Witch

by Marie Brennan

Tajio hesitated, seeming to struggle with herself. “I could help you,” she said finally. “Give you something to slip you past the guards. And once you’re gone, they can’t use magic to find you—you know about that, right? You’d have to fend for yourself after that—”

  Hope had blossomed in Indera’s heart at the offer. “Oh, I could do that,” she said eagerly. “I did it in Angrim. When they were hunting for me. I could do it again.”

  The witch smiled. “Okay, then. Will you let me cast a spell on you? It’ll keep the guards from noticing you go by.”

  Indera hadn’t made any preparations—no food, no last-minute study of maps. “Does it have to be now?”

  “Yes,” Tajio said. “Before they have a chance to do anything with Urishin, or guess that you might run away. I’m sure you’ll be fine,” she added, correctly guessing Indera’s fear. “You’re smart, and very resourceful. You won’t have any problems.”

  The confidence bolstered Indera’s courage. Biting her lip in nervousness, she nodded.

  “Give me a strand of your hair,” Tajio said, straightening. “I need it for the spell.” Indera plucked one out and handed it to her, then watched, fascinated. She’d seen witches cast spells in her months here—they did it all the time—but never anything like this.

  Twining the strand around her finger, Tajio began to sing quietly, incomprehensible syllables weaving up and down in a weird melody that sounded nothing like music, yet had a beauty of its own. Indera listened to it, entranced, and for one brief, fleeting moment, wished that she could feel the currents the adult witches talked about, the strands of power that came together to form a spell.

  But the desire was a stupid one, and she realized it quickly. She would never feel that power. She didn’t want to feel it; to do so, she’d have to be a witch herself. And she wasn’t a witch. She was a Hunter. Her life was out here, in the darkness of the night; her role was sneaking past guards, carrying out secret missions. Spying. Thievery.

  Assassination.

  To hunt, to fight—to kill.

  After all, she was chosen by the Warrior. She was the Warrior—the fifth, independent part of the human soul, pure and uncorrupted by the softer, weaker parts. That was who she was, and Indera embraced it fiercely, understanding for the first time what it meant. Reveling in the power that it held.

  And they wanted to take that from her.

  They wanted to steal the strength she had, and give it to someone else. They wanted to condemn her to a life of mediocrity, doom her to being like every other person in the world. Take away her gifts. Make her slow and weak, like everyone else. The thought infuriated her and her anger rose up like fire, warming her body and mind, until her pulse beat in her ears, a swift, steady rhythm.

  The answer was obvious. To escape that fate, she need only do what she had been made for.

  She was, after all, the Warrior.

  And she knew the Warrior’s role.

  THE SCREAMS BROKE THE QUIET of Starfall’s night, starting a chaos of noise and terror, women running through the halls, people flocking to see what had happened, and no one would make way for anyone else, so that those in charge had to fight their way through, elbowing and cursing and finally using magic, forcing a passage that let them into the room where Indera, staring-eyed and trembling, was pressed against the wall, face whiter than bone, hands red with blood, staring down at the body that had been the other half of herself.

  Satomi recognized that look. She had worn it, years before.

  The room was a public sitting area, with several entrances. More and more witches were crowding in. Witches and Cousins and, slipping among them, smaller bodies squeezing through gaps, students. Children.

  Including doppelgangers and their witch-halves.

  Satomi reached out blindly, grabbed a fistful of fabric, dragged some witch toward her and snapped unseeing, “Get them out of here.” Released, the witch began moving; Satomi paid only enough attention to be sure that she or someone else was taking care of the children, taking them away from the sight they should not see.

  The crowd was growing ever larger, women in back demanding to know what had happened, rumors flying faster than thought and warping as they went. It would be a panic, soon. Satomi gathered the fraying strands of her wits and began to sing. Her voice couldn’t be heard over the clamor, but it was enough for the Goddess; the power came, and with it Satomi forced everyone back, shoving them through the doorways, not caring who got bruised or stepped on, so long as they were gone.

