Voice of the Lost

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Mist began to lift off the water as the sky paled toward dawn. Medair watched the world expand in the growing light while contracting behind walls of white tendrils. During the long stretch between midnight and dawn, her grief had lost that first torn metal edge, had turned to a numb loss which seemed to clamp her in place. This amorphous white world was well-suited to her apathetic state.

A distant peeping teased at the edge of her hearing as the mist thickened. It was a call she didn’t recognise, a chirping sound which seemed to be moving toward her from the left. Occasionally she could make out an accompanying splash, but the source didn’t break into view until it was almost in front of her. A flat boat poled by a diminutive figure was drifting through the band of shallow, reed-studded water near the bank.

It was one of the Alshem: a slight, delicate man with a crest of pale hair, his attention focused on dark shapes in the water around the boat. Medair blinked slowly, realising these were otters. They called to each other; disappearing under the black water, returning to the boat, then launching themselves out again. Fine ropes were attached to miniature harnesses about their chests, and a heavy burden of silver dangled from their mouths as they clambered over the low wooden sides. Fish.

Indifferent to sacrifice and near-disaster, the Alshem was collecting the fish brought to the boat, filling his baskets with them. The catch seemed plentiful, and Medair supposed that the fish which fled from the Blight had not moved out into the great, empty stretch of water which it had left behind.

Resenting this illustration of life going on without Illukar, Medair turned her face away and saw…Illukar.

He had lost shoes and demi-robe from his orderly ensemble, was clad only in near-transparent white shirt and breeches as he walked slowly along the bank toward her. His head was bowed, and his hair streamed over his shoulders and down his back, slick with water. He glowed, brighter than ever.

Each step he took had that precise care she recalled from his recuperation from spell-shock, and everything about him looked drained and worn. Even the scratch on his cheek was blanched and puckered. How long had he been in the water?

Medair didn’t so much jump up as was jerked to her feet by disbelief. And then she ran, hurled herself on him, dizzily landing kisses on his chin and cheek before wrapping her arms tightly about his waist. He flinched, which gave her a moment of horror until she remembered the deep bruises on his back and hastily readjusted her hold. His response was slow, as if weary determination had frozen him beyond anything other than walking, but then his arms wrapped around her as tightly as she could want.

"How?" she asked, imprinting her cheek with the buttons of his shirt. She could not believe the world had turned upside down so completely. "How?"

Illukar stood very still, one hand cupping the nape of her neck, the other at her waist, fingers digging into her ribs. "Medair…" he said softly, breath stirring strands of hair on the crown of her head. The tone was all wrong. Not relieved or joyous or even simply weary, but full of loss and regret. Medair pulled away enough to look up at his face, and then her throat turned to treacle and ice and her stomach fell into cavernous dismay. Because his eyes were blue.

Wrenching backwards, Medair stumbled on a tussock of grass and fell inelegantly to the ground. Illukar’s eyes shifted from blue to grey, then to a darker blue-grey as he stood looking at her, sprawled at his feet. Then he sighed and sat down on the rock which had been her seat during her interminable night. His eyes shifted back to grey, then blue again.

"Your eyes keep changing colour," Medair told him, clutching at the ground as it spun beneath her.

Obligingly his eyes shifted to blue-grey as he held out his hands, palm down, studying them. Slender, tapering fingers and neatly trimmed nails. The right hand was a different shape from the left: narrower, and a touch longer. And there was a thin scar across the back of the fingers.

"H-how?" Medair said again, as her insides continued to tumble into some bottomless well. She had fallen into a pit of disbelief and there was no escaping it.

His eyes were grey now. Illukar’s eyes, full of that dreadful, hateful regret. "Kier Ieskar tried to die in my place," he said, voice even softer than usual. "By taking flesh through me, shielding me and making himself the focus of what I was casting. But the spell was by far too powerful for such subtleties." His eyes flicked to blue-grey as he lifted his hands, then grey as he added: "This is the result."

This. His eyes. That hand. The face, almost the same, but with a change to his mouth which made it far more Ieskar’s than Illukar’s. And perhaps there was a shade of difference in the line of his jaw. She couldn’t decide whether he was taller. It really didn’t matter.

Trying to collect herself, Medair shifted to a sitting position, not ready to risk her feet. "You are both – this is both of you?" she asked, hardly able to say it but needing to know precisely what she was dealing with. A few moments ago, she would have done anything to have him back. But Ieskar? "What – how, exactly, both?"

