Voice of the Lost

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Ileaha had fallen asleep cradling Avahn’s head on her lap. Even dozing she managed to steady him against the jerking of the carriage, and it was typical of the young woman that, no matter how furious she had been, she was still taking every care for his safety. Medair and Islantar shared the opposite seat, packed off to the Cor-Ibis manor, The Avenue, as soon as a carriage could be procured. Illukar had promised to follow soon after, and Medair had gone without demur, not willing to distract him from organising the search for Tarsus. But good sense would not stop her from silently fretting.

"Twenty years. Perhaps thirty. The south will regain its strength, and we will do this again."

Adjusting her numb arm, Medair looked at Islantar. There was a small graze on his chin, suggestive of a fall, but his mouth was firm. Medair was not certain how cloistered the Kierash’s existence had been, but she had seen enough dismay in the eyes of those who recognised him to guess how completely out of his experience these extraordinary circumstances must be. Yet he was already looking to the future.

"Do you think it that inevitable?" she asked. "Given Sendel’s geas?"

"At least likely. And there are those who will argue that it would be wiser, safer, to annex Decia, make it part of the Palladian Empire once again." Islantar was watching her reaction, as if he thought he could gauge the mood of Farakkan from her face. "And perhaps it would dull the weapons of those who wish to keep wounds open. Perhaps make it more difficult for an organised force to be massed."

"I don’t have your answers, Kierash," Medair said. In the aftermath of her fall, it was all she could do to keep a peevish snap out of her voice.

"And are in no mood to find them?" The look he gave her was all Emperor, the sort of survey Grevain would turn on those who offered excuses instead of action. Medair struggled against a sense of injury, thinking him unfair to be pushing her now. But the thought of Grevain stiffened her back, reminding her that she had abandoned the pretence of being an outsider uninvolved in the problems of the present.

"Do you think that question so urgent, then?" she asked. "Above Tarsus and wild magic and a castle threatening to fall on our heads?"

"It is the one urgent to me," Islantar replied, shifting back from Emperor to boy. A grave, serious youth willing to shoulder his burdens – and wanting to focus on anything but the possible price of wild magic. "The disease, rather than the symptoms." He smiled at her apologetically. "You are suffering, I know, and I should not press you, but possibly you do not understand how important you are to what I strive to see. Of all I have known, you have the greatest cause to hate the Ibis-lar as invaders. You experienced the loss of the Empire, you were its Herald. You lived what Estarion and the Medarists and the Hand all try to revive. Yet you set it aside, and used the Horn to defend Athere. If you can heal that wound, how can they not?"

Medair shook her head. "You don’t understand, Kierash. I’m no more healed than they. I’ve merely seen my way to choosing not to mire myself in acts too old to change. But there is no forgiveness in me, not for the invasion."

The words fell from her lips as if it wasn’t she who formed them. Something had stepped into the light as she spoke, and she could neither look at it nor hide from it, only feel its anger. It stood stony and uncooperative at the back of her heart; that part which would not stop hating. Did she really think to start a life with Illukar while it lurked there? But she had neither the will nor energy to try and understand it, to attempt to face it.

Her words had quelled Islantar a little, and she felt immediately sorry for him, sitting so alone on the far end of the seat, trying to shoulder the burdens of a kingdom. But he was not easily defeated.

"How then did you make that choice?" he asked. "For that is certainly more than the Hand or Estarion have managed. It is not something which came easily to you, I think."

"No. It did not. Does not. Will not." Medair flinched away from her memories of the previous year. She had certainly not been able to deal with the chasm between past and present when she had first discovered her five hundred year delay. "I didn’t want to accept reality and I worked very hard not to. But by the time of Estarion’s attack, I had seen too much to continue telling myself that this wasn’t my war."

"What changed?" Islantar asked, watching her fixedly.

Medair shook her head sadly. "It was what had not changed, Kierash," she said. "For all I saw of Avahn and Ileaha, for all I came to feel for Illukar, I gave your mother the Horn of Farak because I was still sworn to defend Athere. I forced myself to keep to the letter of my oath, despite the part of me which did not object to Ibisians being thrown down, because if I did not then my people, Farak-lar, would have been killed."

"Will you always think of us as White Snakes, then?" Such a quiet question.