  Leaving her alone in the room with the doppelganger and no one else. Satomi swallowed the scream that would have demanded Where in the Warrior-damned Void is Mirei?

  She couldn’t wait for Mirei, who knew Indera, who could calm her down. Satomi had to do it herself.

  She slammed a silencing spell down over the room, blocking out noise from outside, and with a last profligate expenditure of power flung the doors shut.

  In the quiet that resulted, Indera’s breathless, terrified whisper could be heard. “I—I—”

  Satomi knelt by Sharyo’s body and felt for a pulse. A formality; she knew the truth. Indera would not look like that if Sharyo were alive.

  She tried to damp down her fury so it would not show in her expression, and knew that she had failed.

  Indera pressed herself even farther into the corner she’d retreated to, as if she could meld with the stone by force of will. “I—I didn’t—she—it just—T-t-t-tajio said—”

  The name, the only marginally coherent thing out of Indera yet, brought Satomi to her feet. “What,” she asked, low and dangerous, “did Tajio say?”

  The banks broke; the river of Indera’s terror and horror poured out in a flood of words. “I don’t know she told me about the thing we can’t die that’s why they hadn’t killed them and I thought about it I guess but I never would have except that all of a sudden I wanted to—they said Urishin was going to do it and then you’d make us all do it and I didn’t want to, oh Goddess, Mother please, but I wouldn’t have done it I swear except suddenly I knew, I’d be free if she were dead and I knew that’s what I should do but I shouldn’t have and oh Mother, I should have left I should have run away Tajio said she’d help but she started singing and I just—I just—”

  And as the torrent came out, it cooled Satomi’s anger, turning her skin and blood to ice and fear. She opened her mouth again, but this time she sang no spell; it was a held note, modulating to feel out the edges of the dissipating power that still lingered about Indera like a clinging, invasive net.

  Mostly gone. They faded fast. But enough for her to be sure of what it was.

  A spell of persuasion.

  A spell, not to force—that couldn’t be done—but to take the impulses already there, to fan the sparks into flame, to make that which had been thought of and imperfectly dismissed seem like the proper thing to do.

  A spell to make Indera kill her other half.

  WITH THE SILENCING SPELL around the room, Satomi could not hear what went on outside.

  Others did, but Koika and a few others had tried to take control, to shepherd them away, and it took everyone a moment to realize the screams they heard were new ones, not Indera in her terror, but other girls.

  MIREI DID NOT UNDERSTAND what authority she held in Starfall until that night. Unranked, neither Key or Prime, not even a member of a Ray yet, she found others responding to her as if she were in charge, offering her information—garbled, contradictory, but enough for her to follow. She didn’t understand what had happened, but she knew it had to do with the doppelgangers, and enough people remembered which direction they’d been taken in that she could go in search.

  She flew down the hallways with rapid strides, almost running—and then a sudden scream from a door she’d just passed jerked her to a halt.

  The door, when she slammed into it, proved to be locked. She didn’t waste time with subtlety. Mirei blasted the door open and threw herself through the smoking wreckage, and foun
d herself facing horror.

  Her eyes took in bodies, small ones, on the floor, and knew with sick dread who they were, but she could ignore that for the moment, because her concern was with the standing figure, the woman at the far wall, bloody knife in one hand, other hand flinging outward, as if hurling something at her.

  Tajio’s spell knocked Mirei back into the wall with bruising force, but she rebounded off the stone and charged straight at the woman. The room wasn’t large. Tajio didn’t have time to cast anything else. Mirei hit her shoulder first, felt ribs crack; they went down in a heap, the knife slicing them both, and Mirei snarled syllables, driving her fingers up at Tajio’s ribcage to strike her diaphragm, and the movement and the words fused as one: force went where she directed it, into the body where her hand couldn’t go, and crushed Tajio’s heart in her chest.

  The woman shuddered and lay still.

  Mirei shoved ineffectively for a moment before she managed to right herself, and by then others were there; witches were screaming, chaos was spreading again, but two things occupied Mirei’s attention.

