The Silence of Medair (5 page)
"A twelve year-old adept. My luck is running true to course." Medair stared out at the storm, which was now driving in through the door. With difficulty she shut out the weather, and carefully fed damp twigs into the fire to alleviate the gloom. Smoke lurked about the ceiling, but didn't grow too suffocating. Small mercies.
Medair wasn't particularly good at being angry, so she grew resigned instead, plotting her course to Palladium's capital on the map she kept in her head. The quickest route would be east from Thrence through Farash, but nothing was ever that simple. As Herald she had been used to travelling without bar or threat through an Empire where quarrels between duchies were settled in the Silver Court. Now Farakkan had broken into myriad little kingdoms clustered into alliances about four major realms: the Ibisian Palladium in the north-east, Decia to the south, Mymentia in the west and Ashencaere in the north-west. Kyledra, Lemmek and Farash enjoyed an uneasy existence in the centre of these four groups, battling not to be swallowed up or overrun in the hostilities between their powerful neighbours.
Strange to think of the once ardently loyal Duchy of Farash at odds with the Empire's heartland, but she'd found on her way to Bariback that the border between Farash and Palladium was not an easy one to cross. She doubted it would be any simpler on the way back, especially with a semi-conscious mage-child in her care and who knew how many different groups searching for someone with rahlstones.
Grumpily, Medair decided on a route north to the generally neutral Ashencaere, which had remained inward-looking since the fall of the Mersians – a kingdom far older than the Palladian Empire. There was nothing else to do but go to sleep. Resisting a geas once it had taken hold usually resulted in painful bouts of nausea, headaches, all manner of nasty maladies right up to total paralysis. If she didn't take the boy to Athere "as directly as convenient," she'd have cause to regret it. Fortunately the wording of the compulsion wasn't wholly unreasonable. She would not be forced to travel through the night until she dropped in exhaustion, but she doubted she would be given too long a grace period.
Nothing ever seemed to work according to her plans. She should stop making them.
The boy was still alive, and even looked a little healthier, when dawn and dripping leaves woke Medair. He wasn't inclined to respond to her attempts to rouse him however, so she ate and cleared the shelter, then attempted the novel task of dressing an unconscious child in almost dry clothing. The weather had turned cool in the wake of the storm, so she kept a blanket out to wrap about him and, with an efficiency born from a desire to get the business over, had them underway while the air was still in the half-tones of very early morning.
It was awkward to go at speed with him cradled against her chest, and she experimented with various positions until noon, when they reached Nodding, a tiny village centred about a farm which had once been a Rynstar holding. Medair had established on her trip through in Autumn that there was no trace of her family home, and today she refused to be sidetracked into thinking about the fate of her mother and sister after the war.
With a few casual questions Medair learned that a great many people had headed into Bariback Forest recently, but none had returned. Nor was anyone interested in whether they did or not, so long as they didn't linger in Nodding. Fear of years-old plague made the villagers unwelcoming and she realised it would have been difficult to leave the boy in their care as she'd originally planned. She was not quite run out of town, but no encouragement was given for her to tarry. It was only when she was back on the horse that she realised that she'd talked with someone for the first time since Autumn. If nothing else, being geased had distracted her from her empty misery.
Thrence was at least another day's travel. Surely the geas would allow them a day there to rest and recover, so that the boy could ride his own horse? But then there were the Decians. Was Thrence big enough to hide her?
Mulling over alternatives, Medair was surprised by a curl of power emanating from her charge. He groaned, and raised his head. Really, he must be a phenomenal mage indeed. Spell shocked people were supposed to be days or weeks in recovering. Power would accrete to them only slowly and relapses were common if casting was attempted. He'd be mad to cast now.
The boy muttered something, lifting a hand. But not summoning power. Some sort of spell was disbanding, wearing thin through lack of renewal, like a set-spell. Not her geas, unfortunately. She reined in as he shifted against her chest. How many pre-set spells did this boy have on him?
"Bratling," she said, as he slid to the right, "stop wriggling about or you'll – "
Medair broke off, jaw dropping for what seemed the tenth time in the last few days. The boy was growing as she held him!
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.
-oOo-
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.
Deliberately, she turned her back on him. White Snake. She opened her satchel, found a water-skin, and emptied it over her head, trying to sluice off the mud. Clean clothes were the next step, pulled on hastily, though there was no-one in sight. She left the mud-caked garments abandoned. She would buy new ones. Somewhere on the way to Athere.
Slowly, she turned around.
Problem. Large, good-as-naked, unconscious man. White Snake. He might be willow slim, but six foot whatever was definitely not going to be as easy to handle as the undergrown boy he'd been pretending to be. With considerable distaste and just an edge of curiosity, she cut away the shirt and ruined trousers, then stopped to look. So it was true that Ibisians had a thick blue line running the length of their spines, a curiosity which had been the subject of much discussion in Athere during the war. She sternly tried to ignore the naked male factor and treat him as inconvenient cargo. Tried to ignore the way her skin crawled when she touched him. White Snake. His pubic hair was downy-fine corn silk.