Warrior and Witch (49 page)
In that moment, Satomi knew exactly what to pray for.
Receiving power for the first time was a painful experience, akin to spending twenty-five years in darkness and then staring straight into the sun. It jarred every woman who went through it.
Women whose doppelgangers were still alive suffered more. The power, as it flowed into them, tried to rebound into the doppelganger; finding no home in the nonmagical half, it then snapped back into the witch. The impact usually rendered both her and her doppelganger unconscious for a time.
This was what Satomi hoped for.
There were two alternatives to that hope.
Some women, despite all the preparation of the Elemental tests, failed when the power came. They didn’t strike the right balance with it, and were annihilated by its force, screaming themselves to death in what seemed to be a doomed attempt to vent the energy.
This was what Satomi had remembered to dread.
What happened was the third possibility, which she, so afraid that Urishin would die before making it this far, had not even thought to fear.
Urishin gasped, face twisting in pain, and her head snapped back until she stared at the sky. Her entire thin frame shook like a leaf in the wind, and then, abruptly, it stilled.
And she began to speak.
“The answers,” she said in a whispering voice that hardly sounded like her own, “are coming. From the forgotten overlooked lost they come. The path will move slip-side not straight not through, but
through
, with help. Two sides, one seen, one not, but the answers coming will open the eyes, and it may be in time, while the other eyes are gone, seeing the truth that lies elsewhere. New hope will help; the loss of fear. No more will be lost. No more save that which is always at risk. No more, in time; you will remember.”
There were no words in Satomi’s mind as she listened to the stream of ravings whisper from Urishin’s mouth; no words that could begin to express the soul-sick horror she felt, seeing the girl standing there with her head thrown back and her mouth moving as if on its own, realizing what they had done.
They had made Urishin a Cousin.
Across the circle, she met Koika’s eyes, and saw the same dead shock she felt herself. Koika knew. The others, new to this ritual, did not.
They had destroyed her forever.
The words ghosted to a halt. Satomi closed her eyes, too hurt to even weep, waiting for the sound of the small body hitting the grass, later to wake with her memory gone.
Instead, she heard a deep, shuddering gasp.
“Did it work?”
Satomi’s eyes flew open.
Urishin was looking around the circle at the five of them, dazed, unsteady on her feet, but speaking. “Did it work? Am I a witch now?” Her eyes alighted on Mirei, standing for Air in the west. “Mirei, did it work?”
Then
she collapsed.
While Urishin slept, the five who had initiated her convened once more.
“She’s a Cousin,” Koika said, voice unsteady. “That’s what
happens
to them. They receive power, they babble some words that would probably be important if we could figure out what in the Void they meant, and then they pass out.”
“But she
remembered
,” Mirei replied. There was no question of it in her mind. “She knew me, and she knew herself.”
Koika shook her head, not as if she was disagreeing, but as if she hardly
dared
agree. “Will she still remember when she wakes up?”
Paere, silent up until this point, spoke up quietly. “She can still work magic.” Heads swiveled to stare at her. “I checked,” she added, looking around at them all. “The channel is still there. In Cousins, it’s gone.”
“Then what in the Void
was
that?” Koika demanded.
“More proof,” Satomi murmured.
Now everyone was staring at the Void Prime. She had been sitting at the table with her hands sedately folded, hardly seeming to be present at all. Now she was alert, and there was a fragile joy in her expression, such that Mirei hardly dared breathe lest it shatter.
“Her mind survived an experience that has destroyed every other woman who’s gone through it,” Satomi said, her voice stronger now. “Because she is eleven? I doubt it. If there is an oddity here—something we’ve never seen happen before—then we must look to the characteristics that are peculiar to Urishin.”
It wasn’t hard to figure out. “Naspeth,” Mirei said.
“Naspeth,” Satomi repeated. “The other part of her self. If one half is killed, but the other survives, then the slain one recovers. As if the duality of their existence somehow protects that life, providing a refuge for it. The same must be true of the memories—the mind.”
The joy faded into something closer to practicality. Satomi turned to Mirei. “But it could have been something else. What did you do to her, during the test of the Void?”
Mirei was hardly confident she could explain it, but this wasn’t the time to tell the Void Prime “no.” She scrambled for words. “I… something like the way the Elemental tests work, only not. In the same way that the Void itself is… not.” The expressions aimed at her were unencouraging.
