“Thank you, Aken,” Eikyo said, and sank into another bow before leaving.
Satomi sat back in her chair and considered this, tapping her lips with one finger. She hadn’t been politely turning Eikyo off, although the student might have taken it that way. She really didn’t know what to do with her at present.
But Satomi was sure she would think of something.
A SHORT WHILE LATER, Ashin stood on the carpet before Satomi’s desk in an uncomfortable silence.
Satomi broke it by rising from behind her desk and gesturing at a chair to one side. “Please, sit.” She came around and joined the Air Hand Key, deliberately lowering the formality of this meeting.
“It’s good to have you safely back at Starfall,” Satomi began when they were settled.
Ashin’s dark eyes showed wry amusement. “Seeing as how I ran out of here in fear for my life?”
It was true. Ashin had left because of a strong suspicion that the Primes had ordered Tari’s death over the issue of the doppelgangers, and if one renegade Key could die, so could another. No one had known at the time that Ashin was involved, but still, the danger had been real. Satomi winced at the blunt words and said, “There were . . . misunderstandings.”
“You don’t need to mince words, Aken. I know you called me and Tari and all the rest heretics. I don’t hold a grudge for that. I’m just glad that you’ve seen the truth.”
Which led inescapably into the current situation with Ashin’s erstwhile Prime. Satomi sidestepped it for the moment, though, in favor of making something else clear. “I fought against it, I admit that. A large part of me did not want to accept what Mirei had to say.”
Ashin nodded. “I heard about your own doppelganger.”
“Orezha,” Satomi said quietly. “I want people to know her name.”
“She’s the last one that will happen to.”
I hope so.
Satomi brushed that fear aside. She had a specific matter she wanted to address, before this afternoon’s meeting with the other Primes and Ashin’s fellow Air Keys. “You were right to leave Starfall when you did. If we’d known about your connection with Mirage, we would have taken . . . harsh steps.”
“You would have killed me. After using any means necessary to get me to talk about the rest of them.”
Sometimes Ashin’s bluntness was refreshing; other times, it was a bit much. Still, Satomi couldn’t deny the accusation. And she’d brought this subject up herself. “It would have been a mistake to do so. I’m glad we avoided it, though we can hardly take credit for that—Mirei was the one who stopped us. I just wish that we could undo some of our other mistakes.”
A faint, bitter smile touched the corner of Ashin’s mouth. “Like Tari.”
“Like Tari,” Satomi agreed.
The uncomfortable silence returned.
“How many people know about that?” Ashin asked at last.
“That Tari’s death was not an accident?”
“That she was assassinated by a Hunter you hired, because she was doing things you didn’t like and didn’t want made public with a trial.”
More than a bit much, this time. Satomi forced herself to answer the question. “The five Primes. Mirei. Yourself, and anyone else you’ve told. The Wolfstar we hired.”
“He’s dead.”
Satomi’s eyes widened. “You killed him?”
“Mirage killed him. I would have thought you’d know about that by now. Yes, he’s dead. You’ve forgotten to list Mirage’s partner, Eclipse.”
She had forgotten him completely. Satomi’s stomach lurched. Bride’s tears—Mirei had sent her a note, saying he was missing, and in the struggle to deal with problems closer to home she had not given him a second thought. Which she should—because he was one of the few outsiders aware of their problems.
Satomi hoped Ashin had not read that shock in her face. “Not many, then.”
Ashin leaned back in her chair, regarding her steadily. “Let me guess. You’d like to keep it that way.”
She couldn’t do this sitting down. Satomi rose from her chair and crossed the room to the window, looking out over the daily life of Starfall. Several Cousins were in the courtyard in front of the students’ hall, unloading a shipment of grain. “We erred in how we dealt with her, and should atone for that in some fashion. But not by making it public knowledge. Not right now.”
“More lies?” Ashin asked softly.
Satomi turned back to face her. “Yes,” she said. “Which will sit poorly with your nature, I’m sure; you’re a straightforward woman. But if I have to lie in order to prevent more strife, I will. The Goddess may judge me for that at her leisure.”
