“Good.” Satomi sang again, more briefly, and around her Mirei felt the spell subside.
The Void Prime returned to her desk and sat down. “Now,” she said, her tone more businesslike. “We have tasks for you here. See Hyoka after you leave me; she will give you the details of the tests she wants to conduct.”
“How long will those take?” Mirei asked.
Satomi favored her with a cool look, devoid of any sign of the compassion she had shown moments before. “As long as they have to.”
Mirei told herself to accept that and not argue. She’s right: It is important. And it would give her time to research some more immediately pressing questions.
Like how to keep Eclipse from dying.
PART TWO
Chapter Twelve
EDAME WAITED until the heavy, carved door had swung shut and they were alone in the room before she turned to Mirei and raised one eyebrow wryly. “Well,” she said, “that could have gone better. But it also could have gone worse.”
Mirei dropped bonelessly back into the plush embrace of her chair. “I know.”
The Fire Hand shrugged philosophically. She wasn’t much older than Mirei—surprisingly young to be a domain-level adviser—but her experience here in Haira, working with Lord Iseman and Lady Terica, meant that meetings like the one just concluded were old, familiar territory for her. “Don’t be too discouraged,” she said, her face reassuming much of the cocky cast it usually wore. “The ministers may be giving you squint-eyed looks, but you have Iseman and Terica on your side, and that’s what counts. They can work on the ministers for you. Or just step on them, if it comes to that.”
Rubbing her eyes in weary silence, Mirei tried to take encouragement from the words. She did have the Lord and Lady of Haira on her side, and that was no small thing. A deft bit of diplomacy—mostly Edame’s work and Satomi’s, but Mirei had done her part, too—had turned some of their most inflexible opponents into their strongest allies.
The married couple who ruled this domain were staunch Avannans, followers of a sect that was strong in Haira. Avannans honored a form of ceremonial Dance as the highest form of worship. The body in motion was the domain of the Warrior. Therefore, Avannans revered the Warrior particularly. A neat little chain that had, in the past, made them not particularly friendly—though not actively hostile—to witches, for the Warrior was by far the most neglected Aspect among Starfall’s people.
Edame had used that very dislike to get her Lord and Lady on Satomi’s side. Or rather, on Mirei’s.
Mirei was not only a former Temple Dancer herself; she was a correction of the very imbalance that had set Avannans against witches. Once that was made clear, Iseman and Terica had seen it almost as a divine duty to help the witches make this change. In other words, to oppose the dissidents under Shimi and Arinei.
Mirei would have taken more comfort from that knowledge if she weren’t so tired. Haira was not the only place Satomi had been sending her over the last few months, since she brought the doppelgangers to Starfall. In fact, she’d ricocheted all over the land, going to every domain but Kalistyi. She was both the strongest advocate they had for the new way, and the only one who could get herself to wherever she needed to be without losing weeks in travel. Not all the places she went, though, were success stories like Haira.
This domain was on their side. So was Eriot, the other major center of Avannan worship. Kalistyi, on the other hand, was solidly with Shimi’s people. The rest were a patchwork of political battlegrounds, and Mirei was not cut out for politics.
She must have said that last out loud, because Edame laughed and said, “No offense, but I agree. Not this kind of politics, anyway. But you’ll have to learn to do some of this, if you’re going to survive in the Void Ray.”
That startled Mirei into dropping her hands and staring up at the Fire Hand. “I what?” Sometimes it was hard to follow Edame’s mercurial shifts, but this one had truly come out of nowhere. “I’m not going to be in the Void Ray. I’m planning on choosing Air.” She hadn’t even thought about that for a while. The troubles among the witches had driven such traditions straight out of her head.
Edame pursed her lips in a way that meant she was trying not to grin and said, “Sure.”
“I mean it,” Mirei said, sitting upright.
“Oh, I don’t doubt you mean it. That’s not where you’re going, though.” Edame looked at her, then made an exasperated noise. “Oh, come on, Mirei. Either you’re ignoring it on purpose, or this blinking about that you do confuses the brain worse than I thought; there’s no way you’re dumb enough to miss it otherwise. You’re being groomed, my dear.”
