I should have tested whether Mirei could take multiple people with her
, Satomi fretted, pacing her office.
Unpleasant as the experience seems to be, she would be safer with a larger guard
. Her one comfort was that, if it
was
a trap, Ashin knew full well that she had better sacrifice her own life to save Mirei’s. The Key had seemed insulted that Satomi thought it even had to be said.
Ruriko knocked at the door, then came in. “Aken, Tajio would like to speak with you.” Casting an ironic eye at the untouched stacks of paper on Satomi’s desk, and then at the Prime, standing next to the window with her fingers twisted together, she added, “If you’re not occupied with something else.”
Sometimes Ruriko knew her too well. But Satomi welcomed the distraction from her worries. “Send her in.”
Tajio entered and bowed. She was a fairly young witch who had come to the Void Head after Satomi left her position as Key to become Prime. Satomi recognized her, mostly by her hooked, prominent nose, but didn’t know her well.
One of Hyoka‘s research group. But not here because of that, or Hyoka would have come
.
“Aken,” the witch said, straightening from her bow. “I wanted to speak to you about the doppelgangers.”
The word was an effective distraction. “Oh?” Satomi said, crossing the room and seating herself behind her desk.
“I was wondering who’s overseeing their training, with Mirei and Ashin gone.”
Satomi hadn’t given it any thought. “They still have their lessons.”
“I meant their physical training. I assume their morning work with the Cousins is continuing. But has anyone planned to take up their afternoon practices?”
“Not as far as I’m aware,” Satomi said. “We don’t have anyone qualified. The training Mirei’s been giving them is not like the Cousins‘.”
Tajio nodded. “Of course, Aken, we don’t have anyone with Mirei’s skills. But I thought someone might at least oversee the practices, the way Ashin does, and make sure the girls keep on with their work. That wouldn’t take much expertise. From what I’ve heard, they’re eager to practice; it shouldn’t be hard to keep them at it. And I expect Mirei would prefer for them not to be left at loose ends while she’s gone.”
“She won’t be gone more than a few days,” Satomi said absently, reviewing in her mind the roster of witches who had taken up various teaching tasks, wondering who could be spared for those hours.
Tajio’s voice broke into her thoughts. “If it’s not presumptuous of me, Aken, I’d be willing to take on that task.”
Satomi glanced up at her where she stood before the desk, hands clasped demurely behind her back. “I thought you were working with Hyoka.”
“I am, but she can spare me.”
It was an elegant solution. Satomi nodded. “Very well. Tell Hyoka, and ask Ruriko to give you the doppelgangers’ schedule. Just make sure they do their usual practices; don’t try to add or change anything.”
“Of course not,” Tajio said, and bowed again. “Thank you, Aken.”
Later that morning Satomi had her usual meeting with Nae, which of late had been more than usually tense. The business they handled in these meetings was a routine that had remained essentially unchanged since Satomi took the office of Void Prime; for all she knew, it hadn’t substantially changed in the last few centuries. Primes and Cousins might come and go, but the task of keeping people fed and clothed remained the same.
Today, she could hardly keep her mind on the matter, and when it was done, she spoke impulsively to the old Cousin.
“Nae,” she said, “if I should ever… give offense…”
The Cousin waited impassively for her to finish, face no more expressive than a rock.
Satomi couldn’t bring herself to admit her charade with Eikyo. Not directly. She tried another tack. “My hopes have always been for good relations between witches and Cousins,” she said. “I hope I have done well. But if there is anything more I can do—some boon I can grant you, that would better your lives—then you have but to ask.”
She said it on instinct, and for a moment she hoped that she might finally get some reaction from Nae.
But the old woman merely nodded, said “Thank you, Aken,” and departed. Leaving Satomi wondering whether she had just made matters worse or better.
With all the demands on Satomi’s time, her day was scheduled from the moment she woke up until the moment she fell asleep, and no one got in to see her without going through Ruriko first. So she was startled to hear the door open and see, not her secretary, but Nenikune.
Nenikune, her normally rosy face white and sick, and marked with tears.
Satomi rose to her feet and moved swiftly around to the front of her desk. “What’s wrong?”
The head of Starfall’s healers sank into a chair without asking permission. She was blinking rapidly, as if trying to stop fresh tears. “Anness—”
The two-year-old doppelganger had suffered a bout of sickness the previous night; Nenikune had brought her into the infirmary for care. “What happened?” Satomi whispered.
The healer looked up, devastation in her eyes. “She’s dead.”
Dead. But she was a doppelganger. She’d died before, when her mother tried to sacrifice her as was custom, and then had come back to life, because she shared a soul with Chanka. She would come back again.
“She wasn’t sick,” Nenikune whispered. “It was Chanka. They put her through the ritual. Two years old, and they opened her to power. It killed her—her and Anness both.”
Satomi’s own knees gave out; she barely reached a chair in time. Chanka was in Kalistyi. Captured by Shimi’s people, along with several doppelgangers. They couldn’t kill the doppelgangers while their witch-halves were safe at Starfall—but Chanka was not safe.
“She’s two years old,” Satomi whispered, unable to believe it.
Nenikune nodded, mute.
