Warrior and Witch (16 page)

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 Wind-blade. 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 Silver-fires. 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

“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.