Voice of the Lost : Medair Part 2 (19 page)

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.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Medair was hurriedly dressing when the next wend-whisper came.  The distant roar of wild magic completely overwhelmed her ability to sense such a subtle piece of arcana, but she noticed Illukar wearing that intent, listening-to-nothing expression.

"They have Tarsus," he said, as she joined him at the door.  His eyes were full of worry and a kind of angry helplessness.  "He woke in shock, and dropped the glass onto stone.  It shattered.  A foolish accident."

"Did it–?"

"The island is no more.  It is the Blight."

He continued out of the room without another word, face frozen in an expressionless mask.  Medair realised he was suppressing what passed for fury in an habitually controlled man.  The worst had happened, for the stupidest of reasons, and he knew of no way to fix it.

Her own plummeting dismay was complicated something she should say, a thing she should suggest.  It seemed impossibly unfair that she was faced with another double-barbed choice – to lose Illukar quickly or slowly – and she was scrabbling frantically for ways to avoid it.  Surely they could first try other means of stopping the Blight, try those dispells and nullifications and containments in the hopes of hitting on some combination which all of Sar-Ibis' adepts had failed to find.  Or they could send someone else, send Sedesten, Islantar, anyone but Illukar.  Craven solutions.  If she were mage enough, she would go herself, because it seemed far easier to sacrifice herself for him, than the other way around.