Behind her, Evin was silent—which was, for him, a small miracle—but she could feel him watching her, and it made her shoulders tighten. She waited until the skyriders had disappeared into the gray horizon, then tried to loosen her muscles as she waved her arms through the preparatory exercise and began the chant. His presence sliced through her concentration, like a strain of discordant music. She got an accent wrong and stumbled to a stop.
“You don’t have to, you know,” Evin said.
Ileni lowered her arms and spun around. He wasn’t watching her after all; he was lying flat on his back, hands laced together behind his head, studying the hazy sky. “Excuse me?”
“You’re not a citizen of the Empire. You don’t have to devote your life to combat, just because you have the skill. Not if you don’t want to.”
Her jaw tightened. “Why wouldn’t I want to?”
Evin laughed. There was something odd in it—almost bitter, and very unlike him. But his voice was lazy and relaxed. “Well, you might die. That bothers some people.”
“I’m sure it does.” The scorn in her own voice surprised Ileni. She sounded, just then, like Sorin. “Shouldn’t you be glad to die for the Empire?”
“Whatever gave you that idea?” Evin rolled onto his stomach and clambered to his feet. “Why would anyone be glad to die?”
Ileni opened her mouth, then closed it.
“Don’t pay too much attention to Cyn.” Evin spread his hands apart, making twines of colored light dance between them. “She likes fighting, and she doesn’t mind killing as much as she should, but even she would prefer to avoid dying.”
Ileni didn’t doubt it. Cyn was fierce and violent, and cruel in her anger, but she was no assassin.
Evin studied her face, his broad brow creased. “I don’t know if you realized what you were getting into when you came here. I can help you.”
“I don’t need your help,” Ileni snapped.
In the silence, she heard the echoes of her nastiness and winced. She tried to think up an apology, hoping she could manage to get it out once she did. But Evin didn’t look hurt or angry. He frowned at her, and all he said was, “Are you going to tell me why you’re always angry at me?”
It sounded so reasonable. But what could she say? If I were you, I would do so much more with what you have.
She couldn’t say that, and she couldn’t bear the patient, open expression on Evin’s face. She whirled on her heel without a word and walked across the plateau and over the bridge.
As she reached the middle, the sky above her erupted in streaks of fiery green light. They danced in the sky, shifting and wavering, widening and narrowing, eerie ghosts that turned the entire sky unearthly.
Ileni didn’t stop. Whatever Evin was trying to say, however beautifully he was saying it, she didn’t care. It was nothing but an illusion, and she wasn’t in the mood for illusions.
She had been living with them long enough—since she was old enough to be told them. But she knew better now. She had no power and no destiny, and she didn’t even have anything to believe in. There was nothing worth fighting for, nothing good and pure, no path that didn’t end in pain.
It was her illusions that had brought her to this point. And she was going to need more than illusions to get past it.
Ileni learned fast that the casual nonchalance of the first few days had been an anomaly. With Karyn back, the training was more intense than anything she had experienced among her own people. Ileni threw herself eagerly into the mental focus, the grim dedication, the constant tension. It kept her too occupied to think.
At least, when she was sparring with Cyn. Which was most of the time.
Lis was sometimes intense, too, but spent most of her time deep in a sullen apathy that nobody seemed inclined to rouse her from. Evin was, even in Karyn’s presence, a slacker: refusing to take anything seriously, so powerful it didn’t matter. Sometimes Ileni admired him for his self-confidence, the ease with which he ignored Karyn’s anger and Cyn’s contempt. Other times, she hated him so much she could barely breathe.
But that wasn’t his fault, not really. So two days later, when she found herself alone on the training plateau with him, she said, “I’m sorry.”
Evin glanced at her over his shoulder. They were supposed to be practicing a ward Karyn had taught them that morning, but he was twirling a cloud of colorful sparkles around his hand, stretching and closing his fingers, playing with the ephemeral colors as if they were putty. “About what?”
“The day before yesterday, when you were doing that thing with the colors. I shouldn’t have snapped at you.” He regarded her through long-lashed dark eyes, and for some reason she felt compelled to add, “I’d just come from talking to Karyn. I was in a bad mood.”
He snapped his fingers, and the colors twirled. “Well, that would do it.”
Ileni hesitated. But he seemed genuinely unresentful. “Cyn said . . . is Karyn your aunt?”
Something sullen dropped over his carefree features, then was gone almost before she had noticed it. “Yes. My mother’s sister.”
Every social grace Ileni possessed was screaming at her to drop this topic. But she was not here to be liked. And she didn’t care what Evin thought of her. “I’ve never seen your mother here.”
“No, I would imagine you haven’t.” He closed his hand, and the colors coalesced into a tight, swirling ball. “Why does it matter?”
Ileni didn’t know why it mattered, but she suspected it did. The assassins were known to kill people as punishment—or warning—for their relatives’ actions. And Karyn had infiltrated and attacked the Assassins’ Caves.
Evin opened his hands wide, turning the sparkles into many-hued streams. He traced them lazily through the air, forming a series of shimmering curlicues. “It doesn’t give me any sort of extra privileges, if that’s what you think. Karyn finds me quite a disappointment.” He twirled his finger, tightening the colors into a long spiral. “Of course, you agree with her.”
“No,” Ileni said, utterly unconvincingly. “Where are your parents, then?”
“Dead,” Evin said.
He said it lightly, easily, the way he said everything. The colors continued spinning fanciful designs, bright and airy. It had to be a pretense, didn’t it? It wasn’t possible that even he truly didn’t care. Not about this.
But his carefree mask made it easier to push him. “I’m sorry. How did they die?”
Evin dropped his hand, leaving his designs to fade in the air. His tone remained mild. “This is an odd follow-up to an apology.”
Ileni turned briefly to examine the vista of gray stone and blue sky, afraid her face would flush. Impoliteness was surprisingly difficult, even when directed at someone who didn’t deserve her respect. “You don’t seem very grief-stricken, which among my people would mean—” She couldn’t figure out any sensible end to that sentence. “Never mind.”
Evin jerked his shoulders, a motion that seemed to have been intended as a shrug. “They chose to put themselves in the path of death, and they didn’t care much about me when they made that decision. So it seems only fair for me not to care about them in return. I’m sure you would be above such emotions, since you’re in general so much better than everyone here.”
“I—” Hadn’t realized I was being obvious about it. “I don’t think I’m better than everyone,” she finished weakly.
To her surprise, Evin burst out laughing. “Only than me?”
“I—”
“Oh, come. You might despise me a little more than 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 Ilen
i 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.
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The 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, wind
ing 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.”
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
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“Tell 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.