Voice of the Lost : Medair Part 2 (13 page)

"Have they found any sign of Vorclase?"

"No."  Cor-Ibis put the comb down on a desk, expressionless.  Her own face felt stiff and unhappy and she knew she could still walk out, but if she did she should never come back.

"Falcon Hill is a warren," he went on, smoothly enough.  "And Estarion has traps and trips laced throughout.  It may take days to find him."

"Do you trust Queen Sendel?"  Her voice quavered, making her feel stupidly young.  She wanted to touch him and was suddenly, unreasonably, afraid of rebuff.

"I took care in forming the geas."  Cor-Ibis raised an equivocal hand.  "Her previous incarnation was less forthright, but equally pragmatic.  Herald N'Taive tells me this version has long been at odds with her brother, yet unwilling to act directly against him.  I trust Sendel's grasp of the situation, at least.  Turning on us would only make matters worse for Decia.  But there are others here who will see less clearly.  The Kierash is a natural target."  He moved to one side, offering her the chair from the desk.  It was easier to sit than to continue to shift from foot to foot, trying to hide her nervousness.  Cor-Ibis sat on the bed.  "And you are in danger, of course," he said.  "If word of your identity spreads."

"I know.  And Avahn–" she began, and stopped, for it was no better a topic.  She could not quite contemplate talking about Avahn's possible demise.  Like too many people, she had not had a chance to say goodbye to him.

"I examined him before I came here," Cor-Ibis told her, his attention never wavering from her face.  "What little I could do, I have done.  He seems to be breathing easier."

Medair nodded, then looked down at his hands, resting lightly on his knees.  There was an awkward pause.

"Gates are beyond the Kierash's casting rank," he said, again filling the breach.  "But he is exceptional, and I believe there is a good chance we will succeed tomorrow morning.  If not, I have sent a wend-whisper to the Kier, suggesting a gate be opened from Athere."

It was stupid to sit here making conversation.  She cast about for some way to ease into talking about overcoming the past.  And found herself asking, with appalling bluntness, "Why did your wife hate you?"

Shocked at her own words, she jerked her eyes up to meet his, and saw sudden distance.  He took a moment before he replied.

"It is something you need to know," he said, and there was only the barest hint of reluctance in his voice.  He shook his head when she started to stammer a denial.  "Amaret.  My mother recommended her to me.  A
sha-leon
marriage, a business contract.  They are still common.  Amaret was an accomplished adept and, most important to my family, her blood was pure."  He glanced at Medair.  "My mother chose my father on the same basis.  There are arguments that it keeps the blood more powerful, but it is essentially founded on a belief in Ibisian superiority, and entrenched tradition.  At twenty–"  He shrugged minutely.  "I had never thought of love and saw no reason not to marry this particular woman."

"Did she feel the same way?" Medair asked.  Her throat was tight.  This was not how she had wanted to do this.

"Before the marriage, she gave no sign of wishing anything else.  She was little interested in me, and apparently willing to treat the arrangement like the contract it was.  In some
sha-leon
marriages, the couple comes together only for the making of children and I cannot say we did more than that.  It was an alliance of convenience.

"Early on, I suspected she was unhappy, but it was not until she lost the second child that I realised it was more than dissatisfaction."  He met her eyes again, his own frank.  "I will not pretend I was not at fault.  I was caught up in my studies, cared for little else, and was quite simply not interested in her.  I was polite to her when I should at least have tried to make her my friend.  After the second child's loss, I tried to reach out, but she made it clear she considered it an intrusion.  I thought she was mourning the miscarriages, as only natural, and I let her be."  He paused, and she saw a muscle jump in his cheek.  That mild voice was even softer than usual.  "I did not know how truly she hated me until after my mother's death."

"When she told you she was carrying someone else's child."  How must he have felt?

Cor-Ibis shook his head.  His gaze was on his hands, lashes shading grey eyes which were strangely blank.  "I knew of her affairs, suspected that the third child was not mine.  No.  That was when she told me she had not miscarried.  That she had aborted them."

Medair could only stare at his lowered head.  Then, when she could bring herself to speak at all, the only thing she could say was: "
Why
?"