  First, three bloodstained bodies, small and unmoving. Falya and her witch-double Yimoe, and Chaiban at their sides.

  And second, so that horror and relief warred for supremacy in Mirei’s heart, six other witches and doppelgangers, not moving, but not dead; rigid with the spell that held them trapped, but alive.

  Thank the Goddess.

  THE INFORMATION HE’D BEEN WAITING FOR came at last, when he had given up on ever seeing it.

  Garechnya.

  Eclipse stared at the name for a moment, hardly believing. Then he pivoted and moved with two swift strides to the wall where the map hung, marked with notations that narrowed down, bit by bit, the area where the dissidents might be.

  His finger slid over the paper, crossing roads and rivers, up into the mountains of northwestern Kalistyi, to a small town with nothing to recommend it except solitude.

  There, Eclipse thought, and then hissed in pain.

  Blood flowered out of nowhere on his wrist, seeping from no visible wound in his scar. He clutched at it with one hand, whispering, “No, no, not now, not yet—” He lunged to the desk, fumbling for a brush—

  Then it stopped.

  Eclipse stood for a moment, panting, trying to slow his heart. Another warning. The third one, all told. Five, supposedly, was the magic number, but he wasn’t about to gamble that he had one more warning before he died.

  Which meant that he had finally come to the crossroads. He could no longer hope for Mirei to pull off another miracle and save him. All that remained was to choose how he would die.

  He wanted to see her one last time, even if it meant bleeding out on the spot. It didn’t seem fair, that he should have to die without being able to say good-bye. If he tried to go anywhere near her, though, the witches would kill him on the spot. They would not risk him changing his mind.

  He could stay here at Silverfire, where the witches would leave him alone, and bleed to death one night soon—judged by the Warrior, and found guilty of failure.

  Or he could choose a third road.

  Eclipse picked up the brush once more. It had spattered ink all over the top sheet of paper: He pulled out a clean page and wrote a brief note in as steady and regular a hand as he could manage.

  The instructions for Jaguar were clear, as were his reasons for them. Depending on how closely the witches were monitoring him, the charade might not do any good, but it was worth a try.

  He wondered, one last time, whether the witches of Starfall already knew his information, and had sent all those Wolfstars to deal with the problem. They had to have been hired to kill someone.

  One way or another, it didn’t matter to him.

  Eclipse folded the note, sealed it, and delivered it to Jaguar’s office, sliding it under the door of the anteroom, where Slip would find it in the morning.

  Then he went through the night to the stables, to saddle a horse.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  CHAIBAN, WHOSE DOPPELGANGER had been captured months ago, did not come back to life.

  They pieced it together, painfully, while the surviving doppelgangers and their witches were placed under the most stringent guard they could arrange, with Indera held apart from the rest.

  From Indera, questioned under a spell to keep her calm, they got the story of her encounter with Tajio. Other witches remembered seeing the woman shepherding the children away from the scene of Sharyo’s death—and why shouldn’t she? After all, she’d been taking care of them in Mirei’s absence, and had showed such concern for their well-being. And Tajio must have informed her allies in Kalistyi of the situation. There was a crumpled note in the room where she’d taken them, telling her to kill Chaiban. The two halves of a pair didn’t have to be killed at the exact same instant—just close enough.

  The one saving grace was that Tajio had been trying to capitalize on an unexpected situation, and had not had time to plan. If there had been a silencing spell over the room she took the children to, Mirei would never have heard Chaiban scream. All the girls in there would have died. And maybe others, as well, if Tajio slipped away and managed to find the rest of them.

  Mirei put another piece into the puzzle: Rigai’s abrupt suicide, before Koika could question the witches to flush out the traitor.

  Rigai’s suicide, which now looked rather more like a murder.

  It had distracted them all from the search. And why should Rigai have killed herself, anyway? Why not escape, or try to stay hidden? Satomi regretted now her decision to cremate Rigai quietly, and to hold no funeral. She would have to make amends for that somehow.

