Andrea Höst - Voice of the Lost

Illukar stood very still, one hand cupping the nape of her neck, the other at her waist, fingers digging into her ribs. "Medair…" he said softly, breath stirring strands of hair on the crown of her head. The tone was all wrong. Not relieved or joyous or even simply weary, but full of loss and regret. Medair pulled away enough to look up at his face, and then her throat turned to treacle and ice and her stomach fell into cavernous dismay. Because his eyes were blue.

Wrenching backwards, Medair stumbled on a tussock of grass and fell inelegantly to the ground. Illukar’s eyes shifted from blue to grey, then to a darker blue-grey as he stood looking at her, sprawled at his feet. Then he sighed and sat down on the rock which had been her seat during her interminable night. His eyes shifted back to grey, then blue again.

"Your eyes keep changing colour," Medair told him, clutching at the ground as it spun beneath her.

Obligingly his eyes shifted to blue-grey as he held out his hands, palm down, studying them. Slender, tapering fingers and neatly trimmed nails. The right hand was a different shape from the left: narrower, and a touch longer. And there was a thin scar across the back of the fingers.

"H-how?" Medair said again, as her insides continued to tumble into some bottomless well. She had fallen into a pit of disbelief and there was no escaping it.

His eyes were grey now. Illukar’s eyes, full of that dreadful, hateful regret. "Kier Ieskar tried to die in my place," he said, voice even softer than usual. "By taking flesh through me, shielding me and making himself the focus of what I was casting. But the spell was by far too powerful for such subtleties." His eyes flicked to blue-grey as he lifted his hands, then grey as he added: "This is the result."

This. His eyes. That hand. The face, almost the same, but with a change to his mouth which made it far more Ieskar’s than Illukar’s. And perhaps there was a shade of difference in the line of his jaw. She couldn’t decide whether he was taller. It really didn’t matter.

Trying to collect herself, Medair shifted to a sitting position, not ready to risk her feet. "You are both – this is both of you?" she asked, hardly able to say it but needing to know precisely what she was dealing with. A few moments ago, she would have done anything to have him back. But Ieskar? "What – how, exactly, both?"

His eyes had been blue again, watching her, but shifted to grey as he spoke. "I doubt there is a way to wholly articulate it. During the casting, I was aware of…Ieskar, but only as a separate presence. I had little concentration to spare." He glanced at the water behind her, the empty stretch beyond the reeds eloquent commentary on the magnitude of the force he had quenched. "At one point I am certain we were physically two, for though it was my reserves being drained, I was no longer the focus. But the spell – the entire purpose of the spell is to concentrate the power to one point and at the zenith–" Illukar turned, as if trying to look at someone beside him. "The focus tried to shift back to me, then it split and it seemed all would end in failure. Then–"

He shook his head, eyes blue, blue-grey, grey. "Then I was in water and there was no power at all. My reserves were empty and I was–" He paused, evidently searching for words, and she again watched the colours cycle. "It is as if – when a healer examines you after an illness, and taps your knee to see your response. Your leg moves, though you did not will it, yet it is still your leg, and it was part of you which moved it." He lifted his right hand and studied it thoughtfully, eyes still grey. "In the first few moments I came close to drowning, because I would move, try to stop myself from moving, try to move. We both very quickly had to learn how to be a passenger, to…take turns, so to speak."

He turned his hand over, equivocally, then looked back at Medair. She tried to summon some sort of meaningful response, but first had to take a deep breath and let it out. It seemed important not to let her voice wobble.

"You…he is trapped in you? Can he be…freed?"

"I am as much trapped in him as he is in me," Illukar replied, flicking a glance back at his hands. "At times, I can hear his thoughts. Sometimes there is nothing to distinguish between what is Ieskar and what is Illukar." His eyes shifted to blue and it was Ieskar who met her gaze directly and, not trying to soften the blow, said: "There is no going back."

How do you reconcile two things which shouldn’t exist together? She truly did hate Ieskar. Impossible for her not to. He had invaded Palladium, he had been the aggressor, the one in the wrong and it was no lie or prevarication when she had said she despised him for it. That was true.

The problem, the reason she had run, had been because he was not hateful enough . His war had, by his terms, been necessary, and he had prosecuted it according to the rules of his people. An enemy should be wrong, should be detestable and greedy and loathsome, but Ieskar, though alien, had waged his war honourably, had minimized deaths, had acted out of what even she had to admit was a belief that it was necessary for the Ibis-lar. And he had held his brother’s child in his arms and shown that he could weep.

She had been attracted all along, in a way. But watching him comfort Adestan had made Medair all too aware of her desire: to touch the untouchable, to comfort him in turn. She had glimpsed something in herself, and she had hated her response to him so much that her reaction had been to seek out the Horn of Farak in the hopes of destroying his entire race.

Five hundred years could not help but alter things, but it did not change the fact of Ieskar’s invasion. He had made that choice. The war was over, and he had shown them how to stop the Blight, and saved Illukar, but that did not make him any less Ieskar. The White Snake she hated most. The one she could never forgive.

They were just sitting there now, silent. Illukar, only a few feet away, was as distant as the sun, because he was Ieskar. She couldn’t remove one from the other, any more than she could separate true Palladians from Ibisian invaders. Hating Ieskar would mean turning her back on Illukar, because would not be possible for her to ignore the fact that he was simply Ieskar cleaned up , because he now was Ieskar. Every word, every touch she shared with Illukar, she would be sharing with Ieskar, and she hated him, so she could not stay with Illukar. It was impossible to have one without the other.

She had run from her feelings for Ieskar, she had run from the disaster of her belated return, and the schemes of the Decians to include her in war. Could she run from Illukar?

But how to do anything else?

Could she do what Islantar was trying to do with those who tore at Palladium from within? What Ileaha had said she would do with Avahn? Could she forgive Ieskar for being on the wrong side? Can anyone just choose to forgive?

For all she had said to Tarsus, Medair did not see how she could simply stop hating. She had not known if Ileaha would succeed in trying to forgive Avahn for something as innocent as not seeing what was under his nose. She was not certain it was in any way possible for her to make that angry hating part of herself simply close the book on the invasion. The part of herself that said Ieskar should pay for his crimes, no matter the cost.

"Medair." His eyes were grey, watching her face, but she could not read what they held. "I do not hold you to the understanding we had," Illukar said, carefully. "I know very well the consequences of this."

Making an indistinct gesture at himself, he rose to his feet, looking very much as if he was only just able to keep himself upright. "Islantar was to leave a small detachment on guard near the foothills."