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.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
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?"
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."