Death Marked (Death Sworn #2)(71)

Ileni gaped for a moment, then found her voice. “That’s how Sorin knew I was here. You’re a spy.”

Lis smiled, arch and smug. “So tell Karyn. Do you think she’ll believe you? Think you’re better off than I am? I know what Karyn has planned for you.”

“How did you even know I was in the Academy?” Ileni demanded. “When Karyn brought me here, nobody—”

“Karyn told me.” Lis laughed. “Evin and Cyn were putting down a riot, and she needed my help to set up extra wards around you.”

“Your help?” Ileni said, and heard a moment too late how much she sounded like Cyn.

Lis flushed, dark red. “Yes. Mine. I’m not as worthless as my sister thinks. Karyn told me not to tell anyone about you . . . and I didn’t. Not anyone here.”

“How did you tell the assassins? I thought the wards—”

“The wards are quite effective, yes. In the Academy.” Lis shook her head, hair swinging back and forth. “But when I go to battles . . . or riots . . . to harvest the wounded, there are no wards there. And it’s easy enough to send messages to the caves.”

Ileni’s feet were fused to the rock. “But how—how did you—”

“The master sent Arxis here for two reasons.” Lis’s eyes shone with a worshipful fervor Ileni had seen before. Obviously, no one had told her the master was dead. “The first was to recruit me.”

Ileni flinched, involuntarily, at the mention of the master. It didn’t surprise her that he had known, from his black caves high in the distant mountains, that here in the Academy a girl was angry and disillusioned and ripe to turn on everyone she knew.

It didn’t surprise her that Lis had been manipulated, expertly, from the very start.

“And the second reason,” Ileni hissed, “was to kill Girad.”

A muscle twitched in Lis’s cheek. “Yes.”

“And you don’t care.”

“I’ve seen lots of people die. I’ve harvested their power myself, to feed it to the Empire. I know what the assassins are fighting against.” Lis was shouting now. “There is no room for pity in war. Arxis knew that.”

“You’re a tool,” Ileni spat. “You don’t know anything about the people you’re serving. Arxis didn’t need a reason not to care. He just didn’t. Not about anything. He thought that was a virtue.”

Lis’s jaw clenched, her face a stolid mask.

Ileni thrust quickly, looking for something that would hurt enough to keep that mask from closing. “He didn’t care what his death would do to you. He didn’t care about you at all.”

“He was willing to make sacrifices,” Lis hissed. “He did what was right, even though he loved me.”

Ileni heard her own laugh, with an edge to it that would have made a sane person back away. Lis stepped closer.

“He loved me!”

“Oh, did he? Would he have stayed his hand if you asked him to? Let Girad live?”

“I didn’t ask him to!” Lis shouted. Hair blew across her face. “I didn’t know it would be Girad. He never told me . . . and even if he had, I wouldn’t have stood in his way. He did what had to be done. This the only way.”

“It’s not,” Ileni said. “It’s not the only way.”

“Oh, really?” Lis sneered. “You have another one? You think if you look long enough, you’ll find a perfect shining solution and fix everything without getting your hands dirty?”

“No,” Ileni said, and heard her own voice: small, defeated. “No. I don’t.”

“Then who are you to judge his sacrifice? Arxis knew what his life was worth, and what he was willing to trade it for. He was braver than any sorcerer in this Academy.” Lis’s hair hung in a tangle of threads over her face, lit into strands of silver by the sun behind her.

“None of them care about their lives,” Ileni said. “There will be another one to replace him. To kill Girad where he failed. Did Arxis ever tell you about the Roll of Honor? Because he might not have feared death, but I assure you, he feared not having his name carved on that column. And it won’t be. Not now.”

Lis’s face twisted, and guilt stabbed Ileni. This cruelty wasn’t all meant for Lis. Some of it was meant for herself.

Which didn’t mean Lis didn’t deserve it. Ileni saw again Girad’s tiny body, heard the startled cry as he fell.

“Maybe you can fall in love with the next one, too,” she said. “Since you enjoy being miserable so much.”

Lis slapped her.

Ileni had been expecting that, and her block was instantaneous. Lis’s hand froze an inch from Ileni’s face. She struggled to break through, but Ileni held her off easily.

Lis snarled at her. Then she stepped backward off the ledge and dropped from sight.

Ileni didn’t move. A moment later, a slim figure rose in the sky, black hair blowing wildly around her.

Ileni stood there long after the sky was empty again, not moving, the mountain firm against her back. The clean slashes of the mountaintops were smudged. She blinked fiercely and swiped at her eyes with the back of her hand.

She had also once thought that she was on the side of good—that she would do something wholly, unmistakably right. She missed that belief more than she missed Sorin, more than she missed her magic, more than she missed not wondering every morning if she would die that day.