloodright.”
The deep blue of the boy’s eyes was troubled and hopeful all at the same time. “I’m not ready,” he whispered, a secret between them.
She shared her own. “No one ever is.” She hadn’t been, that was for certain. “But the land is ready for you.”
She had seen him, all his short life, running in the high meadows, climbing trees and rocks, swimming in the lochs. She knew from Narl, his tutor, that he liked to learn the names of trees and plants and flowers, the habits of foxes and badgers and hawks. Sometimes, in the high summer when the sun lingered in the sky, he stayed out so late that he would fall asleep in the shadows of the standing stones. She had seen him, once or twice, being carried back to the House in his grandfather’s arms.
He loved the land already. He would do well.
His hands grasped hers as her own children’s had. Together, they lifted the Cup, and the new Master of Rockstrewn drank, while the old Chalice of Rockstrewn bound.
iii. Blood
When the battle was over, Syn gathered the blood.
It was a familiar task, now, and she could almost do it without shuddering. But every time, she remembered the horror on the faces of the other Circle members, of the survivors clearing the battlefield. It had almost broken her, the revulsion in their expressions reflected in her heart. But there was blood, clotting and congealing though it was, and Syn had learned early that blood should never, ever be wasted.
Though the past seven years have been nothing but waste.
Syn shoved the thought aside and visited the wounded first. The first time she had done this, after the second battle (she had been too shattered after the first to even think of it), the conscious ones had recoiled from her, a few of the braver even begging no. But after seven years, all of Springleafturn knew what to expect of the aftermath of battle. Some still averted their eyes, but who could blame them for that?
After the wounded, she sought out the dead. They wouldn’t have been moved yet, their bodies gathered for either the Pyre or a bonfire, depending on whether they were ally or enemy. The first thing after the battle was always to attend to the wounded. The dead could wait.
They waited for Syn, blood drying already. But it didn’t matter what she gathered in the Cup of Assuagement, whether bright red straight from veins or flakes from the dead.
At the beginning, she had tried to mix the blood with herbs or drop in a few of the more stable stones. But it had not worked, not for the aftermath. Syn had learned quickly that the Cup of Assuagement needed only blood that had been shed in battle.
When the Cup was nearly full, she straightened from her crouch, ignoring the mud and gore clinging to the hem of her dress, the stench around her, the cawing of circling crows. She raised her eyes from the crimson smears on her pale hands and looked for the Master.
He was already there, standing a few yards away, eyes bleak and face grim as he looked out over the field. The wounded were all with the healers now, and the survivors and the older children and the women who did not fight were picking their way through the scattered corpses, searching for familiar faces.
“Master?”
He turned to her, and even after the past year, she was surprised at the lack of revulsion in his grey eyes as he looked at her. So many things about him still surprised her.
He was her fourth Master. Had any other Chalice ever had so many? There was no time to search the texts and tales for an answer, and there hadn’t been for seven years. At the beginning, Syn had thought that once the war was over, she would take the time to search out the answer. But that was seven years ago, and now she did not care. If the war ever ended—she felt a bitter laugh in her heart—Syn would try never to think about war again.
If the war ever ended. If the demesne survived. She did not think that it would, which would mean that she would not survive. Whether she died first, pulling the crumbling remnants of Springleafturn down with her, or whether the demesne was ground to nothing, taking Syn with it, it didn’t matter. It was difficult to believe in any other ending.
It grew more difficult with each Master. It had not been a surprise when she lost her first. He wasn’t yet old, Master Ake, but he was slowing enough that no one had been shocked when he fell the first battle, the one where the Cup of Triumph cracked. His eldest son, Gulbrand, had been the longest-lasting of her Masters, almost four years. He had been a mighty warrior, and when he had taken on his father’s mantle, everyone had been certain he would bring Springleafturn to victory.
He hadn’t.
After that, it had been Egil, Gulbrand’s younger brother, less strong and skilled in battle, but more sly and cunning. Syn had hoped that his quick mind would find a way out of the morass, and at first it had appeared to be working as he negotiated with the other demesnes. But he had been stabbed at a parley, and the betrayal had plunged Springleafturn back into the thick of war.
And now there was Harald. This cousin was even less of a warrior than Egil, for he had been born with a lame leg. Syn knew what the people, the worn-down dregs of what had once been a thriving demesne, said about their Circle. A blood Chalice and a crippled Master. The last embers of hope that the people of Springleafturn had kept alive had flickered out with Egil’s death.
Though Syn knew enough by then about Springleafturn and its earthlines and its bloodrights to know that a lame leg mattered not at all to how well a Master could do his duty, she hadn’t had hope herself at that point. The screams of the earthlines with each fresh death had ground her down and down, until she wasn’t sure she was truly alive. So she had handed Harald his first Cup and been prepared for the end.
But the strangest thing had happened. Springleafturn kept surviving. A whole year of a blood Chalice and a crippled Master, and it still fought on.
As Harald, leaning his crutch, made his way towards her, his eyes steady, the thought arose, not for the first time: He’s the first Master who believed in you. The first who wasn’t terrified or furious or both with you. Perhaps that makes the difference.
But it was an unworthy thought, taking on more importance than she deserved. After all, it was the whole Circle that had held Springleafturn. The Circle, and the blood and sweat of its people. Syn was only Chalice.
Only Chalice, but still: Chalice.
She pushed that thought aside too.
“A win,” she said, as he joined her.
“Yes.” The flatness of his voice told her that he, too, no longer felt the difference between a battle won and one lost.
“It was wise to hold the Oakhollow troops in reserve. It made the difference.” He couldn’t fight himself, this Master, but he had unexpectedly proved quick with strategy. Egil had fancied himself a tactician, but he lacked the Harald’s steadiness.
