Satomi turned back to the window, placing her slender hands on the sill. When she spoke, her voice was low, betraying her tension. “No. I would not say she shares their beliefs, not to that extent. But the influence is there. And we of Starfall have never given as much attention to the warrior as we do to the other four Aspects of the Goddess; the Void has, for us, been as much practical as theological. We neglect it, as we neglect the Warrior. And for someone like Shimi, who needs a reason to believe you are anathema… it would be easy to magnify that divide. Especially when she grew up surrounded by Nalochkan beliefs.”
Mirei sank into a chair. When other witches were there, she behaved more formally, but in private Satomi allowed her some liberties. “I don’t get it. You had doubts, sure, but you killed your own doppelganger. I can understand why you didn’t want to believe that I was right—it meant that you were wrong to kill her. But what’s Shimi’s reason? Why won’t she believe?”
“Because she
didn’t
kill her doppelganger.” Satomi bowed her head. The two of them had never addressed this issue directly, not since the Void Prime told Miryo of her own doppelganger’s death. Mirei had only come to understand it fully when she and Satomi fought in Star Hall. Then she had realized the cause of the Void Prime’s reluctance to accept what Mirei had to say. “I remember looking at her, and I remember recognizing her as the other half of myself. In the end I convinced myself that she was a threat I must eliminate—a threat to all of us, not just myself—but that memory came back to me when you told us what you had done. Shimi has no such memory. It is easier for her to believe that doppelgangers are anathema, when the alternative is such a radical change.”
“But what does leaving accomplish, except to openly declare her opposition? If she’s so worried about what’s going to happen, then she should stay and try to minimize the chaos. She’s one of the five most powerful women here—”
Mirei stopped mid-sentence, because Satomi had turned around, and her pale green eyes were full of fear she had not shown before.
“Ashin sent us the list,” the Void Prime said.
The words didn’t register. “The list?”
“Of the other doppelgangers. Who they are. And where.”
Mirei’s heart skipped a beat, painfully. The list. The Void-damned list. There were other doppelgangers out there, alive—the nonmagical halves of witch-daughters. A group of conspirators among the witches had arranged in secret for them to survive the ritual where they were supposed to die, because the conspirators were convinced they
shouldn’t
die. And they were right; Mirei had proved it. But prior to that, Starfall had branded those witches as heretics, had even assassinated their leader. One of Mirei’s tasks in the last eight days had been to communicate with Ashin, the Key of the Air Hand, and the only one of the conspirators she knew personally. She had been trying to convince the woman that it was safe, finally, to admit where the doppelgangers were.
It seemed she’d finally succeeded.
“Shimi has it,” Mirei said softly.
“Ashin wrote to us last night, after we sent you away. Shimi had no chance to make a copy of the list, but she wouldn’t need to; we spent hours discussing it. She knows where they are.”
Suddenly Mirei couldn’t bear to be sitting; she rose to her feet and moved a few steps away with quick, tight strides that barely helped to ease her tension. Her boot heels clicked on the tiled floor with shocking loudness. “She’ll go after them. But no—she can’t kill them. Not without the other half of each pair, the witch-daughter. She’d have to kill both at once, for them both to stay dead.” Her gaze snapped up to meet the Prime’s. “You have to protect them.”
“I’ve already taken steps,” Satomi said. “And will take more, after I speak to the other Primes, which will be soon. As for the doppelgangers themselves, we’ll write to the witches that are nearest to them, send them after the children. If they move quickly enough, we should be there ahead of Shimi, or whomever she has sent in her stead.”
For a moment that seemed like an ideal solution, heading the Air Prime off at the pass. Then Mirei had a brief, vivid memory of standing on the balcony of a tower at the Hunter
There’s another at Windblade, and one at Thornblood
.”
“
Bad
idea,” she said.
Satomi paused on her way to her desk, shoulders stiff with affront. “I beg your pardon?”
“No way in the
Void
is that going to work. Not for all of them. You’re going to send a witch into a Hunter school and have her say, ‘Sorry, I need to walk off with some of your trainees’?” Mirei shook her head, knowing her fear was making her be rude. “They’ll throw her out on her ear.
If
she’s lucky.”
“They will not have a choice,” Satomi said crisply. “We will use magic if necessary.”
“Oh, even better. You send witches into three different Hunter schools and have them throw spells about before they run off with trainees. Aken, you’ll start a
war
.”
The Void Prime raised her eyebrows in startlement. “They would be that angry?”
“We do
not
like witches interfering with us,” Mirei said. The word “we” came out reflexively, and she saw Satomi notice it. But Mirei was as much a Hunter as she was a witch, the Mirage part of her had lived that life, as the Miryo part had lived here in Starfall. “They might not be able to stop you. But trainees belong to their schools, just as much as our daughters belong to Starfall. Stealing them away—you’re talking about offending not one but
several
groups of trained assassins, mercenaries, and spies who already don’t like you very much. You do
not
want them angry at you.”
Satomi’s hands clenched on empty air, a gesture of frustration and impotence. “Then what do
you
suggest? We can’t just leave them there for Shimi to take.”
The answer was obvious. “I’ll go after them.”
“No. It would take too long for you to get there.”
“It would take me no time at all.”
Mirei saw the heartbeat of incomprehension in the Void Prime’s face, before Satomi realized what she meant. It was an understandable blindness; translocating living things was supposed to be impossible. And so it
had
been, until Mirei recreated herself out of Miryo and Mirage. That rejoining gave her access to the magic of the Void, believed untouchable until then. Satomi was not yet accustomed to allowing for that in her plans.
“You could bring them right back here!” the Prime said, hope lighting her eyes. “We wouldn’t even have to wait!”
