Chapter 24 TAAR
TAAR
I wake slowly, a radiating ache spreading from the back of my head, down my neck and shoulders. Someone seems to be calling my name, and the voice is familiar, but strangely echoing, hollow: “Taar? Taar! Shakhing-damn you, Taar, wake up! Oh gods, Halamar, is he dead?”
“He’s not dead,” a second voice replies, very dark and dull. “They would not dare kill him. Not yet.”
“Some comfort you are.” There follows a shuffle and a rough expulsion of air through lips, like a wordless curse. “How did I let this happen? I should have stood up to the elders. But when Kildorath said she was—”
“What she was does not matter.” The second voice speaks more firmly now, full of conviction. “All that matters is what she has become. She is our maelar, chosen wife of our luinar.”
I recognize that voice, even through the throb in my head: Halamar. My old friend and battle companion. Still loyal to me, it would seem. Or, at the very least, loyal to my wife. Bless the hearttorn bastard! Though he was strangely absent last night, when I could have used someone on my side.
“But their luinar isn’t luinar anymore by the looks of things,” the first voice growls. I have awareness enough by now to recognize it as well. Tassa. My sister. Another support strangely absent from the moment of crisis.
A groan rumbles deep in my chest as I begin to come more fully awake.
My mind is jumbled, but I reach almost instinctively for the velra, for my connection to Ilsevel.
It is still there, still strong. I can feel as well that she is far from me.
Very far. I squeeze my eyes tight as more memories emerge.
That’s right—I sent her away. On Elydark.
Elydark! He is gone too, leaving me behind. As he should. As he must.
It comes back to me in a flood then. The betrayal of Kildorath, the turning of the elders against me.
The thud of an arrow striking flesh. Ilsevel!
She took that arrow to her shoulder, moments before Elydark carried her away from the fray.
What happened to her? Is she out in the wilds somewhere, wounded? Is she . . . ?
“He’s coming to,” Halamar’s voice rumbles in the dark beyond my eyelids.
“Taar?” A sound of feet splashing in water. I seem to be sitting in water myself. Someone kneels in that puddle beside me, and a pair of strong hands grip my shoulders. “Taar? You stupid idiot of a brother, wake up! Wake up and look at me!”
“Ah!” I wince against the ache in the back of my head and, grimacing, open one eye. “What joy it is to wake to the dulcet sounds of your voice, sister mine.”
Tassa’s face swims into view before me. Wherever we are is cold, damp, and deeply shadowed, but my ibrildian eyes see well enough to discern the spark of tears in her eyes.
She scowls at me and gives me a fierce shake.
“Taar! You absolute blithering fool! What were you thinking, riding straight into the hornets’ nest like that?
You could not have believed they’d welcome you and that warbride of yours warmly. ”
Something tightens in my gut. “I don’t remember seeing you there to lend support.”
Tassa’s expression twists bitterly. “I’d already made my stand and been disarmed. Halamar too. They tossed us down here to keep us out of the way when word came that you were approaching.”
I peer over her shoulder, take in our surroundings.
We seem to be in the Elanlein well-turned-holding cell, the same cell from which I pulled Ilsevel weeks ago, before she could be ceremonially executed.
The walls are stone-lined and slick with damp moss and old, dead ilsevel vines.
I peer up at the circle of sky far above.
Fading stars gleam overhead, vanishing into the paleness of coming dawn.
I could probably climb out. If my head wasn’t pounding like the devil.
And if I weren’t bound hand and foot. I look down, grimacing at the sight of chaeora ropes biting into the flesh of my wrists and ankles.
While it does not have the same poisonous effect on me as it does on licorneir, it is, nonetheless, a powerful binding.
It dims my connection to Elydark significantly; I cannot feel my licorneir, though our soul-tether remains active.
Breathing out a sigh, I lean my head back against the stone wall. All that matters now is that Ilsevel is alive, Ilsevel is safe . . .
Tassa smacks my shoulder.
“Ouch.”
“You deserve that and much worse,” she snarls. “When were you going to tell me that you’d gone and married Larongar’s daughter? A Gavarian princess, Taar! The blood and bone of the very man who brought about our world’s destruction.”
“Who told you that?”
“Is it true?”
“Yes.”
“Damn.”
“It’s true,” I continue, “but I did not know until . . . until well after.”
“Until well after you’d shakhed her, you mean?”