“For what? Void Prime?” Mirei said it sarcastically, and got raised eyebrows in return. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Who else is like you are? Sure, there’ll be more eventually, but right now, we’ve got precisely one of you.”
“So?” Mirei raked her hair out of her face in irritation. It was getting longer; she needed to decide whether to cut it Hunter-style again, or let it grow out. What are you doing, dodging her point? “The Rays don’t have to do with magic—come on, you know that! They’re about who you work with and what problems you solve. And the Keys and the Primes are administrative jobs, organizational ones. Being able to use Void magic doesn’t give me a damn bit of qualification for that.”
Edame nodded, infuriatingly smug. “Which is why they’re grooming you. So that you’ll get qualified.” Smugness faded to exasperation. “Do you really think they’re going to let the first witch of your kind live out her life as some random Air Hand? They’re going to keep you at Starfall—when they’re not sending you on training runs—make you a Void Key the first chance they get, and then stick you in Satomi’s place when she croaks.”
Mirei remembered to close her mouth so she wouldn’t sit there gaping like a landed fish. That’s not what I want to do with my life, she thought, and then So? What you wanted was never going to carry much weight. Not since you decided to be all clever and find a new way of doing things.
“Uh-huh,” Edame said, as if she could read Mirei’s thoughts. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
They left the chamber where they’d met with the council of ministers, and went through the halls of Haira Keep back to the guest quarters where Mirei was being housed. They kept them in readiness for her, these days; she was in and out often enough to merit it.
Their path took them through a small hall Mirei remembered very well. The chairs and curtain that had been there were gone, leaving the room empty, but she recognized the lurid sunset mural on one wall and the galleries that overlooked from above. Temple Dancers had performed here, once, dancing the Aspects of the Goddess for the Avannan devout of Haira.
Edame, seeing that Mirei had lagged behind, paused. After a moment, she asked, “How strange is it?”
It was the first time the Fire Hand had ever asked about Mirei’s experiences. For all her garrulous chatter, it was the one topic she had conspicuously avoided.
Mirei shook her head, still looking around, remembering the various Dances and the responses they’d called up from her unstable magic. “Not as strange as it was. If I stop and think about it, I know that some of my memories are Miryo’s, and some are Mirage’s. But these days, if I don’t stop, then they’re my memories. That’s all. I just have more of them than most people do.”
“It makes me wonder,” Edame said softly, then stopped.
Wonder what her doppelganger would have been like. Wonder what it would feel like, had she become what Mirei was now. It was a sentiment Mirei had heard from dozens of witches, all aware of what they had lost. She had no answers for them, or for Edame, either, and after an awkward moment of silence, they continued on out of the hall.
“SO YOU’RE LEAVING again?” Edame asked, as Mirei folded a shirt and tucked it into her pack.
“Again,” Mirei said, trying not to make it a groan.
“Where to?”
&
nbsp; “Back to Starfall. Satomi’s promised me I can take a break.” Not very willingly, but the Void Prime had promised. Mirei had nearly resorted to admitting how much of a toll translocation exacted from her. The spell was an exhausting one, but its usefulness was such that Satomi was constantly sending her to one domain after another, back to Starfall, back out again, like a hawk being trained to fly from the wrist.
Edame nodded. “Tell her there’s a new delegation arriving from Teria soon, and that we’ll go to work on them. Could be I can wheedle some support out of them.”
That was a political task Satomi hadn’t assigned to Mirei, so she gratefully left it to Edame. She slung the pack over her shoulders, tied it in place, and went into the sitting room. The furniture that had once occupied it was mostly gone; she had less need of furniture than of space. With Edame watching—the Fire Hand had seen it often enough that it no longer startled her, though she watched every time—Mirei used her voice and body to weave the spell that would take her back to Starfall.
