Warrior and Witch (10 page)
But still, from time to time, doppelgangers survived.
Someone had to do it on purpose. Someone with opinions like Tari’s, but who, unlike her, never tried to take it further. Unless their attempts were so deeply buried that no history gave any sign of them.
Someone. A witch? Possibly, though it took special madwomen like Tari and Ashin to gamble innocent lives on the hope that the current way was wrong.
Even if it was a witch, though, she would need help. The bodies of the doppelgangers were given to the Cousins to dispose of.
The Cousins, who served the witches in all kinds of mundane tasks, from cooking to cleaning to guarding them with steel. The Cousins, whose numbers were made up of descendants of witches who failed their final test, and who occasionally took new women of that kind into their ranks.
The Cousins, who hardly ever opened their mouths around a witch for something that was not absolutely related to business.
Satomi rose abruptly from her desk and strode to her office door, to the outer room where Ruriko sat amid her own piles of paper. “Ruriko.”
The secretary looked up. “Aken?”
“When is Eikyo scheduled to be tested?”
Ruriko kept her files obsessively organized; even the stacks of paper were tidy. She turned without hesitation to a ledger on the shelf, opened it, and flipped swiftly to a page, no searching. Only then did she pause.
“In two days, Aken,” she said, looking up at last.
Satomi cursed softly. That soon. She should have remembered—and would have, were it not for the chaos. She wagered she was not the only one who had forgotten. “Thank you. Please notify Eikyo that I would like to speak to her. And—” She hesitated. “Keep it discreet.”
That had to make Ruriko curious, but the secretary simply nodded. “Of course, Aken. When do you want to see her?”
“As soon as possible,” Satomi said grimly.
Eikyo was in her office less than an hour later, clearly startled by the summons, but doing her best to hide it. “You called for me, Aken?”
Satomi was pacing along the windowed north wall of her office. To the Void with looking like the self-assured Prime; despite spending the last hour debating with herself, she still wasn’t entirely certain this was a good idea. She would see what this student thought of it, though, eager as she was to help. “I have thought of something you might do for me.”
“You have but to tell me, Aken, and I will—”
The Void Prime held up one hand to stop her. “Wait until I’ve told you what it is, before you agree to anything. I know you said you wanted to help, but I’m sure you didn’t have
this
in mind.”
Eikyo’s blue-gray eyes widened in apprehension.
“You
don’t
have to do this,” Satomi said clearly. “I mean that. I know that a suggestion from a Prime might as well be an order, but I won’t have you doing this of anything less than your own free will. Understand?”
“Yes,” Eikyo whispered.
Satomi took a deep breath. “So. Ruriko tells me you’re due to be tested in two days.”
Eikyo nodded.
“We can still go through with that. In fact, we
should—
show everyone that the business of Starfall hasn’t been disrupted.”
“Aken—” Eikyo’s head had come up in surprise. “But with Shimi-kane gone—”
“Just Shimi,” Satomi reminded her. “While she’s suspended, you need not use the honorific.”
“But—can you even do it, without her?”
“Of course,” Satomi said. “It even happens more often than you might think. There have been times—not many, but a few—when a Prime couldn’t attend, for one reason or another. Critical business elsewhere, or sometimes illness.” She smiled at the student’s clear confusion. “You’ve never heard about it, of course. We bring in one of the Keys in her place, with an illusion to make her look like her Prime. Even the witches whose tests were conducted by a Key don’t know it happened to them.” Arinei had been one such, though Satomi would never tell her.
“Shimi’s departure will not stop our work,” Satomi continued, putting more confidence into her tone than she felt. Half of keeping life normal was convincing people it
was
normal. Though that would be a lost cause with Eikyo, in a minute. “We’ll appoint one of her Keys to stand for her—without an illusion, though, since everyone’s well aware that Shimi’s not here. You’ll be tested in two days.” She smiled at the student. “I hope you’ve been studying.”
Eikyo turned pale, but she nodded.
The smile faded from Satomi’s face almost immediately. “This, then, is where the chance for you to help comes in.
“You said to me yesterday that you’re a student, and not as much use as a witch. Well, I have witches who support me—not enough, but some. And one new witch, her pendant still warm from the silversmith’s workshop, won’t tip the balance much. But you stand at a crossroads where—if you are willing—you may take a path that no one else can.”
Eikyo’s lips went suddenly white as she pressed them together.
“I am asking you,” Satomi said quietly, “to participate in a lie… and become a Cousin.”
She thought she saw Eikyo sway. What were the odds that the girl would agree to it? Satomi hastened to offer an explanation. She did not expect it to do much good, but she offered it anyway. “The Cousins are a vital part of Starfall, yet we know terrifyingly little about them. They do not confide in us. They do their jobs; they clean our rooms and halls, prepare our food, defend us when we need it. Such has been their lot nearly since our line began.
