Warrior and Witch (41 page)

Then a figure stepped out into the middle of the street and faced down the company of soldiers and witches that had come to take her captive. “Leave those people alone,” Kekkai said in a clear, carrying voice. “I’m the one you’re looking for.”

At the sight of her—so clearly the target the soldiers were after—the noise of the drunken, confused crowd abated slightly. Just enough for Mirei to hear a despairing voice moan, “Oh, you stupid girl,
no
!”

Though her heart was screaming at her to go and help the witch who had just called the violence down on herself, Mirei wrenched her eyes away to find who had spoken.

The young trapper who had called for songs, beardless, not too tall, buried inside a wealth of furs that made his—her—build look larger than it was. Whose voice, absent the hoarseness, was the same as the woman who had just challenged the soldiers, and whose face, now that Mirei was looking for it, was Kekkai’s.

The time for subtlety was gone. She lunged through the crowd and seized Kekkai by the wrist. The woman screamed and tried to pull away. Mirei snarled, “It’s me, you blind bitch! Now we have to get to Ashin before she gets herself killed!”

“Ashin… ?” the Fire Key repeated, confused, but Mirei didn’t have time for her confusion; soldiers had spurred their horses forward to ride the disguised Ashin down, and the witches were singing spells, and Mirei knew she had made a promise to Ashin but she couldn’t just abandon the woman to die.

Power surged, and a roar of heaving earth filled the air. Over the startled yells of the crowd, Mirei could hear screams; the spell, she guessed, was Ashin’s, ripping apart the ground beneath the horses’ hooves. A cloud of snow and dust clogged the air. Hauling hard on the woman’s wrist, Mirei dragged Kekkai out of the press, drawing her sword as she went.

The scouting of Tungral paid off, as she ducked between houses and approached Ashin’s position from the side, avoiding the main avenue of attack. There were soldiers here, too, but Kekkai had recovered enough to sing as she ran; the men were knocked to the sides, clearing their path. But Mirei could feel power to her left, too, from where the other witches were massed.

She broke through onto the street, Kekkai at her heels, and found herself enveloped in a rising cloud of steam; Ashin had conjured heat to melt the snow, hiding herself for a moment longer from the sight of the other witches. Mirei threw herself in the right general direction and saw Ashin, a shadow in the mist, still looking like Kekkai.

No time to waste. The mist wouldn’t last long. Ashin saw her, grabbed hold, and Mirei began to cast the spell, praying to the Goddess that she could take both of them at once.

The power on the other side of the fog was building, but she couldn’t tell what it was, not through the weaving strands of her own spell, shaped by voice and body and desperate, frantic faith—

A flight of blades shot at them out of the mist, soldiers’ swords put in flight, and struck just as the spell snatched them away.

Chapter Eighteen

Many witches maintained schedules that kept them up some distance into the night, because they favored the starlit darkness for working spells. Scholarly and administrative work, however, was mostly carried out during the day, so the archives were not at all crowded once the sun went down. But Satomi suspected that the corner of the archives she was perusing would have been deserted even at midday, for the contents were among the most tedious and uninteresting of those kept at Starfall. No one came here unless they had a specific reason.

Hers was a specific curiosity.

She ran one finger down the rows of identical, black-bound volumes, reading the characters marked on their spines.
Forty years ago would be my guess, but that’s an estimate; I’ll have to check for quite a span in either direction. This is going to be ever so much fun
.

Satomi found the book that contained records from exactly forty years previously; she would search outward from there. Opening it, she found herself eyeing pages with neatly ruled lines, and terse entries on the lines.

Oeba. Choukin. 23 Ara 62. 3. 244. Water Heart.

Shidau. Etsumari. 4 Gire 62. 3. 244. Earth Hand.

Hannen. Waki. 11 Paoli 62. 3. 244. Air Hand.

Tidy annals of witch-students tested, and where they had ended up. Name, mother’s name, date of test, and then later some Void Head returned and added in the Ray and Path each woman had chosen. There were literally hundreds of records for her to search.

The one saving grace was that the entries she was looking for would be easy to spot.

