Death Marked (Death Sworn #2)(21)

Cyn held up an arm. Her skin was laced with blood. “I’ll figure out your secret, don’t worry. In the meantime, care to do that healing thing?”

“Sure.” The healing spell felt dull in comparison to the fighting spells, running through well-worn grooves in her mind. But even that, Ileni had to admit, was not as smooth as it should have been; the grooves were rough, neglected. She was going to have to start doing regular exercises again.

“You know,” Cyn said thoughtfully, “you should use healing to fight. It makes you impervious to injury. You could attack when you should be blocking, let my spell get through, and then just heal your injury once you’ve struck me.”

“I suppose so,” Ileni said after a moment.

“So why don’t you?”

Because she had never thought of healing as a weapon. “It would still hurt, you know.”

Cyn flicked a finger dismissively. “We learn how to handle pain. If you let it interfere with your magic, you’re useless as a battle mage.”

Pain is nothing but a distraction. Sorin’s voice was so clear in her mind that Ileni almost turned to look for him.

“We,” she said as haughtily as she could, “learn to avoid it.”

Evin’s laugh, from the edge of the plateau, was low and smooth. Behind him, the Academy’s main mountain peak rose into the sky, a sharp line of dark gray against the brilliant blue. “Is it too late to join your side?”

Ileni tried to match his casual tone, as if they weren’t truly on different sides. “Is that allowed?”

“Nope,” Evin said cheerfully. He was dressed in threadbare black breeches and a green tunic almost as bright as Cyn’s gown. “But since Karyn isn’t here to snarl at me about it, I’m not sure it matters.”

“Karyn will be gone for a few days,” Lis said. She had landed on the opposite side of the plateau from Evin and was standing with her feet braced apart, arms crossed over her chest, the edges of her hair brushing her elbows. Unlike the others, she was wearing drab, functional clothes, in a shade of gray that reminded Ileni of the assassins.

A few days. That would give her time to find out more. Maybe she could discover the source of the lodestones before Karyn came back.

And, while she was doing that, she would also get to use her magic.

Not mine.

“You wouldn’t want to join our side,” she said to Evin. “We don’t have lodestones.”

The sentence plunked into the conversation awkwardly, but after a strained moment, Evin gave a friendly shrug and said, “I don’t need them. But I can see how that would be a disadvantage.”

Ileni strove hard to keep her voice nonchalant. Lis was eyeing her sharply, but Cyn’s expression was preoccupied. “I’d heard of them before I came here, but never seen one. Where does their power come from?”

“It’s given to us,” Cyn said.

Power stolen, power misused, power drawn from pain and death. Every muscle in Ileni’s body tensed. “Given to you? What does that—”

But Cyn was still focused on Lis. “Why the delay? It really shouldn’t take a few days just to mop up some Gaeran rebels.”

“No, it shouldn’t,” Evin agreed. “I don’t even know why Karyn had to go handle it herself. Lis, did Karyn tell you any details?”

Ileni shoved her frustration aside. She couldn’t risk pushing for more information, not with the way Lis had looked at her.

Though now Lis was studying the smooth gray ground as if it was more fascinating than any of the people standing on it. Her voice emerged sullenly from behind the dark curtain of her hair. “The governor of the Gaeran territory died after the revolt started. They think it was poison.”

“Assassins?” Evin said, with an edge in his voice that made Ileni snap her head around to stare at him.

Casual. Relaxed. She didn’t think she was pulling it off. Fortunately, none of them was paying enough attention to notice.

“That’s the suspicion,” Lis mumbled. “Karyn is trying to find the culprit.”

Ileni concentrated on keeping her breathing slow and even, at odds with the racing of her heart. She cleared her throat. “Why would Karyn think she could find an assassin? I thought . . . I mean, I was told . . . even among my people, we heard they were never caught alive.”

Evin was holding himself still—something Ileni should have been used to, after weeks among assassins, who never made an unnecessary motion. But on him, it was unnatural. It drew her gaze toward him, even as she focused on Lis.

Lis pushed her hair back, giving a brief glimpse of her set, pale face before the shiny strands fell back into place. “It’s true. They aren’t.” She sounded almost proud of that, as if she was looking forward to Karyn’s failure. “Most people would know better than to try.”

“The assassins are a threat to the safety of everyone in the Empire,” Cyn said. “They need to be eliminated.”

“It’s more than that, with her,” Lis said.

“What is it?” Ileni asked, and heard her voice emerge a bit too eager. She hesitated, then pressed on anyhow, heedless of the risk. “Why is she so obsessed with the assassins?”

In the short, awkward silence, a bird called out high overhead. Cyn said, cautiously, “They killed some of her family.”