GETTING OUT OF ANGRIM unseen could be done. Getting out of Angrim unseen with an unconscious body could also be done, but it was harder.
Mirei thought she had managed it, but she wasn’t sure. She missed surety. Hadn’t there been a time when things seemed clear and she didn’t have a lot to worry about? It couldn’t have been that long ago, but it felt like ages.
The comatose doppelganger jounced in the saddle in front of her as they rode through the darkness toward the bolt-hole. Mirei hadn’t the faintest idea what to do with her once she woke up. Herding two eleven-year-old girls was hassle enough; adding in a third with no reason to like her didn’t appeal.
And what about Naspeth?
Mirei hadn’t the first damn clue what to do about the missing Windblade doppelganger. If the witch in that room had been behind that disappearance, Mirei had lost her chance to find out when she put a knife in the woman’s throat. Naspeth might be somewhere in Angrim right now, tied up, waiting for a kidnapper who would never return. It was probably the best-case scenario: if that were true, then sooner or later someone would find her or she would get loose.
Pretty sad, when that’s your best-case scenario. Do you think the Windblades will be nice enough to notify you if she comes back?
And a corner of her mind wondered with sick curiosity just how a doppelganger’s ability to come back to life would work in the event of death by dehydration. How many times might it happen, before Naspeth got free? What would an experience like that do to a young girl’s mind?
Mirei growled such thoughts away. She would do something about Naspeth. She didn’t know what, but she’d do it. Just as soon as she dealt with the three she currently had.
Once she got them moved from their current hiding spot—she wasn’t about to believe the Silverfire bolt-hole was safe anymore, not after today’s adventures—she would contact Satomi. Through the paper or, if possible, through a mirror. The Void Prime could direct her to witches or Cousins who could be trusted. The loyalty of the witches in Angrim was a dangerous unknown.
So. It was a simple plan, partly because complicated plans tended to fail more, and partly because she couldn’t think of anything brilliant to do. Get to the bolt-hole, bring Amas and Indera somewhere safer, contact Satomi. Explain things to them. Get them back to Starfall.
Find Naspeth. Somehow.
Because she’d meant that promise to the Windblades.
She reached the abandoned farmhouse. Mirei pulled her gelding to a halt, slid off carefully with her burden. No sense beating the girl up any more than necessary. She whistled a soft birdcall to announce her presence, then carried the doppelganger through the doorway and laid her on the uneven floor.
The house was quiet. Mirei put her face close to the trapdoor that led beneath the house and said softly, “Amas? Indera?”
No answer.
Please tell me they’re just being careful.
Mirei pulled open the trapdoor and dropped into the cramped space below the house. The bags were there, but otherwise it was sickeningly empty.
She was out into the main room again faster than thought, knife in hand, checking on the Thornblood. Not awake yet, and not likely to wake in the near future. Mirei pulled her to one side, out of sight of the door, and risked leaving her there as she slipped around back to where the other horses were tethered, in the faint hope that they were just seeing to their mounts.
No such luck—though the horses were there—and she felt a rising panic in her throat.
She went at a half jog back toward the front of the house, and nearly put her blade into a nearby tree when a voice said from it, “So who’s she?”
Mirei kept hold of the knife—though she nearly dropped it on her own foot, aborting the throw—and let out a lengthy, vicious curse. When it was done, she said, “Where’s Amas?”
“Over here,” a soft voice said, and the taller doppelganger dropped from a tree to the ground.
“We just wanted to see if we could hide well enough that you wouldn’t see us there,” Indera said, climbing down from her own perch. “I guess we did.” She looked disgustingly proud of herself.
Mirei fought the urge to plant a fist right on that self-satisfied expression. “I told you to stay inside,” she snarled. Her jaw creaked with barely contained fury.
“We were hidden,” Indera said, as if that justified everything.
“You were outside, in a place that isn’t nearly as bloody safe as I’d like it to be, within spitting distance of a city crawling with spies who certainly know this bolt-hole is here. I’m riding myself to rags trying to keep you children safe, and one of you’s missing, and another one tried to kill me, and I get back here to find you two playing training games?” Mirei cut herself off, not because she’d run out of things to say, but because her own voice was rising dangerously high. When it was back under control, she growled, “Get the horses saddled. Now.”