Mirei almost agreed. Then instinct murmured in the back of her head. She was still learning what she could and could not do with Void magic, but one thing she had learned was how exhausting it was, especially translocation.
She had to shake her head. “No. I don’t think I can move more than just myself.”
The hope in Satomi’s eyes withered.
“Maybe I’ll be able to someday,” Mirei said. “But I’d rather not experiment with something that tricky yet. I can take myself to Silverfire now, though. There are two there, right?” Satomi nodded, not that Mirei needed the confirmation. “I need to talk to Jaguar anyway. He knows he’s got two of them, and that they’re like me—that is, like Mirage was. If he’d hand them over to anybody, it would be me. So I can get them to safety, and then go after the other ones.” She thought it over, grimacing. “Windblade, I can probably manage; we’re friendly with them. Thornblood will be a different story. Their people hate my people’s guts. But I’ll figure something out.”
Satomi pulled herself up, spine straightening from its momentary slump. “The rest are fostered with farmers, tradesmen, the like. We can take care of those.”
“Fine.” Mirei’s mind was already racing, thinking ahead to what she would need. Translocate to Silverfire, then ride to Angrim—that would take about four days. Fortunately, both Thornblood and Windblade were just outside of Angrim, so she could kill two birds with one stone. Then—assuming she found a way to steal a girl out of the hostile
But her experiences as Mirage told her how well plans survived actual testing. Better to stay adaptable. “Give me a sheet to communicate with you,” Mirei said. The written word was slower, but on the road, it would be an easier spell to manage than bringing Satomi’s image up in a mirror. “I may have to play things by ear. And you can get in touch with me if anything else happens here.”
Satomi nodded. “Very well. Bring them back to us, as quickly as you can.”
Packing didn’t take long, once it dawned on her that she didn’t need supplies for a ride. She would have to get a horse from Silverfire anyway, and she could get food at the same time. Assuming Jaguar let her kidnap two trainees in the first place.
Well, if he didn’t, she could translocate back to Starfall. No food necessary.
She changed into uniform: the loose pants, shirt, short jacket, and sash that identified her not just as a Hunter, but as a Silverfire. The silver pendant she wore, the triskele knot that was the witches’ symbol, she tucked out of sight inside the shirt. Then, putting on the jacket, she froze in the act of flipping her hair out from under the collar.
It was a reflexive action—for the part of her that remembered being Miryo. For the Mirage half, it was something she hadn’t done in over a decade.
Long hair. Void it.
From the hard calluses on her knuckles to the scar on her left hip, the body she had was Mirage’s—except for the hair. Mirage had been the Void half, the Warrior half, the physical counterpart to Miryo’s magic, and so when the Goddess put them back together as one person, most of the qualities she had picked up from her life as Hunter had stayed. But the hair, for whatever reason, was Miryo’s, and long. Mirage’s hair had been cropped short.
And if Mirei showed up at Silverfire with hair past her shoulders, they’d
know
something was off.
She looked around her room and sighed in frustration. Not a pair of scissors in sight, and if she tried to hack off her hair with a dagger, it would look even more bizarre. She could create an illusion, but she wanted to avoid magic as much as possible while around Hunters.
She went in search of help instead.
Eikyo had not yet taken her test, and so was still living in the students’ hall. Mirei received some startled looks and bows as she went through the corridors and up the stairs; her notoriety in Starfall was unmatched. But she was getting used to that. Arriving at Eikyo’s door, she knocked crisply, and hoped her friend was home.
She was. Still wrapped in a dressing robe, Eikyo answered the knock. Her round face showed her surprise. “Miryo. What—” She caught herself, and grimaced. “Mirei, I mean. What are you doing here so early?”
Mirei generally spent her mornings talking with the Primes and her afternoons demonstrating her new abilities to a variety of other witches, but she’d managed to arrange things such that she and Eikyo saw each other most days. It was a deliberate move on her part. Miryo and Eikyo had been close friends; she didn’t want the other woman thinking of Mirei as a stranger. Mostly she had succeeded. The slipup with her name was the exception now, not the rule.
She gave her friend a crooked smile. “I need my hair cut.”
Soon she was seated in a chair, listening to Eikyo’s scissors snip around her head. The long strands of her hair fell to the floor in a fiery drift. “I wish you’d tell me why you want this done,” the witch-student said dubiously, for the third time.
“Satomi has a job for me, that’s all. And people won’t think a witch with short hair looks nearly as odd as a Hunter with long hair.” Mirei turned slightly, as if that would let her see the back of her own head. “Are you done yet?”
“Nearly. I don’t know how good it’ll look, though.”
“Better than if I did it myself, I can promise you that.” Mirei ran her hand over her scalp when Eikyo finally stepped back, and felt the familiar-but-strange sensation of short hair ruffling against her fingers. How much time would it take before her own body stopped feeling half alien to her? “Thanks.”
“You look weird.”
Mirei grinned wryly. “Thanks. Look, I’ve got to go.”
Eikyo stopped her with one hand on her arm. The look in her blue-gray eyes was worried, as if she’d guessed there was more to the situation than Mirei was telling. Satomi would have to announce Shimi’s departure soon; Mirei wondered how people would take it. “Is there anything I can do to help?” Eikyo asked.
Mirei shook her head. “For me, no. But I’m sure there will be things for you to do here.”
Her friend’s mouth twisted. “That’s not what I meant.”
“That’s not what
I
meant, either,” Mirei said, sobering. “The trouble hasn’t ended, Eikyo. I may have found an answer to the doppelganger problem, but it’s going to take a while for people to adjust to it, and we’re going to hit a lot more potholes in the road before that’s over. Satomi’s going to need help. Even after I get back.”