Death Marked (Death Sworn #2)(27)

Cyn rolled her eyes. “Calm down. I didn’t really hurt her.” She sauntered to the center of the plateau, avoiding Ileni’s eyes, and summoned up a piece of chalk with a snap of her fingers. “I just scared her.”

Ileni swallowed, and what went down tasted thick and bitter.

Cyn dropped to her knees and began drawing a pattern, the scratching of chalk almost frenzied against the stone ground. The pattern was like nothing Ileni had ever seen before, everything about it off-center and unbalanced. When Cyn stood, the chalk snapped in two in her hand.

“My sister likes self-righteousness almost as much as she likes self-pity,” she said. “But she’s wrong. I do terrible things, but only because I have to.”

I’ve heard that before. Ileni didn’t dare say it.

“This is what I did,” Cyn said. “This is how I won the battle without a single imperial soldier lost. I fashioned the spell myself.”

Ileni tried to make sense of the elements of the pattern. “It’s for . . . breaking something?”

“Not something.”

A chill crept under Ileni’s skin. “You used this against people?”

“Froze their bodies and shattered them into a million tiny pieces,” Cyn said. “It tends to have a devastating effect on their fellow rebels, too, especially those who get hit by pieces of their dead friends.”

“That’s how you won the battle?” Ileni’s voice cracked.

“Evin and I are the only ones who can do it,” Cyn said. There was pride—pride—in her voice.

The pause seemed to demand a response. Ileni came up with, “Oh.”

Cyn flung both pieces of chalk behind her. “Do you think you could?”

“No,” Ileni said, and realized it wasn’t true as she said it. The spell was intricate and tricky, but well within her skill. And Cyn knew it.

“I’ll teach you,” Cyn said, her voice suddenly silken. “We can practice on rocks.”

Ileni resisted the urge to back away. Using a spell like this, letting her mind coil around such destructive magic, would be a betrayal of everything she was.

Then again, so was everything she had done lately. This would be no different from learning to fight with Sorin, throwing knives into people-shaped targets, over and over until her muscles ached.

“I don’t want to do it,” she said. “Let’s work on something else.”

“No.” Cyn’s eyes narrowed until they were slits in her face. “Let’s work on this.”

She should have been more careful. Should have remembered that these were imperial sorcerers. Why should anything they did horrify her?

“Watch closely,” Cyn said, and stepped carefully onto one of the thick white lines. Magic shimmered through the pattern, a long, delicious shiver. “You’ll try next. Trust me, Ileni. You won’t know what you’re capable of until you do it.”

I can’t, Ileni thought, and a memory struck her: pushing the dagger through Irun’s skin, blood flowing over her hand. The savage joy that ran through her as she wrenched the blade out. Perhaps it was time to stop pretending she was better than the sorcerers, or the assassins, or anyone at all.

“All right,” she said. Her voice trembled, but she swallowed hard and added, “Go ahead. I’m watching.”


That night, Ileni traced a finger along the mirror’s smooth surface, forming the pattern that—if written with chalk on stone, joined with the right words, fueled by enough power—could shatter not just a person, but a mountain. Gray stone, crumbling down and around them, the might of the Empire buried beneath it.

She had managed to keep herself from thinking, until this moment, of the use she could put today’s lesson to. Of what Cyn had foolishly taught her to do.

The lodestones couldn’t be destroyed. But they could be buried, along with every person in this Academy. That would put an end to the Empire’s power, more dramatically than even the assassins had hoped.

Cyn had no idea what Ileni was capable of.

Her finger left no trace on the mirror’s surface. She pressed her fingertip against it, so hard her nail turned white. Another pattern, a much shorter, simpler one, and she could tell Sorin what she knew.

He would want to use it immediately.

She imagined telling him that she wanted to find another way—that she wanted to put an end to the lodestones without killing anyone—and it was all too easy to envision his expression.

She felt again the surge of power going through her, the shattering of rock spraying in a million different directions. She had met Cyn’s smile through a cascade of pebbles and dust.

She hadn’t realized until that moment that she had been smiling, too.

Oh, yes. She could do it.

But she didn’t want to.

I’ll find another way. The hope felt threadbare and forlorn. She didn’t even need Sorin to tell her she was being weak.

She stepped back from the mirror, not much liking what she saw in it.


The next four days sped by like a dream, the type of dream that might at any moment twist into a nightmare. Ileni practiced magic all day with Cyn—and, sometimes, with Evin and Lis—and got used to the odd concoctions the imperial sorcerers called food, many of which she had already tasted in the caves. She passed other sorcerers-in-training, on the ledges and in the passageways, and saw them practicing from afar. They never spoke to her, and she—perhaps influenced by Cyn’s aloofness—never spoke to them. It occurred to her, sometimes, that she might be making a mistake. But she was too busy to dwell on it.