Mirei stood, hauling the third doppelganger with her; both Amas and Indera backed up this time, as if open air would shield them from her.
She cast a quick glance around. They weren’t on one of the Great Roads, the major routes that had been in place since Three Kingdoms times; she’d chosen to take a smaller lane, leading southward toward the hills of northern Currel, precisely because it was less well-traveled. Unfortunately, she didn’t know it as well as she did the Great Road to the east of them. Mirei wracked her memory. Up ahead—she had no clear image of what was up ahead. But there had been a forested dell just a short distance back where they had watered their horses. It was a little shielded, at least.
“Come with me,” she said, dragging the Thornblood back toward her horse, which had stopped nearby.
“You’re going to kill us!” the doppelganger shouted.
Her paranoia was growing tiresome. “If I was going to kill you, I could have done that in Angrim, and not hauled your carcass around like this,” Mirei pointed out. She glanced at the others. “You, too. And no, I haven’t held off because I need you three for some evil ritual where I’m going to nail you to trees and—and—” Her imagination failed. “And do whatever you’re supposed to do in an evil ritual. Damn it to Void, doesn’t anybody believe I’m trying to help?”
“Funny way you have of helping,” Amas said.
“Should I have waited until you were in trouble, just so you’d trust me?” Fat lot of good that had done, with the Thornblood. Mirei pulled a coil of rope out of her saddlebag one-handed, while the girl struggled ineffectually to hook her feet out from under her. She tied the doppelganger up, Amas and Indera watching silently with their reins in their hands, then threw her captive over the saddle, with a rag stuffed in her mouth for good measure. “To the Void with waiting. You want explanations? Come with me. Take it while I’m still in a mood to offer.” Mirei rode off down the road, back the way they’d come, and didn’t look to see if the other two followed.
AMAS GLANCED OVER at Indera, but didn’t say anything.
She didn’t have to. They were a pair of eleven-year-old girls in an unfamiliar domain, in the middle of the night, with few supplies and no money. Even trying to calculate how they would get back to Silverfire on their own made Indera shudder.
But that wasn’t even the point. The point was that Mirage had dangled bait in front of them, and neither of them could pass it up.
They remounted and followed the Hunter. She didn’t ride far; soon she turned off the road to a dell that Indera remembered stopping in. When they arrived back at the tiny spring, they found Mirage waiting, the other girl still tied up and gagged, but leaning against a tree.
“You’re staying gagged because I don’t want to have to shout over you,” Mirage was saying to her. She glanced up as the other two arrived. “Glad you came. Tether your horses over there, find a place to sit, and the show will begin.”
They obeyed her orders silently. Amas perched on a rock. Indera put her back against an elm, where she could watch both Mirage and the stranger. Her nerves were jumping with anticipation. This, clearly, was what they had been brought from Silverfire for.
She was about to understand.
Mirage let her air out in an audible gust. “I’ve only done this once before, you know. Strangely, it is not easier when the people involved aren’t holding knives.”
This made no sense, but no one braved the silence to point that out.
The red-haired Hunter looked around at the three of them. “You three share something,” she said. “You probably noticed it long before they sent you to Hunter schools to train. You’re faster than the people around you. Stronger than you should be for your size. You love to move, pick it up easily, and when it comes to fighting, it’s like you’re born to it. You’re young, so you don’t know much yet; a trained fighter could take you down. But you’d be learning from him while he did it.”
And it was true of Mirage as well, Indera thought, although she had not said so. That was why she was such a great Hunter.
“People may have used the phrase around you,” Mirage said. “ ‘Blessed by the Warrior.’ ” She paused, meeting each girl’s eyes in turn. “It’s more true than you know.
“The Goddess has five faces. Four of them form the stages of life: Maiden, Bride, Mother, Crone. The fifth, the Warrior, is outside that cycle. She ends life. Where they are the four Elements that make up the world, she is the Void, nonexistence. And—for whatever theological, metaphysical reason, I couldn’t tell you—the movement of the body is her domain. Especially when the body moves to kill.”