"Because they were mine."  The delicate mouth twisted and he looked abruptly tired, like someone who had risen with the dawn in enemy territory and not had a moment to stop since.  "She had a secret, Amaret.  Her family had some tiny strain of Farak-lar blood, and to them the keeping of that secret was the most important thing in existence.  'They bleached their brows', as a courtier would say.  Then my mother approached them with a
sha-leon
proposal, with the Cor-Ibis fortune and title at her back.

"Amaret loathed me because she lived in eternal fear of being discovered by me.  The babes were part of me, and would almost certainly reveal her.  She told me that she had killed her own children as if it were the proudest thing she had ever done, and wept while she told me because killing them had wounded her so deeply she no longer cared who knew her blood."

He stopped, breathing deeply.  Swallowed.  His head was bowed to shield a naked hurt kept to himself for too many years.  When he spoke again, his voice was uneven.  "If she had only asked me, I could have told her how little her blood mattered to me.  That it was a tradition I have never embraced.  But she did not, and I looked to her only often enough to fulfil my role, not to see how frightened she was.  It is the greatest wrong I have ever committed.

"After that, I could not contemplate another contract.  There were heirs in other branches of the family, though if I had anticipated the pressures which would be brought to bear on some of my younger cousins, I might have arranged matters differently."

His voice trailed away and he sat watching his hands.  She could feel his anguish and lashed herself for making him relive such a horrible discovery.  She did not know whether to hate Amaret or pity her.

"Illukar," she said, barely managing to get the whole word out.  He looked up quickly, the movement wholly disjointed.  He had laid himself bare, scoured his reserve because he loved her and she had asked.  It was impossible not to reach out in return.  "I will never find this easy," she said, and her throat was full of tears.  "But I want to try.  I want to stay, to–"

She kissed him so he would know how much she meant it.  Passionately, frantically, as if she could wipe out the memory of Amaret with her touch.

oOo

The room was lost in shadows, the candles reduced to guttering flames which danced countless reflections through a spider web drift of hair.  Medair let strands slip through her fingers, and shifted so she could better see Illukar's back, and the blue line which ran down his spine.  She had discovered how very sensitive he was there, and traced the line now, down to the small of his back, watching his reaction.  He turned to catch her hands.

"We will not sleep at all, if you follow that path," he murmured.  She answered this by kissing him until his heart was beating faster, but she knew that tomorrow would be inordinately wearying, so she eventually subsided.  It should feel wrong to be so happy, but she did not.

"I am content to keep Avahn as my heir," he said abruptly, and she guessed that, like her, his head was too full of thoughts of the future to let him sleep.  After hearing the truth of Amaret's miscarriages, the question of children had become impossibly daunting.  The association alone would be soul-destroying, and she desperately wanted to protect him from hurt.

"I would like settle into this role before thinking about taking on another," she said, touching his arm.  His skin was velvet-soft.

"It is not an issue."  He could not quite manage a reassuring tone.  Moving back, Medair looked into his eyes, at the ghost destroying the contentment of a moment before.  This was a part of
his
past which would not rest quietly while she put off thoughts of tomorrow.  They couldn't hope to just push it to the back of their minds.

"It is an issue," she told him, her voice shaking.  "I'm probably the worst woman in the world for you to love.  Because I can't pretend bearing an Ibisian child will not be complicated for me."  She shook her head.  "But your child, Illukar.  I do want that.  I am not ready for it, but I want it.  Fiercely.  I want to spend all my life with you and I want to have children by you."  She swallowed any hint of tears, refusing to be so selfish as to cry on him again.  "I never find my path a clear one, but I know that I don't want this decision to be made for us by Amaret."

"Then it will not be."  His voice was breathy, and he touched her face delicately.  A stark acknowledgment that children would never be a non-issue with him, and he was overwhelmingly glad that she did not reject the idea.  "When this hunt is over, we will talk of what comes next," he went on.  "Children are something we need not embark upon for many years, but I would like to marry you soon, Medair."

"When this is over," she agreed, almost without quaver.  Naked in his arms, marriage seemed only a small step further, and she was light-headed in the aftermath of finally giving up chasing her own tail about what was the right path.