She landed hard, it seemed, or perhaps it was just the vertigo that overtook her as she arrived. Her ears rang and her vision momentarily grayed out; she took two lurching steps before catching herself and waiting for it to clear.
She felt a hand under her elbow. When she could see again, the hand proved to be Rigai’s. The Void witch was a tiny thing, a full head shorter than Mirei and slender enough to break in a good wind, but she looked prepared to catch Mirei should she fall. Or at least prepared to try. “Are you all right?”
“Headache,” Mirei said through her teeth. Rigai led her across the room that had been set aside as her translocation target, seated her in one of the few remaining chairs, and pulled a feather out of one sleeve. Seeing it, Mirei said, “Were you waiting for me?”
“Hyoka said you were due back this afternoon.” Rigai sang quietly, brushing the feather across Mirei’s forehead. The sensation of power weaving into a lacework made Mirei wince, but then its effect settled in, and the pain receded. “I thought you might need help,” the witch said when she was done, tucking the focus away once more.
Mirei didn’t want to think about the predictability of that need. “Thanks. I promised to work with the girls today. And no doubt I’ve got paperwork waiting for me, too.” Would they really try to make her a Void Key? She hadn’t even been inducted into the Ray yet.
“Before you go,” Rigai said as Mirei made to rise, “I’d like a moment of your time. I believe I may have found something that could help you.”
Moments of Mirei’s time were a vanishing commodity these days, but Rigai’s words nailed her back into her chair. One of Mirei’s first actions after returning to Starfall with the doppelgangers had been to call in one of the three boons she and Eclipse were owed from their commission. She’d asked for help in finding ways to break a blood-oath, and Rigai had been taking care of archival research for them.
Had been. “I thought you weren’t working on that anymore,” Mirei said.
“I wasn’t,” Rigai admitted. The archival approach had proved fruitless, so they’d given it up. “But I came across something while researching a subject Satomi-aken assigned to me.”
Knowing Satomi, that could be anything. Mirei tried not to feel too hopeful; there had been dead ends before. Still . . . “What is it?”
Rigai sat down in a chair opposite her and folded her hands neatly in her lap. “The Prime asked me to look into the history of the Nalochkan sect. She hopes that knowing more about them will help us against Shimi and Lady Chaha.”
The woman’s mind worked at odd angles, but this seemed odder than most—what could it have to do with the oath? Mirei was willing to clutch at any strand of hope she was offered, though; they were few enough already, and the danger to Eclipse grew with every day. She bit her tongue and waited for Rigai to explain.
The witch seemed more hesitant to do so than usual. “The first thing you must remember is that the text I found this in is very old. It’s a copy of an earlier manuscript from the opening days of the Three Kingdoms period, from Tserenar, and the practices it references are even older than that. They may well predate Misetsu’s miracle.”
As Starfall’s view of history tended to begin with Misetsu, disregarding practically everything before her, that was especially startling. And how can this help with the blood-oath, if it’s before magic?
“The warlords of eastern Tserenar had a practice at the time,” Rigai went on, warming to her subject. Like most of Hyoka’s theory witches, she could talk endlessly about her pet research. “If one of them fell ill and seemed in danger of dying, then his priests would attempt to appease the Warrior, so she would not take his life.”
Now that sounds more promising. The Warrior is the one who judges a blood-oath. “Did it work?” Mirei asked, mostly succeeding at keeping her voice level. Everything else had led to a dead end so far. Breaking the crystal used in the ritual would do nothing. No healing could save him once his judgment came. She had no way of canceling or counteracting the spell, and even if it was possible for the original caster to release him from it, she didn’t know who that had been.
“The stories say it did, but we must take them with more than a few grains of salt, I’m afraid. The common folk today claim efficacy for various charms and wards, but many witches have studied them, and have found no proof that they function. There’s a theory that such practices may have held more power before the advent of true magic, but we have no way of proving that.”
Mirei forced a smile. “I’ll try anything. What did they do?”
Rigai hesitated again, and the reason was soon clear. “They offered the Warrior a different life in place of the one they feared to lose.”
