Witch

by Marie Brennan

  THE TWO SCARS DIDN’T MATCH.

  Eclipse took a small amount of solace in the fact that he still had enough of a sense of humor to think such thoughts. The old scar was greenish-brown; if the tales older Hunters told were true, that meant an Earth witch had cast the blood-oath spell. He’d never found out for sure. The new one, though, was silvery-white. Air, he assumed. They looked odd, side by side.

  At least only one of them still had the power to kill him. The old commission was fulfilled.

  He dragged his eyes away from the scar and looked to the road ahead. The witches had knocked him out and dumped him on the road, so he had no idea where he’d been, but now he was almost to Silverfire. It was the best start he could think of. Mirei had taken with her the enchanted paper that allowed them to communicate with the rebel witches who had given them that old commission; he had no way to contact them now, except to look in the places where he’d met them before, and if they had the brains the Goddess gave mice they wouldn’t be there. So he had to start with Jaguar.

  One of whose people he was sworn to kill. And Eclipse couldn’t tell him that. Or where he had been.

  The Silverfire wall appeared on the horizon all too quickly.

  The guard was familiar to him: Sickle, the oldest Silverfire still living, whom some said could have been Grandmaster if he had wanted to spend his silver years with the daily headaches the position carried. He’d been clever enough to pass the job off to Jaguar.

  Sickle might be old, but his eyes were still sharp. He shouted to Eclipse before the rider even reached the wall. “Go straight in. They’ve been looking for you.”

  Eclipse swore yet again and put his gelding to a gallop.

  The wall stood a goodly distance from the school itself; he covered that distance in record time. Briar emerged from the stables to see who was arriving in such a hurry, and opened his mouth as Eclipse reined to a halt. “I know,” Eclipse said, and threw the reins to Briar as he slid from his saddle. “I’m already going.”

  The ground-floor room of the building that served as Silverfire’s administrative heart was dim, after the brightness of the day. The voice seemed to emerge out of nowhere, before Eclipse’s eyes could adjust. “Where in the Void have you been?”

  “Where’s Jaguar?” Eclipse asked. “They said you’ve been looking for me.”

  “We have,” Slip said acidly. “So nice of you to drop in. The stubble looks lovely. Jaguar’s in the main salle, evaluating the twenties.”

  Back out into the sunlight, now just as blinding as the darkness inside had been. But Eclipse’s feet knew the way; he crossed the compound and went into a low building with many oilskin windows to let in the light.

  Inside, there was a large, open room with benches and practice equipment lining the walls. Some of the benches were occupied by lean people in dusty uniforms who looked, to Eclipse’s jaded eye, like fresh-faced young idiots. The oldest class of trainees at Silverfire—those few who had made it through the ten years of grueling work—they no doubt thought they were ready to take on the world. But Eclipse had been on the road for five years, and neck-deep in witch business since before Midsummer; to him, they looked like green fools.

  The pair of men at the far wall were a different story. Both far older than he was, they were watching two of the trainees chase each other around the inside of the salle, blades flashing in the light. Their eyes flicked up at Eclipse’s entrance, though, and the older of the two straightened at the sight.

  “Continue,” Jaguar said to Granite, the advanced weapons master, and beckoned sharply for Eclipse to come to him. Eclipse dropped his salute, crossed the room in the fighters’ wake, and followed the Grandmaster through a small door at the back.

  The room was an office shared by the Silverfire combat masters; the walls were decorated with charts showing which classes were doing what work at what hours under which instructor, and the shelves held stacks of sheets with observations about each trainee’s progress. It was a time-honored tradition among the trainees to try to break into this room and look at their own records. Eclipse himself had not succeeded at the task until he was eighteen. Now, it seemed insignificant.

  “Sir,” Eclipse said, before Jaguar could get started, “I have a question I need to ask you.”

  The Grandmaster gave him a narrow, measuring look. “All right.”

  Eclipse rolled up his right sleeve and displayed the two mismatched scars. “If you violate a blood-oath, how exactly does it kill you?”

