Death Marked (2 page)

Sorin or any of the other assassins would have known exactly which roads led to the Empire, and could have journeyed there with no more provisions than she carried in her pack. But Ileni had never been trained to leave her village at all. And that village was the only place she knew how to get to.

Even if it was the last place she wanted to go.

Ileni had a lot of practice, by then, in doing things she didn’t want to do. So she had set her face toward her village, promising herself it would only be a short detour, trying not
to think about how she would explain why she had left her exile in the caves. Or—even more unthinkably—why she was headed into the Empire.

Then Karyn had ambushed her.

Ileni supposed she should feel some measure of gratitude to the imperial sorceress. She hadn’t had to return, to face her people after failing them twice. She hadn’t had to see Tellis. Instead she had been taken—magically transported, even—straight to the center of the Empire’s power: the Imperial Academy. The source of the magic that kept the Empire running, and the ideal place to discover if that Empire was as evil as she had always been taught.

To decide if she was, in fact, going to help destroy it.

Assuming the imperial sorcerers didn’t just kill her, this had actually worked out quite well. The trouble was, Ileni couldn’t think of a single reason why they wouldn’t kill her.

She had spent the last three days locked in a stone room, and as far as she could tell, no one but Karyn knew she was there. The fact that Karyn hadn’t killed her already was her one slim thread of hope.

She had only a brief memory of the encounter with Karyn, the two of them facing each other on the narrow road. Then Karyn had flung out her hand in a flash of violet
light, and the next thing Ileni remembered was waking up in this windowless room. It had taken her only a few minutes to sense the wards around her and realize where she was.

Since then, food had appeared regularly on a tray on the floor, and her chamberpot had occasionally disappeared and reappeared—casual uses of magic she had once been accustomed to. But she’d had no contact with any human being. How long would Karyn have left her here if Sorin hadn’t forced her hand?

The magic holding Ileni loosened, and the stone wall scraped against her back as she slid to the floor. Karyn lifted one hand, and blue-white light sizzled between her fingers. “If you helped an assassin breach our wards, I will kill you right now. So I suggest you explain what just happened.”

Fortunately, Ileni had just spent several weeks keeping fear hidden. It was instinctive by now. “Don’t be ridiculous. You know I have no magic left. I can’t help anyone do anything.”

“Every sorcerer in the Academy felt the magic coming from this room. Your presence here is no longer a secret.”

So it
had
been a secret? Interesting.

“I wasn’t doing anything,” Ileni said. “Someone was trying to contact me.”

“Someone from the
Renegai
village?”

The sneer in Karyn’s voice made Ileni want to lie, just to spite her.
Yes. My people can break your wards. What do you think of that?

But the imperial sorcerers still believed the Renegai were a backward group of ragtag exiles, no threat to them. If Ileni pretended they had the ability to breach the Academy’s wards, that might put them in danger. The assassins, on the other hand, were already perceived as a threat. And besides, they could take care of themselves.

“No,” she said. “Someone from the Assassins’ Caves.”

Karyn straightened, and Ileni was glad she hadn’t lied. The sorceress was now looking at her as if she represented a true danger. As if she was someone to be reckoned with.

That might or might not be a good thing.
Reckoning with her
could very well translate into
killing her
. But it felt good, in that moment.

“What did they want?” Karyn asked.

Lies spun through Ileni’s mind, some senseless, some unbelievable, some contradicting each other. But seeing Sorin again, even for a few minutes, had reminded her how to take risks. She smiled directly at Karyn and said, “I’m not going to tell you.”

“Oh,” Karyn said, very softly, “I think you will.” The blue-white light around her hand expanded, forming a crackling ball of barely restrained power.

Fear ran through Ileni, a taut thread. Only four days ago, she had seen Karyn hold Sorin suspended over a chasm, the ugly coiling of a deathspell emanating from her chants. Karyn was an imperial sorceress. Torture came easily to her.

“What you’ll also tell me,” Karyn said, “is who you were
really
talking to. Now that you’re gone, there is no fully trained sorcerer in the Assassins’ Caves. Certainly no one capable of breaching our wards.”

