Death Marked (7 page)

“You obviously don’t have your own magic anymore.” Cyn said it casually, but Ileni flinched. “It really doesn’t matter. You’ll see.” She flicked a strand of hair away from her face. “But it does mean you had better stay on Karyn’s good side—which means doing as you’re told. Let’s go.”

She walked off the end of the plateau and lifted gracefully into the air. Lis watched her sister fly away, then held a hand out to Ileni. Her expression was indecipherable. “You can fly with me.”

“How will that—”

Lis turned her arm over. Her forearm was covered with a faint tracing of scars that Ileni hadn’t noticed before. Set into the underside of her thick bracelet was a small round globe with colors swirling in its depths.

“Lodestones to spare, remember? I’ve got my own portable source of magic.” Her tone was slightly bitter. “This stone is almost drained, which is why you can’t feel it. But get close enough and you should be able to borrow some.”

Ileni
could
feel the magic coming from the stone, but only faintly; Lis was soaking it up through her skin, leaving nothing Ileni could have grasped. Even if she wanted to. She bit her lip. “Did you lose your own magic?”

Lis’s laugh was more than just slightly bitter. “Cyn and
I are twins, but we aren’t very alike. I never had any.”

Like Karyn. People who would never have tasted magic on their own, being trained to use power stolen from others.

Ileni pulled her arm back to her side. “Thank you. But I think I’ll use the bridge.”

Lis pivoted and flung herself upward, a swirl of white cloth and black hair.

“Go,” Ileni snapped at Evin. She wanted desperately to be alone. “You don’t have to wait for me.”

“That’s good to know,” Evin said, “since I wasn’t planning to.”

Within seconds, he had caught up to the two girls, looping and curling elaborately through the air. Tears stung the backs of Ileni’s eyes, and she turned away, not wanting to admire the grace and joy of his body in flight.

It was just as well that she had fallen. How close she had come to forgetting that this magic wasn’t hers. That just because something felt good didn’t mean it
was
good.

That she wasn’t whole, and never would be again.

The bridge swayed unsteadily as she walked, death yawning below her on both sides. Fragments of mist swirled far beneath her feet, drifting across the distant treetops. Far ahead, she saw two white figures touch down on the
mountainside and a third swoop effortlessly around the bridge.

Ileni set her jaw and walked, placing her feet slowly and carefully on the slats and keeping her hands tight around the rails.

When she got to her room, there was something new there. A mirror, large and oval, standing in the corner on an ornate silver base.

Ileni recognized that mirror.

She walked over and touched it, tentatively, as if Sorin was still watching from the smooth glass. But she saw only her own face, wide brown eyes and trembling chin, and the fingertips she touched were her own.

Sorin.

The remnants of the spell he had used to reach her shimmered in the glass. The portal was still there. Given enough power, she could open it again.

And she had all the power she could ever want.

But someone had brought the mirror here. Who, and why? Did someone want her to reopen the portal, to talk to Sorin?

She
could
. It would take just a few minutes, and she would
be talking to him, watching his rare, subtle smile warm his face. Reminding her that somewhere, far away from this world of stolen power and lodestones, she was loved. If she opened the portal far enough, she could step right through and touch him. . . .

Her fingers pressed hard on the glass. She curled them into a fist and made her way to the bed. She had nothing to say to the new master of the assassins.

Not yet.

CHAPTER

6

T
hat night, Ileni couldn’t sleep. A cold ache spread through her chest, painful and deeply familiar. Even though, a mere half year ago, she’d had no idea that loneliness could actually hurt.

She reached for thoughts of Sorin, but that only made the empty feeling deepen. Even with him, she had felt alone. He had always been half her enemy. But he had eased the loneliness anyhow, if only by distracting her from it.

Odd that the excitement of having magic couldn’t do the same.

A sob pushed its way up her throat, and she forced it
down. She sat up abruptly, making the glowstones flicker.

She reached for magic. The power was easy to grasp, to pull in and around herself. The magic swirled through her, making her feel both safe and tainted.

And bringing home the true import of what she had learned that day.

