Andrea Höst - Voice of the Lost

"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.

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.

But there wasn’t any choice. Nor, she discovered as they descended the main stair, any time for prevarication. Islantar was among those crowded into the entry hall, and his eyes fixed on her with typical determination. He alone would be able to see the same solution to this lost knowledge. Silence wasn’t an option for her, if it ever had been.

She was given the briefest of respites, as Illukar swept straight out to the portico at the top of the doubled entrance stairs. The move was some measure of how he was feeling, for there was little to gain by going outside to look in the direction of the raging power. The Blight would not tower into the sky as the Conflagration had. Just dissolve Farakkan quietly into water.

Still, he looked, and she did as well, and saw Falcon Black silhouetted against the sunset above the hills. The half-wrecked castle was grim and ugly and striped incongruously in gold and pink. The Blight was somewhere beyond, an unseen presence shouting its advance.

"Can you call him back?"

When she didn’t respond immediately, Islantar went so far as to touch her arm. "I don’t know," she said, struggling against her reluctance to call upon the only person who might know how to stop the Blight. She recognised that her hesitation wasn’t only due to what it would mean for Illukar, but also because that person was Ieskar.

She didn’t want to see Ieskar again, didn’t want to try and summon him up, certainly didn’t want to ask for his help. In the face of the Blight, that seemed contemptible. But she wasn’t certain she knew how to summon him, for she hadn’t done so consciously, back in Athere. He had simply arrived, possessing Islantar – the nearest of his descendants – and told her things she did not want to hear. And offered to haunt her, if she would not touch his hand.

"Call him back?" Illukar repeated, turning to look from Medair to Islantar. "What do you mean?"

Islantar glanced at the mix of servants and others crowding the doorway, then led Illukar and Medair down to the foot of the twin stair, and the entrance of the lavender-filled garden between them. Only two people followed: Queen Sendel, who wore a most pugnacious expression, and Avahn, slow and unsteady, but awake and on his own feet. Illukar’s innate courtesy asserted itself, and Medair was given a few moments more while he saw his injured heir settled on one of the stone seats. It was sufficient time for her to notice, in the shadow of the stair, how that slight glow still clung to Illukar. And to see, like some daemon conjured by thought alone, another tall, luminous figure, wearing clothes so dark that only his face and the straight fall of his unbound hair distinguished him from shadow.