The Silence of Medair

Not that everyone would mean it, Medair thought sourly, watching people turn and smile and bow a very formal and correct Ibisian observance to their lord. Searching the crowds, Medair saw a man who turned abruptly away, and a woman who bowed prettily enough, but wore a frown when she busied herself over a stall of fine-worked leather. No-one was universally popular.

Somehow, it didn’t please her to see those shadowed faces among the mix of the curious and admiring. It turned her thoughts to the Medarists, the most vocal and violent of those who did not care for Ibisians. A movement like that didn’t grow out of nothing. It was fuelled by never-ending skirmishes and long-standing injustices. The south-west of Palladium had been Earl Vergreen’s lands. The Vergreens and the Corminevars and too many others had been displaced by the invasion, had lost their lands and their fortunes along with those who fell in battle. And though the Ibisians did not seem to have proven tyrannical rulers, the initial blow was not balmed by subsequent fair dealing.

Medair looked around at smiling faces and wondered who was wrong. Those who plotted a revenge less amusing than the slighted Ourvette’s, or the ones who accepted the present without care for the distant past? Medair could hardly blame those who could not forget, when she was unable to do so herself.

-oOo-

A familiar rattling clatter sent icy fingers of recognition skittering beneath her skin. She turned, searching among the stalls until she found a sturdy table wedged between a milken vendor and a display of early harvest. Two women, their dark hair streaked with grey, were just sitting down, sipping bowls of steaming milken as a young girl finished turning a cloth bag the ritual three times and up-ended the contents into a specially indented section of the table. Dozens of flat black disks cascaded out and the girl nimbly began sorting them into piles, turning them so that they would all be face down. It was a scene achingly familiar and jarringly wrong. It was marrat.

Medair had been in Sevesta the first time she had spoken to Kier Ieskar outside an official audience. It was after Kedy’s death, and the fall of Holt Harra. She’d been sent to winter at Holt Harra’s ducal seat, newly conquered by Ibisians. Sevesta had put up a better fight than Mishannon, and there had been captives on both sides to exchange, interminable negotiations, and Medair had almost become used to standing before the Ibis Throne and speaking the Emperor’s words.

The audiences had been so formalised that the evening summons had taken her completely off-guard. Imagining all kind of disasters, she’d stared at the white-clad boy who waited to escort her, then hurriedly snatched up her cloak and satchel. The room he’d led her to was not the starkly bare chamber which housed the Ibis Throne, but a sitting room with a single shuttered window and warm braziers burning in the corners, each with an attendant child wearing the black-trimmed white uniform of the Kier’s household.

Her escort had whisked away while she wasn’t looking and Medair had known better than to try and question the attendants, who were always so careful not to even raise their eyes from their appointed task. She’d stepped forward to inspect the table which took pride of place in the centre of the room. Old, dark wood, inlaid on one side with a square of slightly paler material, and on the other a neat depression almost large enough to rest her satchel in.

"Please sit down, Keris."

How hard it had been not to jump, when she’d heard Kier Ieskar’s sublimely even voice directly behind her. She knew she’d stiffened and, because the idea of him standing behind her had made her skin crawl, she’d crossed to the far side of the strange table. Only then had she turned to look at him.

"Ekarrel?" she’d asked, her throat dry. The word meant most cold, and was used the way the Empire employed Your Majesty. He had certainly looked like ice, standing in the doorway in a robe of colourless silk with all that white hair neatly arranged across his shoulders, and those pale blue eyes looking straight through her assumption of calm. She’d never even seen him standing before, had only ever seen him seated on the Ibis Throne during formal audience. She remembered being shocked by the very fact that he walked, as he crossed the short distance to the table and drew out the chair opposite her, then inclined his head in patient courtesy, waiting for her to take her seat.

The attendants came forward as she settled into the chair, pouring out bowls of the sweet, herbed drink Ibisians called vahl. It gave her a moment to collect, to remind herself that she was an Imperial Herald, that she represented her Emperor among the enemy.

"How can I assist you, Ekarrel?"