Blast it—this is like Hyoka and her friends all trying to study Void power when they’re incapable of understanding what it is in the first place
. “The Void is non-essence, empty space, nothingness, and you make an illusion of that. But it wouldn’t really prepare her to understand how she can use the
power
of that concept. I fed her Void power, so she could learn.” Mirei couldn’t suppress a smile. “She handled it pretty well.”
“How did you know how to do that?” Churicho asked, confused. She and Paere were sitting together, slightly apart, as if in deference to the Primes—but Mirei was included in that deference.
Mirei shrugged. “I just knew.” As all new forms of magic were just known. Perhaps her faith had slackened from the fervent, driven surrender that preceded her rejoining, but the Goddess still saw fit to give her that gift.
Satomi was more concerned with other matters. “Could that be responsible for Urishin?”
Again, Mirei shrugged. “I have no idea. But at the moment, it doesn’t matter.”
“What?” Koika asked.
Mirei smiled grimly at the Earth Prime. “Urishin passed out. I’m willing to bet Naspeth did, too. Shimi and Arinei know what we’re up to. So if we’re going to use her to find them, we’d better do it soon.”
Churicho and Paere having been sent away, the remaining three bent over a map spread out on the council room table.
“Kalistyi,” Mirei said, laying a finger on it, tucked into the northern bend in the coastline that formed
“It’s distant, though,” Koika said thoughtfully. “At that range—”
“She’ll still feel Naspeth, trust me. It won’t be precise, but it’ll be more than we have now, and we can do it in just three jumps.”
Nodding slowly, Satomi said, “And even if they find out what we’ve done… they’re in trouble whether they relocate or not. If they stay put, we find them, and if they move, we’ll hear about that, too.”
A knock at the door interrupted them. Mirei, in deference to the Primes, went to open it.
Ruriko was outside. “Aken,” she said. “Chashi. Mirei.” She held out one of the many message sheets the witches used to communicate with distant places. “This just arrived from Silverfire.”
A clatter of heels on the floor alerted Mirei before the two Primes appeared at her shoulders, bending to peer at the words on the sheet. Mirei recognized Jaguar’s hand, even in the brief message it conveyed.
The dissidents are near Garechnya. With this information, Eclipse renders his final service. As the last of his boons, he requires that you not seek him out. He gives you his sworn word that he will not endanger Mirei’s life.
Her stomach lurched at the words. Flat and unemotional as they were, she read what lay behind them.
He’s going to die. Warrior, there
has
to be a way to save him
—
“Garechnya,” Koika whispered, and then swore. “We didn’t need to risk Urishin.”
Mirei didn’t give a damn about that at the moment; her mind was entirely on her year-mate. She wasn’t bound by the boon. She could search for him—
For what purpose? To kill him more quickly?
She became aware of noise. Shouting in the corridors, as witches called out to one another. The Primes and Ruriko were looking up, message forgotten, when a figure Mirei had not seen for months came into view at the other end of the hallway.
“If you’ll pardon the interruption,” Eikyo said, pink with nervous excitement, “there are women who want to speak with you.”
A small crowd of riders waited in the morning sunlight of the courtyard. Red-haired, every one; it took Mirei a moment to realize they were not witches.
They were Cousins.
Cousins as she’d never seen them before. The quiet, near-invisible servants of the witches were standing, reins in hand, facing Satomi and the rest of the growing crowd, and somehow they were more
there
than ever before. Drawing attention to themselves, rather than fading into the background as they usually did. She hadn’t realized how good they were at fading until she saw them stop.
In front of them stood one woman who was not a visitor. Nae, her old face hard with determination, was waiting for the Primes to arrive.
Satomi stepped forward, every bit as imposing as the Cousins, and spoke. What she said, though, was not at all what Mirei expected.
“I hope,” she said in a quiet voice that carried no farther than the newly arrived group, “that you have the answers I was recently promised.”
The council room was not suitable for a group of this size; they took over one of the teaching halls instead, rearranging the seats more appropriately. Or rather, Mirei and Eikyo rearranged the seats. Satomi and Koika, whether they realized it or not, were obviously expecting the Cousins to do that work, and the Cousins were just as obviously not going to do a bit of it. Mirei and Eikyo, so very junior to most of the other people there, took care of it, while the Primes fiddled with foci and cast spells warding the room to the Void and beyond against any eavesdropping or meddling.