Death Marked (27 page)

She forced herself to wait until the sky outside her window was stained pink before she left her room. Outside the door to the sickroom, she heard soft voices murmuring. Two voices.

Girad?
Her heart leaped almost painfully in her chest as she pushed the door open.

But Girad hadn’t woken. It was Karyn in the room, talking to Evin in low tones, across the room from Girad’s still figure.

Ileni froze, suddenly afraid. Yesterday, she had been more than ready for Karyn to take her magic away; it was magic she shouldn’t be using. Today . . . she still believed that. Yet dread rippled through her body, making her reluctant to step forward and catch Karyn’s attention.

She watched from the doorway—not Karyn, not the body in the bed, but Evin. Her heart hurt at the slump of his shoulders, the defeated set of his face. He looked ten years older than he had the day before.

No
. She couldn’t care about him. She couldn’t care about any of them.

She couldn’t forget that she was an assassin, too.

“Evin.” Karyn’s voice was soft, falsely so. “You can’t sit here all day.”

“If he wakes—”

Karyn met Ileni’s eyes over Evin’s bowed head. Ileni reached out, with a nudge of power, and pushed the boy’s restless sleep into something deeper and more healing. She wasn’t skilled enough to fix him, but she could do that.

She didn’t think, until after she did it, about the fact that she had used power from the lodestones. Again.

“He won’t wake,” she said. “Not for several hours. You should sleep, Evin.”

Evin’s laugh was broken. “I can’t sleep. I keep seeing . . . over and over . . .”

“Then prepare,” Karyn said.

They both looked at her, Evin with bleary confusion, Ileni with sharp dread.

“You know we are preparing to attack the assassins,” Karyn told Evin. “We will kill their leader and scatter them, and then they won’t be able to do this to anyone, not for a long time. You can be part of accomplishing that. You could even lead us.”

“Yes,” Evin said. Just the word, but Ileni’s dread spread through her body.

“It’s the only way to save your brother.” Karyn walked across the room and placed one hand on the headboard of Girad’s bed. “If the assassins are left intact, they will keep coming after him until one of them succeeds. If you want to save Girad, if you want to put an end to the assassins—you will have to be better than you have been.”

Evin nodded. He rose, facing Karyn, and Ileni couldn’t see his expression. “I will be training, then.” He turned. Now Ileni could see his face, but she barely recognized it.

“Evin,” Ileni said. “Wait.”

He clenched his jaw, his long mobile face made alien by the grimness around his mouth, the hardness in his eyes. She thought he wanted to say something, but instead he walked out of the room.

Ileni was left staring across the stone floor at Karyn. Girad breathed slow and deep.

“You . . .” Ileni tried to gather her thoughts, the reasons for her fury.

Karyn laced her fingers over the headboard. Ileni thought of a spell Cyn had taught her that would slam that hand off Girad’s bed. “In times such as these, someone with Evin’s power cannot waste it weaving pretty colors together.”

Once, Ileni had thought almost the exact same thing, with the exact same edge of scorn. Once . . . about a week ago. It felt like much longer. “Evin doesn’t want to use his power to kill people.”

“Anyone can want to kill, given enough motivation.”

Ileni could hardly argue with that. She swallowed hard and said, instead, “Why haven’t you blocked me from the lodestones yet?”

“Because I think,” Karyn said, “that you’re ready to choose a side now. Do you really want to save Girad’s life? Betraying the assassins is the only way to do that.”

Ileni couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, and—despite all her agonizing, all the thoughts that had worn grooves into her mind—couldn’t think of a thing to say.

So instead of saying anything, she went after Evin.

She caught up with him at the beginning of the bridge, where he was walking instead of flying, his steps slow and
heavy. She ran the few steps to catch him, making the bridge sway wildly beneath them, and grabbed his arm.

“Evin, wait—”

He whirled, eyes wide. “Is Girad—”

“No! Girad is sleeping. Still.”

Evin let out a breath, and Ileni stood staring up at him, trying to think of something to say. The moment stretched on and on.

“Don’t cry,” Evin said.

She hadn’t been aware, until he said it, that she was crying. She tasted salt on her lips.

“I mean—I’m sorry. What a stupid thing to say. Of course you can cry.” Evin reached out and, with his thumb, blotted a tear on her cheek. His other hand was still clutching his brother’s wooden dog. “I’m going to change it. I’m going to make sure they never kill again.”

