Has the feel of a headquarters
, he thought.
I wonder where we are
?
The walls and floor were dressed stone, and utilitarian. Didn’t feel like a house. A small fort, maybe. He had to be within three or four days’ ride of Sethick, where he’d spent the night before the ambush, but that didn’t help; Palend, the previous Lord of Abern and father of its current Lady, had inherited from his predecessors an ongoing squabble with Eriot and Miest that peppered Abern’s northwestern border with small forts. They were mostly abandoned now, since Palend had made peace with his neighbors. This could be any one of them.
His escort brought him into a room where a number of other women were waiting—and, he saw to his surprise, several men. The light in there was dim, but he memorized what details he could of their appearances. Two short, one tall, and all thickset; two wore the embroidered vests of Kalistyi. What were they doing here?
Another, older witch stood in the center of the room, in front of a table with tools he recognized all too well. She had a pinched, ugly look on her face, as if his very presence in the room offended her.
The escort brought him to the center of the room, and then moved back.
In the moment before anyone spoke, Eclipse sent up a silent prayer, more fervent than any he’d ever framed.
Warrior, Huntress, Lady of Blades. You can kill me later if you want, but if I can beg any mercy from you
—
don’t kill me now. Let me swear this oath, with lies in my heart; let me convince them I mean to kill Mirei. Let me swear, and get out of here, and tell her everything I can, before you exact your retribution for my falseness
.
It was all he dared ask for. If there was any way out of a blood-oath, he would have to find it later. And hope in the meantime that there
was
one.
On the table before him were a knife, a silver bowl, and a faceted, clear crystal. Two blood-oathed commissions in less than a year; it had to be a record. Assuming he lived through the swearing. A spell enforced the task of the oath; he had no idea how soon it would kill him for failure. He just knew two things: He wasn’t going to die in a cell, and he wasn’t going to kill Mirei.
The older witch was apparently the one who would conduct this ritual. Her eyes were almost colorless in the dim light, and the look she gave him was a snarl. “You know the wording of the oath?”
All Hunters learned it. Eclipse nodded.
“We will be changing it,” she said.
The bottom dropped out of his stomach. “What?” he blurted, unable to hide his shock.
“As it stands, the oath is insufficient for these circumstances. We have an addition to make to it.”
He swallowed the curse words he wanted to spit and instead said, as levelly as he could, “The oath is traditional, and sacred.”
Her mouth thinned unpleasantly. “And we are adding to it You swear what we tell you to, or you die here and now. If you will not Hunt her, we have no use for you.”
A good dozen people in the room, several of them witches, and his hands chained in front of him.
I will not die until I have to
. “What’s your addition?”
“In addition to binding you to Hunt the abomination, we will require two more things. First, that you tell no one what your task is. Second, that you divulge nothing of what you have seen here—who we are, and where this place is.”
Which brought his plans to a crashing halt. If he couldn’t say anything, how much good would getting out of here do?
It’s better than dying here. You don’t have a choice. Swear it, and look for loopholes later.
“What you ask is already a requirement of my honor as a Hunter,” Eclipse said coldly, looking as affronted as he could that she would dare to impugn that honor. “But I will swear it.”
The witch wasted no further time. The woman who had cast the spell the first time had made something faintly artistic out of the ritual; this one did not. She took his shackled arm in a clawlike hand, shoved his sleeve up, and slashed the knife across his wrist.
She did it fast enough that he hoped no one noticed the scar right next to it.
His blood fell into the silver bowl, or at least most of it did; he was leaking more energetically than he wanted to. The witch’s mouth thinned again in distaste as droplets spattered the table and even her sleeve.
It’s your own damn fault for cutting so deep
, Eclipse thought, teeth gritted against the pain.
Now finish the spell before I bleed to death
.
She obliged him on that count, at least. The crystal was in her left hand, humming audibly in the quiet room; she held it above his bleeding wrist and the bowl. “You are charged with the task of Hunting and killing the abomination known as Mirei. Until your Hunt is ended, you will not tell what task you have sworn to, nor what happened to you following your departure from Sethick, nor who and what you have seen since coming here. Should you fail, or break the terms of this oath, you will die. Should you succeed, we who have hired you bind ourselves to grant three boons to you, whenever you might require them. Do you accept?”
Warrior. Do not kill me for these words.
“I swear,” Eclipse said, his voice hoarse with tension, “on my oath and my name as a Hunter, that I will devote my utmost efforts to the task, or accept the retribution of the Divine Warrior who holds my oath.”
The witch sang the spell itself then, crisp, quick notes that Eclipse had to fight not to flinch back from. The blood rushed upward, past and across his wrist, in utter defiance of gravity, and flowed into the crystal. The witch pocketed the ruby and took his wrist once more in her cold fingers, covering the wound, getting more of his blood on herself.
“Your oath is accepted. You are free to Hunt.”
The two scars didn’t match.
Eclipse took a small amount of solace in the fact that he still had enough of a sense of humor to think such thoughts. The old scar was greenish-brown; if the tales older Hunters told were true, that meant an Earth witch had cast the blood-oath spell. He’d never found out for sure. The new one, though, was silvery-white. Air, he assumed. They looked odd, side by side.
At least only one of them still had the power to kill him. The old commission was fulfilled.
He dragged his eyes away from the scar and looked to the road ahead. The witches had knocked him out and dumped him on the road, so he had no idea where he’d been, but now he was almost to Silverfire. It was the best start he could think of. Mirei had taken with her the enchanted paper that allowed them to communicate with the rebel witches who had given them that old commission; he had no way to contact them now, except to look in the places where he’d met them before, and if they had the brains the Goddess gave mice they wouldn’t be there. So he had to start with Jaguar.
