Death Marked (13 page)

“I—”

“Oh, come. You might despise me a little more than you do Cyn, but you look down on all of us.”

“If you say so.” Ileni summoned up a piece of chalk. “I’ll be getting back to wards now.”

“An excellent idea,” Evin said. “Me, too.”

His mildness was a goad—a deliberate one. Ileni knew she shouldn’t rise to it.

“And what were
you
doing?” she snapped. “Practicing a light show?”

Evin bit his lower lip. Before Ileni could say anything, he nodded slightly and said, “Why don’t I show you how else you could use magic?”

“I don’t think—”

But he was already kneeling on the stone ground, drawing a series of complex patterns with a piece of chalk he hadn’t been holding a second ago. He drew swiftly, with assured, well-practiced strokes, his concentration wholly on the pattern. When he was done, he leaped to his feet and let out a string of syllables, a spell Ileni had never heard before. The words spilled through the air like gurgling water.

For a moment after Evin finished, nothing happened. Then shards of color shot up from the lines he had drawn, bursts of pale green and blue, pink and violet. They scattered into sparks and pale halos, then faded into each other, an intricate design of color and light.

Something inside Ileni rose and fell and shifted with the lights. Despite the complete silence on the plateau, she could almost hear the music the colors were dancing to as they melded and faded and changed.

She couldn’t have said how long it went on, the dance becoming faster and faster, the twirls and twines ever more intricate, before the colors burst. A shower of lines and sparkles crisscrossed the air, a million tiny lights making the plateau a mosaic of moving colors.

Even after the final color vanished, Ileni remained frozen, staring at the space where they had been. What robbed her of speech was not so much the display itself—though she had never seen anything so beautiful in her life—but the effort and practice that must have gone into crafting it. Evin’s face was flushed and shining, his head tipped back toward the sky.

She had been wrong about him. He wasn’t lazy.

He was just uninterested in power.

When Evin caught her looking at him, she didn’t look away. Easy strength lay in every line of his body, in the tilt of his chin, in the arch of his eyebrows as he raised them. He had no idea what it meant to be weak, or he wouldn’t waste his power on pretty displays.

She hated him, in that moment, more than she ever had.

Evin’s eyes shone, but his shoulders went back a bit. His voice was hesitant beneath its typical nonchalance. “What did you think?”

“It was beautiful,” Ileni said, and heard the wonder in her voice. She cleared her throat, feeling oddly as if she had lost a sparring match. “And useless.”

Evin’s broad grin didn’t falter. “Exactly the effect I was aiming for.”

Ileni crossed her arms over her chest, hoping he couldn’t see the awe shivering through her. Her own people didn’t waste magic on displays, except during important ceremonies. And there was, of course, no time for pretty pictures in the Assassins’ Caves. “A self-portrait, then?”

Evin roared with laughter, spontaneous and unfeigned. He cocked his head to the side. “You’re interesting.”

The way he said it, she couldn’t tell if it was a compliment or an insult. Fortunately, she didn’t care.

Interesting.
Sorin had thought so, too. But she didn’t want to be interesting. Interesting meant that she was different, that she didn’t fit anywhere, that she couldn’t be part of anything. That there were parts of her that didn’t fit together, that rubbed against each other jaggedly, that
hurt
.

She wanted to be like everyone else. For a moment she
didn’t even care which
everyone
. Whether in the Academy or the caves, or even back among her own people, she wanted to be whole again, to be moving in the same direction as the people around her, filled with certainty and surrounded by agreement. To be part of a tide, instead of a sinking straggler who had no idea which way she wanted to go, much less how to get there.

CHAPTER

10

T
he walls of the small cavern were black, but the surface of the mirror was blacker—a darkness so intense it sucked the light out of the small room, making the glowstones flicker and the moon outside the window seem dim as starlight. The two men standing before the mirror did not falter. Neither was afraid of darkness.

“I don’t think I have to tell you,” Absalm said, “why this is a mistake.”

“No,” Sorin said curtly. “You do not. Nor do I have to explain to you why you are wrong.”

Their eyes met. The chalk pattern on the black floor glowed, subtly but unmistakably.