Here among the trees, where the light summer breeze could not penetrate, the air was stiflingly close and still. Indera felt a trickle of sweat slide down the side of her face, but didn’t even move to brush it away. She didn’t want to break—
Break the spell she’s creating? she thought, chilled by the phrase that had reflexively come to mind. The other one called her a witch. And Mirage . . . she didn’t deny it.
But this couldn’t be an actual spell; Mirage was speaking normal language, with no singing. Still, the thought wouldn’t quite leave Indera alone. Mirage was her hero, but how well did she know the woman? How much could she trust her?
Mirage had gone on. “They say the human soul has the same five parts to it. Four for life, and one that’s separate from that set.
“You three—in simple terms—are that fifth part.”
The stranger kicked suddenly against her bonds, a startling sound in the quiet of the night. It looked like surprise, not an attempt to escape.
“The reasons for this,” Mirage said, “are complicated. So bear with me.”
She exhaled again, slowly. “Two of you have red hair—I know you dye yours, Amas. I don’t know about you—” She nodded to the shaven-headed girl tied up before her. “But I’ll bet it’s true of you, too. So I’m sure people have said that you’re witches.
“You aren’t. But you do have a connection to them.”
Indera, listening to this speech, began to wonder. Mirage was talking to the three of them. She kept saying “you.” Never “we.” It might be mere chance. But she’d said they weren’t witches. She hadn’t said that she wasn’t.
But Mirage was like they were. Wasn’t she?
“Witches aren’t born with magical power,” the Hunter said. “The power is out there, in the world; they have a channel, a connection, that allows them to take it and manipulate it. That channel’s created when they’re five days old. The ritual that does it splits the child into two bodies. One of them has the channel; the other doesn’t.
“The witches used to do this ritual before the infant was presented to the Goddess. They disposed of the body that didn’t have the ability for magic, and took the other one out into starlight.” Mirage grinned and ran one hand over her short hair. “I could now go into a very long and complicated story—and I will someday, if you want me to—but let’s keep it simple for now. As simple as this can be, anyway. Basically, the witches have found out that the way they were doing things wasn’t a very good one. There’s a better alternative, and that’s the one I’m here to tell you about.
“The two halves are connected no matter what. You’d have to ask one of the theorists at Starfall to get an explanation of how that works. But this part, I know: If the child has a soul when the ritual happens, then the two bodies share that soul. The witch-half, the one with the channel, basically gets the four parts that are about life. The other one gets the Warrior part. They call that one the doppelganger.”
Mirage glanced at them, one by one, meeting each of their eyes. Then she spoke again, softly. “As you might have guessed by now—that’s what you are.”
Indera found her voice at last, though it came out small and timid. “And—you, too, right? You’re like us.”
Mirage sighed and looked down at her hands, not meeting Indera’s eyes. The silence stretched out, painfully.
“I . .
. was,” she said finally, her voice very quiet. “But I’m not anymore.”
The bottom dropped out of Indera’s stomach. Not like them. Not like her. When she’d been so sure that Mirage, more than anyone else in the world, would understand.
“My name,” the Hunter said, “isn’t Mirage anymore, because I’m not exactly the woman who had that name. That’s the rest of what I need to tell you.
“You can’t just leave the doppelgangers alive. There was a reason the witches used to kill them off. If a witch’s double is alive, then when she tries to use magic, she can’t control it. The doppelganger is a part of herself that’s not concentrating on the spell, that doesn’t know how to channel the power. And unstable magic like that is very dangerous. It’ll kill the witch, sooner or later, and the doppelganger, and anybody else unlucky enough to be caught in a spell gone wild.
“Some witches still think we should be doing things that way.” Mirage’s eyes—no, not Mirage’s, a corner of Indera’s mind whispered in betrayal, she’s someone else—flicked toward the third trainee, where she lay bound and gagged. “One of them was in Angrim tonight. She would have taken you prisoner, and eventually killed you. But there’s a new way, now—one that I found.”
