The twentieth or thirtieth time she did this, Mirage paused. Miryo cringed, imagining what her double must think of her. She hated being incompetent.
“Walk toe-heel,” Mirage advised, and continued on.
Miryo tried this and found it peculiar but helpful. The motion tired her legs, as they were unused to it, but walking toe-heel allowed her to find the ground with her foot before committing her weight to it. She still cracked twigs and rustled in the leaf mold, but she didn’t sound quite as much like a drunken donkey, which made her feel a good deal better. It gave her hope that she might, with practice, learn to do this well.
Some time later Mirage paused again. “Wait here,” she murmured, and then she was gone, swallowed up by the blackness. Miryo strained her ears, trying to track her by sound, but heard nothing more than the occasional rustle that might have been a squirrel.
Then Mirage was back. “Follow me.”
They went on only another ten steps before stopping again. “Can you climb trees?” Mirage asked.
Well-kept garden trees in Starfall, yes. But it couldn’t be harder than Starfall’s roofs. “I’ll manage.”
They scrambled up into the branches. It wasn’t as difficult as Miryo had feared. In fact, the tree seemed to have bees discreetly pruned to make climbing easier. Her suspicion was confirmed when Mirage led her onto a small platform nestled among the branches.
“Observation post,” her doppelganger explained. “The masters come up here to watch trainees, during evaluations.”
Miryo wrapped her cloak more tightly around herself and squirmed around until she was comfortable. “What time will they be riding through?”
“They leave Silverfire at First. Depending on which route they go, they’ll be here a half hour to an hour after that. They’ll pass by here, though, no matter which path they’re sent down.”
By Miryo’s reckoning, it was now somewhere between Low and Dark. They had at least four hours to kill, stuck in a damp, dark, cold tree. She sighed and squirmed a little bit more, then laid her head against a branch and tried to go to sleep.
She probably dozed, but it was hard to tell. Every time she opened her eyes, she saw Mirage, a motionless black shadow against the black of the tree. Miryo wondered if her double was sleeping at all.
“Is it always like this?” she asked at last, voicing her thought from before.
Mirage didn’t answer immediately, and Miryo thought for a moment she’d nodded off, or hadn’t understood the question. Then the shadow shrugged. “Depends on what you’re doing. Some jobs are more… lively than others.”
“Do you ever get a rest?”
A snort answered that. “I was supposed to, back before Midsummer. I’d ridden from one end of the land to the other, with three back-to-back jobs. Then Eclipse showed up with the commission.”
“And you’ve been on the road since then?”
“Yeah.”
Silence; even the wind had died down. “Do you enjoy it?”
Mirage laughed softly. Miryo couldn’t quite guess the meaning of that; it didn’t sound bitter, but neither was it particularly amused. “Yes. Probably more than is good for me. I’d like a rest, but I also feed on the challenge. I was bored stiff for a while, earlier this year. Getting the commission gave me more energy than a month of relaxation.”
“I’ve wondered about it myself. I’ve got to choose a Ray, you know, and I’d been leaning toward Air. But I didn’t know how I would take to being itinerant.”
“Not everyone likes it. The masters at Silverfire try to make sure that students who don’t, either take another profession or transfer to one of the schools we’re friendly with.” Mirage cocked her head to one side, and Miryo felt her double’s eyes on her. “You might enjoy it. I do, after all. But I don’t know if that’s one of the traits we share.”
“Well, I’m getting a sample of it, running around with you.”
“And what do you think?”
Miryo grinned, even though Mirage couldn’t see it. “I think I like it more than is good for me.”
That was the last they said for a while. Dawn came an hour or so before First; just as Miryo was able to see Mirage clearly, her double said, “We need to stay quiet from here on out. If anyone comes through and suspects we’re here, I’ll go down and talk to them. You have to stay as still as possible.”
Miryo nodded.
It was harder than she’d expected, though. Her legs became stiff, then threatened to cramp; she stretched them surreptitiously, but winced at every scrape of her boot against the platform. Mirage didn’t look at her, or say anything; still, Miryo could imagine her thoughts. She finally started meditating, just to take her mind off her growing discomfort.
She was jolted from this exercise by Mirage’s hand on her wrist. Miryo came alert, and eased forward on the platform, putting herself in a position to see the riders as they passed by.
They were strung out along the trail, each several minutes behind the last. Three went by before Miryo felt Mirage’s touch again. The rider who appeared was a thin, wiry girl, with close-cut brown hair.
When the girl had passed, Miryo glanced over at Mirage and shook her head.
Two more riders passed. Then Mirage tapped her wrist again.
Miryo hardly needed the touch. The girl’s cropped hair was a darker red than her mother’s, but it did little to disguise her; she might as well have had Ashin’s name symbol tattooed on her forehead, so striking was the resemblance.
They had to stay in the tree as the remainder of the class passed; then they climbed down and left as quickly as possible. No one crossed their path on the way out. Mirage nodded wordlessly to Eclipse as they took their horses’ reins; then the three of them mounted and rode swiftly away from Silverfire.
At first they rode with little or no sense of direction. It didn’t last, though. Before long Miryo pulled herself straighter in her saddle and chose for them all.
“Aystad,” she decided. “There’s a Void Hand there who might be able to tell us where Ashin is.”
“That was sudden,” Eclipse remarked.
Miryo smiled thinly. “It’s quite convenient, really. Back when I decided not to kill Mirage, I had no idea what I was going to do next. There was far too much we needed to do, and no way to sort through it. The problem’s solving itself, though. Things keep falling out such that I don’t really have much choice in what step I take next.”
“And that doesn’t bother you?”
“I can’t do much about it, can I? So I might as well accept it.”
Mirage tuned them out and rode in an unseeing haze. Her eyes were fixed on the road ahead, but in her mind all she could see were the two girls. The two doppelgangers. Fighting. Moving like her, Eclipse had said.
It irritated her, perversely enough. She’d grown up with the stigma of being red-haired and unusual, and although she had hated it, it had formed a very real part of her identity. She simply wasn’t quite like the other Hunter trainees. She was fast and strong, and fighting just made sense to her. It was instinctive. And that was something that set her apart.
So now you’re upset that you’re not unique anymore. Get over yourself.
All kinds of new questions were cropping up now. Why did doppelgangers have these qualities? Why were they fast, and strong, and natural fighters? Were those traits somehow anathema to magical ability?