Witch Read online

  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 triquetra 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.”

  Eikyo nodded reluctantly. “Goddess go with you, Mirei.”

  Mirei had already gotten more direct help from the Goddess than she could ever have expected, with the miracle that brought her back together. She wasn’t going to count on more. The sentiment, though, was appreciated. “You too, Eikyo. And be careful.”

  FINALLY SHE STOOD in her own room, dressed, shorn, ready to go.

  Her final act was to belt a sword onto her hip, and as she did so, she remembered that the blade was not her own. It belonged to Eclipse, her Hunter partner, who also had most of her other belongings—those that she hadn’t left behind in Angrim when she translocated out of the city.

  I should get those back from him, Mirei thought, and did some calculations in her head. He ought to be at Silverfire by now.

  The thought brought a spark of pleasure, but also of nervousness. Why in the Void am I nervous? It didn’t make any sense. Eclipse had been Mirage’s closest friend, her year-mate at Silverfire—practically a brother. And though Miryo hadn’t known him for as long, the two of them had gotten along quite well.

  That was it. Eclipse was effectively the only person in the world that Mirei had known as both halves of herself. Ashin she’d met only briefly, and everyone else had belonged to one half of her life or the other. Mirage knew Hunters. Miryo knew witches. Both of them knew Eclipse, and he knew both of them.

  She’d seen him very fleetingly after rejoining, before she left for Starfall. Her thoughts had been so fixated on what had happened to her, and what she was planning, that she hadn’t had much time to wonder what Eclipse thought of her now.

  And what she thought of him. The rejoining meant she had layered and somewhat contradictory memories of him. Quasi-brother and friend; known for years and known for mere days. She couldn’t predict which version might win out in her mind, and that made her nervous.

  But standing in her room wouldn’t make the problem go away, and she was wasting time. Mirei took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, banishing such scattered thoughts from her mind. The spell she was about to attempt was a tricky one, and she did not want to find out what would happen if she screwed it up.

  Mirei rotated her shoulders to loosen them. Large spells often required foci, Elementally-linked objects that helped the caster juggle more power than she would be able to handle otherwise. One of the first questions the magical theorists at Starfall had asked her when they heard about Void magic was, what were its foci? The answer she’d given them had set off a storm of philosophical speculation that left her head spinning. As near as Mirei could tell, the main focus of Void magic—perhaps the only focus—was movement.

  She began to sing, her voice calling power from the world around her and shaping it to her will, and as she sang, her body flowed into motion. Mirage, the doppelganger, the Void-linked part of herself, had grown up in environments that centered on movement. Temple Dancer. Hunter. It wasn’t an accident. She’d possessed special gifts for those things before rejoining with Miryo, strength and speed beyond what her body should have had, because the Void belonged to the Warrior. Those advantages had gone away with the rejoining, but the affinity for movement remained, imprinted on her through years of training.

  So she sang and she danced, and the spell built around her. She reveled in the feeling. Miryo had spent weeks avoiding the use of her magic, for fear it would destroy her. Now it was safe, and wondrous. She shaped the strands about her body, a
nd blinked out of sight.

  There was a shattering moment of nothingness—then she was in the wood behind Silverfire.

  The effect left her breathless. She wasn’t sure she’d ever get over that. The concept that translocation moved its target through the Void had always been an unsubstantiated theory; living creatures died if you tried it on them, and you couldn’t ask an object where it had been. Mirei now had confirmation. She didn’t know how long the transit lasted—an instant? an eternity?—and she prayed to all five Aspects of the Goddess that no theorist ever tried to extend the time. She’d fling them through the Void. Let them study it that way.

  A foot slammed into her lower back and threw her into a tree.

  Mirei caught herself and spun to face her attacker. She blocked, not fast enough; a fist clipped her cheek—

  “Mirage?”

  She blinked her vision clear in the dim shade of the wood. The Hunter in front of her was familiar. “Shit, Viper. Yes, Void damn you, it’s me.”

  He backed up a step, but did not drop his guard. “Prove it.”