The woman began to pace, still talking. Such a smooth voice; she sounds so much like a witch, how did I not notice it before . . . “The doppelganger and the witch start out as a single person. They’re meant to go back to that, when the time comes. Part of me is Mirage, the Hunter you all have heard of.” She turned and faced them again. “The other part is Miryo, a witch you never met.”
The third girl yelped something Indera couldn’t make out through the gag.
“I am,” the woman admitted quietly, “a witch.”
She reached into her shirt and brought out a silver pendant Indera had glimpsed once before, when they were dressing in Silverfire’s stable. There was little light beneath the trees, but enough for them all to make it out: the triquetra knot of Starfall.
“My name is Mirei,” the woman said. “I’m a witch, and I’m a Hunter, because I’m both Miryo and Mirage. The Goddess gave me a new name when she made me whole again. There’s some other stuff that went with it—you’ll hear about that eventually. It has to do with a kind of magic that didn’t used to exist, because it draws on the Void, and without the Void part of their nature—the doppelgangers—the witches couldn’t touch it. But that’s metaphysics, and it can wait for later.
“The point is, you are all like I was—the Mirage part of me. There are girls out there, your age, who look exactly like you. They have the channel for magic, and will be witches when they’re old enough. When that happens, you’ll rejoin with them. There’s a ritual for it. Then neither one of you dies.”
Indera climbed unsteadily to her feet, Mirage’s words—Mirei’s—buzzing in her ears. “Hang on,” she said. “Let me get this straight. You’re telling me that when we get old enough, we’re going to be super-fast, super-strong Hunters with magic?” The possibilities made her head spin.
And then it came to a crashing halt.
“No,” Mirei said.
Indera stared at her. “What do you mean?”
Mirei sighed again. “You’ll have magic. And you’ll be strong, and fast, because if I have my way you all will keep training as Hunters, learning to use the gifts you have. You’re the Warrior part, and should honor that. But the reason you’ve got those gifts is that you’re . . . distilled. You’re the Warrior, without the rest. Once you rejoin your witch-halves, though, you’ll be complete souls again.”
“And?” Indera demanded, heart racing.
“And you’ll be physically normal. As normal as Hunters are, anyway. You’ll be faster and stronger than people who don’t have your training, but not supernaturally so.” Mirei shrugged. “It’s a trade-off.”
Indera had no words. Her pulse pounded in her ears as she stared at the woman before her, the stranger masquerading in a skin Indera thought she knew. To lose her gifts—to not be the Warrior-blessed person she was now—to give all that up, and stop being herself, to be somebody else instead, some witch—
Mirei wasn’t even looking at her. The woman’s eyes were on the other two girls, the gagged stranger and Amas watching with her usual impassive silence. “Like I said,” she went on, as if she didn’t see Indera’s fury, “there are people who don’t like that idea. Their solution to it is to kill you. I’ve taken you all from your schools because they know you’re there; they’ve already kidnapped the fourth one, a Windblade trainee named Naspeth. They won’t have killed her yet—it’s complicated, and I’ll tell you why later, when your heads have stopped spinning—but that’s their plan, ultimately. And since these women who want you dead are witches, your schools aren’t enough to protect you. Naspeth’s disappearance proved that. I’m taking you somewhere you’ll be safe, with witches to guard you.”
“But you said witches want us dead,” Amas said, speaking for the first time since they came to this dell.
“Some do.” Mirei grimaced. “Witches don’t all get along. There’s a dissident faction that wants to go on killing doppelgangers. We’re still working out how many of them there are, but there are some we know are loyal. They’ll protect you.”
“For how long?”
The blunt question produced a momentary silence. “I don’t know,” Mirei admitted at last. “I hope we get this cleared up quickly, but I can’t promise that we will.” She rubbed both hands over her scalp, looking tired. “I did make a promise to Jaguar, though, that I would train you two, for as long as I had you away from Silverfire. I’ll do what I can about that. Your reflexes may be better than mine, but I still know ten times as much as you do.”
