Warrior and Witch (26 page)

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 into 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 dung 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 Star-fall, 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.