Ashin stood up, too, and wandered over to run one finger thoughtfully along the front edge of Satomi’s desk. “What are you going to do about Shimi?”
Not as much of a non sequitur as it might seem. “Looking ahead to the future?” Satomi asked, trying to keep the cynical note out of her voice. “To the prospect of replacing her?”
The Hand Key heard the cynicism anyway. Her dark eyes grew hard. “Not exactly. More looking to the question of whether she’ll need replacing.”
Satomi realized her misstep, too late to take it back. The best she could do was reassure Ashin, as much as possible. “We’re not planning to have her killed.”
“Not planning to.” Ashin did not blink. “But you won’t rule out the possibility.”
Three quick strides brought Satomi close to her. “I am afraid of revolution,” the Void Prime said in a quiet, intense voice. “I am afraid of a war among us that might end with many dead. There are those who would follow Shimi. If they win, then doppelgangers will continue to die, as they have since the beginning. Those are deaths others may not count, because doppelgangers are not yet quite real to them—but they’re real to me. I do not want Shimi’s arguments to prevail. But I don’t know what kinds of lengths we will have to go to, in order to stop her. I don’t know whether I should accept the deaths of living witches as the price to pay for that. And if so, how many. At the moment, I’m not planning for anyone to die. But if you want the truth—” Satomi felt a terrible urge to laugh, but not because it was amusing. “I don’t know what I’ll have to do tomorrow.”
Ashin met her eyes steadily throughout this unexpected speech. Satomi could have lied; like many honest people, Ashin was not always adept at picking up the falsehoods of others. But Ashin valued honesty, and so Satomi was gambling by giving it to her.
“She may expose what you did to Tari,” Ashin said at last.
Satomi’s shoulders were still tight; Ashin had not said what she thought of Satomi’s words. “I doubt it. She still approves of that choice. She can’t condemn it publicly, because it would make no sense with her declared stance, but neither can she support it; she’d alienate too many of her potential supporters.” And the carefully worded tenor of the message to the witches of her Ray showed that Shimi was very deeply concerned with the image she presented of herself. “She won’t say anything. Not at the moment.”
“Then I’m your only potential leak,” Ashin said.
And Eclipse, the missing Hunter. And the other witches Ashin might or might not have told. Satomi kept silent and held Ashin’s gaze.
“All right,” the Hand Key said at last. “For now.”
Which would have to be enough.
A COUSIN WOKE Satomi in the small hours of the night.
She swam with difficulty back up into consciousness; the Cousin had caught her in deep sleep. “Wha—” the Void Prime mumbled, pushing herself up in bed.
“Aken, I apologize. Rana-meri is here, and needs to speak with you urgently.”
In the middle of the night? “What time is it?”
“Not quite Dark, Aken.”
What could be happening at such a late hour? Satomi rolled out of bed and pulled on a dressing gown. The Cousin vanished discreetly as she went out into her sitting room, where the Water Prime was waiting.
Rana looked like she had not gone to bed. Her snowy hair formed a disheveled cloud around a face white and strained.
“She killed it.”
The words made no sense to Satomi’s sleep-fuddled mind. “What? Who killed what?”
“Obura. She killed the doppelganger.”
Obura. Pregnant witch. No, not pregnant—she’d given birth a few days ago. Five days ago. Yes, of course; tonight she was slated to perform the ritual on her daughter, which would create the channel for magic. And, in the process, the doppelganger.
Who was dead.
Rana had started talking again, a low stream of words without much force behind them, as if she couldn’t muster the energy. She had been old for years, but now it was like some part of her had simply crumbled away. “She did it the old way. Kept her daughter out of starlight—I thought she’d presented her to the Goddess, the way we told her to. But she lied. And the midwife tending her lied. They said she had, but she hadn’t, and then when she did the ritual she killed the double. Said her daughter would be pure.”
