“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 here?” Ileni demanded.
“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 . . . 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 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 killed them myself, to harvest their power and 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 truly, 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.
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Ileni 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.
And it wasn’t even necessary.
The portal slid open easily, and behind the breach in the wards, someone was waiting for her. She knew it, sensed his presence, even before the mirror erupted into a rainbow whirlwind. When the colors faded back into the glass, he was there.
As if he had been waiting for her.
“Did you know about it?” Ileni demanded before he could say a word. Her throat was so tight it hurt, but the words slid out easily.
Sorin’s face didn’t so much as twitch. He stared at her unflinching, not denying it.
Sorin. The two of them had stood together beneath the earth and faced death. They had lied to each other and betrayed each other and loved each other through it all. Her heart shattered slowly, a hundred agonizing hairline fractures.
“The boy? I didn’t order that,” Sorin said. His voice was calm, even. “Our assassin was placed there over a month ago. It was the master who sent him. You know that.”
His cheekbones were sharp as blades, his eyes dark coals. She couldn’t look away from him. Her heart pounded so hard she could hear it.
Sorin leaned forward, very slightly. A tuft of blond hair fell over his forehead. “What do you really want to ask me, Ileni?”
She sucked in a harsh, painful breath, and said, “Have you ever killed a child?”
Sorin’s face hardened, and the dangerous slant of his eyes wiped away any hint of vulnerability. When he finally spoke, his tone was measured. “I??
?ve only been on one mission. I killed a nobleman. You know that, too.”
“But you’re . . . in charge now.” She couldn’t bring herself to say you are the master. “You’ve sent people on missions. Since I . . . since I left.”
“Yes.”
She flinched despite herself. But she had always known he was a killer. She forced the next question out. “Were any of the targets children?”
He looked at her for a moment—a long moment, considering how dangerous it was to keep this portal open. His eyes had never seemed so impenetrable. Ileni braced herself, heart thudding.
He said, “No.”
In the complete silence that followed, Ileni felt not relief, not joy, but an odd whirling . . . disappointment?
Because he’s lying to me. But she didn’t really believe that. And a moment later he added, “But I will if I have to. And someday, I will have to.”
No. He wasn’t lying.
“Arxis’s mission was necessary,” Sorin added.
Racing through the corridors, running this conversation through her mind, she had planned to be furious. She should be furious. Instead she was suddenly, deeply sad.
“No,” she said. “You didn’t have to kill Girad. You could have found another way. You wanted to kill him. You wanted to kill him because he’s a child and because killing children inflicts the greatest possible pain.”
“Yes,” Sorin said, utterly calm. “This was about inflicting pain. We accept that necessity.”
Her voice was still working, despite the pain in her chest. “You accept it far too easily.”
“It’s not easy,” Sorin said, but for the first time, his gaze wavered.
This time, he was lying. It was easy. Their goal, their lives, their purpose, was to kill. Of course it was easy.
She was still holding Girad’s wooden dog, so tightly her hand hurt.
“The Empire kills children, too,” Sorin said. “In a dozen ways. By sacrificing their parents in its wars and then allowing them to starve. By waiting until they’re too ill to recover and then taking their power when they die.”
“Yes. And you kill them by selecting them as targets and slitting their throats with knives.”
He lifted one shoulder. “What does it matter? The children are just as dead.”
It does matter, Ileni thought; but if she said it, he would ask her why, and she had no answer that would convince him. These were the rules of this unending war, the rules the assassins had played by for centuries.
Sorin hated rules . . . or she had believed he did. But maybe all he had ever wanted was to be the one making them.
“You knew I was here,” she whispered. “You knew why. I could have ended all of this. Why kill a child when I might be about to end the entire war?”
Something flickered across Sorin’s eyes, something she had seen so often—from the assassins and the imperial sorcerers both—that she recognized it instantly.
Pity.
Are all Renegai as deliberately simpleminded as you?
She had forgotten—had allowed herself to forget—what the assassins were.
That they didn’t look for reasons to avoid killing.
Would he still be a killer, she had wondered once, if this war didn’t require it?
How stupid she was. He would always be a killer. He didn’t want to be anything else.
“You need to come back,” Sorin said.
She stared at him as if he had started babbling ancient poetry.
His face was still expressionless, but his voice was low and urgent. “You’re in danger now, more than before. You need to come through, back to—to the caves.”
“I can’t,” Ileni said.
“Then open the portal farther, and I’ll come through to you. You have to, Ileni. They’re going to kill you—torture you, and then kill you. Now that they know you could have prevented the child’s death—”
“The child is not dead,” Ileni said. “I stopped it.”
Sorin said nothing. Maybe he had already known. His face was still the impenetrable mask it had been months ago, when they first met. She couldn’t guess what was behind it.
