As Mirei’s illusion was that of a boy, she didn’t bother to argue. But she was done here; none of these had seen or heard anything about Indera. Time to move on. Ideally without getting into a fight.
“Look,” she said, dropping her tone confidentially and coming a couple of steps closer to the boy. “I ain’t gonna stay. I just wanna find that girl. She beat up my little brother real bad the other day, an’ her father told her she was gonna get a hiding, so she run off here. I wanna get her for that. Lemme on through, an’ I’ll get her out of here.”
It came dangerously close to insulting the boy’s strength. “You think we cain’t get rid of her ourselves?”
Mirei responded with her own indignation. “It weren’t your brother she beat up. I got a claim on her. Ain’t gonna let her walk away from that.”
Revenge and the restoration of pride were motives these children could understand. The leader couldn’t just back down, though; he had to make it into a favor, generosity on the part of the big man. “You just walk on through,” he said, stretching to loom over Mirei. “You don’t stop. You don’t stop until you get to the Cripples’ Corner, understand? I don’t want you on my streets. But I’ll let you through them.”
Mirei assumed the Cripples’ Corner would be easy enough to identify. “Thanks. I’ll find her before long.”
And that much, she hoped, was true.
She spread the same story in other places, knowing Amas and Lehant were peddling their own version from the other side of the Knot. At least they had started out at opposite sides; in the murky tangle of alleys, tunnels, bridges, and rooms that made up the place, it was impossible to keep a sense of direction for long. Mirei just hoped they’d all be able to find their way out at the end of the day. She should have made some way for them to contact each other. But putting spells into objects was even more finicky than illusion work, and not something she had ever tried before.
“I don’t know where she is,” the ninth or tenth kid she spoke to said. This one was a real piece of work, filthy, pox-scarred, and missing half her teeth. “But I can help you look. I can guide you through the streets.”
Help couldn’t hurt; Mirei had already gone in circles twice, thanks to the tortuous layout of the Knot. Still, she had to keep up her act. She gave the girl a suspicious look. “What do you want for the help?”
The girl thought it over for a moment. “If you give me a wheel, I’ll do it.”
“You think I got a silver?” Mirei said incredulously.
The girl looked defensive. “You might. But I’ll help you for ten coppers.”
“Two,” Mirei returned. “You ain’t big enough to be worth ten.”
“Five.”
Warrior’s teeth, but she’s bad at bargaining. “Three.”
“Very well,” the girl said, and led her up a rickety staircase.
They explored an upper level for a while, but ran afoul of a pregnant woman who threw a kettle at them. Then it was back down to the street—at least Mirei thought it was the street. Up, down, through buildings, out doors, with only occasional lances of sunlight to show that the sky was still there.
Mirei’s “guide” was not much use. She didn’t seem to have much idea where she was going, and Mirei still had to do all the talking, questioning people for hints of Indera. And then they squeezed through a gap between two buildings and found themselves back at an intersection they’d passed through not long before.
The girl squirmed when glared at. “If I wanna go in circles, I don’t need you to help,” Mirei said.
“I’m sorry,” the girl muttered, and chose a new direction.
“You’re dumber than a cowpat,” Mirei said, following her, and wondered at the ineptitude. Why offer to be a guide, if she didn’t know her way around?
And then other oddities began to click into place.
The way the girl looked so much dirtier, so much less healthy, than the other street rats Mirei had seen.
The way her speech didn’t match her appearance—too polished, her grammar too good.
The way she seemed to be eavesdropping when Mirei questioned people.
A voice swam up out of her memory, from the Miryo part of her mind. The voice of Edame, the Fire Hand adviser to the Lord and Lady of Haira, when she dropped her illusion and revealed who she was.
“A tip, oh green one: If someone seems odd, check them for any kind of magic. Sometimes it’ll be a fellow witch in disguise. Sometimes it’ll be someone spelled by a witch, for any one of a number of purposes. Sometimes it’ll just be somebody odd. But it’s always good to know.”