“Tassa, have mercy. You’ll blister poor Halamar’s ears with that tongue of yours.”
Halamar’s chuckle rumbles in the darkness, but my sister is not about to be deflected.
“You knew,” she growls. “I told myself that, even if everything Kildorath said was absolute truth, you must not have known yourself. But you knew. All along. And you made me train her! And you made me . . . like her.”
I shift my rather damp seat, twisting at the bindings on my wrists. “So it was Kildorath who told you.”
“Yes. He returned from the campaign and spread word far and wide that you’d abandoned us and gone chasing after the human princess. He told how she brought about the death of the licorneir she’d cursebound, revealed that she was not only a Miphata but also Larongar’s daughter.”
My teeth clench hard. “And where did Kildorath get that idea?”
“From you, presumably.”
I shake my head. “I never told a soul. Certainly not Kildorath, who was already searching for any excuse to do away with her.”
Tassa regards me narrowly. “Who told him then?”
I turn my head, look her in the eye. “Shanaera.”
Even by that dim light, I see the color drain from her cheeks. Her lips part, and she sits back on her heels, shaking her head. “But Shanaera is dead.”
Bile roils in my gut. “I told you about the necroliphon curse. I told you about the living corpses.” Swallowing hard, I force out the words. “And I told you that Shanaera was among them. It was she who knew Ilsevel’s identity, she who revealed it to me.” I draw a long breath. “She told Kildorath.”
“You don’t know that, Taar.”
“I’d bet my life on it.”
“Careful,” Halamar murmurs quietly from his place across the small cell. “Your life isn’t worth much at the moment.”
“I asked him once,” I continue, resisting the urge to beat the back of my head against the stone wall behind me.
“I asked him if he had spoken with Shanaera. I knew she pursued him and the other Licornyn on their return from the campaign in the mortal world. I suspected . . .” I curse bitterly, shake my head.
“He claimed he had not spoken with her, said that if he was ever near enough to speak, he would kill her and break the death-magic curse. I believed him.”
Gods-damn me, am I really the blithering fool my sister claims?
Kildorath was not present at Agandaur when Shanaera died, did not have a chance to bid goodbye to his beloved sister.
How could he then resist the chance to speak to her one last time if such a chance presented itself, in however horrible a form?
And she, seeing an opportunity, had passed on useful information, information she might use to manipulate her brother.
What else had she told him? Had she spoken of her desire to liberate Licorna, using the Miphates’ own magic against them? Had she brought him into her mad schemes? Had he believed the mania of a walking corpse, simply because it bore the face of one he loved?
“Kildorath claimed the chieftainship of Rocaryn,” Tassa says at last, filling the silence I have left with my trailing words.
“In the name of Markildor, his father. In light of the word he brought—the failure of the siege and your own desertion—the elders were only too glad to give him what he asked.” She shakes her head, tossing up her hands helplessly.
“I did what I could to protect you, Taar. I protested and fought and swore. I accused the whole lot of elders of being faithless baggage. But it didn’t do any good in the end. ”
“Though it earned her a marriage proposal,” Halamar inserts dryly.
“What?” I shoot a sharp gaze Halamar’s way then back to my sister.
With a heavy sigh, Tassa takes a seat, little caring for how the puddle on the cell floor dampens her rump.
She leans against the wall beside me, elbows resting on her updrawn knees.
“Kildorath has been trying to convince me to marry him for some while now,” she says.
Her eyes swivel to catch mine in a sidelong glance.
“Ever since things ended between you and Shanaera, and I found myself abruptly available.” This time it’s Halamar who is at the end of her withering glare.
“Kildorath seemed to take it as a sign that we were destined for one another.”
“How did I not know this?”
“Because you don’t see anything beyond the bridge of your nose, do you?
” she snaps, then shakes her head, strands of dark hair falling across her face.
“That was unfair, I know. You have been rather swallowed up in recent events, and the petty dramas of your sister’s life aren’t of much consequence when compared to the end of our world.
But I’ve had a rather trying time of it, fending off his advances. ”
Halamar growls softly. It’s a stronger expression of emotion from him than I’ve heard in a long time.
Since the death of his licorneir, he’s sunk so deeply into himself and avoided Tassa.
All trace of the love he once cherished for my sister had seemed to wither away.
But perhaps it has not vanished entirely.