"How can I answer that?" she said. "The anger is not always there. When it rises I press it down, and give myself more and more reasons not to let it up again."

"Forbearance, rather than forgiveness."

"I suppose so," Medair said. "But Tarsus, who would rule Palladium, cleaves to this idea of cleansing it first. He believes it the right thing to do. The only way."

The carriage jolted around a corner, reminding Medair just how tired and aching she was. Islantar leaned across to steady Avahn, then looked down at his hand. Against custom, though no longer against law, for him to touch.

"Perhaps, for Tarsus to rule, that would be necessary," he said. "I do not know enough of him. Or Prince Thessan, who is in truth the greater threat, since he is Decia’s heir. Do you know," he added, those clear eyes widening in faint amazement, "Queen Sendel had left him locked in those cells? She sent someone to let him out, before we came down."

"They don’t seem close," Medair commented, as they at last rattled through the gates of The Avenue. "King Xarus' influence, perhaps."

"Perhaps." The Kierash lapsed into thought, and Medair was glad to give up thinking of any futures beyond getting clean and finding somewhere to rest.

A pair of Illukar’s over-efficient servants had taken charge of Medair. They had scrubbed her and bandaged her, poured hot sugary liquid down her throat and treated her much like a two-year child. The petite Farakkian woman who cleaned and salved her grazes acted like she and Medair had met before, and her attitude, beneath the bland mask of service, was not entirely friendly. Uncertainty was stretching Medair’s weary nerves, and she was very glad to see Ileaha, who arrived just as Medair was being wrapped in a voluminous robe.

Looking strangely naked without her braid, Ileaha waited a moment for the two women to tie the sash about Medair’s waist, then dismissed them from the room.

"Do I know either of those women?" Medair asked, the moment the door to the guestroom had closed behind them.

Ileaha paused for consideration. "You have been to The Avenue before, so it is likely you have at least seen them. Keris Arona is 'Lukar’s selvurgeon – one who heals without magic. The other is Lekmet, who is fourth in the House’s order of attendants. They exist in both my memories, but I don’t know of any connection with you." Ileaha lifted an equivocal hand. "Despite knowing two worlds, I don’t have every answer you seek."

"Do you have the answers you seek?" Medair asked, then added: "You seem less distressed."

"Less?" Ileaha looked down at herself. She was wearing another variation of what Medair thought of as the uniform of a Velvet Sword – the most abbreviated of demi-robes over workmanlike shirt and trousers. "Seeing Falcon Black above Finrathlar made my own divides seem…petty. I cannot undo what has been done to me, and there is no gain in running from it. I am two halves of a third whole." She shook her head. "I will not waste my energies repining."

"And Avahn?"

Ileaha’s face tightened, then she sighed. "I know it wasn’t his intention to hurt me, yet he did. But, if I take his current protestations at face value, his fault was only that he saw too late. And…in either life, there was a bond between us. I can’t change that either."

"What was he like? The Avahn from this remade world?"

"Much the same." Ileaha paced about Medair, glancing at the tub of water which had not yet been removed from the room. "In both cases, Avahn turned somersaults to avoid winning Illukar’s approval. There were many different incidents, but at core he is the same person. It is on an errand of his that I am here."

"Yes?" Medair was surprised. "He’s conscious again?"

"He drifts in and out. One of Sedesten’s students is tending him, so there is little chance of a further decline." Ileaha found Medair’s satchel and picked it up. "He was most insistent I see to you."

Ileaha wouldn’t elaborate further, simply leading a weary and reluctant Medair out of her room and up a flight of stairs to the third level of the house, a place she hadn’t been before.

"You are not very different, either," Ileaha said, opening a heavy door of near-black wood. "I have been hoping for this in both my memories." She stepped aside to allow Medair to look into the room.

The covering on the bed immediately captured attention. If someone had taken a dozen armfuls of dragonflies and dropped them onto a mossy hill, it would have something of the same effect. Thousands of embroidered insects seethed together in the centre of the spread and dripped down its sides to hover above the floor. They were delicately rendered in pale, shimmering colours, which saved the bed from overwhelming the rest of the room.

