Andrea Höst - The Silence of Medair

Having in moments gained considerable height and a mass of white hair, the boy – man – did as she had been warning and overbalanced them both. Medair impacted first, discovering wet stony ground. The man – the Ibisian – landed on top of her with a complete lack of grace, bruising those portions of her anatomy which had so far been neglected. Gasping for breath, she blinked through tearing eyes as a pale face wobbled before hers.

"Clumsy," said a wry, soft voice.

She hit him, landing a creditable right direct to his jaw. His head snapped back, then he collapsed again. On top of her, of course. Sobbing more than gasping now, Medair rolled him off her and struggled to sit up. She stared first at him, next down the road, then put her hands over her face and indulged in a brief but violent storm of tears.

It wasn’t so much that the tiresome boy who had geased her had been a shape-changed Ibisian, or that he had fallen on her, or that they were both mud-coated in a puddle, or that her back appeared to be one hundred bruises, loosely joined together. Nor was it the sight of her mean-tempered steed galloping gleefully riderless down the road. Rather, it was that soft voice and the particular shape of this Ibisian’s face. For a brief, anguished moment she had seen and heard Kier Ieskar and been caught between believing that she had gone mad and trying to comprehend how he, too, was living five hundred years after his death.

She’d first seen the Kier at the heart of the massive Ibisian encampment, in an elaborate tent; a palace of cloth. Its throne room had been large enough to hold two or even three dozen willowy Ibisians. They shimmered in silk of colourful if muted hues, and all seemed to have acres of straight white hair flowing down their backs. She had followed First Herald Kedy into the room, had been distracted by the height of the Ibisian nobles, then transfixed by the one who sat at their centre. Ieskar Cael las Saral-Ibis.

White on black, a striking image after the colourful sea of the court. Ebony birds with long necks and longer curved beaks had framed the head of the Kier, and he had sat as statue-still as those carvings. His slender hands had been curled over the end of the armrests of his throne, his white robe was arranged precisely about his feet, and that moonlight hair had been divided neatly into twin falls past his shoulders. There had been only three points of colour anywhere about the man: a single fiery stone hanging from his left ear, silver in his right, and pale blue eyes which cut straight through Medair’s composure and left her awkwardly trailing in Kedy’s wake instead of striding proudly forward on behalf of her Emperor.

They had made their bows and the Kier’s response had been to lift one long finger a tiny fraction from the black wood of the throne: a minutely eloquent signal for Kedy to begin. If Medair’s mentor had felt at all unnerved, he had given no hint of his discomfiture. That professional poise had been something Medair longed to own, continually attempted to emulate, but in that throne room of cloth she had felt it forever out of her reach.

Kier Ieskar had been much younger than Medair had expected, at least a year or two her junior, barely out of his teens. His hair had been waist-length, and cut to neatly frame a slightly pointed face. A small nose and precisely formed lips afforded him a hint of prettiness which was almost entirely lost beneath his eyes, ice-blue and penetrating. He had not moved at all as Kedy addressed him. He had listened in silence to the faithfully repeated message, and sent them away without a word.

Medair didn’t know precisely what the Ibisian court discussed after hearing the Emperor’s offer. She and Kedy were given an introductory language lesson, a meal, and had no intimation of how wrong things were going to go when they were brought back to the throne room.

Nothing had altered. The members of the court remained on either side of the entrance, allowing the Imperial Heralds unimpeded passage to the throne. If even Kier Ieskar’s eyelids had changed position since they’d been dismissed, she’d not been able to tell it as they bowed before him. She had seen his chest move slightly, and taken a breath of her own in response. It felt very much as if it were an event for him to inhale.

"I have considered your Emperor’s words," Kier Ieskar had said, speaking Parlance without the slightest trace of an accent. "It is an offer of great generosity, and does him honour. I will not do my people the disservice of accepting it. If there is a home for the Ibis-lar in this land, it is one which we must take by force of arms, not as a gift."

The Kier had a soft, very measured voice which effortlessly commanded attention. His announcement had been delivered with such tranquillity that it had taken Medair a moment before she understood the import of his words.

"In five days," Kier Ieskar had continued, as the world dropped out from beneath Medair, "we will march south. Those who do not stand against us will be spared. That is the answer I must give, in return for Grevain Corminevar’s noble offer."

The man lying tangled in a blanket in the mud, his shirt shredded and his trousers split, was not Ieskar Cael las Saral-Ibis. In other circumstances, she would not have mistaken them, though there was resemblance enough to think them brothers. The voice had been the thing, that soft voice so like the long-dead Kier’s. Ieskar had not often been wry – never while he sat upon the Ibis Throne – but sometimes, over the marrat games he had required her to attend, his voice would take on just the tone, the very inflection, this man had used. It was the most expression Medair had ever seen the immensely controlled Ibisian ruler allow himself.

Five centuries later, having stopped weeping soon after she started, Medair sat on wet, stony ground, knees held to her chest and studied the unconscious White Snake and the cloudless sky and the grass studded with flowers on the verge. The drifting seed of a dandelion caught her attention and she watched that until it had floated beyond sight. Then she listened to the lowing of cows, and birds calling beyond the field beside the road. Distantly, something clanked and she had the impression of voices. They must be near the next village. The horse, typically, had run back toward the mountain.

Rising to her feet, Medair began to walk: away from the forest and the horse and the White Snake. The day was beautiful, the sky washed clean by the storm, the air filled with birdsong. Bucolic bliss. Almost two hundred feet down the road, just after Medair turned a corner to discover a glimpse of buildings, the ever-increasing tightness in her chest became too much and she dropped to her knees, gasping. Spots fuzzed her vision and she wondered if she could be drowning in nothing but twisting coils of magic. She closed her eyes, trying to overcome the pain with hatred. White Snakes. The pale invaders. She would have no truck with them, would not aid one of their kind. Cold, arrogant, unforgiving Ibisian destroyers.

A pathetic and futile gesture. The geas was just as effective, whatever shape the caster wore. At least this explained the twelve year-old adept, which Medair had thought abominably precocious. Eventually, weary and calmer, she stood and wiped her hands on mud-smeared trousers. Sucking a bleeding knuckle, she walked back to where she had left the White Snake.

He looked worse than she felt, not even counting the rapidly darkening violet bruise she’d given his jaw. If the geas had punished her for that blow, she had been so busy hurting everywhere that she hadn’t noticed. The circles beneath his eyes were equally striking, and he looked drawn and wasted. An unravelling transmogrification would have drawn on his reserves whether he willed it or not. And his reserves had to have been as good as empty. If she could overcome the geas, leave him in a ditch by the side of the road, he would probably die.