His eyes had been blue again, watching her, but shifted to grey as he spoke. "I doubt there is a way to wholly articulate it. During the casting, I was aware of…Ieskar, but only as a separate presence. I had little concentration to spare." He glanced at the water behind her, the empty stretch beyond the reeds eloquent commentary on the magnitude of the force he had quenched. "At one point I am certain we were physically two, for though it was my reserves being drained, I was no longer the focus. But the spell – the entire purpose of the spell is to concentrate the power to one point and at the zenith–" Illukar turned, as if trying to look at someone beside him. "The focus tried to shift back to me, then it split and it seemed all would end in failure. Then–"

He shook his head, eyes blue, blue-grey, grey. "Then I was in water and there was no power at all. My reserves were empty and I was–" He paused, evidently searching for words, and she again watched the colours cycle. "It is as if – when a healer examines you after an illness, and taps your knee to see your response. Your leg moves, though you did not will it, yet it is still your leg, and it was part of you which moved it." He lifted his right hand and studied it thoughtfully, eyes still grey. "In the first few moments I came close to drowning, because I would move, try to stop myself from moving, try to move. We both very quickly had to learn how to be a passenger, to…take turns, so to speak."

He turned his hand over, equivocally, then looked back at Medair. She tried to summon some sort of meaningful response, but first had to take a deep breath and let it out. It seemed important not to let her voice wobble.

"You…he is trapped in you? Can he be…freed?"

"I am as much trapped in him as he is in me," Illukar replied, flicking a glance back at his hands. "At times, I can hear his thoughts. Sometimes there is nothing to distinguish between what is Ieskar and what is Illukar." His eyes shifted to blue and it was Ieskar who met her gaze directly and, not trying to soften the blow, said: "There is no going back."

How do you reconcile two things which shouldn’t exist together? She truly did hate Ieskar. Impossible for her not to. He had invaded Palladium, he had been the aggressor, the one in the wrong and it was no lie or prevarication when she had said she despised him for it. That was true.

The problem, the reason she had run, had been because he was not hateful enough. His war had, by his terms, been necessary, and he had prosecuted it according to the rules of his people. An enemy should be wrong, should be detestable and greedy and loathsome, but Ieskar, though alien, had waged his war honourably, had minimized deaths, had acted out of what even she had to admit was a belief that it was necessary for the Ibis-lar. And he had held his brother’s child in his arms and shown that he could weep.

She had been attracted all along, in a way. But watching him comfort Adestan had made Medair all too aware of her desire: to touch the untouchable, to comfort him in turn. She had glimpsed something in herself, and she had hated her response to him so much that her reaction had been to seek out the Horn of Farak in the hopes of destroying his entire race.

Five hundred years could not help but alter things, but it did not change the fact of Ieskar’s invasion. He had made that choice. The war was over, and he had shown them how to stop the Blight, and saved Illukar, but that did not make him any less Ieskar. The White Snake she hated most. The one she could never forgive.

They were just sitting there now, silent. Illukar, only a few feet away, was as distant as the sun, because he was Ieskar. She couldn’t remove one from the other, any more than she could separate true Palladians from Ibisian invaders. Hating Ieskar would mean turning her back on Illukar, because would not be possible for her to ignore the fact that he was simply Ieskar cleaned up, because he now was Ieskar. Every word, every touch she shared with Illukar, she would be sharing with Ieskar, and she hated him, so she could not stay with Illukar. It was impossible to have one without the other.

She had run from her feelings for Ieskar, she had run from the disaster of her belated return, and the schemes of the Decians to include her in war. Could she run from Illukar?

But how to do anything else?

Could she do what Islantar was trying to do with those who tore at Palladium from within? What Ileaha had said she would do with Avahn? Could she forgive Ieskar for being on the wrong side? Can anyone just choose to forgive?

For all she had said to Tarsus, Medair did not see how she could simply stop hating. She had not known if Ileaha would succeed in trying to forgive Avahn for something as innocent as not seeing what was under his nose. She was not certain it was in any way possible for her to make that angry hating part of herself simply close the book on the invasion. The part of herself that said Ieskar should pay for his crimes, no matter the cost.

"Medair." His eyes were grey, watching her face, but she could not read what they held. "I do not hold you to the understanding we had," Illukar said, carefully. "I know very well the consequences of this."