Her grin faded as she looked to the other girl. “For you, the situation might be different. Here—I’m going to take your gag off, and untie you. Just don’t bite me, or start screaming again, or run away, okay?” Mirei knelt in front of the girl, received a wary nod, and began work on the knots. “You’ve already been taught to hate me because I’m a Silverfire, and now I’m a witch, too, which Hunters don’t like as a general rule. But I really am trying to help you, and I’ll train you if you’ll let me.”
The bonds were off, and the gag was gone. Mirei looked into the eyes of the shaven-headed girl. “What’s your name?”
The girl licked her lips, back still against the tree, and considered the question as if unsure whether it was some kind of trap. Finally she said, “Lehant.”
“Lehant. We . . . got off on the wrong foot. And for all I know, you don’t believe a word I say.” Mirei turned to eye all of them, finally noticing Indera again, but paying no particular attention to her. “Maybe none of you does. But I promised you an explanation, and I’ve given it to you, and I swear on the Warrior’s blade that it’s the truth.”
Looking back at Lehant, she added, “And I’ll train you with the other two, if you’re willing to learn. It won’t be the same as what you were getting at Thornblood, since our styles are different, and no doubt I’ll pay when people find out I taught a trainee of another school. But I’ll do it.”
Her words were one last blow to Indera’s already bruised heart. This bald stranger was a Thornblood. A trainee of the school Silverfires hated most. And Mirei was offering to teach her.
This was what Indera had been dragged out of Silverfire for. Away from where she was meant to be.
Mirei stood up from where she crouched by Lehant and cracked her back with a sigh. “Right. I’ve talked myself out, and it’s been a really long day for me. We’ll camp here for the night. Indera, you’re in charge of food. Amas, Lehant, take care of the horses and the bedrolls.”
“And you?” Amas asked, her tone cynical at the division.
Mirei smiled ruefully. “Well, since you know what I am, now, I don’t have to make up excuses to wander off while I cast a few spells. But don’t worry,” she added, as the others tensed at her words. “I won’t do them here.”
; She went a few steps away from the spring, paused, and looked back at them all. “Don’t think this means you can wander off, though. I’ll be watching.”
Then she vanished into the shadows under the trees, leaving the three girls to their tasks.
INDERA COOKED a quick broth, the other two settled them all for the night, and then everyone bedded down, Lehant with Mirei’s blankets.
Mirei set herself to sleep very lightly, because she wasn’t an idiot. Lehant clearly didn’t have much liking for her, especially after the way they had gotten started. Amas was a harder read, and questionable because of that; there was no way to tell which way the girl might jump. Mirei wanted to make sure neither of them tried to sneak away.
She set herself to sleep lightly, and with her bedroll under Lehant, it shouldn’t have been hard.
She slept like a rock, and woke late in the morning with a mouth that felt packed full of cotton.
Blearily, reflexes fighting against a pervasive lethargy, she rolled over and scanned the camp. Two horses, not three. Two doppelgangers—not three.
Lehant and Amas were still there.
But Indera was gone.
Chapter Eight
WHETHER ARINEI WAS the source of the murmurs, Satomi could not discover. But they spread through Starfall like wildfire in the wake of Eikyo’s test.
She failed because Shimi wasn’t there.
They shouldn’t have broken tradition.
It made Satomi want to scream. She had perfectly solid answers to those murmurs, but she couldn’t use a one of them. She couldn’t tell them that Eikyo hadn’t failed; that would negate the entire purpose of the exercise. And she couldn’t tell them that other witches had been tested by a Key, because no one below the rank of Key was allowed to know that.
The unrest came at a bad time. Mirei hadn’t reported in; Satomi had sent three separate queries to her through her counterpart to the sheet of enchanted paper the woman had taken with her, but none of them had been answered. She couldn’t send anything more directly, because she didn’t know where Mirei was, and she couldn’t find Mirei because the woman—understandably—had a blocking spell up.
Witch Page 11