But how to do it without the girl noticing? A few streets on, the problem solved itself. A clump of children were playing a game with stones and singing a song to go with it, some vulgar rhyme about dead rats. One of them was on pitch enough to call up a resonance from nearby spells.
Like the one on the “girl” who was her guide.
Mirei’s steps stuttered for a moment before recovering; she didn’t think the girl noticed. Walking on as if nothing were wrong, she resisted the urge to swear. A witch, or someone spelled by a witch? Either way, it’s somebody who never learned that there’s more to disguise than just the surface. Fortunately for me.
She was tempted to just take a rock to the back of the girl’s head. Witch or not, that would remove her from the situation. But then Mirei would be stuck with an unconscious body, and no Indera. Not ideal.
She decided to wait.
They’d moved into an area where there was even less light than usual; what there was filtered down through the structures above and didn’t give Mirei any help in judging the time. Amas and Lehant were under orders to leave the Knot at dusk and go to a nearby safe house Wisp had set up for them, but Mirei was considering staying. There might be things to learn in the Knot at night. Like, for example, how anyone saw where they were going once the sun went down in a place where lighting even a candle posed a serious risk of torching the entire mess.
Then she heard shouting up ahead, in the high-pitched voices of children, and hoped her search might end before it came to that. Trouble could be a sign of Indera.
When she and her false guide came to the source of the sound, sure enough, there was a figure backed up against a pile of splintered wood left behind by a collapsing wall. The floor of two conjoined buildings above their heads, barely visible in the murk, slanted dangerously, as if the whole thing might be in danger of caving in. Several street rats had formed an arc facing their target, and some of them had crude weapons in hand—but the figure they had trapped was a scrawny boy, not Indera.
A scrawny boy Mirei recognized quite well, because she had carefully detailed what he should look like earlier that day.
She cast a swift glance around, but there was no sign of the disguised Lehant. Void it—I told them not to split up! Mirei wondered whether she’d prefer for Lehant to be lying dead or unconscious somewhere instead of wandering on her own. It depended on how badly this turned out.
Amas, in her boy’s guise, was shouting at the pack facing her. “I didn’t cheat! Like I’d need to cheat at your stupid game—a blind donkey could’ve beaten you!”
Mirei had just enough time to wonder where the quiet, thoughtful Amas had gone, and why the girl had decided to imitate Indera at such a bad time, before the kids charged her.
She only just barely held herself back from jumping into the fray. There was no reason for the boy she appeared to be to get involved; he didn’t know these people. And she’d been avoiding scuffles all this time because she knew she couldn’t fake a real ten-year-old’s behavior in a fight. Her reflexes, though dulled, were far too highly trained. So she held herself back, and tried to think of a way to defuse this situation and find Lehant again.
While she thought, Amas moved.
She’d had less than a year’s training at Silverfire. She knew only a limited set of moves. But she was a doppelganger, and it showed.
Amas dodged the first blow so
fast it was almost comical. The lead boy, makeshift club in hand, stumbled past her and into the pile of broken planks. The second was there just a heartbeat behind him, with a jagged piece of metal he wielded like a knife; Amas slid to the outside of his strike and elbowed him hard in the kidneys.
Next to her, Mirei heard the girl who was not a girl inhale sharply at the sight.
Maybe the stranger had been about to sing. Maybe not. Mirei didn’t get the chance to find out, because everybody, even the beggar children now dog-piling Amas, stopped what they were doing at the sound of a yell.
Indera launched herself out of a crumbling window and onto the hard-packed dirt of the area. She rolled with the landing, her form impeccable, and came to her feet with a feral grin on her face. “Stop right there!” she announced grandly. “I’m not going to let you beat him up!”
“Indera, you stupid little bitch,” Mirei groaned, and then chaos broke loose again.