“Another life?” Mirei looked at the witch’s expression, and felt her budding euphoria drain away. “You don’t mean—”
“Human sacrifice.”
Mirei stared at her. “You’re joking.”
“Not at all. The Nalochkans arose as a sect because they abhorred this practice. Over time, that attitude grew into an abhorrence for the Warrior, who supposedly accepted such gruesome trades. From there, it was a short step to demonize that Aspect, and name her an entity entirely separate from the other four faces of the Goddess. There was an offshoot sect, the Velejkans, who denied the existence of the Warrior entirely, claiming she was a false and powerless idol, but they died out during—” Rigai saw Mirei’s face, and broke off. “At any rate, this is how I came to uncover the reference.”
“Are you suggesting,” Mirei said, “that I kill someone else to save Eclipse?” She ignored the vision of Ice dancing in the back of her mind, and the vision of Shimi.
Rigai at least had the decency to look startled. She probably had considered it, but only in the distant, theoretical way the witches of the Head tended to. The idea that Mirei might do it had likely never crossed her mind.
“I just thought it might be of use,” Rigai said. “A new angle for you to follow. Undoing the oath isn’t really your goal; saving this man’s life is. Without, of course, losing your own. If you can find a way to do that, then the rest is irrelevant.”
From a practical standpoint, she was right. And Mirei was not about to stomp on the one lead she’d been offered in weeks. “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll think about it.”
“How is he doing?” Rigai asked, hesitant once more.
Mirei shrugged and looked away, gazing across the mostly empty room. It wasn’t hard to visualize him there, his face drawn and shoulders sagging with weariness. Jaguar said he wasn’t sleeping well. “I don’t exactly know. We’re not communicating directly; it isn’t safe.”
“No, of course not,” Rigai said. The silence that followed hung leaden in the air. Mirei hated not being able to talk with him. Their partnership on the commission had reminded her how well they worked together, and he’d been her main support during the long days when she fought not to kill herself. She missed him fiercely, and the knowledge that she might be responsible,
however indirectly, for his death . . . that burned like poison.
Rigai said, “I’m sure you’ll find an answer soon.”
She wasn’t at all sure, and they both knew it, but Mirei appreciated the words nonetheless. Lies of that sort were the only comfort she had these days.
TWO COUSINS FOLLOWED HER as she went through the corridors. Their presence drove Mirei up the wall, and she was grateful that Iseman and Terica had refused to allow her a permanent escort in Haira; otherwise, Satomi would have given her a pair of babysitters there, too. Mirei wasn’t sure what the point of their presence was, other than to make her feel like an idiot. If someone attacked her, she had more ways of defending herself than the Cousins did. But while she was at Starfall, Satomi refused to let her go unattended.
At least they stayed outside her quarters, taking up sentry positions on either side of the door. And there was one perk to Satomi’s concern for security: Mirei had been given the rooms vacated when Shimi fled from Starfall. Keys and Primes always lived under at least a minor guard, just in case, and the rooms were much more defensible than the usual quarters allotted to new witches.
Mirei tossed her pack on a chair. She still wasn’t used to having a Cousin serving as her personal maid, but at least there she could see the point of having one. There were other things demanding her time and attention, things that a Cousin could not take care of.
Like Satomi’s little spying program.
The latest message from Eikyo was discreetly buried in a stack of unrelated papers. Satomi had assigned Mirei to work with her friend, but there wasn’t much “with” to it; Eikyo sent messages, Mirei translated them out of code, and Satomi presumably did something with the information. Mirei couldn’t risk translocating messages directly to Eikyo, and anything sent with the usual packets to the Cousins had no guarantee of getting to her friend. In all likelihood, Eikyo didn’t even know that Mirei was the one reading her messages.
Bit by bit, the information had dribbled in. Some of it wasn’t of much use. They complained about their work, but no more, it sounded like, than normal people would. Some of them were mildly resentful of witches, but some weren’t, just as people felt about their Lords. Nothing in particular there.
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