Making an indistinct gesture at himself, he rose to his feet, looking very much as if he was only just able to keep himself upright. "Islantar was to leave a small detachment on guard near the foothills."

He began to walk, summoning fragile poise with such effect that she was reminded of the time he had shown her around Pelamath. Even wet, exhausted and bedraggled, Illukar could be beautiful. And his shield of Ibisian courtesy could not begin to hide the effort it cost him to walk away.

He was trying to make it easy for her. Such unbearable grace. She had to blink hard to stop tears when she saw through the web of his unbound hair and his thin, wet shirt the mottled pattern of the bruises he’d earned during their arrival at Finrathlar. It was like seeing straight through to the pain beneath that determinedly upright carriage.

"Wait," she said, catching up, not quite able to touch him. He paused and she faced him, feeling like the world was not really there as she said through a strangling throat: "I’m not willing to simply give up."

His face was a mask as his eyes flickered from blue-grey to grey, to icy blue. It was Ieskar who lifted his hand, his right hand with that thin scratch across the back of the fingers, until it brushed her stomach. Medair took a deep, fluttery breath as he settled his hand against her ribs, below her left breast. Her heart was racing as if she had run all the way to Athere, and she had to struggle to hold that icy gaze. And he just stood there while her body betrayed her feelings.

"You have hated me for years," he said, in the most obviously controlled voice she’d ever heard from him.

She felt tears sting, because it was true. Her own argument. She refused to give in to it, to the part of her which could not believe what she was doing. "I hated you for a reason that no longer exists."

His only reaction was the tiniest drop of his eyelids. "I will always be the one who ordered Palladium’s invasion."

"And the one who made it possible to save Farakkan. And Illukar. Yes, I hated you. And wanted – wanted more of you. Those two things couldn’t exist together, so I gave into one and ran from the other. I thought I would kill every single Ibisian in Farakkan, given the chance."

She felt her face heat and took a deep breath. "I don’t have the right reasons to hate you, any more. Habit is not enough."

The hand on her ribs shifted, sending shivers all through her chest and stomach. She straightened, an involuntary reaction not entirely negative, and his hand dropped. The blue eyes flickered to grey, then blue again, but not a muscle shifted. Ieskar gave so little away.

"Medair." He said the name with the conscious awareness that she’d never given it to him to use. He even took a breath before going on, a near-hesitation she’d never seen before. "You cannot even bear my touch. How can you think to marry me? Hold me each night in your arms? Bear my children? Can you truly tell me, you with your heart leaping over itself in fright, that you can be my lover? My friend and helpmeet, my comfort and passion? Because I would not accept less."

His eyes were frightening and she realised it was because he held them so fully and absolutely on her, never wavering. She had every scrap of his attention.

"I’m telling you that I want to try," she said, in the faintest of voices, and his eyes flicked suddenly to grey. Illukar, frowning, took both her hands and led her to a pair of rocks. He was fighting exhaustion to have this conversation, and as they sat down it showed as clear as morning.

Before letting go of her hands, he squeezed them tightly, then asked: "Are you saying this for my sake?"

Her throat tightened, but she thrust back the wholly inappropriate sense of insult. There was still a little of the proud herald in her it seemed. "I have never spoken more truth in my life," she said, steadily. "I mightn’t be able to simply choose to forgive, but I can work at it. And I am going to. For you, yes, but also because–" She looked down, then back at him and watched as they shifted back to blue. "For my sake, don’t you see? I have loved you for as long as I’ve hated you, Ieskar. I wanted you and I could not stop, though I tried. Now – it’s long past time for me to acknowledge that you did what was best for your people instead of mine. And let myself do what’s best for me. I don’t want to lose either of you."

He just looked at her, the statue Kier she knew so well, trying to stare into her mind as if for the first time he was uncertain what he would find there. His eyes changed back to Illukar’s grey, but he did not speak.

"What do you think we should do, Illukar?" she asked.

Those grey eyes lit with the elusive amusement she found so special. "Medair, there is no force in this world which could urge me to argue you out of sharing my bed. If you truly feel yourself capable of it, I think we should go home."

The smile she should have given him in response went all awry and she pressed the base of her palms into her eyes to try and stop them from stinging. "I very much want to hold you to the understanding we had."

But Illukar’s face had become Ieskar’s blue-eyed mask, shadowed and unyielding.