She ignored the brawl. It wasn’t the problem. The problem was standing next to her, in the form of the girl who had just heard her say that, who spun at the sound. The element of surprise was gone; there would be no braining this girl with a rock while she looked the other way.
Mirei didn’t punch her in the throat. Too much risk of collapsing the windpipe, and she wanted this one alive. But there were other ways to disrupt spells—if indeed this was a witch—and so she started by tackling the girl to the ground.
Or tried to. Mirei had forgotten that an illusion did nothing to change anyone’s weight, and slammed into the bulk of a fully-grown adult. Instead of falling, they staggered backward into the nearest wall, which creaked alarmingly at the impact. Mirei grunted and went for a choking grip; her hands locked down, but the girl began to claw at her wrists, raising bloody gouges. Still she hung on, gritting her teeth at the pain and dodging the occasional swipe at her eyes, and tried not to wonder how the brawl behind her was going.
The girl’s face contorted as she gasped for air, then went slack. Mirei held on, counting—and then let go in shock as the body beneath her hands transformed into a stout, red-haired woman.
Unconscious, she realized as the witch slumped bonelessly to the ground. Well, at least I don’t have to wonder how long to hold on for.
Then she turned around to the rest of the fight.
Indera had squandered the element of surprise—bad tactics, and a corner of Mirei’s mind made a note to chide her for that. But she’d obtained a cast-off horseshoe somewhere and was using it as a weapon, to devastatingly good effect; when the boy with the makeshift knife lunged at her with it, she hooked the blade out of the way, then smacked him over the head with the iron.
She’d also done Amas the service of breaking the focus on her. The dog pile had split up, some of them going for Indera, some of them staying with their original target, and the result was that there weren’t enough on either doppelganger to pose an effective threat. But there was still chaos and struggling, howls of pain and muffled curses.
And as they brawled back and forth in the claustrophobic little area, bodies and makeshift weapons thudding into walls, the structures creaked and swayed alarmingly.
Mirei shot a swift glance upward, but she was no architect; she couldn’t guess how likely the building was to collapse on them all. She just knew she didn’t want to risk it. The girls would survive it, or at least come back, but she wouldn’t.
So she gave up on the hope of maintaining her disguise in front of Indera. Whether or not the girl had pegged Amas for who she really was, there was no way she wouldn’t notice this.
Mirei waded into the fight. She went for the ones facing Amas first; as long as Indera was busy, she wouldn’t be running away. What should have been the work of mere moments for her took longer than expected—the slowing of her reflexes was nothing next to the oddity of a smaller body with the weight of an adult—but these were beggar children, and she was a Hunter. Amas was able to break away almost immediately, and then Mirei finished them off.
She turned in time to see Amas dive through Indera’s fight and club the other girl over the head.
When the last of the street rats was down for the count or fled, she stared at the scrawny boy the trainee appeared to be. “What in the Void was that for?”
Amas shrugged. “It’s easier than arguing with her, isn’t it?”
It was, but it wouldn’t make Indera feel too kindly toward her year-mate. Then again, Mirei was increasingly less concerned with how Indera felt. She could understand that the girl had some issues with her situation, but the problems she had led them into as a result . . .
One of which was lying on the ground not far away, her illusion fallen away with her consciousness. Mirei was getting heartily sick of smuggling comatose people through the most spy-ridden city in the world.
Which made her remember her concern of a short while before. “Where’s Lehant?”
Amas at least had the grace to look guilty as she shrugged this time. “I don’t know.”
Mirei ground her teeth, then made herself say levelly, “Where did you lose her?”
“I didn’t lose her,” Amas said. “We just decided to split up.”
“After I told you not to.”
“It was faster that way. And I lured Indera out of hiding, didn’t I?”
“Getting one back won’t do us a damn bit of good if we’ve lost another in the meantime.” Mirei stabbed a finger at the witch on the ground. “She was trying to find Indera. There may have been others. Lehant may be a prisoner now, thanks to your desire for efficiency.”
