Death Marked (Death Sworn #2)(55)

She tried to call up a magelight, a futile attempt too instinctive to stop. She closed her eyes, because it made the darkness easier to bear, and flattened one hand on the ground beneath her. Stone, unnaturally smooth and straight. She got onto her hands and knees and slid one hand forward, then the other, making her way across the slick rock floor. When she hit a wall, she wasn’t surprised.

She took off one of her shoes and left it on the ground. Then, keeping one hand on the wall, she began to walk. The wall curved inward.

Her gait was awkward and uneven, but it was only a short while before her bare foot hit her shoe. So her prison was circular and very small.

No. It wasn’t a prison. Prisons had beds. And food. And water.

Perhaps Karyn hadn’t wanted to kill Ileni in front of the others. But none of them would know where Ileni had been translocated to. And none of them would see when Ileni finally died, alone in the dark.

She crossed the room slowly, hands out in front of her, until she hit the far wall. She did it again and again, crisscrossing every inch of the stone ground, but the cavern was empty. There was nothing in here.

Nothing but her.

She stretched up on tiptoe, reached her hands above her head, and her fingertips brushed the flat rock above her.

She couldn’t keep herself from reaching for magic again, digging frantically, ripping at her insides. But there was nothing. Nothing inside, nothing outside, nothing, nothing she could use to escape.

That was when she began to scream.


In the total darkness, it was impossible to keep track of time. At first Ileni could pay attention to the hollow ache in her stomach as it slowly intensified; she could track the worsening of the dry pain in her throat. But then both went away, and everything was endlessly the same.

She thought she slept a lot, but she couldn’t be sure. There ceased to be a clear distinction between sleeping and waking. One slipped into the other. Eventually, she supposed, they would slip a little further, into death.

Instead of frightening her, the thought filled her with a vague, fuzzy discomfort.

Once, she opened her eyes and saw Sorin, his eyes blacker than the darkness. She said, “You can’t be here.”

“I can be wherever I want to be. Haven’t you learned by now not to underestimate an assassin?”

“I mean it’s not safe.”

“It’s not safe for you. I’ve come to take you back.”

“No. I need to be here. I need . . .” She couldn’t remember what she needed, and the effort pushed her into a doze. Some indeterminate amount of time passed before she roused herself and said, happily, “I’m on your side now.”

The cavern was empty. Sorin hadn’t been there at all. He couldn’t have been. And if he had, he would not have left her.

Another time it was Karyn, and by then all Ileni’s pride was gone. She said, “Please.”

Karyn smiled with cool disdain.

“You’re ashamed to kill me,” Ileni whispered. “That’s why you’re doing it secretly. But the others will find out. . . .”

“No,” Karyn said, “they won’t.” Her eyes glittered, pinpoints of bright malice, and Ileni drifted into darkness again.

She should have been more careful. She should have stood there, among the people waiting for slaughter, and pretended she thought it was perfectly reasonable.

If something like this had happened among the assassins, she would have been killed at once—brutally, publicly, with no need to explain anything to anyone. Perhaps murder was worse when it needed to be hidden.

When she opened her eyes again, the pale girl knelt over her, clutching a baby to her chest. “You promised to save her,” she whispered, as her magic flowed out of her and vanished into the stone around them. Her blond hair floated around her head. “You promised.”

“I’m sorry,” Ileni tried to say, but the woman vanished and she had no one to say it to. No one but herself. She was going to die, and because of that, she was never going to keep that promise.

The realization roused her, a jab of frustration piercing her lassitude. She wanted to do something good—something simply, purely, unmistakably good. In all her time in the Empire, she had made only one promise she could keep without guilt or shame, and made it to a girl whose power she had stolen. Here in the darkness, that promise seemed more important than the fate of the Empire or the plots of the assassins.

A part of her was glad that soon she wouldn’t have to think about those things anymore, wouldn’t have to untangle the tightly woven threads of good and evil that shifted with every new step. But she wished desperately that she could have saved the blond girl’s baby before she died.

It hurt to think, like pushing her mind through a fog of needles. It was so hard to fight—and what, really, was she fighting for? What was worth all this pain? All she wanted was to slip back into the peaceful blackness.

So she did.





CHAPTER

19

When she woke again, she woke fighting. Ileni did not recognize the figure looming over her—she didn’t know if she was really awake, or really alive—but a sense of danger shot through her, real and sharp as pain. She surged upward, her back against the wall, hands up and curled into claws.

”Well,” Arxis said, “I think she’s feeling better.”