She knelt in the center of the room. Triskeles done in Elemental colors encircled her; she spared them a brief glance before ignoring them entirely. Her mind focused on a single thing.
Maiden. Bride. Mother. Crone. Warrior. Be with me.
Miryo took a moment to calm her breathing and her heart. Both were racing, after the scene with the Hunters. The knowledge of what she was facing didn’t help her any, either.
Forgive me. I should have helped that man. He was seriously injured, and needed healing. But I had not prepared myself properly, and so I could not—would not—help him. I was too weak.
Please, Lady of Five Faces, help me not be weak now. My doppelganger is upstairs. I must—no, I will kill it. It hurt that man, nearly killed him; it has probably done the same to others. I, however, wish to help those in need, wherever, they may be. I know now that I can serve you best as a witch of the Air. And this is the first step in that service.
I go now to execute my doppelganger. Be at my side, Goddess, as I wield the knife.
Mirage spared a quick glance out the hallway window as she turned the corner. As she had hoped, she was about to reach the ground floor. A straight run for the front door seemed her best option. Hopefully the house’s remaining defenses would not mobilize in time to stop her. And hopefully she wouldn’t run into anything worse than surprised Cousins. But luck, which had been with her so far, now deserted her. She reached the bottom of the stairs, turned a corner, and found herself face-to-face with another red-haired woman.
The triskele pendant that hung around her neck drew Mirage’s eyes like a magnet.
“Warrior,” she whispered. “You’re the witch who had me taken.”
Miryo stood frozen, numb, barely able to feel the dagger in her fingers. She had thought she was prepared for the shock of seeing her doppelganger. She was wrong.
Her doppelganger’s flame-colored hair was cut close to her head, but the hue was like hers. Its body was hard muscle, but the proportions were the same. And the face she saw was her own. Not similar: identical. Battered though her doppelganger was, its face was hers. Miryo’s skin crawled as she stood in the hallway, staring at herself.
Its eyes—gray, like her own—widened in shock. It was even less prepared for this than Miryo herself.
“Who are you?” it whispered, body tensed and wary. Miryo realized for the first time that it, too, had a knife in its hands. “My—my sister?”
“No,” Miryo said, responding automatically. She couldn’t make herself move. “Not sisters. You and I—we’re the same person.”
One pale eyebrow rose in a manner that was eerily familiar.
“You’re my doppelganger. My double. Made when I was five days old. Only you were supposed to be killed then—doppelgangers are always killed—but you survived. Somehow. But I have to kill you now.” She closed her mouth with a snap to keep herself from babbling more.
It brought the knife up defensively. Miryo eyed the blade and swallowed; it looked very competent. And it had nearly killed a Hunter. How was she supposed to stand against it?
“So you murder babies,” the doppelganger said coldly.
“It’s not murder!” Miryo protested. “It’s done before the child is presented to the Goddess. So there’s no soul when one body is killed.”
“I’ve been in starlight since then, more than once. Do you want to bet that I still have no soul?”
That hit far too close to home, even after Miryo’s resolution to put the question behind her. “It doesn’t matter. I have to kill you. As long as you’re alive, I can’t control my magic. So either I kill you now, or I cause a lot of destruction and probably hurt or kill other people before I die, myself.” The word “kill” stabbed her every time she said it.
“And I’m supposed to believe you.”
“You don’t want a demonstration, believe me.” Miryo clamped down on the trembling part of herself and matched her doppelganger, glare for glare.
“So why don’t I kill you? That should solve the problem, shouldn’t it?”
Miryo’s heart thudded painfully. She didn’t have a prayer of matching it in a fight, and now she’d admitted her magic was not stable. And she had a sick suspicion that neither Kan nor Sai would be appearing to help her. The courage of her convictions held her up. “That’s not the way it goes. You’re a doppelganger. A copy. Not a real person. You were never meant to live.”
It stared at her as though she were babbling nonsense. The expression, its familiarity, unnerved her, but she refused to show it; any hint of weakness and this thing would exploit it. Miryo kept her jaw firm and did not look away.
The doppelganger straightened suddenly. “All right,” it said, and tossed its knife casually to the floor in front of Miryo. Then it spread its arms wide. “Do it.”
Miryo stared at it in complete shock. “What?”
“Kill me,” it said grimly. “Stab me in the heart. If you truly believe what you’re saying, then it should mean no more to you then tearing up a sheet of paper. Do it. Stab me in the heart.”
Miryo stepped forward, over its discarded blade. Taking a deep breath, she raised her own knife, lining its tip up with her double’s chest. It could undoubtedly strike the weapon from her hand, but it made no move to do so.
Her doppelganger gave her a twisted smile. “Think of me, whenever you cast a spell.”
15
Path
Neither of them moved for an eternity. Then the witch swore an oath Mirage never would have thought she knew, and dropped her dagger to the floor.
“I can’t do it,” she said.
Mirage breathed for the first time in what seemed like a year. Warrior, but I hate bluffing.
The witch looked up, and her eyes narrowed. Mirage was not yet over the indescribable shock of seeing her own face, down to its expressions, on someone else. Other thoughts bubbled at the edges of her mind, but she kept them ruthlessly quashed. Deal with this first.
“You knew I wouldn’t,” the witch accused, that voice so like a trained version of Mirage’s own.
She shrugged, trying to make it look casual. “I couldn’t, were I in your place.”
The other woman thought about that for a moment, then gave a sour half grin Mirage’s muscles knew very well. “Is that really how this works?”
“Looks like it. Lucky for me, too, since I was kind of gambling my life on it. But I knew I couldn’t kill me, so I figured you couldn’t, either.”
“I am killing myself, though,” the witch said wretchedly. “By not killing you. One of these days, I’m going to cast a spell. I can’t keep stopping myself. And if that doesn’t destroy me outright, other witches will step in. They can’t take the risk of letting me run wild.”
Mirage’s gut clenched. Her double had not been lying; the hopelessness in her eyes was very real. The woman’s hands, hanging limp at her sides, trembled faintly before she closed them into fists. Mirage almost smiled at that; she wouldn’t want to show weakness, either.
She is weak, though, a corner of her mind whispered. She can’t use magic. You could kill her right now.
In theory, yes. In practice, no. The feeling of recognition was too strong, the sense that here was something she had been missing all her life, searching for without knowing it.
A witch. After years of telling people she had no connection to them.
But however much she hated being wrong, she couldn’t just write this woman’s life off. No more than she could really surrender to death at the witch’s hands. So that left her with only one option.