  “Prove it?” She stared at him. “Did somebody hit you in the head since the last time I was here? Don’t you remember my face?”

  “Prove this isn’t some illusion.”

  His words turned Mirei cold. Hunters liked to keep witches from meddling in their business, yes, and were paranoid about them as a result, but there was no reason for Viper to expect a witch to show up in the woods of Silverfire.

  Or was there?

  “Warrior’s blood, Viper, you know me.” Mirei straightened up slowly. She roughened her tone subtly; if he noticed how trained she sounded, he’d be sure she was a witch. “I was here, what, two weeks ago? With Eclipse. You’d bet ten silver on me showing up sooner. Your leg was injured—well, if that kick’s anything to go on, you’re feeling better. You were playing guard for the infants, so they could try to sneak past you on the front wall.” He still didn’t look persuaded. “You make a weird snorting noise if somebody grabs your hair during a fight. We used to go for that in sparring, just to hear you do it.”

  That last bit finally sold him on it. Viper relaxed. “Okay. Sorry. It’s just— I attacked before I really saw you. Seemed like you came from nowhere. Slowing down, aren’t you?”

  “Or you’re getting faster,” she said lightly, but inside she winced. She was slower, and hadn’t yet learned to shift her tactics to compensate.

  “What in the Void are you doing back here, anyway?” Viper asked.

  “Came to see Jaguar. Got to talk to him about something.”

  Her fellow Hunter gave her a sidelong look as they began to walk toward the Silverfire compound. Mirei had chosen a familiar clearing in the woods as her target; the better she knew a place, the easier it was to aim for. She still shivered to remember how she’d jumped completely blind to Eclipse’s room at an inn, after she rejoined. That had been the tail end of the miracle that made her whole again. She wasn’t about to try it again without divine help.

  But Viper was speaking, and his words reminded her that there was more going on here than she’d suspected. “Does this have anything to do with our two, shall we say, special cases?”

  “Does your paranoia have anything to do with them?”

  Viper groaned. “Four ways from feast day. Some of the first-years jumped one of them the other night, for being such a brat.”

  “It’s a time-honored way of resolving differences among trainees.”

  “Yeah, but it didn’t solve the brattiness, and next time it might be worse. Traditional-sized bloodbaths are fine, but I don’t want a real mess on my hands.”

  “The joys of babysitting duty.”

  “My leg’s nearly solid again, and you’d better believe I’m getting back on the road the minute I can.”

  They were in the compound by now, and Mirei kept Viper chatting about less important matters as they headed for the tower that stood at the center. Or rather, he let her do it. Silverfire Hunters took investigative jobs often enough that neither one of them could miss the fact that there was a subject they were both edgy about. Mirei didn’t want to tell Viper anything before she told Jaguar, and Viper . . . he was holding something back, too. Like, perhaps, why he was afraid of a witch showing up under an illusion. Mirei was glad she hadn’t put one up.

  “You staying long?” Viper asked as they arrived at the door to the building that stood at the tower’s base.

  “Not sure.”

  “Well, catch me before you leave. You and Eclipse vanished awfully fast last time.”

  Because they’d found out about the doppelgangers. Mirei nodded at him. “Right. I’ll see what I can do.”

  He walked off. She closed her eyes to let them adjust from the growing morning sunlight, then stepped into the dim closeness of the office.

  For the first time the rail-thin man behind the desk looked startled. “I didn’t get word you were coming.”

  “Guess I’ve learned to sneak better, Slip,” Mirei lied. “I need to talk to Jaguar.”

  “He’s busy.”

  “I don’t care.”

  Slip had his expression mostly under control again; his eyes only widened fractionally at her flat declaration. “You the reason we’ve had witches skulking around lately?”

  No wonder Viper was paranoid. “Did Eclipse not bloody explain anything? Or has Jaguar just not let you in on it?”

  Slip cocked his head to one side. “We haven’t seen Eclipse since you were here with him last time.”

  His words jolted her. “Haven’t seen him?” She did her mental arithmetic over again. Ten days, since she left her year-mate and erstwhile partner with instructions to return to Silverfire. Either he’d found some good reason to disobey her . . .

