Death Marked (Death Sworn #2)(28)

She tried to ask about the lodestones, but it was a slippery subject. She couldn’t even tell whether Cyn was avoiding the topic—it seemed, rather, that there was always something more interesting to talk about—but after four days, she still had no idea where the magic filling the lodestones came from. It was with vague, guilty relief that she eventually gave up. Arxis had promised her the truth. All she had to do was wait. There were eleven days left—and then ten—and then nine—and then just eight.

It was only at night, in the few minutes before sleep, that despair came creeping in. And even then, it wasn’t over magic, and it wasn’t over the lodestones. It was thoughts of Sorin that slid between Ileni and sleep, a sore spot in her heart that she couldn’t stop poking. Over and over, she went through their last encounter, when he had told her he would wait for her.

Over and over, she reminded herself that he was a killer.

The mirror in the corner was a constant taunt, an itch she didn’t dare scratch. It was a trap, somehow—it had to be—though she couldn’t fathom its purpose. More than once, she stood in front of it for minutes she didn’t count. It would be so easy to open the portal again, to see Sorin’s eyes in the glass instead of her own.

Usually, she turned away before her thoughts could lead her down that path. Sometimes, she didn’t turn away until she noticed how wet her eyes were.

And for all the very good reasons she had to turn away, the one that finally spurred her to do it, on those nights, was a simple and stupid one: she didn’t want Sorin to see her cry.





CHAPTER

9

Ileni woke suddenly from a dreamless sleep, not certain where she was. The glowstones flickered dimly, revealing smooth gray stone and dark polished wood in a foreign, too-large room.

Then the glowstones’ light vanished, the room went black and featureless, and someone yanked her blanket off her body.

“Get up,” Karyn said, and all the glowstones turned bright at once. The sorceress stood over Ileni’s bed, dressed in a lacy black tunic and purple leggings. “I have some questions.”

Ileni was already upright in bed, heart pounding, mind forming the pattern of an attack spell. The bolt of fire shot straight toward Karyn’s face, but Karyn blocked it with an impatient wave of her hand. The backlash of repelled magic hit Ileni like a punch.

“You need to calm down,” Karyn said. She lowered her hand, and her flowing sleeve fell over her wrist, but not before Ileni saw the metallic bracelet clamped around it. “You’re not among assassins anymore. No one here is trying to kill you.”

Ileni wasn’t even sure how that was ironic, but she knew it was. She pulled the blanket back over her bare legs. “It’s a bit early.”

“This is when I have time. Get dressed.”

As slowly as she dared, Ileni got out of bed and walked to the wardrobe. When she had fastened a long gray skirt over her sleeping tunic and slipped on shoes, Karyn said, “Sit down.”

Ileni glanced at the chair, then whispered a quick spell under her breath. She drew her legs up and crossed them beneath her, sitting calmly on empty air, floating several feet above the ground.

Karyn rolled her eyes. Then she muttered a spell. A gash tore down the skin of her own forearm and immediately filled with blood.

Ileni flinched. Karyn held out her arm. “Teach me how to heal it.”

Ileni had managed not to think about this: how she had promised to betray not just herself, not just the assassins, but her own people. As she watched the blood spill onto Karyn’s skin, her fear and longing and confusion struck against something deep within her, something rock solid. No. She wasn’t going to do this. Not for any reason.

She laughed.

A muscle twitched in Karyn’s sharp chin. “Is something amusing?”

“Many things,” Ileni said. “But at the moment, mostly your arrogance.”

“Indeed.”

“It took me years to get to the point where I could heal myself.” Ileni leaned back, extending her spell so her hands, too, could support her on thin air. Blood spread over Karyn’s arm, but the sorceress didn’t even glance at it. “You’re not going to learn it in a morning. First you have to master the basic patterns of healing spells—they’re very different from other spells—and then you need to understand what’s inside a person’s body, and then—”

“Understood,” Karyn snapped. “Unfortunately, I have no interest in devoting my life to becoming a Renegai healer. I have a war to win.”

“Unfortunately for who?” Ileni said coolly.

“For you.” Karyn stretched both hands high above her head, fingertips pointing up. Blood curved down her left arm. Ileni felt the magic coiling in Karyn’s hands and pulled in as much magic as she could from the lodestones, but then didn’t know what to do with it. She didn’t recognize Karyn’s spell.

Karyn’s eyes glinted. She brought her arms down sharply, all her fingertips pointed at Ileni.

Ileni threw her power into a ward. It was unplanned and messy—her Renegai teachers would have been appalled—and Karyn batted it aside with a flippant hand gesture. Then she whispered a word and released her spell.

A wave of dizziness, tinged with nausea, ran through Ileni. With a suddenness that made her scream, she fell several feet to the ground.