Warrior and Witch (46 page)
Sharyo’s the only one who’s real to them. I’m a copy, and they’ll get rid of me as soon as they can.
She sat glaring at the stars, pretending they were not blurring in her vision, and ignored the cold tracks that formed down her cheeks. She stayed until the air chilled her too much; then, reluctantly, she climbed back down to the ground. And there she found someone waiting for her.
“Are you all right?” Tajio asked.
Indera resisted the urge to scrub at her face. If any marks of her tears remained, that would only draw attention to them. “What do you care?” she asked rudely.
Instead of being offended, the witch smiled sadly. “I thought you might want to talk to someone, after your mother’s funeral.”
Indera turned away. “She wasn’t my mother.”
After a moment, she heard Tajio move, coming forward two steps, but not trying to touch her. “I understand. It’s very brave of you, to face it like that. To be strong enough to stand on your own, at such a young age.”
Startled, Indera turned to face her again. “You—Do you really mean it?”
Tajio nodded. “You’re an impressive young woman. Strong and disciplined. I’ve seen how hard you work at your training. I can only imagine how well you would be doing if you were still at Silverfire.”
The name lanced through her, awakening other pain. Indera turned away again, but this time a soft hand on her shoulder turned her back. “Tell me,” Tajio said, full of compassion.
So Indera did. They walked through the woods, Indera hugging her arms around herself in a futile attempt to ward off the chill both inside and out, and she told the witch everything. How no one here really thought of her as a person. How they only cared about Sharyo. And then what she’d overheard—it was a lie, that she had years yet before she would be expected to turn into somebody else. They were going to do it
now
. With Urishin, anyway, and if that worked out then there would be no point in waiting, would there? They’d all have to do it, then, every last pair.
So Indera would stop existing, and in her place there would be some witch. Sharyo, but with all the things
Indent
had worked for. All the Hunter training. All the things the witch-girl hadn’t earned. And Indera would be gone forever.
“I’m going to
die
,” she said at last, miserably, and the tears began to run down her face again, against all her efforts to stop them.
“Hey, listen to me,” Tajio said softly, and stopped and knelt. Indera turned to look at her, reluctant, sure she was going to hear another lecture on how it wouldn’t be bad, she’d still be herself, just
more
. The same lecture everyone else gave her.
She was wrong.
“If you weren’t here,” Tajio said, “then they wouldn’t do it. With the others, maybe, but not with Sharyo. It would be too risky, to open her to power when you’re not around; she’d be in danger, then. Both of you would.”
“But I can’t get out of here,” Indera said, struggling to keep her voice from going high and tight with tears. “I’ve looked. There’s patrols, and I can’t steal a horse.”
Tajio hesitated, seeming to struggle with herself. “I could help you,” she said finally. “Give you something to slip you past the guards. And once you’re gone, they can’t use magic to find you—you know about that, right? You’d have to fend for yourself after that—”
Hope had blossomed in Indera’s heart at the offer. “Oh, I could do that,” she said eagerly. “I did it in Angrim. When they were hunting for me. I could do it again.”
The witch smiled. “Okay, then. Will you let me cast a spell on you? It’ll keep the guards from noticing you go by.”
Indera hadn’t made any preparations—no food, no last-minute study of maps. “Does it have to be now?”
“Yes,” Tajio said. “Before they have a chance to do anything with Urishin, or guess that you might run away. I’m sure you’ll be fine,” she added, correctly guessing Indera’s fear. “You’re smart, and very resourceful. You won’t have any problems.”
The confidence bolstered Indera’s courage. Biting her lip in nervousness, she nodded.
“Give me a strand of your hair,” Tajio said, straightening. “I need it for the spell.” Indera plucked one out and handed it to her, then watched, fascinated. She’d seen witches cast spells in her months here—they did it all the time—but never anything like this.
Twining the strand around her finger, Tajio began to sing quietly, incomprehensible syllables weaving up and down in a weird melody that sounded nothing like music, yet had a beauty of its own. Indera listened to it, entranced, and for one brief, fleeting moment, wished that she could feel the currents the adult witches talked about, the strands of power that came together to form a spell.
But the desire was a stupid one, and she realized it quickly. She would never feel that power. She didn’t
want
to feel it; to do so, she’d have to be a witch herself. And she wasn’t a witch. She was a Hunter.
Her
life was out here, in the darkness of the night;
her
role was sneaking past guards, carrying out secret missions. Spying. Thievery.
Assassination.
To hunt, to fight—to kill.
After all, she was chosen by the Warrior. She
was
the Warrior—the fifth, independent part of the human soul, pure and uncorrupted by the softer, weaker parts.
That
was who she was, and Indera embraced it fiercely, understanding for the first time what it meant. Reveling in the power that it held.
And they wanted to take that from her.
They wanted to steal the strength she had, and give it to someone else. They wanted to condemn her to a life of mediocrity, doom her to being like every other person in the world. Take away her gifts. Make her slow and weak, like everyone else. The thought infuriated her and her anger rose up like fire, warming her body and mind, until her pulse beat in her ears, a swift, steady rhythm.
The answer was obvious. To escape that fate, she need only do what she had been made for.
She was, after all, the Warrior.
And she knew the Warrior’s role.
The screams broke the quiet of Starfall’s night, starting a chaos of noise and terror, women running through the halls, people flocking to see what had happened, and no one would make way for anyone else, so that those in charge had to fight their way through, elbowing and cursing and finally using magic, forcing a passage that let them into the room where Indera, staring-eyed and trembling, was pressed against the wall, face whiter than bone, hands red with blood, staring down at the body that had been the other half of herself.