A muscle jumped beneath Absalm’s eye. He drew his lips back, uttered a short phrase, and unleashed magic on the mirror.

The glass surface exploded with color. Absalm closed his eyes, deep lines creasing his brow. Sorin considered taking the opportunity to let out a breath, but chose the safer path. He stood perfectly still while the sorcerer wrestled with the spell.

But for all Sorin’s control, when the colors vanished, he leaned forward.

On the other side of the mirror was a colorfully decorated bedroom. There was a window, a wardrobe, and a desk. Otherwise, the room was empty.

Sorin did not straighten. That would have been a bigger mistake than leaning forward in the first place. He examined the room carefully, noting every detail.

“Whose room is it?” Absalm asked. The sorcerer’s forehead had smoothed, though it was still beaded with sweat.

“Ileni’s,” Sorin said shortly.

“How can you be sure?”

Sorin poured scorn into his voice. “We are trained to observe.”

And he had been observing Ileni for weeks. A dozen
subtle signs told him it was her room: The blanket shoved carelessly against the wall toward the foot of the bed. The tunic folded carefully but unevenly on the chair. The faint dust that covered both the top of the wardrobe and the dark corners of the floor, but not the wide windowsill.

“It doesn’t look like a prison room,” Absalm observed.

“No.” Sorin’s voice was steady. “It does not.”

“So she could have contacted you by now. She chose not to. What does that mean?”

Sorin didn’t know. For all his scrutiny of Ileni, he had never been able to fully predict what she would do.

A failure in his training, perhaps.

Or perhaps not. The master’s voice whispered in his memory:
Never be confident in your knowledge of your enemy. No one, no matter how predictable, can be fully understood.

Except—the clear implication—by the master himself. Who understood everyone.

Sometimes, Sorin wondered if the master had foreseen his own death. If they were all, still, enmeshed in his plans. It wasn’t hard to believe.

Especially since, if it was true, Sorin had no reason to hate Ileni for killing him.

Despite all his training, keeping still was impossible. Sorin
spun on his heel and stalked across the room. He wanted to hit the black wall. Ever since the master had died—ever since Ileni had left—the wildness in him had simmered close to the surface, urging him toward unplanned violence.

He could not afford to give in.

He stood for several seconds facing the black rock, fists clenched at his sides. Absalm’s gaze jabbed at him, two hot pinpricks beneath his shoulder blades. When Sorin turned, he kept his face impassive.

“Someone needs to go after her,” he said.

Absalm drew in a breath. Sorin watched him in complete silence for two, three, four seconds.

“To do what?” Absalm said finally. “Murder is a blunt tool. I can’t see what it would accomplish here.”

It was meant as a challenge, but fell flat. The balance of power between them shifted subtly but unmistakably in Sorin’s favor.

Sorin knelt and, very deliberately, rubbed out a corner of the chalk pattern. Absalm gasped, a small, pained sound. The image of the room in the mirror vanished, and the mirror’s surface roiled with dense gray fog.

Sorin straightened, daring the sorcerer to say something. Outside the window, the wind howled and then went still.

“I’m not going to kill anyone. Yet.” Sorin walked to the window. Far below, the narrow path curved between the mountains, winding away from the caves. “There are things in the Empire Ileni should know about. Things she should see. And I intend to make sure she sees them.”

CHAPTER

11

“T
ell me,” Karyn said, “about the Renegai.”

Ileni sat up slowly in bed. She was almost used to these morning appearances, always before dawn—not just because Karyn was busy, she had realized, but because that was when Ileni was off-guard.

Ileni had a defense against that. Usually she pretended to wake slowly, giving her mind a chance to clear before the interrogation began.

But this morning, she didn’t need the extra time. “No.”

Karyn lifted her eyebrows, surprise and threat compressed into a single gesture. She leaned back in Ileni’s chair and
crossed her legs at the ankles. “I beg your pardon?”

“The Renegai are no threat to you.” Ileni’s fingers dug into her blanket, drawing it up in front of her. “They haven’t made a move against you since our exile, and they have too little power and too many scruples to threaten you now. Leave them alone.”

