Warrior and Witch (20 page)
“And Koika and Rana?”
Satomi met her gaze coldly. “Themselves, you, or me. No one else.”
Hyoka moved in startlement, then bowed. “Yes, Aken.”
Mirei stumbled to her feet, off balance, head thick and slow. Her eyes kept going over the scene, not quite processing it yet. Two horses: hers and Amas’s. Two trainees: Amas and Lehant.
No Indera.
No Indera’s horse.
The foul taste in her mouth stopped her where she stood. Mirei raised one hand to her lips, then swore. Ferraleaf. Someone had drugged her. Drugged her and taken Indera.
Taken only one
? a more alert part of her asked.
Taken one, and left the others here
?
And how would they have fed her the drug, anyway?
Mirei’s eyes went, inexorably, to the pot the previous night’s broth had been cooked in. It had been washed in the spring and set upside-down against a rock to dry. No evidence left.
But Indera had cooked the broth.
Ferraleaf. One of the herbs she had pointed out to Amas and Indera on the long ride from Silverfire to Angrim.
Mirei swore again, louder. “Void-damned idiot,” she added. It was easier to keep her thoughts going around the aftereffects of the drug when they were said out loud. “Watching the wrong bloody two. Left your eyes off her. Ferraleaf likes damp—let’s see—yes, there it is, right by the spring, how clever of you to spot what’s left of it
now
, when she’s fed you most of the plant. Didn’t drink the broth last night, did she? Weren’t watching for that. And didn’t taste it, either, because she put salt in, like you told her to. Good job, Mirei, you’re a wonderful teacher.”
Her rambling, venomous monologue broke off as she turned and found Amas and Lehant had stirred into wakefulness.
“She’s gone,” Mirei said. No point in trying to hide it. “Drugged us and ran. Don’t know how long ago.”
She began to cast about on the ground as the other two struggled upright. Her body was stiff from her unnaturally deep sleep on the ground with only her cloak to protect her, but she disregarded it, working the stiffness out as she looked for tracks. Indera had taken a horse; that would be hard to hide—yes, there, leading back toward the road. Mirei followed the marks, leaving the trainees and the horses behind for the moment, and emerged out from under the trees into the sunlight of late morning. If Indera had left as soon as they were soundly asleep, then she could have quite a head start.
The hoofprints went to the road, and vanished into the hard-packed dirt.
Mirei straightened from her crouch and began cursing once more in a low, unbroken monotone. The lane was smaller than a
Bad enough to lose Naspeth because she didn’t reach Angrim in time. How was she supposed to justify losing Indera when the girl had been
right there
?
A rustle in the dry grass made her spin. She staggered a step, equilibrium still not recovered, and found Amas behind her.
“Why in the Void aren’t
you
gone, too?” Mirei demanded, saying the first thing that came to mind. “I thought you’d be the one to run. You, or the Thornblood.”
Amas gave her that same infuriatingly level look as always. “Why me?”
“Because you treat everything I say like I’m a marketplace vendor trying to cheat you, and you just haven’t figured out how. I expected
you
to question the things I said last night.”
“But not Indera.” Amas shook her head. Red-gold roots were appearing in her dyed hair, glimmering in the morning sunlight. Her expression almost pitied Mirei’s lack of understanding. “She worships you. Worshiped, I guess. Wanted to be just like you. She
loves
being who she is, being this—doppelganger thing. Then you come along and tell her you’re going to take that away.”
“I’m saving her life.”
Amas shrugged, sardonic. “I guess she’s not very grateful.”
“So why didn’t you run away with her? Are you more grateful?”
“She didn’t ask me to come,” Amas said. Then she smiled, with a cool edge to it. “And I haven’t finished thinking about what you told us.” The smile faded; she grimaced and spat into the grass. “Is this what ferraleaf tastes like, then?”
“Indera overdid it,” Mirei muttered, and headed back toward the camp.
Lehant was there, ducking her head into the spring in order to clear it. The water streamed over the girl’s bald head; she blinked her eyes clear and said, “Now what?”
Mirei knew before she tried that it wouldn’t work, but she had to try anyway. Maybe it would work for her, with her different flavor of magic.