"I am still sending you to Athere tomorrow," he added.

"I have a feeling there might be almost as many people in Athere inclined to kill me as there are in Gyrfalcon Castle.  Falcon Black."  She touched his face, revelling in her freedom to do so, and the pleasure such a tiny act gave them both.  "The purists on top of everything else.  At least I think I know, now, why Keris las Theomain tried to kill me."

"Because of this."  His eyes were grave.

"Because of you.  When you sent her to make sure I didn't leave Athere."

He closed his eyes.  "I was not unaware that Jedda had ambitions centred on me.  If she hid purist sentiment along with that, then it may well be that her ambitions were mixed with the whispers that the Cor-Ibis line should rule because the Saral-Ibis line has been corrupted with Farak-lar heat.  Foolishness."

"I see we will make possibly the most unpopular marriage of the century," she said lightly, and then had to grip his hand hard, because all her doubts hadn't gone away just because she was trying not to listen to them.

"Medair–" he began, but she shook her head.  It wasn't the moment to air her fears.

"I wonder if and how the purist cause has been changed by the Conflagration," she said.  "With the cold blood less...liable to dilution, they might not care so much."

"Difficult to say.  Those within the shield wall of Athere have not been changed."  He paused.  "I do not...I do not know what, in this remade world, became of Amaret.  With the reason for her self-destruction altered, did our marriage run a different course?  I am not equal to asking Ileaha that."

The wound left by Amaret cut to his core.  And Medair doubted she could find any response which did not sound wrong, so she simply pressed closer to him, thankful that she had spoken to Ileaha long enough to be confident that Illukar would not find himself still married.  Any remnant of contentment lost, they held each other as if locked arms could keep back all threat of hurt.

Gradually the rigidity of Illukar's muscles eased, until Medair felt he was ready to move through painful territory.  "I don't know if I will ever truly grow used to the world being remade," she said.  "Let alone the possibility of further changes.  I suppose it's unlikely Ileaha's will be the only transformation."

"No."  Control regained, Illukar shifted back, and held up a hand, frowning at it.  "I have been casting spells which I do not have set, without any preparation, without any incantation at all.  A change more subtle than Ileaha's, but quite as profound."

World-shaking.  Casting time was an adept's greatest weakness.  Without the need to prepare in advance, an adept's effectiveness would be ten-fold.  They looked at each other and didn't need to name the implications.  Nor was Medair slow to wonder if she, too, had been changed and simply didn't know it.

"I don't yet control it consciously," Illukar went on.  "Merely find myself casting some of the simplest spells as if I have never needed to prepare them.  Something for me to experiment with, when time permits."

"When we get home," Medair whispered, preferring to focus on another aspect of their shared future.  She had meant to move them to a less difficult topic, and she was surprised to see Illukar's eyes darken.

"I don't even know if Finrathlar exists," he said.  "Or what form it takes in this new Farakkan."  He gathered her closer.  "You had to do that, didn't you?  Go home, to find out if it was still there and what it looked like?"

"Yes."  She struggled against the inevitable plunge of spirit that memory conjured, but succeeded only in worrying herself further.  They were not even close to home territory, problems with purists, or the frightening prospect of Medair an Rynstar going so far as to marry an Ibisian.  She remembered her strange feeling of certainty regarding Vorclase, and it obligingly revisited her.  Vorclase was still in Falcon Black and they would see him yet. 

Medair slid out of Illukar's arms, but only so she could cross to lock the door.  She blew out the last surviving candles before returning to the bed.  He still glowed.  If the effect remained, it would never be truly dark when he was there.

"We will find out together," she said, feeling wrong and pleased and sad all at the same time.  Out of so many contradictory emotions, all she could do was choose the best one.

CHAPTER TEN

A sharp
tink
startled her awake.  The room was full of sunlight and the scent of wood polish.  Illukar, warm at her side, lifted himself to one elbow.  He was looking at the door, frowning, then he tensed as a key turned in the lock.  Their own key, falling to the floor, must have been what woke her.  Medair sat up, trying to disentangle herself from Illukar's twining hair.  She had no chance to do more before the door opened and Vorclase walked in.