Some time passed—at least a quarter of an hour, by the movement of moonlight across the floor—before Mirage became aware of eyes on her. She glanced up and found Miryo looking in her direction.
“What is it?” she asked.
“When you were a Temple Dancer,” Miryo said, “was this how you prayed?”
Her voice was hesitant, yet behind it lay a kind of unconscious conviction. As if she knew the answer before Mirage gave it.
“No,” Mirage said. “Sometimes, yes, and sometimes we went to regular services. But other times—for me, most of the time—we prayed as Dancers.”
“What does that mean?”
“We prayed with our bodies. Not with our voices or our minds. We Danced. Together, or alone, following the music in our hearts.”
The words were a poor description for it; usually only Avannans or other Dancers understood. But Miryo was nodding, and the unconscious conviction had grown visibly stronger. “Witches do something like that. Usually alone. We just sing. No words, ordinary or magical; whatever notes and sounds seem right. It’s not a spell. It’s prayer.”
Mirage cast a glance around the temple. The Aspects of the Goddess gazed back at her in the reflected moonlight. Even the breeze had died; there was no sound from the town outside.
She began to strip down to the Hunter uniform beneath her robe. “Do you want to take turns, or do this together?”
Miryo stood in the center of the room, the moonlight casting her shadow onto the stone, and closed her eyes.
Mirage stood nearby, eyes also closed.
For several heartbeats, the two of them stood, silent and motionless, and composed themselves.
Then they began.
Miryo was tentative at first, her voice hardly more than a whisper. She was not accustomed to an audience. But Mirage was not listening to her, not consciously. Each was in her own place, speaking to the Goddess in the truest way she knew.
Miryo sang with no particular plan. Her voice strengthened as she went along. Mirage, moving in a circle around her, also began hesitantly; her motions became more assured with every step she took.
Goddess, Miryo prayed through her wordless song, forgive me for what I have done. I meant Tsue harm; I wanted to do something that would get her out of my way. I succeeded, but at afar higher price than I had intended. Forgive me for that. And forgive me for the joy I felt when I held that power. I took pleasure in acting, if not in the act. Please, forgive me. I beg you.
Mirage, too, sent up a prayer, writing it in the air with her hands and her arms, the angle of her head. Help us, please. Don’t let us lose our momentum. For our own sakes, as well as those who will follow us, we cannot afford to let this go. Too much depends on it. Please, help us keep our course.
And, behind it all, from both of them: Give us the answer. Please. There is another way; show us the path to it.
Miryo’s singing took On a sense of direction. It was the progression she had seen in Haira: the Aspects of the Goddess, from youngest to oldest. Four of them she sang, from Maiden to Crone, while Mirage moved around her. The doppelganger made no sound, but her dancing provided a sharp counterpoint to the notes Miryo sang; the kicks and leaps, with their fierce, hard perfection, were sworn to the spirit of the Warrior.
Their separate prayers flowed into each other, creating a single plea, sound and movement, voice and flesh. The styles were different; Miryo sang the four, while Mirage danced the Warrior, but the rhythm that underlay them was the same.
And then they felt the change.
To Mirage, the air became filled with an electric energy. Her tired body took on a sudden drive that lifted her to greater heights, as it sometimes did in battles, in Dances, when words and thought dropped away and there was nothing but the movement. To Miryo, however, it was something more.
Without intending to, she lowered the guards she had placed so carefully on herself, and reached for power.
Panic tried to claw its way up her throat, but faded to nothingness before it could paralyze her. Miryo knew, distantly, that she should be afraid; this was not in her control, and she did not know what it would do. But the strange purity of mind that had overtaken her would not allow her to fear. She watched, with detached immediacy, as she sang onward, and the power took shape around them.
Mirage leapt into the air, a spinning, kicking leap, and did not land again. The power that filled the air around them lifted her up. She danced on, with nothing beneath her feet but air, and also found she could not fear.
The energy pulsed into visibility. Miryo, singing full-voiced to the four Aspects she had invoked, was also lifted from her feet; around her she could see the shining strands of power. Earth, Water, Air, and Fire; they wove a dizzying, exhilarating web around her and Mirage, and together they wept at the beauty.
And then, through those strands, something else.
Void, Mirage whispered in her mind, and Miryo recognized it as well.
The four concrete Elements and the one that was not pulsed in counterpoint to each other, a pulse that fit the rhythm they had created. And still Miryo sang, and still Mirage danced. The tornado of energy around them was not even remotely in their control, but they had created it, and it continued to draw on them, feeding its own growing power. The strands of the Elements spun them around each other in a dizzying circle, and the air grew to an incandescent white glow.
Goddess—
Show us—
Show ME—
The white fire tore through them, a blinding rush of pure energy, and all thought disappeared into the flames.
25
Mirei
A crash brought Eclipse to his feet, sword in hand.
He dropped the blade an instant later, wondering how in the Warrior’s name Mirage had suddenly appeared in his room in the middle of the night.
“Sen?” he asked, baffled.
From where she knelt on the floor in the dim light, she lifted her head, one inch at a time, and as she did so something around her neck fell down to dangle freely, drawing Eclipse’s eyes.
A triskele pendant.
“Miryo?” he said uncertainly.
The pendant was all she was wearing. She knelt there, half lit by the moonlight through the window, and he grew more confused the more he looked at her. There was no way Miryo could have picked up those muscles, but the woman’s hair was long, not cropped. And why would Mirage be wearing that pendant?
And what was it in her face that made him so unsure?
Eclipse voiced a question he had never expected to have to ask. “Who… which one are you?”
She stood, slowly, and looked down at her hands and arms with a completely unreadable expression. “Either.” she said, and her voice had the well-trained tones of a witch. “Or neither.” She laughed faintly; it had a disbelieving sound. “Does it matter?”
“What?” he whispered.
She looked straight at him. “She gave me the answer, Kerestel. I prayed for an answer, and the Goddess showed it to me.”
Then she fainted.
“I don’t understand,” Eclipse said.
She raised one eyebrow at him. “Yes, you do. You’re just having trouble admitting it.”
“You’re…”
“One person. As I used to be. I was praying—both of me were—was—whatever.” A grin bloomed involuntarily on her face. “I don’t think grammar can cope with this. I was praying to the Goddess, and it occurred to me—to the Miryo part of me—that I wasn’t praying the way I really wanted to. Ought to. So as Miryo, I sang, and as Mirage, I danced, and I listened to the Goddess with all of my heart. And she made me whole again.”