"Did they speak to you, Medair?"
"No," Medair replied, tightening Avahn’s now soaked kerchief around her palm. "I’m not altogether sure why an Ibisian would be trying to kill me."
"It had to be done," said the man who had cut her, his voice precise and unapologetic. "Keris las Theomain saw clearly the threat you pose. It will not happen. You can be sure of that."
"What threat?" Medair asked blankly, but the man just tightened his lips.
"Take them somewhere less intrusive," Avahn ordered. "And clear the door. Where is Vel?"
"Here, Kerin." An elderly Ibisian woman came forward, a collection of salves, needles and bandages neatly laid out on the tray she carried.
Avahn left Medair to the ministrations of the attendant, while Jedda las Theomain’s body was removed. The cut on the back of Medair’s right wrist and hand wasn’t bad, but her left palm was scored deeply across the base of the thumb. The woman called Vel tended it with a mixture of stitches and a casting to hurry the healing. Medair wondered why Jedda had started with a cushion instead of the knife, and tried not to picture that awakening.
"There will be no loss of function, Kerin," the attendant told Avahn when he returned. She wrapped an injury which now looked days old. "It did not touch the tendons."
"That’s as well." Avahn glanced around the room, at blood-specked feathers and broken furniture. "We guarded you poorly, Medair. We thought you would be at risk from the Hold, or from Medarists, not our own kind."
"What is the Hold, Avahn? I’ve often wanted to ask."
Avahn, after a startled pause, reverted to his more usual persona, laughing. "You don’t know, do you? We were convinced, at one time, that you were an agent of the Hold, or at least their tool. We never came even close to guessing the truth." He laid the cushion on the bed and placed the knife neatly upon it. "The Hold of the Emperor – it started as a resistance movement in the time after the Niadril Kier’s death. Certain of the Farak-lar nobles who had surrendered attempted to retake the throne in the name of the surviving Corminevar, Princess Alaire.
"Their first open move was an attempt to kill Kierash Elvalar, Kier Ieskar’s newborn heir. A serious miscalculation: the Princess would not allow her daughter to be murdered, no matter the child’s father. Alaire never supported them, and it ended in executions. But the Hold itself still flourished. For centuries they have worked behind the scenes, pulling the strings of those such as the Medarists, weakening from within and allying without. Playing their games."
"I’m surprised you let me travel with you, thinking me one of these puppeteers."
"Owing life-debt, glimpsing the secrets you held? We were not inclined to trust you, Medair, but you were far too interesting a study not to pursue. Besides, there are factions within the Hold, and some no longer consider the Ibis-lar vermin to be hunted from Farak’s breast."
"And Jedda las Theomain?" she asked, in a lowered voice. "She was certainly no agent of the Hold."
"No." Avahn lost his incisive air and looked worried. "I don’t know where this has come from. She could not possibly have thought the Horn of Farak false. No-one could mistake that power. Unless she thought that, despite everything you have done for us, you would inevitably be used by those who band against us." He did not sound convinced, meeting her eyes with forthright concern. "Liak tells me that one of the attackers – Felden – has purist sympathies. I don’t know why they would want you dead, but that may be where this comes from. Though for Keris las Theomain to be a purist, when her links to the Kier are so strong–" He shook his head. "The thoughts of those who would keep the Ibis-lar bloodline pure must be strange indeed to find reason to kill someone who has preserved us."
Medair smiled thinly. "I have become unpopular in all corners, it seems. Perhaps I can hope that the Medarists will stop taking my name."
"Or learn–" He stopped. "I had best see to our captives. There is not much time before sunset, and I wish to speak with Liak about having them questioned before we go to the outer wall."
"To ask them whether more will come after me?"
"To ask them why."
With a formal inclination of his head, Avahn left once more, leaving Medair to the wreckage of the room. Testament that she was not safe even from the Ibisians.
She should have left sooner, found some way out of the city despite the army at the gates, and rested only after sufficient distance allowed her to return to anonymity, to leave the mistakes of Medair an Rynstar behind her.
"The same mistake, all over again."
She had slept after finding the Horn of Farak, and lost the chance to use the Horn to destroy the invading Ibisian army. Today she had let escape slip through her fingers, and would have to face the consequence of her choices. The Horn would be used on a Farakkian army, one which claimed to represent a true Corminevar heir, one not tainted by Ibisian blood. People would die, and those deaths would be laid firmly at her feet. What did it matter that she was sworn to defend Athere, that her act would save the descendants of the oldest Atherian families, that even the most pure-blooded Ibisian families now thought themselves Palladian? Time had muddied everything, making it impossible to do anything, to do nothing, without in some way betraying her oaths, and herself.
Inevitably a traitor.
Medair flexed her hands within their bandages then retrieved her satchel from beneath the bed and undressed, carefully folding the damaged pearl-gray uniform and tucking it away. She would never wear it again. She was oath-breaker, placeless and lost. Herald no longer.
CHAPTER TWO
Sunset saw thousands gathered along the southern reach of Athere’s outermost wall. The army beyond had spent the hours since its abrupt appearance positioning for attack, and casting. Impossible at such distance to distinguish the exact nature of so many spells but, as Avahn remarked, the sheer number and strength told them all too much. The Ibisians' long supremacy in matters of magic seemed to have been lost, like so many other things, in the transformation wrought by the Conflagration: wild magic slipped from control.
But magic-rich armies appearing overnight was only one of too many changes. The Conflagration had not left the land seared and blackened, but it had altered Farakkan to the point where Athere’s defenders' greatest disadvantage was lack of knowledge. The attackers and the spells they might use in this transformed world were a puzzle the Ibisians did not have time to unravel.
Yesterday Medair had stood safely invisible among a less orderly crowd, watching as the city’s most powerful adepts constructed a shield to hold back the Conflagration. Today, unmasked and under escort, she could not fail to notice the ripple of attention which followed her. Abandoning her uniform would not grant her anonymity.
There’d been a time when she’d enjoyed people looking at her. Proud little herald.
"Were you on the wall, Ileaha?" she asked. "When they raised the shield?"
"No," Ileaha’s attention was on Avahn as he slipped through the knot of people surrounding the Kier. "I was on Fasthold."
Ileaha must have stood with Cor-Ibis while he served as keystone for that formidable casting. And now he was mere feet away, at the Kier’s elbow, turning in response to a word from Avahn. Looking back at her.
Before the world had been transformed by flame, and before Medair had slept away five hundred years, there had been two brothers, their island kingdom consumed by disastrously misused wild magic. The younger, Illukar, died ending that Blight. Medair had met his young daughter, in the company of the elder brother, Ieskar, the Ibisian Kier, who she hated above all things for deciding to conquer Athere rather than accept the Emperor’s offer of refuge.