The Silence of Medair

He looked at her, cord still in his hand. "You do not like to face certain truths, Medair an Rynstar. Unwilling to help my people, unable to ignore their plight, you decide to kill yourself. And, not wanting to die, you reach out to pull me here, to convince you not to. It is an unusual form of cowardice."

"I don’t want to live," she protested, numbly. "There’s no place for me here."

"You do not want to lay claim to your name, yet you refuse to give it up. You do not want to face the world as yourself, to have history record the breadth of your failure, but nor are you willing to create a new identity for yourself."

It was a cold, precise, unforgiving denunciation of her faults. Medair turned away, hugging her arms around herself.

"Go away," she said. "If I summoned you here, then surely I can banish you. You have no reason to stay – the power of the Horn will alert your people to its presence, and they will be saved. It is not necessary that I personally hand it over to them. I want to die more than I fear death."

"If that were true, I would not be here," Kier Ieskar countered, calm as ever.

"I don’t even know if you are what you seem to be," she replied, trying to rouse anger, hurt, anything but numb fear and apathy. And shame.

"My identity is not at issue." She could hear him moving, and looked cautiously over her shoulder to find him gazing pensively at the marble which encased his body. "I did not wish to live," he said. "To struggle against the wounds of my body, the losses I had incurred, to lead my people in war. But the easy route is not often the best."

"An unnecessary war," she accused, still searching for anger. Why was it she could not feel as she should, when she looked on him?

"Not so."

"The Emperor offered you safe haven. You chose to make war."

"Tell me, Keris an Rynstar," Kier Ieskar said. "Why do you imagine my people refused the offer made to them this day – why pass up an opportunity to ensure their children, our race, survived?"

Medair frowned. "If you are trying to make a comparison, you over-reach yourself, Ekarrel. Grevain Corminevar would not have enslaved your people. He was an honourable man."

"He was. He would have aided my people in any way possible, given us shelter, provided us with food. And we would have been lost, a pauper race with no land to call our own, feared for our strengths, hated for our differences. Chained by our own laws. Our culture has been irretrievably altered through exposure to the peoples of Farakkan, but it would have shattered us, or been lost altogether if we had allowed ourselves to be separated, broken apart as we would have been as petitioners."

"That still doesn’t make it right!" Medair groaned, finding that this was an explanation she would rather not have heard.

"The salvation of my people to the detriment of my honour. It is a price I would pay again, and willingly."

"I hate you."

"I know." Impossible that there could almost be a hint of humour in his voice. She stared at him, at that perfect mask and the blue eyes which could still look straight through her, despite his death. "Tell me, Keris," he went on. "Why did you seek out this Horn, so unexpectedly? The odds were against your success, and it is not a task usually given to Heralds."

Medair did not answer.

"Keris?"

"What does it matter? If you are here to convince me not to kill myself, why don’t you do that?"

"Because I do not need to, Keris. The moment has passed, and you will not take up the knife again. You will go from this place of the dead to the halls of the living and admit your name and your past. Because you know that that is right."

"Is it?" She shook her head. "From your perspective, just as, from your perspective, it was better to invade Palladium than be its pensioner."

"Your replacement was much less adept with Ibis-laran."

He said it in the same even tone that he’d used to condemn her, and she felt it just as strongly. It was beyond comprehension, how she could be standing in the bowels of Athere having an argument with Kier Ieskar. Medair, moving away from the man or ghost or whatever he was, carefully collected her satchel from the hands of her Emperor. Tucking the cord inside, she sealed it gently. She could feel Ieskar watching her.

"Why did you allow Telsen to play that song?" she asked, in a tiny, thready voice.

"A question for a question?"

"If you wish." Medair closed her eyes. She could not think about this.

"An interesting man," Ieskar said, with unshakeable equilibrium. "Soulless, turning the hearts of others into music. His saving grace was the skill with which he did so. That song – Telsen may not have felt it, but eternal longing for the impossible has never been better expressed."

Medair started, blinked, but his face was still a mask, and before she could react further he continued. "I believe, at the time, it was a form of apology."