"You don’t believe me," she said. "Do you?"

He didn’t reply straight away, examining her expression in minute detail. "I believe you do not wish to lose my brother," he said finally.

Medair blinked. Did he really think she would lie? When she had already admitted that it had been his tears which had driven her away? Did he think she would be able touch him, if her hate was stronger than the love it had tried to kill? She stared at his statue-still face and realised what a very thin thread was holding that mask of composure in place. Even Ieskar’s self-control had its limits.

"And you told me I ran from things."

His face didn’t change but his chin lifted, just a little. That was something she’d seen Illukar do, but it was Ieskar who had reacted. It made her feel strange, to see Ieskar react to anything at all, and an immense rush of feeling forced her to snatch at breath. She wanted to do that again, to crack the mask. She wanted to touch.

"I’m not lying," she told him, in a voice which sounded shocked to be genuine. She was trying to imagine Ieskar smiling at her. The very idea made her tremble.

Ieskar just sat there, expression once again completely blank. "Then how?" he asked, at last. "How did you come to love me, Medair an Rynstar? For I saw very well that you hated."

Medair tried to channel all that morass of emotion into speech, to make him understand the feelings which had endured despite her hate, to become the kind of wordsmith Telsen had been. And said, "I don’t know." The words fell out and a gasping kind of laugh followed. She shook her head, cheeks hot, and pressed on. "It was an unpleasant shock, when I understood. Hate was a great deal easier, and for a long time I called everything I felt hate, even when it wasn’t."

He tilted his head just a fraction to one side. She wasn’t sure if he did it deliberately, and decided it meant he was listening. Illukar’s grey eyes flashed at her, and she struggled on, face growing ever warmer.

"You are beautiful, Ieskar," she said, with stilted honesty. "And you looked straight through me. And you were so alone." She closed her eyes, dismayed at how wrong that sounded. "I hated the rules which bound you. Could not understand how you stood them. I used to watch your hands turning the marrat pieces. The grace – it, I – I would only let myself think of stopping you. Hating you. I would have used the Horn of Farak on the Ibis-lar. I would have killed you. And it would have–" She looked away, remembering the stinging of the Horn, and the way her chest had seemed to vibrate like a struck gong, when she knew that she had the power to kill the Ibis-lar. "I would have done it, and it would have destroyed me," she whispered.

After a long silence, she lifted her head and stared into those pale eyes, willing him to accept. He seemed to be gazing past her, and she looked over her shoulder at a huge, hazy lake fringed by the border of reeds and islets which had escaped the Blight. Tiny ripples reflected the pale sunlight creeping over the hills, and turned it all into a thing of vast and delicate beauty. It would sparkle at midday and burn at sunset, but in the dawn it earned its name: Shimmerlan.

Ieskar’s voice, cool and dreadfully even, inserted itself into this vista: "What would you have done, Medair, if I alone had returned?"

Horrid thought. She turned back to look wide-eyed at him, not even trying to hide her dismay. "I would have mourned Illukar," she said, roughly. "And–" She swallowed the next breath. "And I would have run from you. Frantically." She looked down at the ground, feeling utterly lost. There didn’t seem to be anything else to say.

Ieskar stood up. She supposed they would go to The Avenue now, to rest, recover, and shred themselves inside because of the bar which divided them. Slowly, she climbed to her feet, flayed by self-recrimination. She could have lied, she could have told him she was strong enough to overcome her hatred for him alone, to openly be Ieskar Cael las Saral-Ibis' lover. She could have at least tried. When she thought she knew an argument which would convince him, she would try. She refused to just give up.

Cool fingers touched her cheek. Teetering into astonishment, Medair looked into ice-blue eyes as Ieskar cupped her face between his hands. He still wore no expression as he traced the shape of her cheekbones with his thumbs, touching her because he could, because there was no longer a law to forbid it, and she had said she wanted him to. Because he had believed her, after all.

She knew she must look stricken, terrified, and lifted her hands to cover his, to declare her desire. Her coward self and her vengeful self could be suppressed. Not hating wasn’t one choice, but many, and she would make them all.

His eyes went grey, then blue again. Ever graceful, Ieskar bent his head to her, and paused. He shivered, and that ran through his hands. Then there was the warmth of his breath, and then the tiniest graze against her lower lip. The smallest touch, and it made her blood turn somersaults and ignite. She had not lied to say she wanted him.