  Jaguar had gone still at the sight. He knew about the first commission; in fact, he had chosen Eclipse to carry it out, no doubt knowing that Eclipse would choose Mirage as his partner for it. To show up with a second scar so soon, though . . .

  “If you break your oath,” Jaguar said, his voice low even though they were alone in the room and the door was shut, “then the scar begins to bleed. And no bandage or spell will stop it.”

  I wonder how long it will take me to bleed to death through one wrist, Eclipse thought with detached curiosity. If it starts, I’m going to tell Void-damned everything I can before I die. Because at that point, it won’t matter.

  “How—” Jaguar began. Eclipse stopped him with an upraised hand, fully aware of how badly he was violating protocol and the respect due to the Grandmaster.

  “Sir, unless you want to run the risk of me bleeding to death right here in this office, please let me explain what I can, and forgive me for what I can’t tell you.”

  That silenced the older man. He knew the standard wording of the blood-oath as well as anyone, and this had nothing to do with it. Which meant, without Eclipse saying it outright, that he’d sworn a modified version of the oath. And probably not by choice.

  Now, the coldly rational part of his mind said, I find out how far I can go without dying. Carefully. And depend on Jaguar’s ability to listen to how I say things, and hear what isn’t said, and put the pieces together.

  And hope the Goddess doesn’t blast me for giving things away semi-on–purpose. They told me I couldn’t say stuff. Not that I couldn’t betray it by other means.

  The intent had been obvious. The wording hadn’t. Hopefully the loophole would be enough.

  Eclipse took a deep breath. “Sir. The first commission is finished, you’ll be glad to know. I haven’t seen my employers in a while, so I haven’t been able to collect the rest of my fee, or ask for the boons I’m due.” Taking this damn thing off me will be boon number one.

  Jaguar nodded, processing this information, hopefully picking out the hint that the original set of witches were not the ones who had placed this second oath on him.

  So far, so good. “Unfortunately,” Eclipse went on, “I can’t tell you where I’ve been.” True in two senses; even without the oath, he still didn’t know specifics. “But I have other information I’m supposed to give you, which Mirage asked me to bring here.”

  “I know,” the Grandmaster said. “It’s how we knew to be missing you. She showed up here not long ago.”

  The bottom dropped out of Eclipse’s stomach, sickeningly. “She’s here? Mi—Mirage?” He’d almost said Mirei.

  Unblinking, Jaguar took in his reaction. And the stutter. “I know what she sent you to tell me, and more besides,” he said. “I know how she’s changed. She came here to take the two trainees—the doppelgangers—to Starfall.”

  His words took Eclipse completely by surprise. “To Starfall?”

  “She said it was the only place where they would be safe.”

  The world inverted around Eclipse, leaving him with no clue which way was up. How long had he been gone, and what in the Void had happened while he was? “Last time I spoke to her, Starfall was the danger.”

  “Not anymore,” Jaguar said. “Not exactly. She said there were problems among the witches. The Air Prime still wants to kill these girls. And she knows where they are—or rather, where they have been—so those who want to keep them alive are taking them to Starfall.” His aged faced shifted in
to hard, bitter lines. “They were not safe here.”

  “But the other Primes are on her side now?” Eclipse asked, trying to wrap his mind around the sudden change. “Where is Mirei?”

  He would have taken the question back if he could have. As long as he didn’t know that, he was one step further away from having to kill her or die. And that impulse, his dread of the answer, must have shown on his face, because Jaguar went instantly wary.

  “We don’t—” the Grandmaster began, then checked himself. “Mirei?”

  Did I just make two mistakes at once? “I thought you said you knew how she’s changed.”

  “I do,” Jaguar said. “But ‘Mirei’?”

  “It’s who she is, now. The Goddess gave her a new name.”

  “The Goddess,” Jaguar repeated, his tone flat.

  “When she became whole again. When Miryo and Mirage became a single person.”

  The Grandmaster’s eyes had narrowed again, taking this in. Eclipse glanced down and saw that the man’s hands had gone tense, where they hung at his sides. “I thought,” Jaguar said, “that it was a spell.”