“No.” Ileni tightened her grip on his forearm. “
Don’t
. Nobody can change the way things are.”
Nobody but me.
“Girad needs you, and you—you shouldn’t have to be something you’re not.”

“If I change,” Evin said, “that will be what I am.”

And it would be. No one could force themselves back into innocence. She searched Evin’s eyes for a hint of the
wry, careless humor she had once despised.

She would never forgive Sorin for killing
this
.

“Don’t worry,” Evin said. “I’ll still be the best at whatever I end up being.” His smile was small and forced, but in it, Ileni saw a flicker of his old self.

Above them, a sound, so faint it might have been the wind.

Evin followed Ileni’s gaze and sighed. He stepped back. The bridge tilted beneath them.

Lis dove headfirst and straightened when she was hovering beside them. She put one hand on the rail and said to Evin, “I’m sorry.”

Bleakness settled on Evin’s face, wiping away that brief glimmer. “Thank you. He will—I’m sure he will be all right.”

But he didn’t sound sure at all.

Lis drew in a breath, and her face twisted with an expression Ileni recognized.

Guilt.

I know exactly who Arxis is
, Lis had said.

Ileni met Lis’s eyes, and Lis whirled so fast her hair whipped audibly through the air. She leaped upward, arms tight at her sides, and streaked across the pink sky.

“I should go,” Evin said. He lifted his hand toward
Ileni’s face, then let it drop. “I should train.”

“Yes,” Ileni said. She curled one hand around the railing. “I shouldn’t have—I didn’t mean—I—I have to go, too.”

“Wait. I want to ask you—” He looked down at the wooden dog in his hand, and held it out to her. “Can you give this back to Girad?”

Ileni took the dog, knowing that wasn’t what he had meant to say. She nodded, then turned and ran.

She caught up to Lis on the ledge near the beginning of the bridge. When Ileni grabbed her arm, Lis jerked away, almost throwing the two of them off the mountain. Ileni used a thrust of magic to push herself closer to the gray mountainside.

Lis didn’t. She crouched near the edge of the abyss, her heels at the very rim of the drop. As if she didn’t care whether she fell.

She could fly, of course. But still, unease lodged in Ileni’s throat, choking off her accusation. She recognized that sort of despair.

“What?” Lis said wildly. “What do you want? Do you have more useless warnings to throw at me?”

“I didn’t have to warn you,” Ileni said slowly. “Did I? You already knew what he was.”

Lis laughed, and something about it made Ileni want to
back away. She pressed against the mountainside.

“Oh, yes,” Lis said. “But unlike you, I know what
we
are.”

“And what are we?” Ileni said.

“We’re killers, too.” Lis straightened, but didn’t step away from the edge. “I kept Arxis’s secret because he was
right
. It’s that simple.”

It’s never that simple.
But Ileni had once thought it could be. That
right
was a simple concept, that she could make a choice that didn’t take into account who she was and who she loved and what she wanted.

“Arxis was just using you,” Ileni said. “You were his way to Evin, who was his way to Girad.”

“You don’t know anything,” Lis snapped. “I was far more important to the assassins than that.”

To the
assassins
?

It all came together with a click, so fast Ileni wondered if some part of her had already known. Lis and Arxis, heads bent together. His taunt.
The assets we already have here
.

And the question she had never managed to answer.

Ileni gaped for a moment, then found her voice. “That’s how Sorin knew I was here. You’re a spy.”

Lis smiled, arch and smug. “So tell Karyn. Do you think she’ll believe you? Think you’re better off than I am?
I know what Karyn has planned for
you
.”

“How did you even know I was in the Academy?” Ileni demanded. “When Karyn brought me here, nobody—”

“Karyn told me.” Lis laughed. “Evin and Cyn were putting down a riot, and she needed my help to set up extra wards around you.”

“
Your
help?” Ileni said, and heard a moment too late how much she sounded like Cyn.

Lis flushed, dark red. “Yes.
Mine
. I’m not as worthless as my sister thinks. Karyn told me not to tell anyone about you . . . and I didn’t. Not anyone
here
.”

“How did you tell the assassins? I thought the wards—”

“The wards are quite effective, yes. In the Academy.” Lis shook her head, hair swinging back and forth. “But when I go to battles . . . or riots . . . to harvest the wounded, there are no wards there. And it’s easy enough to send messages to the caves.”

