Death Marked (Death Sworn #2)(32)

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 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 Ileni 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.