Indera had the sense not to say anything; she was no doubt the one who had suggested the exercise. Amas, though, spoke quietly from the side. “Where are we going?”
“I’ll tell you when I’m damned well ready. Get the horses.”
But Amas stood her ground. “There’s more than the two of us. You just said so. The girl in there is one, I guess, and there’s another one missing. But those two weren’t at Silverfire; they must have been at Thornblood or Windblade. Why are you collecting all of us? Is this all of us?”
Two swift strides brought Mirei up to Amas’s face. The girl flinched back—she could hardly do otherwise—but she met Mirei’s eyes in the darkness.
“What are we?” Amas whispered.
Mirei clenched her jaw, trying to keep herself from saying something she might regret. Finally she snapped, voice low, “I will tell you later.”
“You keep promising answers later,” Amas said. “Do you mean those promises? Or are you just putting us off until you can herd us safely into whatever it is you have planned for us?”
In a moment of unexpected honesty, Mirei admitted to herself that she wouldn’t be nearly so irritated by Amas’s insistent questions if they hadn’t been the kind of thing she would have asked, in the trainee’s place. That realization allowed her to swallow down her anger and respond levelly. She spoke both to Amas, still fighting not to retreat in front of her, and Indera, watching from behind.
“I mean them,” she said. “I’m not going to lead you blindfolded into this. But I wanted to have all of you—there’s only four—so I could explain it just the once, and now that I have all it looks like I’m going to get, I want to wait at least until we’re somewhere that I don’t have to worry quite so much about Thornbloods or city guards breathing down our necks. There was trouble in Angrim, and I’d like to get away from it right about now.”
Amas accepted that, after a moment, with a cool nod that reinforced Mirei’s wariness of her. She didn’t accept anything just because someone in authority told it to her; she had to weigh it, consider it, and then decide how best to respond to it. Mirei turned to Indera, and found her nodding, too. But she probably hadn’t taken the time to think before doing so.
“For the last time, then,” Mirei said, “get the horses.”
THE RIDING WENT FINE for about an hour, and then the Thornblood woke up.
Mirei, engrossed in mental calculations of where to go and how long it would take to get there and what the best course of action would be once they did, didn’t notice as quickly as she should have. By the time she realized the movement in the body she held wasn’t just caused by the horse’s stride, the girl was wrenching herself out of Mirei’s grip and crashing hard to the ground below.
Amas’s horse nearly trampled her. The Thornblood rolled to her feet, disoriented, but alert enough to set off at a lurching run for the nearest trees, as if she could somehow escape three mounted pursuers. She might have, had it just been the trainees; their horses were spooked by the sudden commotion, and the girls were having trouble getting them back under control. Mirei, though, brought her gelding around, and was soon alongside the running girl. A quick stunt brought her out of her saddle and took the girl down in one clean move.
The Thornblood was screaming again and flailing wildly; the flailing turned out to be less panic and more a cover for a sudden, snakelike blow at Mirei’s throat. Mirei knocked it aside, cursed the fading of her own reflexes, and finally got the trainee pinned.
“Bloody witch!” the Thornblood was screaming. She’d caught sight of Amas and Indera, now, and seemed to recognize them as fellow Hunter trainees, though not Silverfires. They had taken off the scarves while hiding at the bolt-hole; uncovered, their cropped hair was visible in the light of the newly risen moon. Both had dismounted, and were watching in startlement. “Don’t trust her! She’s a witch! She’s going to take us and kill us—”
“I already told you, I’m the one who doesn’t want to kill you,” Mirei snapped, tightening her grip on the girl’s wrists. “Will you shut up already, or will I have to spell you to sleep again?”
And then she heard her own words, and looked up, and saw the other two staring at her.
The Thornblood saw it, too. “I told you! She’s a witch! She killed a Hunter, she casts spells—”
“I didn’t kill Ice,” Mirei said reflexively, and saw the Silverfires notice that she hadn’t denied the rest.
Amas backed a step away. “You—”
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.