One of whose people he was sworn to kill. And Eclipse couldn’t tell him that. Or where he had been.
The Silverfire wall appeared on the horizon all too quickly.
The guard was familiar to him: Sickle, the oldest Silverfire still living, whom some said could have been Grandmaster if he had wanted to spend his silver years with the daily headaches the position carried. He’d been clever enough to pass the job off to Jaguar.
Sickle might be old, but his eyes were still sharp. He shouted to Eclipse before the rider even reached the wall. “Go straight in. They’ve been looking for you.”
Eclipse swore yet again and put his gelding to a gallop.
The wall stood a goodly distance from the school itself; he covered that distance in record time. Briar emerged from the stables to see who was arriving in such a hurry, and opened his mouth as Eclipse reined to a halt. “I know,” Eclipse said, and threw the reins to Briar as he slid from his saddle. “I’m already going.”
The ground-floor room of the building that served as Silverfire’s administrative heart was dim, after the brightness of the day. The voice seemed to emerge out of nowhere, before Eclipse’s eyes could adjust. “Where in the Void have
you
been?”
“Where’s Jaguar?” Eclipse asked. “They said you’ve been looking for me.”
“We have,” Slip said acidly. “So nice of you to drop in. The stubble looks lovely. Jaguar’s in the main salle, evaluating the twenties.”
Back out into the sunlight, now just as blinding as the darkness inside had been. But Eclipse’s feet knew the way; he crossed the compound and went into a low building with many oilskin windows to let in the light.
Inside, there was a large, open room with benches and practice equipment lining the walls. Some of the benches were occupied by lean people in dusty uniforms who looked, to Eclipse’s jaded eye, like fresh-faced young idiots. The oldest class of trainees at Silverfire—those few who had made it through the ten years of grueling work—they no doubt thought they were ready to take on the world. But Eclipse had been on the road for five years, and neck-deep in witch business since before Midsummer; to him, they looked like green fools.
The pair of men at the far wall were a different story. Both far older than he was, they were watching two of the trainees chase each other around the inside of the salle, blades flashing in the fight Their eyes flicked up at Eclipse’s entrance, though, and the older of the two straightened at the sight.
“Continue,” Jaguar said to Granite, the advanced weapons master, and beckoned sharply for Eclipse to come to him. Eclipse dropped his salute, crossed the room in the fighters’ wake, and followed the Grandmaster through a small door at the back.
The room was an office shared by the Silverfire combat masters; the walls were decorated with charts showing which classes were doing what work at what hours under which instructor, and the shelves held stacks of sheets with observations about each trainee’s progress. It was a time-honored tradition among the trainees to try to break into this room and look at their own records. Eclipse himself had not succeeded at the task until he was eighteen. Now, it seemed insignificant.
“Sir,” Eclipse said, before Jaguar could get started, “I have a question I need to ask you.”
The Grandmaster gave him a narrow, measuring look. “All right.”
Eclipse rolled up his right sleeve and displayed the two mismatched scars. “If you violate a blood-oath, how exactly does it kill you?”
Jaguar had gone still at the sight. He knew about the first commission; in fact, he had chosen Eclipse to carry it out, no doubt knowing that Eclipse would choose Mirage as his partner for it. To show up with a second scar so soon, though…
“If you break your oath,” Jaguar said, his voice low even though they were alone in the room and the door was shut, “then the scar begins to bleed. And no bandage or spell will stop it.”
I wonder how long it will take me to bleed to death through one wrist
, Eclipse thought with detached curiosity.
If it starts, I’m going to tell Void-damned
everything
I can before I die. Because at that point, it won’t matter
.
“How—” Jaguar began. Eclipse stopped him with an upraised hand, fully aware of how badly he was violating protocol and the respect due to the Grandmaster.
“Sir, unless you want to run the risk of me bleeding to death right here in this office, please let me explain what I can, and forgive me for what I
can’t
tell you.”
That silenced the older man. He knew the standard wording of the blood-oath as well as anyone, and this had nothing to do with it. Which meant, without Eclipse saying it outright, that he’d sworn a modified version of the oath. And probably not by choice.
Now
, the coldly rational part of his mind said,
I find out how far I can go without dying. Carefully. And depend on Jaguar’s ability to listen to
how
I say things, and hear what isn’t said, and put the pieces together
.
And hope the Goddess doesn’t blast me for giving things away semi-on-purpose. They told me I couldn’t
say
stuff. Not that I couldn’t betray it by other means
.
The intent had been obvious. The wording hadn’t. Hopefully the loophole would be enough.
Eclipse took a deep breath. “Sir. The first commission is finished, you’ll be glad to know. I haven’t seen my employers in a while, so I haven’t been able to collect the rest of my fee, or ask for the boons I’m due.”
Taking this damn thing off me will be boon number one
.
Jaguar nodded, processing this information, hopefully picking out the hint that the original set of witches were
not
the ones who had placed this second oath on him.
So far, so good. “Unfortunately,” Eclipse went on, “I can’t tell you where I’ve been.” True in two senses; even without the oath, he still didn’t know specifics. “But I have other information I’m supposed to give you, which Mirage asked me to bring here.”
“I know,” the Grandmaster said. “It’s how we knew to be missing you. She showed up here not long ago.”
The bottom dropped out of Eclipse’s stomach, sickeningly. “She’s
here
? Mi—Mirage?” He’d almost said Mirei.
Unblinking, Jaguar took in his reaction. And the stutter. “I know what she sent you to tell me, and more besides,” he said. “I know how she’s changed. She came here to take the two trainees—the doppelgangers—to Starfall.”