She had told Sorin she was leaving to find out if the imperial sorcerers were evil—and she had hoped, deep down, that they were. That her choice would be clear and simple and totally right.

That she and Sorin would be on the same side.

But back in the caves, she hadn’t known that most of the sorcerers weren’t true sorcerers at all. That their power came almost entirely from lodestones.

All her life, she had thought the Empire was invincible, a destructive force. And maybe it was. But it was also a tottering edifice, propped up by the lodestones. If she destroyed the lodestones, she could tip over that edifice.

Killing was one thing. She wouldn’t—couldn’t—do that, not unless she was absolutely sure she had to. But maybe she could bring down the Empire without killing a single person.

She could almost see Sorin’s sneer, but she pushed it to
the back of her mind as she got dressed and stepped out into the hall.

A quick spell, a nudge of power, and she could see in the dark. Everything looked hazy and red, as was usual with this spell, but it was more than enough to make her way through the corridors unobserved. She crept through the dark curved passageways, using more power to keep the glowstones from flickering on. Finding her way was no problem. The power from the testing arena was a roaring fire, pulling her toward its warmth and brightness.

The testing arena was empty. Ileni paced slowly around its edges, touching her fingers to the lodestones embedded in the walls. There were hundreds.

Power stolen, power misused, power drawn from pain and death.
How many times had she chanted that Renegai children’s song? She found herself humming the familiar tune as she paced, as that same power surrounded her and filled her.

She put her hand on one lodestone and tried a spell—a small, simple one, that would have cracked an ordinary piece of glass. She didn’t really expect it to work, but it would give her a sense of what she was up against.

The lodestone grabbed the spell and sucked it in, so fiercely Ileni cried out. Her scream echoed in the large cavern.
A sharp pain pierced the center of her chest, as if the spell had gouged out some of her flesh.

She waited, teeth clenched, as the echoes of her scream died. After several moments passed and no one came, she forced herself closer to the stone. Time for a more complex attack. She called up a piece of chalk, drew a swift pattern around her feet, and began a chant. It wasn’t one of the silent spells—her words rang musically in the stillness of the cave, echoing back and forth—which meant that if someone did come, she wouldn’t be able to hide what she was doing. But it was the most powerful spell she knew for dissolving magical wards and protections. She chanted as fast as she dared, the magic twisting and bending, forming an intricate pattern. Despite the danger, she lost herself in its creation, and regret twinged through her when it was done.

The spell strained within her, beautiful and dangerous. She glanced back at the wooden door—not that it mattered, now, if anyone came—and let it go.

She was prepared, this time, for the lodestone’s reaction. She gasped, but didn’t scream, when the magic was ripped out of her. She bit her lip hard, tears filling her eyes, and doubled over. But she didn’t make a sound, and finally the pain faded.

She had planned to try a third time, but she didn’t need to. No matter how much power she threw at them, the lodestones would do exactly what they were made for: pull it in. They were indestructible.

If it had been a ward, or a defense, she could have tried to figure something out. But the Renegai didn’t believe in changing the intrinsic nature of things. Nothing she had ever learned could be used to destroy these stones.

Well. So much for that.

“Satisfied?” Karyn inquired archly.

Ileni jumped, but managed not to scream again.

“There are quite a lot of them, aren’t there?” Karyn said. The sorceress was leaning against the wall across the cavern.

“Yes,” Ileni said. She tried to say it neutrally, but some of her revulsion must have shown, because Karyn stiffened.

“We need every one,” the sorceress said. “Without magic, the Empire would disintegrate into a hundred warring nations—the way it was centuries ago. Far more people would die than the number of lodestones in this cavern. And they would die in far more terrible ways.”

“But you wouldn’t be the one killing them,” Ileni said.

“That might make
me
feel better. I suspect, however, it wouldn’t help the dead.” Karyn straightened. “But let’s not
pretend you’re here to engage in moral debates. If you want a lodestone of your own, I’m the only one who can give that to you.”

Ileni concentrated on slowing her breathing. This wasn’t as bad as she had feared. If Karyn didn’t realize that Ileni was trying to destroy the lodestones—if she thought Ileni just wanted power of her own—she would let Ileni stay.