“I know they’re no threat,” Karyn said, and her casual contempt made Ileni curl her fingers tighter. “I was thinking, however, that they might be an ally.”

The blanket dropped back over Ileni’s legs with a tiny swoosh.

Karyn tapped a finger against the armrest. “You must have realized, by now, that the Empire has changed since the time when we drove your people into exile. Perhaps it’s time for a reconciliation.”

Her calm assurance made it hard for Ileni to find words. Finally she sputtered, “Why would they
want
a reconciliation?”

Karyn’s eyebrows, which had never come down, arched even higher. Her feet thudded on the floor as she leaned forward. “Why wouldn’t they?”

Growing up, Ileni and her friends had told tales of sacrifice and heroism under the Empire’s evil reign, spat when they spoke of the Imperial Academy of Sorcery, fantasized
about ways to destroy it. It was oddly disheartening to realize the imperial sorcerers had no idea how much they were hated.

“They’re fine as they are,” Ileni said finally. And it was true; in exile, her people could stay true to their ideals, far from the messy complexities of the world they had left. As she had been when she lived in the Renegai compound, surrounded by people who thought exactly like her, knowing she was on the right side of . . . of everything, really. Sometimes, she had guiltily suspected their cause might be hopeless. But she had never doubted it was just.

She missed being that person. She missed living a life where everything was simple and clear. Even if that simplicity had been a lie—and she wasn’t entirely convinced it had been—it was a lie she missed living in.

Ileni had grown up wanting the exile to end, for the Empire to be defeated. And wishing for it had been far, far better than getting the chance to do it.

“Leave them alone,” she said again. “They have nothing to do with any of this.”

Karyn’s shoulder lifted, an airy shrug that reminded Ileni of Evin. “So you’re willing to betray the new master of the assassins, but not the people who abandoned you and sent you to your death? Interesting.”

Ileni shoved the blanket to the wall and swung her legs over the side of the bed.

“How,” she said, “did you know there was a new master of the assassins?”

Karyn froze for a fraction of a second. Then she straightened in the chair, resting both hands carefully on the armrests. “I know you’re trying to be careful, but you’re an amateur. You’ve betrayed more than you thought.”

“No,” Ileni said firmly. Of this she was sure: she remembered every single word she had said to Karyn about Sorin. “No, I didn’t. So how did you know?”

“I’ll tell you,” Karyn said, “when you’re on our side.”

She was so smug, so sure, that Ileni’s mouth opened to protest. Silence felt like acquiescence, like the first step toward defeat. If she didn’t deny it out loud, Karyn’s certainty would seep into her mind and settle there. Ileni’s eventual betrayal would start seeming inevitable, even to her.

But it was only Karyn’s certainty—her arrogant, superior assumptions—that was allowing Ileni to remain in the Academy. So Ileni kept her mouth shut, biting the insides of her lips, until Karyn said, “Now. I have some more questions about the wards. . . .”

Are you willing to betray the new master of the assassins?
Sorin asked.

He stood behind her, one hand sliding along her waist, the other resting on her wrist. She held a throwing dagger in her hand.

I love you,
Ileni whispered. Her heart pounded, and she couldn’t tell if it was because he was about to kiss her, or because he was about to wrest the dagger from her and lay it against her throat.

I love you, too.
His fingers slid along her wrist, and then the dagger was in his hand, so fast she didn’t have a chance to tighten her grip. He whirled her around to face him, and as his mouth came down on hers, she heard the thunk of the dagger hitting the cloth target behind her.

When he pushed her away, she clung to him blindly. It didn’t matter, of course, not against his strength. He held her in front of him, eyes black and blazing.

Betray me,
he whispered, before pulling her in and kissing her again,
or don’t. But make a decision before it’s too late.

Ileni woke with her heart pounding, her stomach clenched tight. She doubled over in her bed, not sure whether she was going to cry or puke or both.

She waited for several minutes before she realized that she was going to do neither. Instead, she threw her blanket against the wall and pulled the wardrobe doors open with a
surge of angry power. They flew apart with a clash, and she yanked out the first dress she saw. It snagged on the edge of a door and ripped, a jagged tear across the seam of its neckline.