A wide, flat bowl of translucent porcelain, beautiful for the extreme perfection of its proportions, was set upon a black table to her left. It was filled with water, with a scattering of rose petals on the still surface. White screens were set before sun-filled doors of glass, each panel glowing with light so that every fleck in the material was clearly outlined. Two pens had been placed neatly on a block of heavy paper sitting in the exact centre of an ebony writing desk. The room was spare and balanced and inexpressibly Illukar, in a way which made Medair feel his absence acutely.

Ileaha crossed to the chair before the writing desk and set Medair’s satchel in its lap. The movement had an air of confirmation and finality about it, as if Ileaha was declaring a homecoming. Medair walked into the room far less certainly, feeling stupidly shy.

"You are wanting to sleep, I know," Ileaha said, and left her, closing the door firmly. The air of light conspiracy was unexpected, especially when Ileaha had been so furiously wounded that very morning. It felt like decades ago, but the sun was not far past midday.

The depth of Ileaha’s hurt, and how much of her apparent recovery was merely brave show, was difficult to judge. Medair had not missed the way she had altered course when speaking of Avahn, and her departure felt abrupt. But it was apparently Avahn who had sent her. Could she believe Ileaha had simply chosen to accept and move on? The very thing Medair had struggled so long to achieve. She supposed the important thing was to make the attempt.

Too tired to speculate further, Medair crossed to the bed and sat down. She felt out of place, but pushed the uneasiness aside. Sleep would dull the edge of some of her doubts, and if she was to find any way to help, to think of some solution, she needed rest to clear her mind.

There were tiny blue smudges on the very outer edges of Illukar’s eyelids. Medair lay staring at them, trying to remember if they had always been there. They might be a symptom of fatigue, or something every Ibisian had, and she had never noticed because she’d never before had the occasion or the desire to study the details of a sleeping Ibisian’s face.

It was still the same afternoon, though the angle of the sunlight suggested it was closing in on evening. She’d woken listening to his steady breathing and found him lying next to her, arranged on his side in a position loosely symmetrical to her own. The scratch down his cheek looked older, though it would be a long time before it faded completely. He was dressed in linen, as if he had meant to go out and only stopped for a short rest which weariness had prolonged. That mass of pale hair shone in two neat braids, and he smelled very clean. Quite captivating.

Medair was taking the opportunity to enjoy him, to examine each quirk of his delicate brows and pale lashes, and these little smudges which she’d never looked hard enough to notice before. He was such a beautiful man, and she supposed that was part of the reason she had been drawn to him, along with his intelligence and fine sense of courtesy. But she had fallen in love with him for his smile, and most especially for the tale he had told her of Ourvette’s Lake, because he had found his own family’s pride amusing.

It was hard to resist touching him, but Medair scarcely let herself breathe in case he woke up and felt he must immediately go take up the reins of his Dahlein. It was a soap bubble moment.

On cue, he opened his eyes. Clear grey, with a scattering of darker crystal flecks. She was glad he didn’t sit up immediately, but lay looking back at her. He shifted his hand, so his fingers just touched her splinted ones, and his eyelids dropped as if he was overwhelmed by that simple act. The soap bubble didn’t break, and they lay there until a whisper of power trickled into the room and Illukar looked away.

"They are attempting to stabilise Falcon Black," he said. "The majority of the task was to be done with stone, and this casting will be to fuse the supports. The first of many, for it is the work of several days. Weeks, perhaps."

He didn’t get up, despite the continuing increase of arcane noise. Medair, feeling glad, shifted her fingers so they brushed back against his, and watched his expression change. It meant a very great deal to him that she wanted to touch him.

"And Tarsus?" she asked reluctantly, not certain she wanted to know any answer.

"No sign. The traces have seemed to fix on him, and then dissipate. Likely, the device absorbs them as it did my own casting. The physical searches continue and Sedesten has spoken to a representative of the Shimmerlan’s inhabitants to arrange a hunt in their territory."

"What will you do with him, when he’s captured?"

Illukar’s brows drew together. "His ultimate fate is a matter for the Kier. Even without Estarion to fuel his ambitions, there are too many who would use him to challenge us, or who would appoint themselves champions of his welfare. Impolitic to kill him, imprudent to let him live."

"Would the Kier be…prudent, then?"