Ileni rubbed out the chalk pattern with her foot—no point in leaving clues to enlighten the sorceress—then braced her legs apart.

“What do I have to do,” she said, “to get one?”

Karyn shook her head, slowly and smugly.

Ileni strove to keep her voice steady. “I told you I’d give you information.”

“And that will be a pleasant conversation, I’m sure. But you could be so much more useful if you were working
with
us.”

I never will.
She managed not to say it, but she couldn’t stop her chin from going up. “What do you want me to do?”

“Not yet,” Karyn said. “I’ll tell you when the time is right.”

“When I’ve been away from the assassins longer,” Ileni said, “and am more willing to betray them?”

Karyn’s smirk turned into a grin. “Exactly.” And at Ileni’s suspicious glare, it became a laugh. “I see no reason to lie to you. You must realize I’m not letting you stay here for whatever tidbits of information you learned from your assassin lover. You can be far more valuable than that, once you’re willing.”

It was stupid to argue—she
wanted
Karyn to let her stay—but Ileni dug her fingernails into her palms. “And you assume I’ll be willing because you’ll give me power?”

“Yes,” Karyn said. “That tends to be effective.”

“In the Empire, maybe.”

“Oh, right,” Karyn said. “I forgot. The assassins murder out of pure idealism. They’re not after
power
.”

The savagery in her voice shocked Ileni into silence. Karyn kept her smile, but it seemed more like a thin veil for a snarl.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I hate them. Every bit as much as your people hate us. And I’ll do whatever is necessary to put an end to them.”

Ileni bit her lip. It was like talking to Sorin. . . . or to the master. Was everyone in the world full of passion and certainty except for her?

Once, she had hated the Empire—and everyone in it—
just as much. Things had been a lot simpler then.

“I spent years infiltrating the caves.” Karyn rubbed her thumb over her wrist, where her lodestone bracelet would have been. “I gave up more than you can imagine to do it—people in my position don’t normally go out on spying expeditions. But Arum and I were the only ones willing. Now, thanks to you, Arum is dead, and the assassins are aware that there’s a back way into the caves. I’m sure they’re guarding it now, so I’m right back where I started. Unless you can help me.”

Arum.
The blond man, Karyn’s companion, who had died in a spray of red blood on white stone. Ileni found her voice. “I didn’t kill him.”

“No. You led your assassin friend to him instead. Do you think that makes you innocent?”

“I didn’t—I mean, I didn’t know—”

“That things would get messy, once you started exposing secrets to killers?” Karyn’s laugh, too, sounded like a thinly disguised snarl. “Are all Renegai as deliberately simpleminded as you?”

Rage came to Ileni’s aid, wiping away her uncertainty. “If by
simpleminded
you mean
pure
, then yes. We don’t need elaborate explanations of whose fault murder is or when it’s justified.”

Karyn’s face went blank, just for a moment. Then her lashes swooped down to shield her eyes. “Well,” she said, “I envy you that.”

She sounded sincere, which was not what Ileni had expected. Sorin would have responded with scorn.

When Karyn’s lashes swept up, though, her expression was speculative. “You should be getting back to bed. I have something to take care of tomorrow, so I won’t see you, but you’ll still get to play with magic all day. Have fun.”

Ileni tried not to react, though she wasn’t entirely sure what she was concealing. Guilt? Joy? Anticipation?

Whatever it was, she knew by Karyn’s pleased expression that she had not succeeded in hiding it.

CHAPTER

7

I
n the large, echoing training cavern, dozens of assassins whirled and lunged at each other, wielding swords and garrotes and metal discs. But Irun, as he advanced on Ileni, bore only a knife. It was already dripping with her blood.

Kill him,
Sorin whispered. He stood behind Ileni, hands firm on her waist, lips pressed to the nape of her neck. Ileni leaned back into him, resting against his chest.
Kill him, and prove that you are one of us.

Ileni woke with a start. Confusion swirled as she blinked at walls that were not slick black rock but pink-speckled gray stone.