Amas at least had the sense not to have an answer to that. She looked at her bare feet and kept silent.
The light was virtually gone; it had to be nearly dark out. Mirei swallowed and forced herself to handle the immediate, manageable problems first. “We’re going back to the safe house. Bring Indera.” She herself would carry the unconscious witch, and the Mother’s mercy on anybody who got in her way now.
LEHANT WAS WAITING for them when they reached the safe house.
Mirei knew she was reaching the end of her rope when she realized she was angry at the trainee for being there, quietly, when everyone else had been in so much trouble. It was dark out by now; according to the instructions she’d given the girls, Lehant was right where she should be. Be angry about them splitting up, she told herself, but happy that you’re not having to break her out of witch custody, like you feared.
When she trusted herself to be calm, she sang a cancellation to the illusion and said, “Care to tell me why you decided to ignore half of what I told you?”
Lehant, unlike Amas, decided to have an answer. “Because it didn’t make sense.”
“It did make sense,” Mirei said, and unrolled the blanket she’d wrapped the witch in. The woman was stirring at last, but with her hands bound, her eyes covered, and her mouth securely gagged, there was only so much trouble she could cause. Mirei was willing to leave her be for the moment.
Lehant’s eyes widened. “Where did you get her?”
“In the Knot,” Mirei said. “Chasing Indera.”
“We were disguised. She wouldn’t have known us.”
“Unless you fought somebody, like Amas here, and showed yourself to be a doppelganger. I actually found myself hoping you’d run back to Thornblood—since the other likely alternative was that you’d been picked up by a witch.”
The words didn’t have the effect she’d intended. The shaven-headed trainee flinched and turned away, but the brief flash of expression Mirei caught was not one of guilt.
Concern distracted her from her irritation. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” Lehant said, but the flatness of her tone belied it.
“Share this ‘nothing’ with me.”
The thin shoulders shrugged. “Just—you don’t have to worry about me going back to Thornblood.”
It was meant to be reassuring, no doubt, but it wasn’t. “Why?”
She deliberately let the painful
silence that followed grow. And sure enough, after a while, it forced Lehant into speech again.
“You were right about Ice,” she mumbled. “I wanted to believe you weren’t, because you’re a Silverfire, but I knew you were right. And she’s not the only one.”
Mirei had a sudden, vivid memory of her own early time as a Hunter trainee. She followed the intuitive leap of Lehant’s last statement. “You’re not accepted there.”
Lehant still hadn’t turned around to face her. “Let’s just say Ice isn’t the only one who would have taken that kind of offer.”
What could she say to that? Everything that leapt to her lips was a standard-issue slander of Thornbloods, and this was not the moment for such a thing.
Then she heard what was behind Lehant’s words.
“You don’t have to go back,” she said gently. “When this is done, I’m going to make sure you all can go back, if you want to. But you don’t have to.”
Lehant faced her again at last, and her eyes glinted with unshed tears. “What else should I do? Live with a bunch of witches?”
The answer was there, and getting more comfortable all the time.
“Be a part of my new Hunter school,” Mirei said.
Chapter Ten
IN A ROOM WITHOUT WINDOWS, there were only so many ways to count time, and none of them were reliable.
If food came twice a day, then it had been thirteen days. If the witch who sang a spell over him—the same spell every time, but he didn’t know what it did—if she came once a day, then it had been seventeen days. But Eclipse suspected they were trying to throw off his count. He would have, in their place. The golden stubble on his jaw might be a more accurate measurement.
He retraced his capture in his mind, for the thousandth time; what else was there for him to do? There were only so many times he could analyze his situation and conclude that he had, at present, not a snowflake’s chance in a bonfire of escaping. They knew how to keep a Hunter imprisoned.
Mirei had arrived in his room, appearing out of nowhere after her miracle: that was at night. The next morning, he’d left before dawn to continue his journey to Silverfire.
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