A hysterical laugh rose in her. “Are you going to kill me for that?”
She knew it was stupid to ask. But she wanted to break that mask, to make him show some sort of emotion.
She wanted him to be something he wasn’t.
And it worked. For a moment the mask vanished, and his face burned. Pain and longing and love, all directed at her—at her—with an intensity that scorched everything else away.
He said, “No. I’m not going to kill you.”
She couldn’t breathe. She certainly couldn’t say, So there’s one person in the world you can’t kill.
It’s not enough.
And she knew, suddenly, why a part of her had wanted to hear a different answer, when she’d asked him if he had killed a child. She had been disappointed because, if he’d said yes, that would have been the end. It would have been over. The knowledge would have broken her free of him, forced her to go through that pain and see if she came out on the other side.
If she didn’t love him, everything would be so much easier.
“I can’t kill you,” Sorin said, almost steadily. “I know I should. But I can’t.”
“But you’ll kill him,” Ileni said. “Gi—the child. You’ll send someone else after him. Won’t you?”
He didn’t respond, which was answer enough.
Ileni searched his face, looking for a trace of . . . shame? If he were an imperial sorcerer, that would have been the reason for his silence. But he wasn’t a sorcerer. He was an assassin, and all she saw on his face was resolve.
Her chest hurt. Her eyes burned. She whispered, “I love you.”
Sorin opened his mouth, and she drew the power back. Then the mirror was just a mirror, and she was staring at her own stricken face.
The emptiness in her chest was even worse than the ache of lost magic. The emptiness had teeth, and would never let her go. But Ileni reached through it and clung to the memory of how she had stood here earlier, looking at Tellis and feeling nothing.
If she had felt that way about Tellis, one day she would feel that way about Sorin, too.
It helped, but only in a vague, distant way. She wanted to close the connection between them—to slam it shut, so he would be leagues and leagues away and have no way to talk to her ever again.
But she didn’t. She held the portal open, delicately—not wide enough to let someone through, just enough to keep it from closing entirely. It required every ounce of her Renegai training. It almost slipped from her, twice, but each time she managed to hold it back.
She dropped to the floor, snatched up one of the broken pieces of chalk, and drew a swift pattern over the one that was already there. She took the time to check the overlay of the two patterns, then placed Girad’s wooden dog in its center and placed both hands on it. It had been worn smooth, and felt almost like warm glass. This was a toy that had been much-handled, deeply loved by a child.
But there was nothing else at hand she could use. I’m sorry, Girad.
She ran the words of the spell through her mind once, then began tapping her fingers along the toy in patterns she had memorized long ago. Halfway through, she got her finger pattern mixed up, and the building power shuddered and vanished. She gritted her teeth in frustration and began again.
The second time, she faltered over a word.
Focus. If she had been in the Renegai village, two tries would have been all she got; her teachers would have insisted she stop and replenish her strength. But here, she had an endless supply of power. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, pressed her fingertips into the wood, and began again.
The third time, she got it right. As soon as the magic spiraled into the end of the spell, she let out her breath and opened her eyes. She let go of the wooden dog, and it rose into the air, undulating faintly.
Behind it, the mirror was dull
and lifeless, the magic torn from it and instilled in the toy dog. The toy, now, held one end of the portal.
The other was still in the caves.
She couldn’t bring herself to touch the wooden dog. She let it hover in the air in front of her when she was done, let it float before her all the way down the narrow hallway and the narrower ledge and across the swaying bridge.
Karyn and Evin were on the plateau, colored lightning zigzagging over their heads, frantic bursts of savagely beautiful lights. When Ileni stepped off the bridge, the brilliant zigzags disappeared before she could get a close look at them. But she knew what Evin was doing. Turning art into combat magic.
This place ruins everything it touches.
It was her last chance to hesitate, but she didn’t. She walked straight over to the center of the plateau, past Evin to Karyn, the wooden dog hovering in front of her.
“I think,” she said, her voice shaking only the tiniest bit, “that this is what you want from me.”
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The plateau was completely silent but for the rush of wind around them and the cry of an eagle somewhere overhead. The sky stretched vastly blue over the harsh gray plateau and soaring twin pillars of the Judgment Spires.
Karyn reached for the wooden dog, and so did Ileni. Ileni’s hand closed around the small toy first, and she pulled it back.
The wind whistled around them, then went still. The residue of Evin’s spell hovered overhead, faint glittering sparkles of color.
“Ileni?” Evin said.
“It’s a way through the assassins’ wards.” Ileni kept her focus on Karyn, whose hand was still out, fingers curved. “A way into the caves. This was your plan for defeating them, wasn’t it? For me to turn traitor and let you in.”
Karyn curled her fingers slowly into a fist and drew her hand back. Evin murmured under his breath, and the remnants of color above them vanished, leaving the air clear and featureless.