Satomi recognized that look. She had worn it, years before.
The room was a public sitting area, with several entrances. More and more witches were crowding in. Witches and Cousins and, slipping among them, smaller bodies squeezing through gaps, students. Children.
Including doppelgangers and their witch-halves.
Satomi reached out blindly, grabbed a fistful of fabric, dragged some witch toward her and snapped unseeing, “
Get them out of here
.” Released, the witch began moving; Satomi paid only enough attention to be sure that she or someone else was taking care of the children, taking them away from the sight they should not see.
The crowd was growing ever larger, women in back demanding to know what had happened, rumors flying faster than thought and warping as they went. It would be a panic, soon. Satomi gathered the fraying strands of her wits and began to sing. Her voice couldn’t be heard over the clamor, but it was enough for the Goddess; the power came, and with it Satomi forced everyone back, shoving them through the doorways, not caring who got bruised or stepped on, so long as they were
gone
.
Leaving her alone in the room with the doppelganger and no one else. Satomi swallowed the scream that would have demanded
Where in the Warrior-damned
Void
is Mirei
?
She couldn’t wait for Mirei, who knew Indera, who could calm her down. Satomi had to do it herself.
She slammed a silencing spell down over the room, blocking out noise from outside, and with a last profligate expenditure of power flung the doors shut.
In the quiet that resulted, Indera’s breathless, terrified whisper could be heard. “I—I—”
Satomi knelt by Sharyo’s body and felt for a pulse. A formality; she knew the truth. Indera would not look like that if Sharyo were alive.
She tried to damp down her fury so it would not show in her expression, and knew that she had failed.
Indera pressed herself even farther into the corner she’d retreated to, as if she could meld with the stone by force of will. “I—I didn’t—she—it just—T-t-t-tajio said—”
The name, the only marginally coherent thing out of Indera yet, brought Satomi to her feet. “What,” she asked, low and dangerous, “did Tajio say?”
The banks broke; the
swear
except suddenly I knew, I’d be free if she were dead and I knew that’s what I should do but I
shouldn’t
have and oh Mother, I should have left I should have run away Tajio said she’d help but she started singing and I just—I just—”
And as the torrent came out, it cooled Satomi’s anger, turning her skin and blood to ice and fear. She opened her mouth again, but this time she sang no spell; it was a held note, modulating to feel out the edges of the dissipating power that still lingered about Indera like a clinging, invasive net.
Mostly gone. They faded fast. But enough for her to be sure of what it was.
A spell of persuasion.
A spell, not to force—that couldn’t be done—but to take the impulses already there, to fan the sparks into flame, to make that which had been thought of and imperfectly dismissed seem like the proper thing to do.
A spell to make Indera kill her other half.
* * *
With the silencing spell around the room, Satomi could not hear what went on outside.
Others did, but Koika and a few others had tried to take control, to shepherd them away, and it took everyone a moment to realize the screams they heard were new ones, not Indera in her terror, but other girls.
Mirei did not understand what authority she held in Starfall until that night. Unranked, neither Key or Prime, not even a member of a Ray yet, she found others responding to her as if she were in charge, offering her information—garbled, contradictory, but enough for her to follow. She didn’t understand what had happened, but she knew it had to do with the doppelgangers, and enough people remembered which direction they’d been taken in that she could go in search.
She flew down the hallways with rapid strides, almost running—and then a sudden scream from a door she’d just passed jerked her to a halt.
The door, when she slammed into it, proved to be locked. She didn’t waste time with subtlety. Mirei blasted the door open and threw herself through the smoking wreckage, and found herself facing horror.
Her eyes took in bodies, small ones, on the floor, and knew with sick dread who they were, but she could ignore that for the moment, because her concern was with the standing figure, the woman at the far wall, bloody knife in one hand, other hand flinging outward, as if hurling something at her.
Tajio’s spell knocked Mirei back into the wall with bruising force, but she rebounded off the stone and charged straight at the woman. The room wasn’t large. Tajio didn’t have time to cast anything else. Mirei hit her shoulder first, felt ribs crack; they went down in a heap, the knife slicing them both, and Mirei snarled syllables, driving her fingers up at Tajio’s ribcage to strike her diaphragm, and the movement and the words fused as one: force went where she directed it, into the body where her hand couldn’t go, and crushed Tajio’s heart in her chest.
The woman shuddered and lay still.
Mirei shoved ineffectively for a moment before she managed to right herself, and by then others were there; witches were screaming, chaos was spreading again, but two things occupied Mirei’s attention.
First, three bloodstained bodies, small and unmoving. Falya and her witch-double Yimoe, and Chaiban at their sides.
And second, so that horror and relief warred for supremacy in Mirei’s heart, six other witches and doppelgangers, not moving, but not dead; rigid with the spell that held them trapped, but alive.
Thank the Goddess.
The information he’d been waiting for came at last, when he had given up on ever seeing it.
Garechnya.
Eclipse stared at the name for a moment, hardly believing. Then he pivoted and moved with two swift strides to the wall where the map hung, marked with notations that narrowed down, bit by bit, the area where the dissidents might be.
His finger slid over the paper, crossing roads and rivers, up into the mountains of northwestern Kalistyi, to a small town with nothing to recommend it except solitude.