  . . . or he’d run into trouble.

  Slip answered the question before she could ask it. “We haven’t heard about anything happening. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t.”

  She could find him; the spell wasn’t hard when you knew the target as well as she knew Eclipse. But she could hardly resort to magic in front of a former Hunter, especially Jaguar’s aide. Mirei swallowed her curse and snapped, “Right. I don’t care who Jaguar’s with, or what he’s doing. He and I talk now.”

  “Go on up. In the meantime, I’ll kick some people in the asses, and try to get you more information.”

  Eclipse might just be in hiding, Mirei thought as she climbed the creaking staircase. When she last saw him, there had been Cousins out looking for them both. Those had all been called off after she went to Starfall, but did he know that? Still, a search wouldn’t halt Eclipse, just slow him down. Something else was going on.

  Mirei knocked on the Grandmaster’s door, then went in when Jaguar responded.

  He was at his desk with a stack of papers he covered before she came in. The Grandmaster of Silverfire was a man gone hard with age, like wood weathered by a storm. His gray hair was trimmed meticulously short, and like many Hunters, he was always clean-shaven. The irritated look in his light blue eyes smoothed out into careful blankness at the sight of her. She saluted him, and he considered her for a moment before saying anything. “Mirage. Wisp told me you’d vanished from Angrim. Have you come back to give me the explanation you promised?”

  Mirei had forgotten that Wisp would wonder where she had gone, after taking refuge in the temple. “Yes,” she said. “You were supposed to get it from Eclipse, but Slip tells me he never arrived. So I guess I have extra problems to deal with.”

  “Extra problems?”

  “I’m afraid I came here with one already in hand.”

  Jaguar held up one hand to stop her. “I see. Come here a moment. I want to show you something.”

  He rose and beckoned her over to a tall wooden cabinet that stood against one wall. She’d never seen it open; as far as she knew, that was where he kept sensitive papers about the doings of Silverfire’s people. Mirei approached, and Jaguar reached out for her shoulder, looking almost companionab
le—

  And then he spun her violently and slammed her back against the cabinet, a knife at her throat.

  “Make one sound before I tell you to and I’ll slit your throat before you finish it,” he said, in a terrifyingly level voice. “You’re not Mirage. Your voice is different, and you’re too damned slow.”

  Mirei kept her curse safely behind her teeth. Jaguar did not make idle threats.

  “Your voice sounds trained,” he said. “Which tells me you’re a witch. Tell me, briefly, who you are.”

  Briefly. Mirei answered him as best she could, and stopped trying to disguise her voice. “Half Mirage.”

  The Grandmaster’s eyes narrowed. “Explain. Level tone.”

  Which was to say, without the variation in pitch that might disguise a spell. Magic used a different language in addition to its music, but some spells were short; she could attempt one mid-sentence and pretend it was a name. But Mirei wasn’t about to try it. “Half of me is Mirage. The other half is—was—a witch named Miryo.”

  He processed this. “Why? Level tone, still.” And the knife hadn’t moved.

  “Because they—I—started out as one person. Split apart in infancy—the witches always do that. It’s part of how they get their magic. The half that’s like Mirage is normally a soulless shell, just a body. They kill it. But Mirage survived. Shared a soul with Miryo. Miryo’s magic was going to kill them both. She was supposed to kill Mirage. Tradition, but wrong way to solve the problem. They—I—found a better one. Back into one person. Lost the edge off my reflexes, though, and my voice is different.” Her shoulders were tense with the effort of keeping her tone as flat and expressionless as possible.

  “Then the two girls training here,” Jaguar said, “are the same.”

  “Yes.”

  He’d known they were like Mirage in their physicality, their knack for the art of fighting, but not what it had meant. Jaguar looked intently into her eyes. “Why are you here? Just to explain?”

  “They’re in danger.”

  Finally, slowly, he backed off. The knife left her throat, and he lowered the arm that had her pinned. He did not put the blade away, though, and Mirei knew he still practiced knife-throwing every day.