“Yes,” he agreed with no pride in his voice. “Your blessing before the battle did as well.”
Syn wasn’t sure about that. The fighters of Springleafturn no longer flinched away from her when she lifted her scarlet thumb and pressed it to their foreheads before battle. But neither did she see it kindle hope in them.
“Are you ready?” she asked.
“Yes. Let’s begin.”
He positioned himself in the center of the battlefield. It had taken a few tries to figure out how best to arrange themselves for the aftermath. Her previous Masters had walked with her as she paced around the outside of the field, but even though Syn had gone slowly with Harald, it had still worn him down. Eventually, they realized this binding worked just as well with him standing firm in the middle with her moving around him like a child in spring dancing a ribbon around a pole.
At the far north edge of the field, near the treeline, she dipped her fingers into the Cup of Residuum.
This Cup was only six years old, one she had commissioned from Griff the potter. They had spent weeks working out the making of it before she had deemed it correct. Griff was dead now, killed not a month after he had pulled it from the kiln, and she thought of him after every battle. It was the only Cup she used after battles now.
After the past seven years, Springleafturn had the largest collection of battlefield cups that any text or tale had ever told of. When Syn had become Chalice, there had only been the typical one.
She remembered how Hilde the silversmith had trembled when Syn had approached her after that first, worst battle. Seven years gone, but it was so clear in Syn’s mind, Hilde’s clever, strong hands reaching for the remnants of Springleafturn’s only battlefield cup. The Cup of Sacrifice had cracked right in half when Syn had tried to stop the battle with a binding. Syn had dragged herself from the field, covered in mud, and though her fingers had spent the three previous years of her Chalicehood more often stained with blood than not, it had felt different.
For the first three years, before the wars began, the blood had been mostly animal. Whenever it was time to stir a cup, Syn would go to one of the farmers or herdsmen or hunters who had recently completed a slaughter and be handed a clay jar by someone with a horrified face.
It wasn’t the blood that horrified. Most of the people of Springleafturn knew how to wring a chicken’s neck, or slice the throat of a sheep or deer, and did it without hesitation. Death, after all, lay so close to life, and blood tied the two together.
But to take the blood into a Cup of a Chalice? For the first three years, her people had been terrified of her. It was only when the war began that they–and Syn herself—had understood.
So Hilde’s hands had trembled when she took the two halves of the Cup from Syn, and though Syn had scrubbed and scrubbed her hands after the battle till no flecks of blood lurked even under her fingernails, Hilde had been careful not to let her own skin brush Syn’s. That had stung, then, though Syn couldn’t blame Hilde for being frightened. No craftsman of Springleafturn had made a battlefield cup for centuries. The potters and smiths learned a few words about such a creation in their training, but none of them ever expected to have to apply such teachings.
But Springleafturn only had one battlefield cup, and the battle that had broken it had settled nothing. They would need another.
So Hilde had made Syn another to hold aloft while her people fought. Then Marv the goldsmith—also dead now —had made the Cup of Preparation and a new Cup of Healing just for those wounded in battle. And then Griff made the Cup Syn held now.
It was wide-bowled and deep, and her arms ached as she carried it. She wasn’t old, though she felt it. Even so, she managed to hold it steady as she walked, stopping every few yards to dip her fingers into the cooling blood and flick the droplets over the wailing land.
When Syn had trained with her master, the last Chalice, she had been giddy with excitement every time she held a Cup. Ragna had chastised her, reminding her that Chalice work required focus and gravity. Syn had learned both quickly.
The words she spoke now were so old that their meaning had been lost as language changed. She didn’t know exactly what she was saying—something soothing? Something calming? Something binding?—but one thing she knew for certain: her fingers were stained with the blood of her people, and she must quiet this battlefield before the blood she had not gathered (so much blood) curdled and soured the earthlines.
The earthlines were still reverberating like war drums, and it took all of her remaining strength to keep a grip on them. She might not have managed it with Egil or Gulbrand; neither of them had been steady enough. With Harald, it was just possible.
When she had dragged herself around the entire perimeter and back to the center and the Master, she whispered the last, strange syllables and then poured the remaining blood onto the ground. Now the crows could come.
The Master handed her a cloth, already dampened, for her to clean her hands. She knew it was irrational, but she had always thought that she could feel the difference between human blood and the blood of animals that she still used for Cups that had nothing to do with war. It had been an idle thought at the beginning, before the war, when the only human blood she ever used was her own, and then only a few drops in the most weighty of Cups.
Now she knew the feeling of human blood as well as she did the water she used to clean herself after. The red washed away, but the feeling never did. Even if they made it to the other side of war, she did not think her hands would ever feel as they had before.
“If we come through this,” she said, voicing a thought she had never dared to speak to her previous Masters, “we should have a fresh start. We should find a new name for the demesne.”
“Yes,” he said, with no hesitation, as though the thought had occurred to him before as well. “We will think of one together.”
It was a very rare thing for a demesne to gain a new name. But after what Springleafturn had endured, it deserved one. It would take some time to pick a new one, and they would only have time for that if they truly did survive the war. Syn still thought that there was little chance of that.
But somehow, somehow her people and their land carried on, propped up on the shoulders of a blood Chalice and a crippled Master.
Syn took Harald’s free arm, and they leaned on each other as they walked. As exhausted as she was, as unsteady as his steps were, they should not have been able to make it all the way back to the House.
But somehow, somehow, they did.
(When they finally won peace, three grueling years later, she and Harald and the last exhausted remnants of their people chose a new name for their demesne. Dawnrise.)