Death Marked (Death Sworn #2)(72)

For a moment, she envied Lis. She wished she, too, believed in something strongly enough to kill for it without hesitation or doubt.

She turned her back on the empty sky and ran.





CHAPTER

25

Ileni ran straight to her room, and straight to the mirror, and she pulled power from lodestones as she ran. She dropped to her knees and drew patterns on the floor with dangerous haste, her chalk strokes steady despite her shaking arms, pulling in yet more power through her skin. By the time she unleashed all that power on the mirror, sweeping her arm at the glass and shouting the spell, she had more than she could safely control.

And it wasn’t even necessary.

The portal slid open easily, and behind the breach in the wards, someone was waiting for her. She knew it, sensed his presence, even before the mirror erupted into a rainbow whirlwind. When the colors faded back into the glass, he was there.

As if he had been waiting for her.

“Did you know about it?” Ileni demanded, before he could say a word. Her throat was so tight it hurt, but the words slid out easily.

Sorin’s face didn’t so much as twitch. He stared at her unflinching, not denying it.

Sorin. The two of them had stood together beneath the earth and faced death. They had lied to each other and betrayed each other and loved each other through it all. Her heart shattered slowly, a hundred agonizing hairline fractures.

“The boy? I didn’t order that,” Sorin said. His voice was calm, even. “Our assassin was placed there over a month ago. It was the master who sent him. You know that.”

His cheekbones were sharp as blades, his eyes dark coals. She couldn’t look away from him. Her heart pounded so hard she could hear it.

Sorin leaned forward, very slightly. A tuft of blond hair fell over his forehead. “What do you really want to ask me, Ileni?”

She sucked in a harsh, painful breath, and said, “Have you ever killed a child?”

Sorin’s face hardened, and the dangerous slant of his eyes wiped away any hint of vulnerability. When he finally spoke, his tone was measured. “I’ve only been on one mission. I killed a nobleman. You know that, too.”

“But you’re . . . in charge now.” She couldn’t bring herself to say you are the master. “You must have sent people on missions. Since I . . . since I left.”

“Yes.”

She flinched despite herself. But she had always known he was a killer. She forced the next question out. “Were any of the targets children?”

He looked at her for a moment—a long moment, considering how dangerous it was to keep this portal open. His eyes had never seemed so impenetrable. Ileni braced herself, heart thudding.

He said, “No.”

In the complete silence that followed, Ileni felt not relief, not joy, but an odd whirling . . . disappointment?

Because he’s lying to me. But she didn’t really believe that. And a moment later he added, “But I will if I have to. And someday, I will have to.”

No. He wasn’t lying.

“Arxis’s mission was necessary,” Sorin added.

Racing through the corridors, running this conversation through her mind, she had planned to be furious. She should be furious. Instead she was suddenly, deeply sad.

“No,” she said. “You didn’t have to kill Girad. You could have found another way. You wanted to kill him. You wanted to kill him because he’s a child and because killing children inflicts the greatest possible pain.”

“Yes,” Sorin said, utterly calm. “This was about inflicting pain. We accept that necessity.”

Her voice was still working, despite the pain in her chest. “You accept it far too easily.”

“It’s not easy,” Sorin said, but for the first time, his gaze wavered.

This time, he was lying. It was easy. Their goal, their lives, their purpose, was to kill. Of course it was easy.

She was still holding Girad’s wooden dog, so tightly her hand hurt.

“The Empire kills children, too,” Sorin said. “In a dozen ways. By sacrificing their parents in its wars and then allowing them to starve. By waiting until they’re too ill to recover and then taking their power when they die.”

“Yes. And you kill them by selecting them as targets and slitting their throats with knives.”

He lifted one shoulder. “What does it matter? The children are just as dead.”

It does matter, Ileni thought; but if she said it, he would ask her why, and she had no answer that would convince him. These were the rules of this unending war, the rules the assassins had played by for centuries.

Sorin hated rules . . . or she had believed he did. But maybe all he had ever wanted was to be the one making them.

“You knew I was here,” she whispered. “You knew why. I could have ended all of this. Why kill a child when I might be about to end the entire war?”

Something flickered across Sorin’s eyes, something she had seen so often—from the assassins and the imperial sorcerers both—that she recognized it instantly.

Pity.

Are all Renegai as deliberately simpleminded as you?

She had forgotten—had allowed herself to forget—what the assassins were.

That they didn’t look for reasons to avoid killing.

Would he still be a killer, she had wondered once, if this war didn’t require it?