Mirage twisted her hands behind her, testing the ropes binding them.

If a Thornblood tied these, they're even more worthless as Hunters than I thought. The ropes, while not loose, were definitely workable. With an ease born of long, painful practice, Mirage dislocated both of her thumbs and set about wiggling out of her bonds.

in moments she was free, but as she reset her thumbs and examined the rope around her ankles, footsteps sounded on the stairs outside the door. With one last, quick glance around, Mirage twined the rope loosely around her wrists and lay back down, more or less in the position she had been in when she awoke.

The only difference was that now she could see the door.

The visitor was not Ice, nor any other Thornblood. Red hair, clothing good but practical; probably a Cousin. Mirage suppressed a shudder. Am I better off, or not? Which would be worsea"Cousins, or Ice?

No time to dwell on it. The woman was bending down to examine Mirage; she'd see the loose rope in a second.

Mirage slapped her hands hard against the floor and threw her weight onto them, kicking upward with her still-bound feet. She was lucky. The Cousin was unprepared and her aim was good; her heels struck the woman's head and sent her careening backward into the wall. She fell to the floor and Mirage was on her in an instant, clipping her hard behind the ear. She wouldn't be waking up any time soon.

Mirage searched her clothing and swore. Unarmed. What kind of Cousin goes around unarmed? Unless she's a witch, but I can't believe it of her. No pendant, and she doesn't move like a witch. She's combat-trained, I'd bet on it. I'm just lucky she thought I was still unconscious.

Swiftly now, she untied her feet. There had been a definite thump when the Cousin hit the wall, and another when she fell; someone might come to investigate. The room's one window was much too small for Mirage to fit through, and looked out onto an unhelpful brick wall. She'd have to find another path of escape.

So she tied the unconscious Cousin with the ropes that had bound her and slipped out the door. It opened onto a very short hallway with two more doors off it. They looked like more attic rooms, so she headed for the stairs at the other end.

The floor below was much more habitable, with a staircase to the next floor down at the other end of the hallway. But before Mirage could decide whether to investigate the rooms along the hall, go out the window, or head downstairs, one of the doors opened and another red-haired woman stepped out.

Void it. Mirage charged her. But this one was more ready than the first; she whipped a knife out as Mirage approached.

The woman's speed was no match for Mirage's. As the woman thrust with the knife, Mirage dodged to the inside. One hand seized control of the knife, while the other slammed into her collarbone.

This second Cousin collapsed with a cry of pain. Mirage kicked her in the head and put her out, too, but now her nerves were humming; with that noise, more Cousins would be arriving within seconds. No time to tie up this one, and no point. Mirage scooped up the knife and ran.

The house did not contain a religious shrine, but it did have a room for working spells, which was much the same. Miryo went there immediately after ordering the Cousins to take care of the doppelganger.

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 nota"would nota"help him. I was too weak.

Please, Lady of Five Faces, help me not be weak now. My doppelganger is upstairs. I musta"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 eyesa"gray, like her owna"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. "Mya"my sister?"

"No," Miryo said, responding automatically. She couldn't make herself move. "Not sisters. You and Ia"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 thena"doppelgangers are always killeda"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."

CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

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.

Not a very good onea"but it's all I've got.

"Look," she said into the dead silence. "You believe what you're saying, I'm sure. And maybe the rest of Starfall thinks it's true. But it can't hurt us to look again.

"So how about this? We promise not to kill each other. Instead, we look for other answers, other ways out of this they may have ignored or missed." She paused, biting her lip as she watched the other woman's reaction. "And if it looks like time is running out, we'll reconsider."

The witch's eyes widened. For an instant hope lived in her eyes, before dying again. "But witches have been doing things this way for centuriesa"there's got to be a reason. And people who know far more about this than I do have sworn there's no other way."

"Ah, but they lack one thing we have." Mirage smiled, putting as much certainty behind it as she could. "Each other. Am I right? None of them have had their doppelganger there."

"But you don't know anything about magic."

"Do you want to pick the knives up and start over? Our chance of success at this may be tiny, but at least it is a chance. And it might even leave us both alive."

The witch swallowed, visibly torn. Then she straightened her shoulders. Mirage approved of the grim determination in her eyes, even if there wasn't a lot of conviction there. "All right. We can try."

They took care of the unconscious Cousins first. Miryo was appalled to see the ease with which her doppelganger had taken them down.

Her double checked the two women over with a professional eye; she set Kan's broken collarbone as though she had done this more than once before. "They'll be fine, except for the break. They both might have concussions. But I tried not to kill thema"I just needed them out of the way."

Miryo nodded, wondering how on earth she was going to explain the current situation to the Cousins. But that's a problem for later.

Once the two women were laid out more comfortably, they fetched a bottle of rice wine and took it to the study, the very room where Kan had, in Miryo's name, hired the Hunters. The irony amused Miryo in a grim way. They dragged chairs to the hearth, where a small fire was burning, poured themselves glasses of wine, and finally sat down to talk.

Miryo broke the silence first. "All right. Let's start at the beginning. What's your name?"

"Mirage," her doppelganger said. Only one group of people in the world took names like that. "You're a Hunter."

"You didn't know?"

"I had no idea." Miryo laughed without humor. "No wonder you were able to hurt those other Hunters so badly. Unless you had help?"

Mirage shook her head, that familiar wry grin on her face. "You hired Thornbloods. They're not as good as they like to think they are."

"I only hired one. It's lucky for me she thought to bring friends, or you might not have ended up here at all."

"Luck." Mirage snorted. "Ice is a coward. She knew I could take her in a fair fight; I'd bet on myself against any one other Hunter, and probably any two Thornbloods. Had she come after me alone, I'd've killed her on the spot."

Miryo felt an odd sort of pride. Of course. I don't want my double to be a second-rate anything. She should be that good. But she was also disturbed; the casual way in which Mirage spoke of killing was completely alien to her. It reminded her that, although they were technically the same person, they were not identical. Which makes sense. We had very different upbringings, after all.

Then what Mirage had said registered. "You knew that Hunter?"

"We're old enemies," Mirage said shortly. "Our schools don't get along, and she's a bitch. You could have saved yourself a lot of trouble by just sending a messenger, you know. I probably would have come, and then we'd all have avoided this mess."

And then that Hunter wouldn't be dying from a gut wound. But it's too late to fix that now. Miryo's inward laugh was bitter. And hopefully I won't have to do this again.

"So I know you're a witch," Mirage said. "Your name?"

"Miryo." It was only when she said it that she noticed the similarity. They both pursed their lips, and then laughed nervously at the other's expression. "But you weren't always called Mirage. You used to be a Temple Dancer, right?"

"How did you know that?"

"While I was following you, I got to see Eriot's company perform the Aspects. Afterward I talked to one of the Dancersa"Sareen, I think her name was."

"Sareen. There's someone I haven't thought about in years." Mirage looked pensive, then banished the expression. "My parents named me Seniade."

The words jolted Miryo. "Your parents?"

"The people who raised me for a few years, then sold me off to the Temple as a Dancer when their farm died out from under them and they couldn't afford to feed themselves, let alone a child." Mirage shrugged, apparently undisturbed by the story. "One of the priestesses told me I was never their child to begin with. I certainly didn't look anything like them. I only saw them a handful of times after that, though. The Temple, and then Silverfire, were my real family."

Miryo looked at her thoughtfully. It's still so strange. As if I'm seeing myself, had I lived a different life.