Wondering if she could possibly put into words this sudden burning sun, Medair shifted so that they touched: knee, hip, chest. He was still sodden, shirt and skin cold and damp. Her chin grazed his, soft and smooth. So close, she could see in precise detail the way grey flecks rose to crowd out the blue of his eyes. Like a storm of snowflakes, or a hundred thousand butterflies. Then, just as quickly, that ice blue was at the fore, and his lids dropped, a screen of heavy white lashes.

When he moved again, she opened her mouth to meet his, remembering that he had become Kier very young, that the laws which bound him would have meant he would not even have been permitted to touch Princess Alaire, would have had to use magic–

She tasted his lips, and had to grip his wrists tightly because her legs did not seem quite able to keep up with her disbelief. But she did not stop, nor shift away, or even take breath as tentative exploration turned into deep, needy investigation. Hers to touch, hers to taste, to take.

Medair might possibly have stayed there forever, trying to weld her mouth to his, but a distant shout brought an unwelcome reminder of a world outside a white-skinned man with eyes of blue and grey. She quite literally sobbed as she broke from his lips, turned her head only just enough to see the riders.

Islantar, true to his word, had returned for her. At the head of a small unit of guards, he had reined in and was simply staring. Medair thought she had never seen the Kierash look so young.

After another moment, listening to distant peeping, a jingle of harness, and the rasp of breath in the throat of the man who held her, she came back to herself enough to realise that she had her arms wrapped around him again, oblivious to his sorely bruised back. It had to be agonising, but when she hastily adjusted her grip and looked up at his face, she saw no pain, but blue eyes opened wide, almost dazed. Full five hundred years of longing laid bare.

With Islantar and his entourage approaching, Medair was not quite equal to facing those eyes. Not when there was no time to respond. She hid her face in his throat and listened to the tumultuous pace of his heart instead.

There was no need to see blue shift to grey to know it was Illukar who relaxed the death grip about her waist, who squeezed her in quick, silent encouragement before easing back. She caught at his hands, looking up into eyes that were stunned and overjoyed, and even Telsen would not have been able to find a way to say what she was feeling.

"Are you going to tell them?" she asked instead. Her voice was hardly audible. Illukar and Ieskar. She was holding them both.

His eyes shifted to blue. "Islantar will recognise me," he said, quite hoarsely. Speech seemed a thing of long ago. "And I must tell–" He hesitated, shifting to blue-grey, then grey. "–my Kier. But the rest? What gain? I am still Illukar las Cor-Ibis and my memories are my own."

"And Ieskar’s."

He half-nodded, then the blue crowded to the surface. Ieskar blinked, and took a breath, then said, "Both," with a little more of his old self-command. "But this is Illukar’s life, and I will not appropriate it."

His eyes shifted to grey. "Sharing our life is something we talked of, returning to shore. We cannot suppress each other, would not choose to do so, but Ieskar has no wish for a public face." Illukar looked toward the horses, as a jingle of harness warned that the riders had overcome their initial shock and were hurrying toward them. "Just you," he added, quite seriously.

She touched the mouth which was Ieskar’s. It made her ache, suddenly, that she would never really be kissing Illukar’s lips again. Just as they would never really return to Finrathlar, but something almost the same. Would he think she loved him only as Ieskar’s shadow?

She lifted his left hand, the unscarred one, and pressed it to her cheek. "Can you do this?" she asked, anxiously. "You know, don’t you, that it’s not just– That you and I–?"

But Illukar smiled at her with unimpaired joy. "I know how you looked, when I woke beside you just yesterday," he said. "That had little to do with Ieskar."

"It is still–" She watched his eyes flicker. "I don’t want to give you less than everything."

"I infinitely prefer you loving him than hating too much to let us keep what we found together." With perfect formality, he pressed his lips to her forehead. Butterfly light, the kiss still carried a world of reassurance. For, despite everything, they were his lips. "I think we’re going to be happy, Medair."

She stared up at Illukar’s face, with those subtle shifts which also made it Ieskar’s. His eyes were grey as he glanced out over the bright expanse of the Shimmerlan, at the blank stretch of water which was almost the fate of all Farakkan. As he looked back down at her, they flicked to blue-grey, and briefly grey as he squeezed her hands. Then they turned to blue again.

Slowly, as if venturing into unfamiliar territory, he smiled.