Voice of the Lost : Medair Part 2 (23 page)

Ieskar turned his head minutely.  "Did you tell me the full truth, when I asked why you hunted the Horn?"

Medair tried to say something.  Her mouth worked, but nothing came out.  What could she say?  Could she
not
answer, when Illukar's life was in the balance?  But Ieskar was not bargaining for a response.

"Yes, there is something which could be done," he said, evenly.  "As I am, I cannot cast.  I have no reservoir of power, no means of impacting the world about me.  But I could possess one of my blood, even one of limited strength, and be able to face the Blight.  Whom do you suggest?"

Medair immediately thought of Islantar, and was forced to shake her head.  "Illukar wouldn't accept that," she said, unhappily.

"No."  He didn't say any more, simply watched her.  Waiting for an answer to the question he had asked.

"It was true," she said, faint protest to a demand she wished she was only imagining.  "I decided to hunt for the Horn after your brother's child came to you."

Ieskar still didn't respond, just stood there, eyes cutting through her as if she held the gate device to her chest.  How she hated this man.  The man who, if he had not been leading an invasion – but even then all the laws which constrained a Kier–

Medair wrenched her mind away.  It wasn't so.  The similarities to Illukar meant nothing: they were different at core.  Ieskar had never smiled, not once; he lacked one of the things she treasured most about Illukar.

And, whispered a traitorous voice at the back of her mind, what reason did Ieskar have to smile?  His home had been destroyed.  He was leading an invasion against overwhelming odds.  He was dying.  And you hated him.

Taking a shaky, shallow breath, Medair stared into pale blue eyes.  "When you carried Kierash Adestan away...the light reflected from your cheek."

She thought she'd never seen a face more utterly closed.  "You left because I wept."  So soft she was unsure she'd heard the words correctly.

"I left because I wanted to stop you."

"I understand."

There was absolution in the words; exactly what Medair didn't want to hear.  She lashed out rather than accept.  "Why is there nothing you can do?  If he died in your place before, why can't you find a way to stop it from happening again?  Why are you here with me instead of saving him?!"  Medair couldn't look to see the expression on his face and lifted a hand, fingers splayed, to hide her tears.  She didn't know if she was crying because Illukar was going to die, or because Ieskar already had.

oOo

When she could finally bring herself to look up again, Ieskar was gone.  Perhaps she had managed to wish him away.  Or had he been released somehow by her admission that it had been the sight of his tears which sent her questing for the Horn?  Because it was the foundation of a harder truth: if he hadn't been on the wrong side of a war she would have more than admired him.

Now there was no war.  Ieskar was dead.  And Illukar was about to die.  Even on Bariback Mountain, she'd never felt this alone.

At that moment, the 'sound' of the Blight faltered.  Out in the dark, a white spark was struck to life, and Medair gasped: a pointless intake of breath which did little more than show how stupidly she'd clung to hope.  Illukar had begun his counterspell, and all Medair could do was dig her fingernails into the palms of her hands and watch.

What kind of life would she have had anyway, married to Illukar?  Hated by two extremes for allying herself with the Ibisians.  The Medarists would never forgive her for turning her back on the legend they had built up around her name.  The Ibisian purists would do all they could to ensure the Cor-Ibis line remained unsullied.  And all the people in between could not help but regard her as a curiosity, a political hot potato.  Marriage to Illukar would have inevitably meant that even those protecting her would have reason to kill her.

Medair smiled painfully at the point of light in the far distance.  She was not succeeding in convincing herself that she was better off.

The force of the Blight seemed to inhale, growing more intense and more distant at the same time.  Medair refused to close her eyes or look away as a white sun flared into being, bringing with it a peculiarly flat dawn.  He was too far away for her to see more than the light and the narrow band of reeds and muddy tussocks which separated her from an unbroken stretch of water reaching to the blaze on the horizon.

The pyre of his destruction.

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.

oOo

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.

oOo

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."

oOo

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.

oOo

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?