  Koika, dragging herself away from self-castigation over not continuing to search, wanted to know why Tajio hadn’t killed the children sooner. The traitor’s merely partial success seemed to answer that: She’d been waiting for a chance to get all of them, or at least as many as possible. The situation with Urishin had provoked her into action.

  Not long after that point came up, a message arrived from the rooms where the girls were being protected. It came from Urishin.

  She didn’t come out and say it, but Satomi and Mirei knew what she meant.

  “I still want to do it.”

  “IF YOU KNEW WHERE THEY WERE,” Mirei said, “what would you do?”

  Koika glanced sideways at Satomi. The three of them were alone in the council room. Rana had retired to her rooms, her nerves shattered by the bloodshed. No one expected anything more out of her, after this. The elderly Water Prime was done.

  As the silence from Satomi dragged on, Koika said with a hint of her usual wryness, “I don’t suppose you could transport an entire army to Kalistyi.”

  Mirei shook her head. “I won’t even try.”

  Satomi roused enough to shake her head and speak. “Urishin would only be able to give us a direction. Not anything more specific. And we already know they’re in Kalistyi.”

  Mirei took a deep breath. What Satomi would think of the suggestion she was about to make, she didn’t know, but she would make it anyway. “I can get her closer. And if she pegs the direction from multiple angles, we can pinpoint it on a map fairly well.”

  They were finally accustomed enough to her specialized skills that they knew what she meant. Koika moved in startlement. “But I thought translocation was bad for you.”

  “It is,” Mirei said, and tried to suggest by her tone that this was a minor concern. “But only in repeated doses. Urishin’s never gone through it before, and it would only take a few jumps; I’m sure she’ll be fine.”

  “But what about you?”

  Mirei met the Earth Prime’s eyes, unflinching. “I’ll take my chances.”

  “No,” Satomi said softly, and then repeated it louder. “No. It’s all too risky.”

  Despite her best intentions, Mirei’s temper snapped. “So what are you going to do? Sit around and wait for more of them to die?”

  It produced an ugly silence. Koika see
med torn between agreement and shock at Mirei’s lack of respect. Satomi just stared at her, pale green eyes flat and unreadable, but not happy.

  Finally Mirei caved. “I’m sorry, Aken,” she muttered, and tried to sound like she meant it. “We may have a chance here. I don’t want to miss it. But it’ll be for nothing if there’s no plan for what to do once we find them.”

  Koika exhaled, laying her hands flat on the table. “Shimi and Arinei are the largest problem. The Keys who have defected with them are a problem, too, but those two are the worst. Loyalty is what’s keeping their followers with them, as much as fear and confusion and dissent with us. Cut that tie, and the group loses its organization; disorganized, we can bring them back in.”

  “Cut the tie,” Mirei repeated quietly.

  The Earth Prime looked at her, unblinking, for several heartbeats. “Could you do it?”

  Had she still been Mirage, her answer would have been easy. But she’d known since she faced down the helpless Ice that she had changed.

  “No,” she said. “Not as an assassination.”

  Koika’s jaw hardened. “You know what a threat they are. What damage they’ve already done to us. You want to leave that out there?”

  “No,” Mirei replied, this time with more strength. “No more than Miryo wanted to leave Mirage out there, with the danger she posed. But I don’t want to just kill them off, either. They’re a part of us, Chashi; we can’t just cut them out because of a split between us. We have to bring them back in, somehow.”

  The Earth Prime shook her head, but before she could muster up a response, Satomi spoke. “She’s right.”

  Mirei turned to look at her.

  Satomi’s face was weary but resolved. “They’re our people, Koika. And some of their concerns are valid. I can’t condone their methods—but neither can I send Mirei, like a shadow in the night, to kill them while they sleep.”

  Koika slapped one hand on the table. “So what—are we just supposed sit here? Mirei, I thought that’s what you were arguing against just a minute ago!”

  “It was,” Mirei said. “It is. I’m not going to assassinate them. But I want to know where they are, because we can’t do a Void-damned thing until we have that information. And that means Urishin.”