Death Marked (4 page)

And found it.

The white orb stopped an inch from her face. Ileni was still cringing away when she realized that her block had worked. She had stopped the orb without touching it. Something so easy, something she had been sure she would never do again.

Time froze. The orb whirled impotently in the air, its brightness blinding her.

Stupid scruples
, Karyn had said, and suddenly Ileni understood. It wasn’t
her
magic.

Stolen magic. There must be lodestones in the walls around her, magic ripped from murdered souls, their life energies trapped in stone and collected by the Academy. Black magic. Not hers.

But it felt like hers.

Ileni swirled the orb, once, then flung it back at Karyn.

Karyn’s eyes widened. She lifted her arms and soared into the air, graceful as a bird, landing lightly on the ground after the orb had passed below her. She jerked her arms together, crossing them over her chest. When she spread them apart, there were a dozen orbs hovering in front of
her, so hot they shot off tiny sputtering sparks.

She smiled, a thin unpleasant smile, and the fiery balls spread apart and sped toward Ileni.

There was no way Ileni could dodge, no way she could duck—there were too many of them, taking up too much space, coming too fast. She had no choice. She drew in more power, a rush of magic that went straight through her skin.

Ileni shot upward, and the barrage of glowing balls streamed harmlessly beneath her. As they hurled toward the far wall, she twisted in midair and stopped them with a silent, magic-fueled shout.

Then, with a whisper, she extinguished the fire in the orbs, leaving a dozen clear translucent spheres frozen inches from the stone wall.

She called them to her and gathered them in her arms, sparing a sliver of magic to make sure she didn’t drop any. She landed in front of Karyn, opened her arms, and let the orbs drop onto the ground.

They landed in a cacophony of thuds and immediately began rolling in random directions. Karyn flicked a finger, and they all disappeared, but she never took her eyes off Ileni.

Ileni’s heart pounded so hard it almost drowned out the
tingling in her hands, where the magic had poured out, where it had responded to her command. She had worked so hard to put this grief away, to not wish for the impossible, that she still couldn’t believe it. Doubt wriggled through her, as if the last few seconds might have been a dream.

She lifted her hand and whispered a quick spell.
Call up fire
, Evin had said.

The fire wreathed around her hand, flickering in and out between her fingers. She added a surge of power, and her whole arm was encased by a leaping flame that didn’t hurt her and didn’t touch her skin, even though its heat warmed her face.

“That’s enough,” Karyn snapped.

Ileni twisted her arm, murmured a word, and banished the fire. She turned in a slow circle, eyes flickering over the glowstones embedded in the wall. She chose one at random and stared at it, long enough to see the rainbow colors swirling beneath its surface. To understand that it wasn’t a glowstone at all.

Hundreds of lodestones, representing hundreds of deaths, hundreds of innocents tortured and murdered. Harvested for their power. She had grown up singing songs of mourning for those victims, swearing vows of vengeance.

In the caves, she had thought she was surrounded by evil. She’d had no idea.

That evil had been nowhere near as seductive as this one.

She met Karyn’s dark, speculative eyes. And realized, too late, that it wasn’t only her skill that was being tested.

It was how vulnerable she was to temptation.

Karyn’s smile was a white slash in her pale face. “The Academy doesn’t allow just anyone to access the lodestones. It’s a privilege. Remember that.”

The underlying threat was clear:
I can take this away.

Karyn watched Ileni’s face carefully—predatorily. “That’s all I need to see. You’ll be training with the most advanced students.” She turned, and Ileni couldn’t tell whether she meant it or not when she added, over her shoulder, “Congratulations.”

On the way back along the narrow, curving ledge, Ileni tried to feel guilty. The Empire’s sorcery was evil. It was wrong to use power that wasn’t your own, power that could only be given up at the moment of death. And yet she couldn’t feel guilt—or anything, really—through the exaltation bubbling up in her.

And she couldn’t stop smiling.