Ileni wished that were true. But if there was one thing she would never tell Karyn, it was that Absalm was still alive. That was the thread that could lead the sorceress to the whole tangled conspiracy—to the real reason she had been in the caves, and the real reason she had left.

Her chance of discovering whether the Empire was as evil as she had always believed—not to mention of surviving the next ten minutes—depended on Karyn believing she was no threat. She had to look at Ileni and see a naive, powerless ex-sorceress. Not a . . . weapon.

The sense of betrayal, thick and dark, rose in Ileni’s throat. Absalm was an Elder of her people, someone she
had trusted, and he had twisted her entire life for his own purposes.

She swallowed her hurt and fury. She was
not
a weapon—not yet, anyhow. She was not here to be Absalm’s tool, but to decide for herself which side she was on.

Right now, the Empire’s side wasn’t looking very promising.

“I don’t know how they broke through your wards,” she said. “But I could help you find out.”

Karyn’s eyebrows went up. “Really. You
do
switch sides rather easily, don’t you?”

There was enough truth in that to make Ileni flush. “I was never one of the assassins. I was forced to go to the caves, forced to tutor them in magic. And I
left
.”

“So you did. To return to your own people. Apparently you are still attached to them, despite your dalliance with killers.”

The slight emphasis on
dalliance
made it clear Karyn knew what Sorin had been to her. Ileni struggled to keep from blushing and failed spectacularly. “Yes. I was going home.”

She hadn’t planned to say
home
. It just slipped out.

Karyn curled her fingers slowly into a fist, and the blue-white light shrank into her palm. “For what purpose? From
what I understand, the Renegai don’t have much use for sorcerers who have lost their powers.”

Another truth.
It doesn’t matter
, Ileni told herself, as different kinds of shame roiled within her. As long as Karyn didn’t figure out the deepest truth of all.

I may not have magic, but I have the power to kill you all. And I’m here to decide whether to use it.

Although it wasn’t her power, not really. She was just the vessel—trained in magic even though her power had always been temporary. The only magic she could ever draw on, now, would come from others’ deaths. A caveful of assassins would, at a word, kill themselves so she could have their power. With that much power, she could destroy the Imperial Academy of Sorcery, the epicenter of the Empire’s might. With the Academy gone, the Empire would have no adequate defense against the assassins.

She could be the one to accomplish the goal both the assassins and her own people had been working toward for centuries: wiping the Empire off the face of the earth.

Unless she died here first, killed by that very Empire. Which she would be, if she couldn’t keep up with her lies.

She made herself say, in a small, helpless voice, “I had nowhere else to go.”

Karyn snorted. “And now that you’re here, you’ll just throw in your lot with us?”

“I could help you,” Ileni said. “I lived in the caves for weeks. I might know things that would be useful to you.”

Karyn tilted her head sideways, a pose that could have been mistaken for amusement if not for the suspicion in her eyes. A tic started in Ileni’s eyelid as the silence stretched. Then the sorceress said, “All right. You can stay.”

“I—” She managed not to say
what
or
why
, mostly by biting her lip so hard it hurt.

“For now,” Karyn added. “But I’ll be watching you.”

Ileni nodded.

Karyn slowly opened her hand. The blue-white light was gone. “I’ll find a way to explain the breach—say it was a mistake during your preliminary testing. And then I’ll have you enrolled as a new student. Nobody has to know where you came from.” She flexed her fingers. “You realize that if anyone discovers you used to be an assassin, you won’t survive a day here.”

“I wasn’t an assassin.”

“You taught them magic, didn’t you? Trained them to kill us?”

The bite in Karyn’s voice killed Ileni’s next question.
There could be only one reason Karyn was letting her stay: because she believed Ileni
could
help her fight the assassins. But did she really believe Ileni had turned traitor? Or did she have some other plan, a way to use Ileni against her will?

Well. That would be nothing new.

Karyn crossed the room and touched her finger to the mirror. “Right now, I’ll summon the nearest sorcerer. Some luckless student will be here shortly to escort you to the testing arena.”