“It was a few generations after Misetsu that the first woman lost her memory and her chance at magic in the test. One by one, others followed. What should be done with such women? We must either send them out into the world, or keep them among us. In the world, they would be alone, with no kin or friends to help them. Among us, at least, they need not start from scratch.”
Eikyo
was
swaying on her feet. Satomi took her by the arm and guided her to a chair; the student sat without any sign of awareness that she was moving. The Void Prime went on, softly. “We don’t mistreat them. You know that The ones who fail their tests pick what jobs interest them, and learn their trades; how many people in other domains have that much choice? Many of them have children, and then those children either follow their mothers’ trades, or choose something else. They stay here because we are their people.”
At her own words, she laughed softly. “Or so we tell ourselves. We don’t really
know
why they stay.
“And there are more things we don’t know. Doppelgangers have survived in the past; they
had
to have had a Cousin’s help. The Cousins themselves claim not to know anything about that—but can we believe them?” Satomi cast a glance at one of the books on a shelf behind her desk. It was a history she had read shortly after her ascension to the position of Head Key in the Void Ray gave her access to it; she had never touched it again until Miryo’s test showed that her doppelganger was alive. It detailed the efforts Tokaga, Void Prime in those days, had made to discover how Orezha had survived.
“We have ways of determining whether someone is telling the truth,” Satomi said. “You’ve studied those spells. But we can’t place every Cousin under the lens like that; there are too many of them. And taking such extreme actions… does not help our relations with them.” There had been some unpleasant repercussions to Tokaga’s efforts.
Eikyo showed some sign of life at last; she turned and looked at Satomi, eyes still very wide.
Satomi spoke quietly, meeting her gaze. “We
must
know more about the Cousins. About what they do, and how, and why, when we are not watching them. There’s a whole society around us we know almost nothing about. They won’t talk if we ask them to; the only way I can think of to learn about them is to place someone among them who
will
talk. But no current witch could do that. Even with an illusion to hide who she is, they’d wonder who this newcomer is, when there’s no word of anyone failing her test. It has to be a student, ready for the test—but who has
not
failed. Someone who retains her memory, who knows she has a task. And you are in a perfect position to do that.”
And then she fell silent, because she could think of nothing else to say. She simply had to wait.
Finally Eikyo stirred, and spoke. “I… would not be tested?”
“You would go through the questioning of the Keys. But for the ritual itself—no. Everyone else would believe it had happened, but it would not have.”
“Then I wouldn’t be a witch.”
Satomi had considered testing the girl, and then simply lying about the result. The odds of passing were substantially in Eikyo’s favor; those who died or became Cousins for real were in the minority. But magic was hard to resist, once you had it; the masquerade would be far more plausible without it. “Not yet,” she told the girl reassuringly. “Afterward, we would test you for real. I would not leave you among the Cousins forever.”
The young woman’s hands were trembling in her lap. She looked down and clasped them hard together. “I…” Her voice trailed off, and for a moment she was silent.
Then she turned back up to face Satomi, and her eyes were full of tears. “Aken, I—I’ve been afraid of this for years. Afraid that I would be a Cousin. I’d rather
die
than have that happen to me. If I’m not going to be a witch, then I’d rather the Goddess kill me, than take away my mind.”
Satomi reached out and took the student’s hands in her own. “You
won’t
lose your mind. That’s the point. You’ll know exactly who you are, and why you’re there.”
“But—” Eikyo’s breath was coming rapidly, though she was clearly fighting to maintain her composure. “Why now? If this is so important, why haven’t you done anything about it before?”
The Void Prime pressed her lips together. The young woman had a point. She
should
have worried about this before now.
But Cousins are Cousins; they’ve always been there, since the day you were born, keeping your world in good working order. Who ever stops to think about what they do when out of sight
?
“I suppose,” she said at last, her words coming slowly, “that it’s because of Mirei. Her arrival here was like an earthquake, and this is one of its many aftershocks. I find myself questioning many things I took for granted, and wondering what else we have missed. What else has become habit, that should be changed. The way we relate to the Cousins may be one of those things.”
“And—you can’t just
ask
them?”
Satomi’s breath came out in a short, soundless laugh. “My rank carries a certain amount of weight with them, and no more. They do what I tell them to, and politely stonewall anything else. I cannot get more out of them except by force—or subterfuge.”
Eikyo took her hands out of Satomi’s, picking at the cotton of her skirt. Satomi let her sit in silence for several long moments and tried not to show how desperately she waited for an answer.
“You need me to do this,” Eikyo said, almost inaudibly.
“I need someone to. You’re the best candidate.”
Another silence.
“All right,” Eikyo whispered. “I will do it, Aken.”
