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?

Maybe when we find Ashin-kasora, we can convince her to bring us her daughtera"both of thema"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 thea"

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. Witha"

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 hera"

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 herea"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.

CHAPTER TWENTY.

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 saya"the arrow bounced off you?"

Miryo held up her hands to silence both of them. "Pleasea"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."

More silence. Then Eclipse said, "So if I were to attack hera""

"You stay away from me," Mirage snapped. "I'm damned if I'm going to let you test this theory on me." The very thought made her gut clench. She could still remember, though she had tried to forget, the sickening crunch in her neck as Leksen's foot collided with her jaw. That, and now the impact of the arrow, and the hot, spreading pain, and the blackness.

"It makes sense, though," Eclipse said.

"Except that neither of you has given me a good answer for how I ended up like this."

Miryo snorted. "We've already got ten thousand unanswered questions. What's one more or less?"

Mirage cleaned her sword of dust and her dagger of blood, then sheathed them both, the familiar tasks hiding the shaking of her hands. "Fine. So I'm hard to kill. What now?"

She succeeded in turning them from the subject, at least for the moment. The glance Miryo sent at the corpse on the ground looked involuntary, as though it drew her eyes against her will. "Is that the Wolfstar?"

"Wraith. Yeah. You can tell by his uniform."

"So your commission is finished."

"Only partly," Mirage said, grateful to be discussing something other than her deaths. "There's still the matter of who exactly hired him. Eclipse and I will write to our contact while you go see yours. Then we can decide whether to go after Ashin or our employers first" She snorted. "Assuming, of course, that Ashin isn't our employer."

Miryo gave her a startled look. "Do you think she is?"

"Not any of the ones we've met so far. From your description, she sounds too straightforward to be our first witch, and too confident to be our second. So there are at least four of them involved, counting Tari-nakana. But probably more than that, since there are four doppelgangers that we know of."

"Yeah. I'm trying to think of who else has a daughter the right age." Miryo pondered it, then gave it up with a shake of her head. "I'll have to think about it What should we do with him, though?" Again that involuntary glance, her eyes sliding sideways.

"We strip him," Eclipse said. "The uniform marks him, and generally the only way to get a complete one is to kill its owner. So that'll be proof of his death. The body, we'll bury." He raised one eyebrow at Miryo's reaction. "You seem surprised."

"I guess I just didn't expect you to show him that kind of respect."

"He was doing his job. Just as we are. I personally wouldn't have accepted a commission to kill Tari-nakana, but that's not an issue worth defiling his corpse over."

Mirage watched Miryo's reaction with interest. Did she think we'd leave him for the crows? I didn't much like him, but that's not a fate he deserved. It seemed that her double had in fact expected something of the sort.

Miryo closed her eyes, swallowed once, and opened them again. This time she looked at the body quite deliberately. "All right, then. Let's get this done and move on."

Snatches of conversation kept drifting to Eclipse's ears. He tried not to look as though he were eavesdropping, but it was hard; he wanted to hear what they were saying.

He could tell Miryo's voice from Mirage's. They were very similar, of course, being built of the same basic stock, but Miryo was a witch, and it showed. Mirage lacked the trained mellifluousness her double had. And there was a near-permanent edge to Mirage's voice that Miryo didn't have.

But the more they talked to each other, the more they began to sound alike. Not entirely, of course, but their tones did shift together. Eclipse had heard it before; people often picked up intonations and speech patterns from those around them. But it was more disturbing, hearing it from two voices that were so similar at their core.

He wondered if it was possible Mirage could pick up all the qualities of Miryo's voice. She had a tin ear, probably caused by the same division that made Miryo's reflexes ordinary. But could either of them develop to match the other? Or was there a basic divide between them, caused by the ritual that had made them two?

That was, in part, the topic of their conversation tonight.

Earlier in the evening they had experimented once more with magic. Miryo had described what happened to the spell she had built during Eclipse's fight with Wraith; she hadn't really been in control, and had barely managed to divert the energy when Mirage reappeared. She had speculated, however, that bad she completed the spell while Mirage was deada"or whatevera"it might have worked. Mirage, of course, had flatly refused to test this theory. But they had compromised: Eclipse knocked her out, then moved back a safe distance while Miryo tried a spell.

It backfired. Miryo hadn't seemed surprised, but it was hard to tell; the fallout had all but completely paralyzed her, so her expression was a bit stiff. The spell's effects had only worn off a little while ago.

Eclipse snorted at the memory. The growing rapport between the two occasionally left him on the outside, but they needed him around; without him, they might start trying some of their more crack-brained ideas. Like getting Mirage drunk. Miryo thought the alcohol might inter-fere with the power sliding into her, but Eclipse had gotten her to postpone that particular test. Permanently, he hoped.

"I don't know how we'd do that, though."

He blinked and came back to himself. What had Mirage just suggested?

His year-mate shrugged. He pulled his eyes away and watched her out of his peripheral vision. "You're the witch," she said. "Can't you put something together?"

"It's not that easy," Miryo said, shaking her head. "You don't create a new spell by experimentation, you know."

"Oh, right, because I know so much about where spells come from. Does a little bird deliver them?"

There was real bite in Mirage's voice, but Miryo just rolled her eyes, unfazed. "No. They're created by intuition, mostly. Although that's not the way my teachers put it. I never quite understood how this works, but apparently, every so often, there's a witch who just finds herself following a pattern nobody's used before. And it works. They say it's a matter of closeness to the Goddess. That's the way Misetsu got started. Her faith was strong enough mat she received the gift of magic, and the ability to pass it on to her daughters. We're all descended from her."

"So new spells aren't something you can create at will."

"I'm afraid not. Still, the idea's worth looking into. Maybe someone else can find a way to make it work. It runs counter to the way I've been thinking, but we haven't had any luck so far combining our efforts. So maybe separating us completely is the solution."

Separation? Eclipse tried not to show his interest. After all, he wasn't even supposed to be listening. But as a potential answer to their problems, it had merit. As near as anyone could tell, the difficulties they were having were caused by the remaining connection between them. Severing ita"if that was possiblea"might fix everything.