She found one on the next page.
Urayomi. Yabure. 16 Riggio 63. 3. 744
. No Ray and Path. That omission was the silent record of a student who had failed.

“Died, or became a Cousin?” Satomi murmured to herself. No indication; she had known there wouldn’t be. But it didn’t matter for her search.

Looking for those blank spots, the search went quickly, if not fruitfully. Satomi went methodically in each direction, year by year, fanning outward from the forty-year mark. Every time she found a failed student, she checked the name.

Until at last she found an entry that caught her eye.

Omonae. Hinobi. 5 Paoli 58. 3. 244.

She stared at the words for several minutes before closing the book and returning it to the shelf. Not definitive proof. Other women had names like that. But it came from roughly the right time, and it could have been shortened to Nae.

Satomi was not certain why she’d gone to the trouble of checking. If Nae had been a witch-student, rather than a child of a Cousin, then she wouldn’t remember anything of it. What difference did it make, if the woman in charge of the Cousins had been one of those who lost her memory in the test? What bearing could it have on the situation? She didn’t know. But the question had crossed her mind, and once it had done so, she hadn’t been able to shake it.

Omonae. Would any part of her remember that name, if she heard it again?

She left the test records and went to another section of the archives, equally deserted. This time her search went faster. Knowing the date she was looking for, she immediately located the relevant book and pulled it down.

One is one and it doesn’t continue. Then one sees one and one is more. More than one is a set, a group, a series. But there is only one. There are all the ones and none of them is more than one. East and west and north and south and from one domain to another it goes, hands carry the hope but there is no hope in their hands. More than one is death. More than one is war. War is one of five. You must see this before there can be more than one.

With a sigh, Satomi closed the book. Those were the words spoken by Omonae, the night she lost her memory, the night power broke her and made her a Cousin. Satomi could make no sense of them. She couldn’t help but try to apply them to the current situation, but they could as easily be referencing the politics of Askavya, or nothing at all. And even if they
were
about the current time, she could not derive any advice from them. They were useless to her. Eikyo had hinted, tantalizingly, that the Cousins knew about the words, but with the young woman under suspicion, Satomi had little hope of learning more. Perhaps it was time to retrieve Eikyo, and pray there was some way of salvaging that situation.

Leaving the archives, Satomi went through the corridors with a brisk stride, nodding briefly to witches who sank into bows at her passing.
If nothing else, I accomplished one thing by going on that hunt: It distracted me from wondering what’s happening in Kalistyi
.

The message from Mirei had shaken her deeply, with its suggestion that someone had betrayed news of their journey to Shimi and Arinei. Satomi was willing to trust—for the time being, anyway—that Rana and Onomita were loyal, but Hyoka’s witches were another matter. Koika had taken charge of the search for the spy. Given a free rein, she would have used methods that would make a sledgehammer look subtle, but Satomi had talked her into more delicacy. If they could identify the traitor, they could use her to feed false information to the dissidents.

Depending on how the mission to Kalistyi went, though, delicacy might end up the least of her concerns.

Ruriko was out when she arrived at her office. Satomi passed through the secretary’s room and into her own. There was another report from Hyoka waiting for her, detailing the various obstacles they’d run into; despite all efforts, it seemed there was no way to disrupt the communication papers without having physical access to them.

She turned up the lamps, sat down at her desk, and had just begun reading the report when she felt a twisting of power in the air.

It wasn’t large; she didn’t immediately go on alert. So she was completely unprepared when three figures appeared in the space before her desk.

Screams hammered the air.

Two of the three figures collapsed to the floor; the third, Mirei, stumbled and half fell against Satomi’s desk, retching and trembling. Satomi shot to her feet. The screams continued. Mirei was filthy, ragged, bleeding. Beyond her, on the floor, Kekkai was curled into a tiny ball inside a giant mound of furs, shrieking, hands clamped to her head, and next to her—

Satomi began singing even as she flung herself around the end of her desk, reaching her hands out to the third woman on the floor. Her knees hit the tiles and skidded in blood. Power came to her call and went where she sent it, but it wasn’t enough; healing was magic, but even magic had its limits. Wounds knit faster, under a spell, but some wounds were bad enough to kill even more quickly.