it looked far more like honey than it did like fire.
He moved his hand till it was over hers, and turned the palm, so that the honey-fire ran off the edge and onto the back of her wounded hand. It had a hot sweet smell....
Her hand stopped hurting the moment the honey-fire touched it. But that wasn't...that didn't begin to describe what happened. It was exhilaration, exaltation; it was the finest, purest, best moment of her life expanded into something unrecognisable and almost unbearably joyous. No rumour of any power of Fire had suggested anything like this.
She felt as if she came back to herself with infinite slowness, but some fraction of her mind had remained behind in ordinary time and was sure that it was all over in a matter of seconds. Still when she came back she discovered that she was being supported by a hand caught hard up under her left arm, so that her shoulder was nearly at her ear as she raised her head from her breast and gasped for breath.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I wasn't taught the proper forms for healing, and I was so afraid of hurting you further."
She looked up at him. She recovered her sense of up and down, and where her feet were, and stood on them. He let go of her arm. He had been holding her through both her cloak and the heavy Chalice robes, but there was no smell of singed cloth. She looked at his hand, and then glanced involuntarily at her sleeve.
"I can control it, a little, now," he said, understanding her look. "And I guessed you might.... It is one of the things I am trying to learn if I can control enough. Or not. I was...very tired, the day I arrived. But...once you learn to live in Fire, you do not return. I had not, quite, when the summons came. But I had entered Fire farther than I realised. I began to find this out on the trip here. I think I would not have dared, if I had realised."
"I am glad you did not know," she said. "That you came. You are - you are adapting. You are coming back to us. To your demesne. You have just said you can - you can control it." She could not bring herself to describe what "it" was. "You - you could not have borne so much of my weight, as you did just now, when you first arrived."
He said, "Fire helped me, just now. I could not lift the stone bowl at the Lower Water last week. Fire had no place there - as it rarely has any place in the functions of the Circle - and I could not call on it."
The memory of joy was draining away, leaving her in the too-familiar place of worry and frustration and ignorance and helplessness. She shook her head, to clear it, to shake loose something she could say to him, something that would convince him - something that would draw him further into the human world - where Willowlands needed him. "You are remembering the ordinary things." As she could not bring herself to describe what "it" was a moment ago, she could not now bring herself to say "the ordinary human things."
He bowed his head and spread his black fingers, and looked at them. She looked at them too; the tips were not ember-red today. "It is a capital offence to harm a Chalice, even for a Master," he said thoughtfully.
She said sharply, "I think no one else knows. Do not tell them."
"You are the only one I have hurt," he said. "I knew I was tired, but I did not know...remember...how delicate human skin is. I should have; I knew that the two young apprentices they sent with me could not touch me, and that the coachman avoided me. But I was...overwhelmed by the world. I had not seen it in seven years. I did not know how much I had changed.
"And the first thing I did upon arriving at my demesne, where I had come to hold as Master, is burn my Chalice when she gave me the cup of welcome."
"It was an accident," she said fiercely. "Anyone can have an accident, from a king to a scullery maid."
There was a pause. "Chalices are usually great believers in fate and omens," he said at last. "As are Elemental priests."
She didn't notice that she had reached out both her hands and seized