Andrea Höst - Voice of the Lost

The idea of trying to manipulate the Kier was ludicrous. She looked at his luminescent figure out of the corner of her eye and decided that she would not attempt it. But she would ask.

"Did you tell me the full truth," she began, hesitantly, "when you said there was no way to stop Illukar’s death? Is there, perhaps, something I could do? Someone who is – who is not dead?"

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.

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.

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.

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?"