Karyn led her down a long, flower-scented passageway, where they passed a man in a brown cape who handed Karyn a sheaf of papers, two girls in green dresses giggling as they walked, and a very tall man who vanished in a flare of blue light. Finally, Karyn stopped at one of the closed doors. “This will be your room.”

Ileni still didn’t trust herself to speak. She nodded.

Karyn gave her a dour look that only made Ileni grin wider. The sorceress continued down the passageway, her shoes clicking on the stone. Ileni pulled the door open and stepped inside.

Where Arxis was waiting for her.

CHAPTER

4

T
he assassin was sitting on the bed by the wall, in the relaxed yet ready pose Ileni knew so well, his arms braced behind him and the balls of his feet resting on the floor.

Good
, Ileni thought, and pulled the air around her into a barrier, tough enough to deflect knives.
Magic, magic, magic . . .
it was so easy, and she was finally as powerful as she had spent all those weeks pretending to be. Buzzing with anticipation, she said, “Well?”

Arxis bowed his head, very slightly, the faintest possible gesture of respect. When he raised it, his eyes were cold. “What are you doing here, Teacher?”

The magic sizzling through her made Ileni brazen, dying to take a crazy risk. She shrugged. “I was sent to help you.”

“And that . . . demonstration . . . earlier? Was that supposed to
help
? You threatened an identity I’ve spent weeks building up.”

Weeks
. So Arxis had been here for most of the time Ileni had been in the caves. Assassins, once sent on their missions, had no contact with the caves until they succeeded. Which meant that not only did he not know she had killed the master, he didn’t know about her and Sorin.

He had no reason to kill her. Attacking him had been a colossally stupid move.

“I apologize.” Ileni crossed the room and sat on the bed, right next to the assassin. “That was a mistake.”

“I would say so.” Arxis stood, a smooth, fluid motion that reminded her of Sorin, and strode for the door.

“Wait,” Ileni said. “The master didn’t tell me who you were sent to kill.”

He didn’t stop until he was at the door, and then he only half-turned, so she couldn’t make out his expression. She had seen Sorin’s profile, at that exact frustrating angle, a dozen times. She hadn’t realized until now that the pose was something he had been trained in.

“He wanted you to tell me,” she added. “So I can help you.”

“You’re lying.”

He said it so flatly she couldn’t muster up a denial. Instead she said, “Oh, really? And how do you know that?”

“Because I don’t need help.” And with that, he was gone.

Assassins
, Ileni thought, trying to roll her eyes and not quite managing it. She sat back down. Her hands were shaking.

Why?
She
wasn’t his target; she was safe. And it wasn’t her responsibility to stop him. The sorcerers were targeting the assassins. She had been in the caves when they attacked. She had almost died. The assassins had a right to strike back.

Sorin’s voice, in her mind:
In war people die. You have to accept that, if you’re going to fight.

It took a few moments of steady breathing before she got back to her feet to investigate her new room. It was a small rectangular chamber, with a desk and chair along one wall and a polished wooden wardrobe along the other. With the bed, that made four whole pieces of furniture—grand in comparison to her room in the Assassins’ Caves. But this time, there were no wards on her door, reinforced by generations of Renegai. And there was a window at the
end of her room, near the wardrobe, which she went to, immediately. Through it she could see a dusky sky streaked blue and pink. Mountains faded into the distance, solid gray behind a veil of white sunlight. To her left, the mountains sloped into a mosaic of red and white. A city.

She backed away from the window. It reminded her of another window carved into a mountainside, of a wiry boy who had crouched on that windowsill and thrown himself into the night. This window was higher. If someone jumped from it, the thud when he landed probably wouldn’t be audible.

That boy had jumped at the master’s command, proud to die for his cause. The caves were full of young men just like him, waiting for the command to die. And when they did, it would be her turn to attack.

But the sorcerers had thousands of lodestones. The life force of hundreds of assassins—if she agreed to take it, and wield it—couldn’t stand against that.

Unless it was a surprise attack. One blow, swift and sudden, struck at the moment of the assassins’ deaths.