She sang the spell that would locate a human being.
The result was not like trying to find someone hidden behind a blocking spell. Instead of the painful silence, she suffered a wash of dizziness that dumped her on her ass.
She should have given the girls warning. They had no way of knowing what spell she was casting. By the looks on their faces, they had half-expected that she was going to rain fire down on their heads for letting Indera slip off. Her fall clearly hadn’t helped their confusion.
“Damn it to Void,” Mirei said, not even able to put any real force behind it. She had known the spell would fail. That, then, must be what it felt like to try and find a person who was in two places at once. Sharyo was hopefully at Starfall, and Indera was Goddess knew where.
“Are you okay?” Amas asked, not approaching her.
Depending on what you mean by “okay
.” “Yes,” Mirei said, tucking her legs underneath her.
Crone on a crutch. So what now
?
After she had sat there for a moment, pondering that question and coming up with nothing useful, Amas spoke again. “Can’t you just get her back with magic?”
“No,” Mirei said shortly, and left it at that.
Better not to tell them they’re untrackable by spell. Don’t want to give them any ideas
.
Another few moments of silence, and then Amas’s voice. “Shouldn’t you be following her? Before she gets too far away?”
“I have no idea which bloody direction she’s gone in, and I have you two to worry about,” Mirei growled. “Need to figure out what to do with you, before I go after her.”
“What to
do
with us?” This time it was Lehant, rising from her crouch beside the spring and coming a step toward her.
“Remember me saying your lives were in danger? I’ve lost two of you already, at least in the short term. I’m going to get you two safely stowed with somebody before I go haring off after Indera.” She closed her eyes and tried to recall where the nearest group of Cousins was likely to be. No, not Cousins; she needed at least
some
witches to protect these two. And she couldn’t just recruit the nearest Water Hand. This was going to be a nightmare. Every minute she spent on this, Indera was getting more thoroughly lost. Or being found by the wrong people.
Amas’s voice broke through her thoughts,
again
. “I can help you find her.”
“
Will you stop distracting me
?” Mirei demanded, rising to her feet in one smooth motion. Good; her sense of balance was coming back.
The trainee stood her ground against the anger. “I can help. I know Indera better than you do. If you can’t get her back with magic, then you’ll need to know where she’s likely to have gone. And besides, she trusts me, kind of.” The girl grimaced. “Okay, not really—but more than she trusts you, after what you said last night. I might be able to convince her to come with you.”
“And I’m not letting you hand me off to some witch,” Lehant put in, looking defiant.
Mirei’s frustration boiled over. “In case you forgot last night’s lesson,
I’m
a witch. And you’ll damn well go where I
say
you will, because I’ll hit you over the head or gag you with a spell or do whatever I bloody
have
to in order to keep your miserable, ungrateful skins in one piece.”
“
We‘re not ungrateful
!” Amas shouted back at her, and for the first time, Mirei saw the girl’s composure snap. “It’s just that it’s a little
hard
to deal with what you’ve told us—it’s come out of nowhere, can’t you understand that? And you’re the only person we
know
, now. We can’t go back to our schools and we can’t go back to our parents and you want to pass us off to a bunch of women we’ve never met before, and then they’re going to put us back together with some girls we don’t know and we’re not going to be like this anymore. We won’t be ourselves. You’ve been through it, you’re the only one, and so we want to stay with you,
all right
?”
The summer silence that followed her words, a quiet breeze and the buzz of cicadas, seemed incongruous, even silly.
Mirei stared at the two girls. Amas, skin flushed and hands clenched into useless, impotent fists. Lehant’s gaze alternating between them both, its nervous flicker betraying that she was on the edge of snapping, too.
I don’t know what to do with them.
She turned her back on them, walked a few steps to an elm and leaned against it, arms propped on the cracked gray bark. The remaining horses were not far away; they sidled a little, made uneasy by the shouting. Horses she could deal with. Witches she could deal with. Eleven-year-old girls? She was twenty-five, and when she was their age she’d spent the last six years of her life in a temple, learning to Dance for the Goddess.