His gaze shifted back to their hands, the tips of her fingers still only grazing his. "I have never known the Kier to be unjust," he said, but continued past prevarication. "He warred against us, no matter that Estarion worked the strings. It is possible the Kier might choose to have him executed. But imprisonment is more likely. I expect it will be a country estate: constant guards, little freedom. And for us, a lifetime of denying that he has been disposed of more permanently."

That would be easier to deal with than an execution. Medair sighed softly, wishing that Tarsus had proven to be an obvious charlatan, the painfully greedy kind who would not rouse such conflicting emotions. "I will never be sure if he was truly Corminevar," she said. "Before the Conflagration."

"No."

Medair watched shadows cross Illukar’s face, speculating on their meaning. "Finrathlar is very much the same, isn’t it?" she said.

"Its proximity to the Shimmerlan seems to be the greatest change," Illukar replied, and she saw that she had guessed correctly. Something about Finrathlar disturbed him.

"What is it?" she asked.

His lashes swept down again, then he closed his eyes briefly. "It is very much the same," he said, and there was a thread of loss in his voice. "I am in the room which I have long called mine, in the city which is my home and my charge. My mother is buried in the grounds of this house. I recognise it all and cannot mark out something which is not as I left it. Yet today my oldest friend spoke of having travelled with me through a place I have never seen, dealing with a race I have never met." He flattened his hand on the bedspread. "Is this my home, or something which merely resembles it? Did the true Finrathlar die in flame? Did Sedesten? Was The Avenue burnt to the ground and a copy erected in its place? Am I trying to save a place which is not even mine? Am I an impostor in my own home?"

Tiny lines had formed on either side of his mouth. He looked as if he were in physical pain.

"You are Illukar," Medair said, slowly. "And–" She hesitated, then covered his hand with hers. His long, slender fingers made hers look stunted. "I think this is not quite your home. The Conflagration seemed to be–" She chewed her lip, trying to decide just what she thought the Conflagration had done. "I don’t–" She paused again, uneasily. "If there had been no shield wall around Athere, and we had been altered to Estarion’s purpose, I don’t know what I would be. Medair, evidently, but would I have been a Medair who, when she blew the Horn of Farak, destroyed defender instead of invader?"

"I do not think that likely," he said, and she smiled at him, but continued even though she did not like where her thoughts were leading.

"Whether the Conflagration truly killed them or not, those who were outside Athere must have experienced the change as death." Medair looked away from those clear eyes. She wasn’t saying anything he hadn’t already concluded, merely speaking out loud what weighed on his heart. "They would have felt the flames on them, they would have run screaming and been overwhelmed. Is it something other than death, to be reborn the same day in almost exactly the same situation? Those horse-people certainly aren’t the people they were before, and nor is Kyledra and all the other lands drowned in the Shimmerlan. Finrathlar looks the same, but it is not. And yet, that doesn’t change anything."

"No?" Illukar’s hand had closed into a fist beneath her fingers.

"No." Already distanced from the modern world, Medair could not react to its alteration in the same way. She felt helpless in face of his hurt, but stumbled on regardless. "You mourn the Sedesten who was, and the home you remember, but the Sedesten who is doesn’t stop being Sedesten for having the Shimmerlan incorporated into his memories. He certainly knows you. You are as much a part of this world as you were of the one before the Conflagration. I can’t tell you not to mourn that terrible day when Finrathlar watched the Conflagration sweep over it, but don’t reject what is here in the meantime. This is still your Dahlein and you are still you. It is still Finrathlar and it will always be your home."

She could tell she had not been very convincing. "Just as it was still Athere for you?" he asked, eyes still hooded.

Medair took a deep breath, thinking through the comparison. "Will you feel you are turning your face from the true Finrathlar if you defend this new one?"

That had been closer to the mark. He looked away from their hands and shifted gingerly onto his back. "In a way. Yes. This is not my Finrathlar. My home and my friends and those in my charge died in flame. I cannot just put that aside, even if their death was not precisely final."

It was difficult to imagine Illukar responding as she had: running off to sulk on a mountain because she could not come to terms with what had gone wrong.

"Then don’t put it aside," she suggested, feeling his sense of loss more acutely. "Mourn them. Remember them. The important part is to go on." It had taken her far too long to understand that.

He didn’t respond, gazing at the ceiling. It wasn’t something he was going to come to terms with instantly. She wondered how he would have felt about her, if she’d been outside the wall.

