Free Warrior and Witch by Marie Brennan

touched an infant, that infant had no soul. It wasn’t a person yet. What Obura had killed was nothing more than a body.
    But it could have been more.
    “Where is she?” Satomi asked into the silence left by Rana running out of words.
    “In her quarters,” Rana said. “With Cousins guarding the door. I didn’t know what you would want done with her.”
    Satomi herself didn’t know. But she would have to think of something. She was the Void Prime, the linchpin of the circle of Primes, the ruler of the Ray whose dominating concern was the affairs of Starfall, the actions of its people.
    In these dark hours after midnight, in this room so faintly lit by a single lamp, with her mind off-balance by the suddenness of her waking, she felt old. And she didn’t want to deal with this problem.
    But I have no choice. No one else will take this responsibility.
    And to abdicate it would only make problems worse.
    Satomi rose, put one hand on Rana’s shoulder. “Have you slept?” The Water Prime shook her head. “Then go to bed. I’ll handle this for now.”
     
    But she did not get a chance to, because she arrived outside Obura’s door to find the two Cousins in an unconscious heap on the floor, and the rooms behind them empty. She tried a finding spell, but knew before she cast it that it would do no good. Obura had a blocking spell up. So did the absent midwife. Blocking spells, hardly ever used because they were only useful against fellow witches, but now they were springing up like a cancer, everywhere she turned.
    Satomi sent Cousins and witches in search. Rinshu, the Key of Obura’s Path, made a stiff-faced apology. Rana awoke and took up her own duties, looking as though the sleep had done her no good at all. The searchers came back with nothing.
    They still had Obura’s daughter, for what good it did them. Satomi knew, as Obura had no doubt known, that they would raise her as usual. Children belonged to all of Starfall, not just to their mothers; Obura would not have been with her daughter long regardless. And Satomi could not simply refuse to educate the girl as a witch, as a revenge upon her mother; what would that accomplish? The child would study, and grow, and someday face the traditional test, and be yet another witch missing a part of who she could have been.
    Satomi sat at her desk, head propped on one hand, and stared at the list Ashin had given them, of other doppelgangers in the world. Twelve, not counting Mirage. Four old enough to enter training as Hunters; eight of varying ages below that. All spirited out of Starfall in secret after the ritual.
    But how, exactly? Ashin’s daughter was one of them. Sharyo, the witch-half, was here in Starfall, under close guard; the doppelganger, Indera, was in Mirei’s care. That one was easy to explain. Ashin had been one of the first witches Tari recruited to her rebellion, and she had volunteered her child to the cause. Cold-blooded of her, perhaps, when she didn’t know there even
was
a better way of handling doppelgangers than killing them, but Ashin was in her own way as much of a zealot as Shimi: She believed in Tari’s cause, and gave everything she had to it.
    What about the others, though? Not every doppelganger of the twelve was the daughter of a witch in the conspiracy. Some of them belonged to witches who had no idea of what had happened. They had carried out the ritual in the usual way, killing the doppelganger with a dagger to the heart, not realizing that the infant would come back to life shortly after. It worked because the child had a soul before the ritual began; then the two bodies shared that one soul. The witch could kill the doppelganger, or the doppelganger could kill the witch, but anyone else would have to kill them both.
    So the infant doppelgangers came back and, with the help of some allied Cousins, the heretics took them away from Starfall to be raised by false parents. But at some point before the ritual, the rebels must have