Maybe when we find Ashin-kasora, we can convince her to bring us her daughter—both of them—whatever. It’s possible that there is a solution, but it has to be done before that second ritual. If that were the case, it was too late for Miryo and Mirage, but at least they could do something to help those other girls.
And somehow, in the middle of all this, she would have to deal with Wraith.
Something slammed into her chest.
What the—
Miryo’s horse reared, nearly throwing her. She hauled sideways on the reins as the gelding came down and just barely avoided trampling Mirage.
Mirage. On the ground. With—
With an arrow in her chest.
Another shaft streaked through the air and buried itself in a tree next to her horse’s head. Miryo’s gelding bolted.
The animal plunged off the road, leaping a rock and then narrowly avoiding a tree. Miryo hung on for dear life, hauling on the reins, staying low in the saddle lest a tree branch slap her down. She had to stop her horse. Mirage was somewhere behind her—
Dead.
She snarled. Can’t be sure of that. I’ve got to get back.
Her gelding stumbled, and finally she was able to rein him in. He’d run quite a distance in his panic. Miryo twisted in her saddle, trying to spot the road through the patchy trees. The ground was too broken, though, and she couldn’t be sure of her direction.
Steel crashing against steel was her guide. In the split second before her horse ran, Miryo had seen the uniformed and masked Hunter who had shot her double down. He and Eclipse must be fighting. So all she had to do was find them, and she’d find Mirage.
She kicked her horse into motion.
The rough terrain confused her, though; she kept being led astray. Under her breath, Miryo muttered a stream of increasingly vicious curses. I don’t have this kind of time to waste!
Then she crested a small rise, and saw the fighters.
Eclipse had crowded his horse close in against the other Hunter’s, trapping him against a sharp spur of stone, and the two of them were fighting furiously. But their struggle had carried them away from the road, and Mirage was nowhere in sight.
Miryo swallowed hard, forcing tears down. Then she took a deep breath and began to sing.
She meant to craft a holding spell, to stop the two combatants. Within three words, though, it was gone. Without even meaning to, Miryo reached up to the sun above her and the earth below her and the wind around her, and pulled them together into a spell of destructive force. Her control was poor, and the energy surged wildly, straining against her fragile hold.
Miryo was past caring.
Mirage had taken an arrow to the heart. If she was not dead, she was beyond Miryo’s ability to heal. And so Miryo had nothing to fear; she drew the power in to crush the Hunter before her.
He drove Eclipse back with a furious attack. And in that moment, Miryo gathered the maelstrom of nearly uncontrollable energy; it was oscillating violently, slipping out of her grasp, but she focused every fiber of her being to unleash its fallout on him.
And then she twisted desperately, wrenching the power sideways into the ground with an effort that made her entire body scream. The earth exploded into fire and dust, but through it she could still see the figure that had leapt from the outcrop and slammed the Hunter off his horse.
I don’t believe it.
Miryo stared, through the pounding of her sudden headache, as her doppelganger rolled to her feet and drew her sword in one swift motion. I saw her go down. She can’t be here—not fighting.
But she could not deny the evidence of her eyes. Mirage had leapt off the spur of rock as the Hunter neared it again, and with her momentum had wrenched him to the ground. It was a miracle she hadn’t landed on his drawn sword. Beyond them Miryo could see Eclipse, slack-jawed with startled disbelief, staring at the two of them. And now they were fighting, and Miryo finally saw what Eclipse had meant when he said Mirage was good. Wound or no wound, she was fighting, and even Miryo could tell that she was brilliant. She flowed from one motion to the next like liquid lightning. The other Hunter looked clumsy by comparison, and slow with the shock of seeing her. He sliced at her side, but she was long gone; then she leapt forward in his cut’s wake and nearly impaled him. Only a quick twist saved him. And now Mi-rage had him on the retreat, and she pressed her advantage.
She cut high, low, and then low again. Somehow he had gotten a dagger out, and was using it to parry some of her blows, but Mirage’s speed made her one blade seem like three. He took a nick to one hip, and then another on his shoulder. A thrust nearly caught him in the face, and he wasn’t fast enough to avoid a slice along his cheek and ear. Part of his mask flapped free. Beneath the blood Miryo could see a grim, hard expression.
Mirage kicked dust into his eyes. He shut them and for a moment seemed to be fighting by hearing alone. But it wasn’t enough; within a moment he’d lost his dagger, and a finger with it.
He howled and charged forward, opening his watering eyes. His momentum and greater bulk knocked Mirage off-balance, and the two of them went sprawling, blades flying across the ground. He should have kept his feet and his sword, though. Before he’d even finished rolling, Mirage was on her feet.
She waded in with a swift flurry of kicks. They caught him in the face, the chest, the groin; even where she was standing Miryo could hear bones breaking. The Hunter was barely putting up a token resistance now. And then Mirage slammed him onto his back, knelt on his chest, and drew her dagger. Miryo closed her eyes as she slashed it across his throat.
20
Misetsu
“That’s twice!”
“You’re seeing things.” Mirage refused to look at Eclipse as she retrieved her sword from the dust.
“No. The first time, maybe, that explanation would fly. But not now. He shot you down, Sen, and there’s a hole in your jacket to prove it.”
Now Miryo stepped forward, looking from one to the other of them. “What do you mean, ‘the first time’?”
Mirage shot Eclipse a furious look, but it didn’t silence him. And somehow hitting him didn’t seem like a reasonable course of action. Since she couldn’t think of anything else to do, she just stood, trying not to shake, as he answered Miryo’s question.
“It was when we were students. She got into a fight with this other trainee. He hit her and killed her. I ran to get a master, but when we came back, Sen was on her feet again, and fighting him.”
“He didn’t kill me. I was just stunned.”
“Not a chance, Sen. Even then I knew what a broken neck sounded like.”
“And now it’s happened again,” Miryo said, her voice faint “I saw that Hunter shoot you. You were dead before you bit the ground.”
“I wasn’t dead.”
Eclipse laughed wildly. “What are you going to say—the arrow bounced off you?”
Miryo held up her hands to silence both of them. “Please—just think about it. This would explain so much.”
Mirage’s eyebrows shot upward. “Like what?”
“Like how you didn’t die twenty-five years ago. Maybe Kasane did kill you, and then you came back to life.”
That produced a momentary silence. Then Mirage shook her head. “But how could I have ended up unkillable? Is there some spell that would do that? No, it doesn’t make sense. Besides, if I’m invulnerable, why would the Primes send you to kill me?”
“Maybe they didn’t know,” Eclipse said.
But now Miryo was shaking her head, eyes wide with appalled understanding. “No, the Primes knew. But you’re not completely invulnerable, either. When they sent me after you, the one thing they emphasized above everything else was, I had to kill you myself.”