"How is your arm?"

At times he was suspiciously telepathic. "How is your back?" she asked in return, and he lifted one corner of his mouth, acknowledging that there had been a cause for his stiff movement and winces.

"Bruises on bruises," he said. "But if I were to admit to injuries, a glancing blow to my head was my real concern. I had no wish to try and cast anything of moment while suffering concussion, but it seems that the rap inspired nothing more than a headache, and the rest has rid me of that."

"My arm feels exactly as if it was recently broken and healed," she said. "A dull ache, stiff with bandages and cuts and grazes, but no longer the sort of thing to make me want to keel over." She shook her head. "A castle fell on us. We’re lucky to be alive."

"Yes." He turned his head so he could look again at their hands, hers now under his. Dragonflies hovered beneath their fingers, and Medair was suddenly uneasy. There was something terribly ephemeral about dragonflies, and she wondered just how long his family had used them as an emblem.

"Why did your mother name you Illukar?" she asked, not even trying to keep her fears out of her voice. "It’s as good as asking for a situation where you are obliged to sacrifice yourself."

"Or asking that I be capable of meeting such challenges," Illukar replied, at his mildest. The clear gaze was serene once again. "My mother believed strongly in tradition, and it is the practice of the Cor-Ibis line to name a male heir Illukar if he is born in the month of the original bearer’s death."

"It’s the practice of the Cor-Ibis line to not marry Farak-lar," Medair said.

"True. It is fortunate that I am not entirely traditional." The glow in his eyes would reassure any doubting bride, and he touched her cheek tenderly. "Don’t fear for me, Medair. The name has been linked to sacrifice merely because of the character of those who have borne it. It is not a death sentence."

"If Tarsus releases the Blight, is there anyone else with the strength to dispell it?"

"Perhaps not. But that is not quite the issue at hand. If the Blight is released, I will not go forth to combat it as my forebear did. I do not know how."

"What?" A giddy feeling fluttered through Medair’s chest, something more complicated than surprise.

"There are no records of just what it is Illukar Kohl las Saral-Ibis did to rid Sar-Ibis of the Blight. I have long presumed the process was somehow related to the summoning of wild magic, because it is otherwise an oversight of ludicrous proportions. Very likely it was recorded, and then purged in later centuries during one of the drives to destroy all records of the summoning of wild magic. It may have been accidental. Or a deliberate decision, in those first stark days after Sar-Ibis' destruction, not to document even the cure, in case it became the cause. Whatever the truth, it leaves us without a defence now."

"I shouldn’t be glad, should I?" Medair said, unsteadily.

"No." He smiled, and touched her face. "Do you think me so anxious to leave you?"

"I think it likely you share the character of other Illukars."

"Perhaps. There will be little choice but to try and stop it, if the Blight is released." He looked at her thoughtfully. "But I am forgetting you, Medair. Was the method of destroying the Blight ever discussed in your presence?"

Medair had been distracted by a possibility she could not follow, and had to concentrate, to think back to everything which had been said to her of the Blight. It seemed a very distant thing now, so less immediate than it had been when she came down off Bariback Mountain. Part of a former life.

"I don’t recall the Blight’s bane ever being described," she told him. "Our mages were more concerned with the declaration of war, and did not pursue the matter with our instructor beyond establishing with certainty that it was gone, that it would not threaten Farakkan. The one assigned to teach us the Ibisian language, Kerikath las Dona, said of their attempts to stop it that spells of containment and cancellation had no effect on it, that it was impossible to neutralise. She said that the – that the Kierash went to a mountain called Desana and…drew all the power to himself? A great conjuration, she called it. She did not mention summoning wild magic, did not say what he did with the power to get rid of it. Just spoke of the pyre of his destruction."

A murmur of sound cut short Illukar’s response. Medair was close enough to hear the cadences of a wend-whisper, but could not make out the words. The relief in his smile told her enough, and he caught up her hand.

"They have found Tarsus," he said. "Asleep on an island quite five miles from the border. They should be taking him in hand even now."

Medair did not even have time to smile in response. Hard on the heels of Illukar’s words came the bloom of power, the sudden and gigantic flare which she had felt only once before. The inevitability she had been dreading. Wild magic.