  “It was.” How had Eclipse gotten saddled with trying to explain this? Nearly everything he knew about the theory behind magic, he’d learned from eavesdropping on Miryo’s explanations to Mirage. That hardly qualified him for this. “Magic is religious, apparently. New spells get invented through divine inspiration; particularly devoted witches learn how to do new things. Or something like that. Miryo and Mirage were praying, and then poof, they were one person again. And she told me the Goddess had given her a new name, like she did for the first witch.”

  Jaguar shook his head, with an expression more unguarded than any Eclipse had seen on him before. “So she really isn’t the woman we knew.”

  Eclipse shrugged awkwardly. “Kind of. She half is and half isn’t.”

  “I know.” The Grandmaster sighed and sank down to lean against the edge of the desk. “I knew. She told me that. But hearing a different name . . . makes it harder.”

  Time for another gamble, Eclipse thought, and hoped for luck. “I said something like that not too long ago myself, about her not being my year-mate anymore. I didn’t really mean it, but sometimes people take you seriously anyway.”

  And that visibly snapped Jaguar’s attention back to the clue of a moment before, forgotten in the confusion over Mirei’s name. “You wanted to know where she is.”

  “Might be useful, if I had some reason to find her,” Eclipse said, not even trying to pretend his attitude matched the casual words.

  “I imagine she might like to see you,” Jaguar said, watching him closely.

  “At first, sure. Might not be real happy with me for long, though.”

  Jaguar nodded, slowly, gaze still intent. “Well, as I started to say a moment ago, we don’t know where she is. We even got a message from Starfall, asking what’s happened to her. I don’t think anyone can find her.”

  Relief washed over Eclipse, taking away a tiny fraction of his tension. Looks like the Goddess is on my side, at least a little. “I might have to go looking for her, then. I wonder how long that’ll take.”

  It was enough. Jaguar gave a quick, sharp nod, and Eclipse knew to shut his mouth before he could say the wrong thing and bleed to death. The message had been conveyed, without ever being said outright. The Grandmaster knew what job he had sworn to.

  Now, Eclipse thought, let’s find the bitches who did this to me.

  Chapter Eleven

  THE CONVOY THAT TRAVELED south to Starfall was not a subtle one.

  Witches, Cousins, eleven-year-old girls, and one prisoner tied up in the back of a wagon under constant guard; there were over twenty women in the group, all told. Satomi was taking no more chances. Well, almost none; she had ordered Mirei back to Starfall, told her to translocate and let the others catch up later.

  Mirei had refused.

  She owed it to the girls to stay. To Amas and Lehant, anyway; Indera wasn’t speaking to her. Mirei had promised Jaguar to train them, and had semi-promised the same thing to them directly. She was the Grandmaster of this minuscule school, and the closest thing they had to a friend in this group of strangers. She couldn’t abandon them.

  Satomi had disagreed. Mirei had ignored her. She was not looking forward to the confrontation she expected when she arrived with them in Starfall.

  But for now, she rode south, and trained the girls as they went. Indera sulked at first, refusing to participate, but in the end her love of her body’s strength won out; she was silent as she trained, but driven. As if she was going to enjoy every minute of this while she could.

  As if, perhaps, she was hoping she could get strong enough to escape for real. But Mirei would worry about that later.

  They were more than halfway to the domain’s border when Amas finally worked up the nerve to ask Mirei the question that had clearly been on her mind for some time. “What’s it like?” the doppelganger asked, her voice quiet, barely audible over the irregular rhythm of hooves along the hard-packed dirt of the road. “Meeting . . . the other one?”

  Even though it was Amas, the ever-level, Mirei could hear the unease behind the words. For the first time, she considered that in some ways it had truly been easier for the Mirage half of herself, not knowing that the meeting was going to happen.

  “Odd,” she said after some consideration. Lehant, riding to her left, edged her own horse closer to hear. The girl’s hair was growing out into a coppery stubble; she looked very different without the smooth scalp. “I won’t pretend it’s anything less than odd. But it isn’t bad.”