Ileni’s feet were fused to the rock. “But how—how did you—”

“The master sent Arxis here for two reasons.” Lis’s eyes shone with a worshipful fervor Ileni had seen before. Obviously, no one had told her the master was dead. “The first was to recruit me.”

Ileni flinched, involuntarily, at the mention of the master. It didn’t surprise her that he had known, from his black caves high in the distant mountains, that here in the Academy a girl was angry and disillusioned and ripe to turn on everyone she knew.

It didn’t surprise her that Lis had been manipulated, expertly, from the very start.

“And the second reason,” Ileni hissed, “was to kill Girad.”

A muscle twitched in Lis’s cheek. “Yes.”

“And you don’t care.”

“I’ve seen lots of people die. I’ve harvested their power myself, to feed it to the Empire. I know what the assassins are fighting against.” Lis was shouting now. “There is no room for pity in war. Arxis knew that.”

“You’re a tool,” Ileni spat. “You don’t know anything about the people you’re serving. Arxis didn’t need a
reason
not to care. He just didn’t. Not about anything. He thought that was a
virtue
.”

Lis’s jaw clenched, her face a stolid mask.

Ileni thrust quickly, looking for something that would hurt enough to keep that mask from closing. “He didn’t care what his death would do to you. He didn’t care about you at all.”

“He was willing to make sacrifices,” Lis hissed. “He did what was right, even though he loved me.”

Ileni heard her own laugh, with an edge to it that would have made a sane person back away. Lis stepped closer.

“He
loved
me!”

“Oh, did he? Would he have stayed his hand if you asked him to? Let Girad live?”

“I didn’t ask him to!” Lis shouted. Hair blew across her face. “I didn’t know it would be Girad. He never told me . . . and even if he had, I wouldn’t have stood in his way. He did what had to be done. This the only way.”

“It’s not,” Ileni said. “It’s not the only way.”

“Oh, really?” Lis sneered. “You have another one? You think if you look long enough, you’ll find a perfect shining solution and fix everything without getting your hands dirty?”

“No,” Ileni said, and heard her own voice: small, defeated. “No. I don’t.”

“Then who are you to judge his sacrifice? Arxis knew what his life was worth, and what he was willing to trade it for. He was braver than any sorcerer in this Academy.” Lis’s hair hung in a tangle of threads over her face, lit into strands of silver by the sun behind her.

“None of them care about their lives,” Ileni said. “There
will be another one to replace him. To kill Girad where he failed. Did Arxis ever tell you about the Roll of Honor? Because he might not have feared death, but I assure you, he feared not having his name carved on that column. And it won’t be. Not now.”

Lis’s face twisted, and guilt stabbed Ileni. This cruelty wasn’t all meant for Lis. Some of it was meant for herself.

Which didn’t mean Lis didn’t deserve it. Ileni saw again Girad’s tiny body, heard the startled cry as he fell.

“Maybe you can fall in love with the next one, too,” she said. “Since you enjoy being miserable so much.”

Lis slapped her.

Ileni had been expecting that, and her block was instantaneous. Lis’s hand froze an inch from Ileni’s face. She struggled to break through, but Ileni held her off easily.

Lis snarled at her. Then she stepped backward off the ledge and dropped from sight.

Ileni didn’t move. A moment later, a slim figure rose in the sky, black hair blowing wildly around her.

Ileni stood there long after the sky was empty again, not moving, the mountain firm against her back. The clean slashes of the mountaintops were smudged. She blinked fiercely and swiped at her eyes with the back of her hand.

She had also once thought that she was on the side of good—that she would do something wholly, unmistakably right. She missed that belief more than she missed Sorin, more than she missed her magic, more than she missed not wondering every morning if she would die that day.

For a moment, she envied Lis. She wished she, too, believed in something strongly enough to kill for it without hesitation or doubt.

She turned her back on the empty sky and ran.

CHAPTER

25

I
leni ran straight to her room, and straight to the mirror, and she pulled power from lodestones as she ran. She dropped to her knees and drew patterns on the floor with dangerous haste, her chalk strokes steady despite her shaking arms, pulling in yet more power through her skin. By the time she unleashed all that power on the mirror, sweeping her arm at the glass and shouting the spell, she had more than she could safely control.