She closed her eyes and murmured a brief spell. A shimmer of magic, distant and tantalizing, brushed Ileni’s skin, and she shivered despite herself.

Karyn’s eyes opened just in time to catch that. She watched Ileni from beneath hooded eyelids. “I have access to as many lodestones as I want. If you had known that, I assume you wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble to steal the one I had last time we met.” She pursed her lips. “Though I suppose if you had managed to hold onto it,
you
could have tasted power again.”

It was such an obvious, childish taunt. It shouldn’t have worked.

“It’s interesting, though.” Karyn was practically purring. “How do you think you’ll feel, being surrounded
by sorcerers-in-training? Once you would have been the best of them, isn’t that right?”

Ileni knew exactly how it would feel. She had left her own people for the Assassins’ Caves just so she would never have to feel like that again.

She didn’t trust herself to control her expression. She turned away from Karyn just in time to see two young men appear in the doorway.

Literally,
appear
: a second ago, the space outside the door had been empty.

“Good,” Karyn said, still sounding like a stroked cat. “This is Ileni. She’ll be—”

One of the new arrivals looked at Ileni. She froze when she recognized him, but his face remained perfectly pleasant, as if he had no idea who she was. He bent toward his boot, a smooth feline movement, without losing his placid expression for a second.

Ileni went for her dagger, but he was faster.

Assassins always were.

“Whoa,” the other boy said mildly, and Karyn snapped, “Ileni!”

The assassin’s hand was around her wrist, tight enough to hurt, yet he exhibited no strain. His other hand was curled
but empty. Too late, Ileni realized that he hadn’t been reaching for a blade. He had merely been bending to wipe off his breeches, which were marked by a long smudge of chalk.

“What are you
doing
?” the assassin asked, voice high-pitched and shaking. His eyes were wide, his breath fast, as if he was the one who was afraid. But his eyes glinted with amusement that only she could see.

Ileni’s heart sank. She didn’t dare look at Karyn. She forced her fingers open and heard her dagger clatter to the floor.

The assassin didn’t glance down, and he didn’t let go of her wrist. He was wiry and muscular, with a crop of unruly red hair, and was wearing green and black instead of the assassins’ typical gray.

“Sorry,” Ileni said. Her voice emerged high and scratchy. “I . . . thought you were someone else.”

She didn’t check to see if anyone believed her; she knew for certain that Karyn wouldn’t. She kept her eyes on the assassin, to find out if she was going to die for her mistake.

A moment of silence. Two. The killer’s pale blue eyes stared into hers. Then he let go of her wrist and stepped back, and she couldn’t help a sigh of relief that sounded long and loud in the small room.

“I think,” he said, “you know exactly who I am.”

Ileni’s mouth was too dry for speech, even if she had been able to think of something to say.

“Arxis?” the other boy said.

The assassin glanced at him sideways. “I traveled with a band of traders, for a while. One of our ventures into the mountains took us to Ileni’s village, and she and I . . . well. Apparently, she thought it was more than it was.”

“We did
not
—” Ileni began hotly, and stopped. The glint in his eyes was no longer amused. She recognized that coldness.

She could almost feel the dagger on her throat.

“I did not
think
it was more than that,” she said finally. Her face burned, but she went on. “It
was
more than that. You told me it was.”

“Oh, Arxis,” the other boy said. “You need to rein in that silver tongue of yours.”

“What I need,” Arxis said, “is to stay away from gullible, romantic village girls.” He swooped down, picked up her dagger, and held it out to her. “You might need this, in case you come across someone who’s actually dangerous.”

Ileni had to bite the inside of her mouth to keep silent. She took the dagger, wishing her hand wasn’t shaking.

“Enough,” Karyn snapped. Arxis glowered at Ileni convincingly. Ileni glared back. She didn’t have to try to be convincing, because she meant it.

Karyn sighed. “Evin, congratulations on being in the wrong place at the wrong time. She’s your responsibility now.”

Ileni glanced at the second young man. His eyes were wide, his hair a mass of brown tufts fanning out around his head. He ran his fingers through his hair, leaving it exactly as disheveled as before.