Satomi had gone very still, one hand still holding the front of her dressing robe closed. She looked around blankly in the dim lamplight, found a chair, sank into it.
A child had just died.
Not a child. A shell. A soulless body, because Obura had done it the old way, the way everyone else had done for centuries. Until the light of the stars, the Goddess’s eyes, touched an infant, that infant had no soul. It wasn’t a person yet. What Obura had killed was nothing more than a body.
But it could have been more.
“Where is she?” Satomi asked into the silence left by Rana running out of words.
“In her quarters,” Rana said. “With Cousins guarding the door. I didn’t know what you would want done with her.”
Satomi herself didn’t know. But she would have to think of something. She was the Void Prime, the linchpin of the circle of Primes, the ruler of the Ray whose dominating concern was the affairs of Starfall, the actions of its people.
In these dark hours after midnight, in this room so faintly lit by a single lamp, with her mind off-balance by the suddenness of her waking, she felt old. And she didn’t want to deal with this problem.
But I have no choice. No one else will take this responsibility.
And to abdicate it would only make problems worse.
Satomi rose, put one hand on Rana’s shoulder. “Have you slept?” The Water Prime shook her head. “Then go to bed. I’ll handle this for now.”
BUT SHE DID NOT GET A CHANCE to, because she arrived outside Obura’s door to find the two Cousins in an unconscious heap on the floor, and the rooms behind them empty.
She tried a finding spell, but knew before she cast it that it would do no good. Obura had a blocking spell up. So did the absent midwife. Blocking spells, hardly ever used because they were only useful against fellow witches, but now they were springing up like a cancer, everywhere she turned.
Satomi sent Cousins and witches in search. Rinshu, the Key of Obura’s Path, made a stiff-faced apology. Rana awoke and took up her own duties, looking as though the sleep had done her no good at all. The searchers came back with nothing.
They still had Obura’s daughter, for what good it did them. Satomi knew, as Obura had no doubt known, that they would raise her as usual. Children belonged to all of Starfall, not just to their mothers; Obura would not have been with her daughter long regardless. And Satomi could not simply refuse to educate the girl as a witch, as a revenge upon her mother; what would that accomplish? The child would study, and grow, and someday face the traditional test, and be yet another witch missing a part of who she could have been.
Satomi sat at her desk, head propped on one hand, and stared at the list Ashin had given them, of other doppelgangers in the world. Twelve, not counting Mirage. Four old enough to enter training as Hunters; eight of varying ages below that. All spirited out of Starfall in secret after the ritual.
But how, exactly? Ashin’s daughter was one of them. Sharyo, the witch-half, was here in Starfall, under close guard; the doppelganger, Indera, was in Mirei’s care. That one was easy to explain. Ashin had been one of the first witches Tari recruited to her rebellion, and she had volunteered her child to the cause. Cold-blooded of her, perhaps, when she didn’t know there even was a better way of handling doppelgangers than killing them, but Ashin was in her own way as much of a zealot as Shimi: She believed in Tari’s cause, and gave everything she had to it.
What about the others, though? Not every doppelganger of the twelve was the daughter of a witch in the conspiracy. Some of them belonged to witches who had no idea of what had happened. They had carried out the ritual in the usual way, killing the doppelganger with a dagger to the heart, not realizing that the infant would come back to life shortly after. It worked because the child had a soul before the ritual began; then the two bodies shared that one soul. The witch could kill the doppelganger, or the doppelganger could kill the witch, but anyone else would have to kill them both.
So the infant doppelgangers came back and, with the help of some allied Cousins, the heretics took them away from Starfall to be raised by false parents. But at some point before the ritual, the rebels must have arranged for the babies to be exposed to starlight.
Plausible, certainly; there were ways to do it, if you were determined. Even if the child was not your own.
But that didn’t explain Mirage. And it didn’t explain Orezha.
There was no conspiracy of heretics, when those two survived. Discovering Mirage was the catalyst that made Tari begin her subversive campaign. The thirteen-year-old girl had been a Temple Dancer in Eriot; Tari saw her perform, realized what she was, and arranged for her to be transferred to the Hunter school of Silverfire, because of a doppelganger’s gifts for fighting.
