"Because it is my birthright," he said. Utter sincerity. True or not, he believed it. And he was as out of place as she was, in the Palladium of today.
"And did you agree with Estarion, that the only way for Palladium to achieve peace is by killing all of Ibisian blood?"
"Yes." Tarsus looked at Illukar briefly and his eyes hardened. "Yes, it’s the only way. The rift is too deep, their crime too great."
"How much of Palladium do you think would be left, after that?"
"Enough," Tarsus replied, with only the faintest hint of uncertainty.
"And do you think they’d forgive you?"
"What?"
"You would be the invader, you see." Medair tried to fill her voice with the same inescapable certainty which had kept her from using the Horn a year ago. "You would have killed their friends, wrested the throne by force. No matter how true your bloodline, there is no just path to forcing your way onto Palladium’s throne. Five hundred years ago, the cause would be just, but it’s too late. That was what I had to accept, when I came to Athere, centuries late. That Palladium is Ibisian now." She couldn’t keep the sorrow out of her voice. That fact would always hurt.
"You’re wrong," Tarsus said, with a frantic pitch to his words. He backed into the wall again. "There are many in Palladium who would throw the White Snakes down, who would see them crushed into the dirt."
"Yes." Medair looked at him across that gulf of hate. "There are. But why do you think that they’re the ones who should choose the present? How more or less right are they than the ones who love the Palladium of today? Why should the will of the ones who can’t accept, who dwell in the past instead of living–"
"Stop talking!" Tarsus ran at her, tears streaming down his face, the glass raised as if to strike her down. Everyone moved at once, hoping to wrest the thing from him before he remembered himself and made good his threat to smash it. "You’re wrong!" he shouted, as Illukar moved between them. "You’re–"
The bloom of power was overwhelming, as like to the Conflagration as anything Medair had experienced. Bright light flashed, and she heard Illukar gasp, then the world dropped out from beneath her feet once again.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
She was sliding.
In the first moment Medair was completely disoriented, as she fell down a steep, rocky slope. She seemed to be underneath some sort of huge overhang, for she could see hills and blue sky to either side of her but only blackness above and shadow beneath. Around her she could hear men’s startled voices, almost entirely drowned by a massive grinding and an explosive fracturing of rock.
Struggling to control her descent, Medair bounced and somersaulted, catching glimpses of flood-lands to her right and a city to her left. She realised she was tumbling into the saddle between two hills and her startled mind struggled to translate the noise which so deafened her. It was from the stony roof above, as it ponderously followed her down the slope.
In the next few moments, panic fired her to heroic efforts, but she couldn’t get upright, and found herself heading directly into the centre of the saddle. The great slab of rock above was night falling in the most tangible way, and it was closing the distance, pummelling her with volleys of shattered stone. Frantically she struggled to change her course. She had to get out from beneath before it ground her into paste, but it seemed to stretch for miles in all directions. There was no way.
In the moment after that, a hand caught at her arm. Illukar, typically upright, pulled her almost to her feet. He hurled them both left, out of her tumbling course, and together they half-ran, but mostly fell, down a chute full of dust and a rebounding hail of rocks toward a rapidly narrowing line of sunlight. Medair’s lungs were full of sand and her veins thick with acid mud and she couldn’t see, could scarcely think, but she knew when they slid out from the shadow of that mammoth weight. She could feel Illukar’s hand still tight in hers as she fell some ten or fifteen feet to a slippery slope of grass with mercifully few rocks to bruise them during another tumbling slide. Behind and above them came a thooming clap of thunder, the death-knell of a mountain, and then something which was only silence in comparison. Dust and small rocks sifted liberally over them as they slid into a soft bed of clover and were still.
Medair knew she was alive because she hurt. She had a great many sources of pain to consider, though only her left arm came close to unbearable. Scratches, bruises, bumps and grazes and one broken bone. Her head spun and her chest seemed resolved to disown her. The world around her was dust-blurred and distant and her ears were clogged with dirt.
Letting go of Illukar long enough to scrub at her face, she gazed through tearing eyes at a handful of goats fleeing in utter panic down toward the city. And then she did not know what to stare at first, because before her was Finrathlar and above her was Falcon Black.
Her view was blocked as Illukar snatched her to his chest. She could hear his heart thundering at a full-out gallop, and with her one good arm squeezed him painfully back, thanking Farak for his survival. Her disbelief was reflected in his face.
She had never imagined Illukar in such utter disarray; the cuts and grazes and fine coating of dust were nothing compared to the incredulity in those wide grey eyes. Not even Ibisian reserve was proof against someone moving mountains.
But he was recovering, enough to discover her forearm, with a bone protruding in a most irregular fashion and blood oozing liberally over her hand. Moving the arm had been a mistake, and the look on Illukar’s face only made it hurt more. Medair blinked rapidly, dots swimming before her eyes. Sucking in a breath, she tried not to mewl at the pain.
"I’ll be all right," she said, unconvincingly, managing to get her feet under her. She was shivering, and her legs were rubbery as she stood, but they held her. Wanting to sit right back down, she looked up at Falcon Black properly, and saw that half the hill had come with the castle. It looked as if it had been sliced cleanly across at an angle which did not quite fit the line of the two hills it now rested between. The dust was settling around the transplanted hill and as she watched, the largest of the castle towers shuddered and collapsed, stones bouncing down into the valley bare feet to their right. The entire thing was canted in toward the city, tilted as if set to slide from its precarious perch.
"Can you see anyone else?" Illukar asked, his voice breathless as he searched the rock-studded slopes around them. He put his hands on her shoulders to steady her and she knew she must look on the verge of collapse but at this moment he could not spare his attention from the overriding problem. Not the castle teetering above, but Tarsus. Tarsus and the device.
"No wild magic?" Medair tried to focus on searching the slopes, spotting a demolished chair and a sprinkling of candles among the tumble of rocks, but no people.
"Not now." Illukar had seen someone, and led her carefully left as more small stones bounced down the slope. Every step made her arm feel like it was about to explode, but all she could do was try not to jar it and refuse to break down. "What was summoned was completely consumed by the gate," he continued, looking jerkily up at the castle and then down at Finrathlar. "I cannot feel any residue. It has not broken loose."
Medair blinked at him, trying to focus beyond her arm. He was speaking in small bursts, was still hollow-eyed with shock, and he had not hidden his fear. He was thinking of the Blight, of the inevitable consequence of a malfunctioning device which summoned wild magic in such monstrous proportions. And Finrathlar. His beloved home, the seat of his Dahlein, with a Decian castle perched above it and, somewhere, wild magic which had screamed at them, and then vanished.