  “You don’t sound very sure,” Lehant said.

  Mirei shook her head. “You’ve got to understand the situation I was in. The witch-half of me, Miryo, was trying to convince herself to kill the doppelganger-half of me. Mirage, on the other hand, had no idea Miryo even existed. So from the one perspective, it was all shock and confusion and the very real possibility that I was going to die, while from the other, it was fear and revulsion and the very real possibility that I was going to kill someone. Not a very good way to begin.”

  She paused, looking without seeing at a spot between her horse’s ears. She was back on Mist, the gray mare she’d left in Angrim when she rejoined, and the saddle felt like an old friend. “Yet for all of that . . . I was meeting myself. That’s the only way to describe it.”

  The dull thudding of hooves on hardpack filled the silence before Amas said, “But you didn’t know her. The witch.”

  “Or the doppelganger,” Mirei reminded her. “I know you look at me and see Mirage, but I’m both. Neither half of me knew the other. But it didn’t matter, and that’s the point. That’s what made it so strange. There was familiarity, even though I’d never seen myself before. Seen the other half of me, that is.”

  Lehant jerked her chin over her shoulder at where Indera rode among a guard of very beefy and well-armed Cousins. “You think that’ll convince her?”

  Mirei hoped meeting Sharyo would soothe Indera’s fears, but it might not be that easy. “I pray so,” she said. “For her sake.”

  More silence, more riding; Lehant seemed about to move off when Amas asked one last question.

  “What are their names?”

  Mirei closed her eyes and ran through the list in her mind, pairing girls up. Urishin was Naspeth’s doppelganger; there would be no meeting between them, yet. The witch Mirei had captured was tied up in the wagon that trundled along in their wake, heavily guarded; whether she knew anything of use would have to wait for others to discover. There were no other leads on the missing girls as yet.

  “Yours is Hoseki,” Mirei said. “Lehant’s is Owairi. You’ll meet them soon enough.” And Indera will meet hers sooner than she wants to.

  THEY DID NOT STOP for the night in Samalan. Everyone who had been recruited for the escort plainly felt they would only be safe once they crossed the border into Starfall, or better yet, once they reached the settlement. With
a witch tied up in a wagon behind them and three walking targets in their midst, Mirei couldn’t argue it. And by then the trainees were tough enough to stick out the extra hours in the saddle.

  The town, lying on the border between Starfall and Currel, was familiar to Mirei; she had passed through it more than once. She described it to the girls as they rode by its western edge, giving them details on the witches who lived there, the inn she had stayed at, the effort it took to make sure the townspeople didn’t gouge travelers with their prices.

  Nothing terribly exciting on its own, but the trainees’ interest in her words was clear enough that she kept talking as they rode on. It was easy to forget that none of them had journeyed much from home; these southern mountains were exotic and new to them. If they were to be expected to stay here for long, of course they would want to know what the place was like.

  So Mirei told them about the domain of Starfall, which had been her home for fifteen years. With fond detail, she described the orchards on these slopes, the farms on the coastal plateaus, worked mainly by Cousins, with assistance from Earth witches who kept the weather in balance. The main settlement lay in the mountains proper, and she told them what to expect when they came there. She sang the sentry spells into quiet, and explained about their presence; she mentioned that there would be guards when they reached the Starfall settlement, but did not bring up the patrols in the area. If Indera was hoping to escape again, no sense giving her extra information.

  They arrived in the settlement after dusk, when hardly anything could be seen of the place but the dark bulks of the various buildings and the lofty, glowing windows of Star Hall. No reconstruction had yet been done on the shattered crossing; jagged edges of stone still outlined themselves against the stars. That was a story she still hadn’t told them.

  It would have to wait. Mirei hadn’t even dismounted yet in the front courtyard when a Cousin was at her stirrup. “The Void Prime commands your presence.”

  “I’ll bet she does,” Mirei murmured under her breath, too quiet for the woman to hear, then raised her voice to the rest of the group. “They have rooms for you. I’ll come find you tonight if I get a chance. If not, then be out here at dawn.”