But aimed at what? What was she supposed to attack?

Not what. Who.
She knew how assassins thought. Whatever strike Absalm and the master had planned, it would be aimed at killing as many sorcerers as possible.

But the master was dead. So it would be Absalm and Sorin’s plan, now.

Thinking of Sorin physically hurt, a knife slicing at her from the inside. She had been so afraid that he would hate her, once he knew she had killed his master. But he had looked at her exactly the way he had back in the caves. As if what he felt for her mattered more than all the other things he was supposed to feel. As if being with her made him, for those brief stolen moments, less of an assassin.

But he wasn’t just any assassin, not anymore. He was their leader. More than ever, he couldn’t afford that weakness.

And neither could she.

She turned from the window and went to the bed. It had an ornate iron headboard and colorful bedding and was raised higher than her simple bed in the caves. But furniture or no, the room felt familiar, right up to the sense of rock closing in around her. She would have traded that window in a second for the possibility that Sorin could knock on her door. She wanted desperately to rest her head on his shoulder and cry.

Not that he would have much sympathy for her.

She hadn’t thought it would feel like this, after she walked away. She had never been all that comfortable around him
anyhow. It didn’t make sense that missing him was a constant gnawing ache within her, a thin fog of sadness that colored everything.

And it made even less sense that seeing him today had made it worse instead of better.

How did he know where I was?

But of course he knew. He was the master now.

No. He isn’t
. She forced her mind steady. He wasn’t some cold, all-knowing puppet master. He was the boy who had cradled her in caves beneath the earth, had kissed her fiercely and against his better judgment, had let her walk away when his duty was to stop her. He wasn’t the master.

Yet.

And if she did what he wanted, maybe he never would be. Would he still be a killer if this war didn’t require it?

She opened her hand. The borrowed magic surged within her, and a magelight floated above her palm. The simplest of magics, a child’s trick, that had been impossible for her just this morning. She smiled even as tears burned her cheeks.

She had power, now, too—and even without power, she had outsmarted Sorin before. She would figure out how he had found her, and she would determine what exactly his
plan was, and then she—
she
—would decide whether to play her designated part in it.

She kept the magelight afloat as she readied herself for bed, its light warming the insides of her eyelids until the moment she fell asleep.

The next morning, Ileni woke with the dawn, so tense and excited and terrified she didn’t even consider going back to sleep. Magic waited for her, and she itched to use it. She sat up, rubbed her crusty eyes, and resisted the urge to vault out of bed. It had been so long since she had been eager to start her day that she didn’t trust the feeling.

And she shouldn’t.
This is the Empire. I am surrounded by my enemies, and I am a weapon.

She reached out for the lodestones . . . so close, and brimming with power. Her skin tingled, and she realized that she had drawn some of the magic in without thinking.

It was like being herself again, after she had been someone else—a stranger—for months.

But who was really the stranger? The girl with no power? Or the girl who would use power she knew was evil, just so she could pretend magic was still a part of her?

She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to think past the
shame and the joy twined tightly within her. If she was going to pretend she was a student here, she had to use the magic.

But she couldn’t let herself forget that it was evil.

She pushed the blanket off her legs and got to her feet. The wardrobe contained a selection of clothes, none of which fit exactly right. She chose a large plain dress with a belt she could pull tight. There was no mirror in the room—because there didn’t have to be: a flicker of magic turned a section of the stone wall reflective, and Ileni gave herself a cursory glance. The dress was far from elegant, but it would do.

She had forgotten how much
easier
magic made everything. The belt tied in back—no problem. The tangles in her hair unknotted at her command. Dirt disappeared from her skin, and the tinges of blood that had been clinging to her for days took only a moment to banish. How had she ever lived without this?

How will I live without it again?

She was in the middle of a spell to make her dress blue when someone knocked. She hesitated, then let the spell go and opened the door.

Evin’s eyes swept up and down her dress. “You didn’t have to stop on my account. What color were you going for?”