It was unforgivable. Whatever Shimi thought of the doppelgangers—this had to have been her idea—killing a
child
, someone that young and helpless…
A cold voice in the back of Satomi’s mind murmured,
Can you use this against her
?
Satomi’s stomach heaved in revulsion at the thought. To sit here, with two children dead, and think about using it for political gain… and yet she had to. It was one thing for Shimi to fight against the changes that had come to Starfall. But if she was willing to go this far, then Satomi
had
to stop her, and sooner rather than later. Before she could find a way to kill the rest of the children, too.
And she knew, with icy clarity, that Kekkai had better have been honest in asking for help. Because if the Key was lying, and was captured anyway, then she would find no mercy here in Starfall.
Constant tension had worn away at Eclipse; between a lack of appetite and a disinclination to train, he’d lost more than a little weight. If he really wanted to pretend that he was going to kill Mirei, he knew he should throw himself into practice, to build himself back up again. But there were other things occupying his time.
One of the rooms at Silverfire had been converted into an office for him. There was little in there other than a desk, a chair, and some shelves, but decorations weren’t Eclipse’s primary concern these days.
Information was.
Seating himself in the chair, as he had for days before, Eclipse reflected that he was getting a taste of the Grandmaster’s life. Silverfire Hunters were independent, for the most part, operating off their own resources and ingenuity, but there were still times when the school helped them out. And though Silverfire’s network of agents and informants paled next to, say, Cloudhawk’s, they had people in every domain—and Jaguar had given him full access to them.
The most dangerous part had been the early stages. Eclipse could not tell anyone the details of where he had been, and who he had been with—but he could and did ask very carefully worded questions. Bit by bit, he had learned what he needed to know.
He knew now which fort he’d been held in, and where it stood along Abern’s border. He knew that no obvious convoy of witches had left the area following his release—but there
had
been a suspiciously large group of non-witches, with no obvious reason for traveling together. Tracking them was made more difficult because they changed their disguise spells more than once, but their path led northeast, through the
Now he was trying to learn where they’d gone to ground.
That Lady Chaha had given her support to the dissidents was common knowledge. By the reports Eclipse was getting, she was doing more than just talking about it, too. She had given them soldiers and some manner of base; he thought it was in the mountains that formed the domain’s western border, but nailing down specifics was difficult. The prevalence of the Nalochkan sect there meant that recruiting people to work for Hunters wasn’t easy, and besides that, Chaha was doing her best to guard the security of the dissidents. So his spies were having to dodge domain guards while they went about their work.
There was other information he could gather, though, and he strongly suspected its usefulness was the main reason Starfall hadn’t decided to play it safe and off him before he could be a threat.
Mirei would never stand for such a thing, he knew—but they didn’t have to tell her. They could make it look like the oath had struck home. Then no more worries about his loyalties, no fear that he might try to save his own life by taking hers. The warning had to have made them nervous.
So give them a reason not to act on those nerves
, he thought, and turned his attention to the newest reports.
The rumor that a Nalochkan monastery near Lavesye had all but emptied out seemed to be true, and more to the point, now he knew where they had gone. The write-up collated notices from other domains of Nalochkan monks proselytizing in the outlying villages and towns, preaching against the Warrior.
The witches might have heard about that one already, but Eclipse set it aside as information to be passed along, wondering as he did so how long it would be before one Hunter school or another took exception to the monks preaching against the Warrior. That track of thought made the next report catch his eye even more than it would have otherwise. It was a scrawled note from Slip, who occasionally passed Eclipse tidbits that Jaguar chose not to share.
Confirmation: Ice is dead
, the note said.
Accepted story is Mirei killed her
.
Eclipse bit back an oath. There had been a rumor going around about Ice, but they had the story from Mirei and knew she’d left the Thornblood alive. If Ice was dead, then it was because somebody was trying to set Mirei up. The dissidents? They were the most likely candidates.
Next sheet. A trio of ships had sailed from a port on the western edge of
Next sheet. Lady Chaha was drilling her troops, and had recruitment planned for the spring. Attached was an older paper that didn’t look like a Silverfire report, a political and tactical analysis of where Chaha might strike, should she decide to make war on anyone. The mountains kept her domain largely hemmed in; her main options were to try and take the
Next sheet, and this one made Eclipse’s fingers go cold. Someone—no clear details on who—had visited the Wolfstar compound in Razi, and had bought up every unemployed Hunter in sight.
The fact that it was in his stack said that
somebody
, most likely Slip, thought it was related to Eclipse’s own work against the dissidents in Kalistyi. Could it be? By all indications, both Chaha and Shimi were too rabidly Nalochkan to even dream of sullying their hands with Hunters. He knew that Shimi had been a part of hiring Wraith, but that was before her religious convictions had asserted themselves like this.
Who would even
want
that many Wolfstars? They were assassins. People usually hired them singly, not in squadrons.
He tried to think of their potential targets. Hiring many assassins suggested there were many targets; otherwise it would be overkill, in a very literal sense of the word. Scattered targets, or a concentrated group?
Then a deeply unpleasant possibility occurred to him.
The Primes have hired a Wolfstar before, to kill one of their own. Shimi wouldn’t be likely to use a Hunter again
—
but Satomi
?