"Won’t happen." Avahn shrugged feebly. "Changed too much. Enjoy Decian hospitality." A strange expression flickered across his face and he fell silent. Medair watched him, knowing that she couldn’t just sit here and not tell him that she had agreed to marry his cousin. He would be the first person she should tell, and perhaps the most important. She wasn’t altogether certain how to go about it.
"Have you grown very used to being Illukar’s heir, Avahn?" she asked, awkwardly.
To her surprise, Avahn immediately crowed with delight, then fell into a fit of painful coughing. It took a glass of water to settle him, but he smiled all the while and wheezed, immediately he was able: "Accepted him? Knew something there. Care less about being heir."
Medair tried to control her conflicting expressions, then shook her head, passing over agony and exasperation both. "You would have made an excellent Keridahl, Avahn."
"Bosh," Avahn said, succinctly. "Congratulations, Medair. Happy for you both."
"Thank you." She was going to cry if she wasn’t careful. But it felt good.
"Recruit you for match-making," Avahn added, looking at the door again. A frown further distorted his swollen, ravaged face. New emotions touched his voice: longing, uncertainty. Ardent desire. "Bad timing. Not at best."
"No." He certainly wasn’t, but Medair couldn’t help but be pleased that Avahn was apparently ready to reach out to Ileaha.
"Won’t even tell me her name," he added, with an edge of frustration, and Medair’s heart sank. "Wasn’t with us after gate. Velvet Sword?"
"Yes, I rather think she is."
"Doesn’t like me much. Or not. When I woke, the look in her eyes!" He coughed again, waved away water. "Always told too rash – but I mean to have her."
"Did you actually look at her?" Medair asked. "Listen to her voice? You must have–"
"Must what?" Avahn asked, catching her distress. He tried to sit up and she hastily pressed him back down. "What is it?"
"Oh, Avahn." Medair shook her head, not knowing where to start. Gravely injured, he had opened his eyes to see a beautiful stranger, her face suffused with the love Ileaha had hidden so long. And he had fallen, tumbled into passion, whether true or fleeting. Shown his desire to an Ileaha he thought was a stranger, because her Ibisian blood was now dominant. Medair could hardly picture a worse misstep.
"She’s promised, isn’t she? Or var-ma? But she looked at me, like, like–" He began to cough again, helplessly. For a moment it seemed he was on the verge of another fit, but gradually he regained control. His breathing moved from ragged to shallow, and he was able to drink water. She sat by his bed, watching him until, finally, he turned his head to look at her again.
"What, then?" The coughing had reduced his voice to the barest whisper. "Who is she?"
"Ileaha."
Medair had found Ileaha behind the sixth door she opened. She was standing by a window overlooking the eastern forest. Tall, slender, with that straight, perfect braid only a breath from sweeping the floor. She could be a portrait of a model Ibisian, but for the taut anguish in her stance.
"I told him," Medair said softly, when Ileaha didn’t turn from the window.
"And was he much dismayed?" The north wind could have spoken.
Thinking on Avahn’s horrified reaction, Medair nodded. A futile gesture, when Ileaha’s gaze was fixed so rigidly on the forest outside.
"Even Illukar did not recognise you at first, Ileaha," she said. "I certainly didn’t, and I’m not injured."
"You did not try to quote one of Telsen’s love sonnets at me either," Ileaha replied, and the bitterness in her voice could have blighted generations. Medair closed her eyes.
"There is little I can say to that," she said, searching for something which would not make it worse. "I can’t blame Avahn for responding to what he saw in your face, but he has scant excuse for never having looked before."
"Not till I was this." Ileaha gestured at herself, the coiled intensity of the movement reminding Medair horribly of when she had leapt across the bed to kill Jedda las Theomain. Moving to her side, Medair saw that her eyes were fixed on nothing.
"There was never a moment of desire, before. Avahn might pretend to care little for his role, play feckless, heedless, eschew the demands of his role, but he is as traditional at his core as any of the blood. He would never consider a half-breed."
Savage. But was she right? Avahn had certainly been inclined to mock Ileaha, had shown a disdain which might have been due to her mixed heritage. But he had not been the least bit perturbed by the prospect of a child of Illukar and Medair’s succeeding the Dahlein, and his taunts has revolved around Ileaha’s lack of spine. "You never showed yourself to him, either," Medair said, quietly.
"Don’t pretend that he has been hiding forlorn hopes about me," Ileaha spat back. She was practically vibrating with tension.
"I’m not. He said–" Medair hesitated, terribly afraid of making things worse. She had been Herald, not diplomat. But Ileaha seemed to be on the verge of doing something truly drastic. "He said that it had never even occurred to him."
"No. Not a yellow-haired pauper. Not warm blood."
"Not, according to him, until I woke out of a nightmare and saw a woman who looked on me as if I were the dawn after a thousand year night," Medair said, taking excruciating care, just as Avahn had.
Ileaha’s pale brows drew together. "Fine words," she said, scathingly.
"But quite true."
For a breath or two, it seemed that Ileaha would listen. Then, tormented beyond endurance, she recoiled. A knife, glass-sharp, appeared in one hand and she caught up that long tail of white hair with the other. Before Medair could so much as gasp, she had sawn off the braid as close to her scalp as possible, leaving herself a ragged, abbreviated bob. The nape of her neck looked painfully exposed.
"Don’t!" Medair protested inadequately, and earned herself a defiant, frantic glance as Ileaha flung the braid out the window. It twisted in the air like a living creature, then fell to the rocks below.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Since Ileaha had not returned to Avahn’s room, Medair asked Kel ar Haedrin to watch over him, and headed down the corridor to the central dining hall which Queen Sendel had adopted as her base of operations in apparent preference to her brother’s throne room. Tarsus' survival was a double-edged gift. Medair could not be anything but glad not to have killed him, but she could not pretend that his death would not have made what came next less complicated.
There was no way to be certain how much difference the Conflagration had made to the question of his descent. He might be no more a direct heir of Emperor Grevain than N’Taive was a Mersian Herald, but the past she remembered made no difference to the facts of a remade world. She would–
A hand over her mouth.
An arm swiftly followed, clamping across her chest, pulling her back, and someone came from one side, bending to grab and lift her legs. Surprise froze Medair only for a moment, and then she writhed, twisting in their hold. She bit the hand, or tried to, because there were allies in the rooms ahead and behind and all she had to do was call out–
Movement. They were carrying her away, and she fought harder, furiously now because she would not die here, not now, not when at last it had seemed possible to live.
"We just want to ask you a question!" hissed a voice, young, choked.
Medair still fought, because she did not dare trust, and succeeded in wrenching her face free as they came near to tumbling down a short flight of stairs. She drew breath to shriek, but one of her captors slapped her, hard enough to snap her head to one side, and then there was a door, closing behind them and suddenly she was free, dumped unceremoniously on a flagged floor before a banked fire.