How did Mirage get there in the first place?
How did Orezha?
Kasane, Miryo and Mirage’s mother, would not have done it deliberately. And Tsurike Hall in Insebrar was, like Starfall, built with special rooms for newborns where the child was at no risk of seeing starlight until after the ritual. The same was true of Satomi’s own mother and Kanishin Hall, where she had been born. It was true of every hall the witches built.
But still, from time to time, doppelgangers survived.
Someone had to do it on purpose. Someone with opinions like Tari’s, but who, unlike her, never tried to take it further. Unless their attempts were so deeply buried that no history gave any sign of them.
Someone. A witch? Possibly, though it took special madwomen like Tari and Ashin to gamble innocent lives on the hope that the current way was wrong.
Even if it was a witch, though, she would need help. The bodies of the doppelgangers were given to the Cousins to dispose of.
The Cousins, who served the witches in all kinds of mundane tasks, from cooking to cleaning to guarding them with steel. The Cousins, whose numbers were made up of descendants of witches who failed their final test, and who occasionally took new women of that kind into their ranks.
The Cousins, who hardly ever opened their mouths around a witch for something that was not absolutely related to business.
Satomi rose abruptly from her desk and strode to her office door, to the outer room where Ruriko sat amid her own piles of paper. “Ruriko.”
The secretary looked up. “Aken?”
“When is Eikyo scheduled to be tested?”
Ruriko kept her files obsessively organized; even the stacks of paper were tidy. She turned without hesitation to a ledger on the shelf, opened it, and flipped swiftly to a page, no searching. Only then did she pause.
“In two days, Aken,” she said, looking up at last.
Satomi cursed softly. That soon. She should have remembered—and would have, were it not for the chaos. She wagered she was not the only one who had forgotten. “Thank you. Please notify Eikyo that I would like to speak to her. And—” She hesitated. “Keep it discreet.”
That had t
o make Ruriko curious, but the secretary simply nodded. “Of course, Aken. When do you want to see her?”
“As soon as possible,” Satomi said grimly.
EIKYO WAS IN HER OFFICE less than an hour later, clearly startled by the summons, but doing her best to hide it. “You called for me, Aken?”
Satomi was pacing along the windowed north wall of her office. To the Void with looking like the self-assured Prime; despite spending the last hour debating with herself, she still wasn’t entirely certain this was a good idea. She would see what this student thought of it, though, eager as she was to help. “I have thought of something you might do for me.”
“You have but to tell me, Aken, and I will—”
The Void Prime held up one hand to stop her. “Wait until I’ve told you what it is, before you agree to anything. I know you said you wanted to help, but I’m sure you didn’t have this in mind.”
Eikyo’s blue-gray eyes widened in apprehension.
“You don’t have to do this,” Satomi said clearly. “I mean that. I know that a suggestion from a Prime might as well be an order, but I won’t have you doing this of anything less than your own free will. Understand?”
“Yes,” Eikyo whispered.
Satomi took a deep breath. “So. Ruriko tells me you’re due to be tested in two days.”
Eikyo nodded.
“We can still go through with that. In fact, we should—show everyone that the business of Starfall hasn’t been disrupted.”
“Aken—” Eikyo’s head had come up in surprise. “But with Shimi-kane gone—”
“Just Shimi,” Satomi reminded her. “While she’s suspended, you need not use the honorific.”
“But—can you even do it, without her?”
“Of course,” Satomi said. “It even happens more often than you might think. There have been times—not many, but a few—when a Prime couldn’t attend, for one reason or another. Critical business elsewhere, or sometimes illness.” She smiled at the student’s clear confusion. “You’ve never heard about it, of course. We bring in one of the Keys in her place, with an illusion to make her look like her Prime. Even the witches whose tests were conducted by a Key don’t know it happened to them.” Arinei had been one such, though Satomi would never tell her.
Witch Page 6