Death Marked (Death Sworn #2)(73)

How stupid she was. He would always be a killer. He didn’t want to be anything else.

“You need to come back,” Sorin said.

She stared at him as if he had started babbling ancient poetry.

His face was still expressionless, but his voice was low and urgent. “You’re in danger now, more than before. You need to come through, back to—to the caves.”

“I can’t,” Ileni said.

“Then open the portal farther, and I’ll come through to you. You have to, Ileni. They’re going to kill you—torture you, and then kill you. Now that they know you could have told them about Arxis—”

“Arxis failed,” Ileni said. “I stopped him.”

Sorin said nothing. Maybe he had already known. His face was still the impenetrable mask it had been months ago, when they first met. She couldn’t guess what was behind it.

A hysterical laugh rose in her. “Are you going to kill me for that?”

She knew it was stupid to ask. But she wanted to break that mask, to make him show some sort of emotion.

She wanted him to be something he wasn’t.

And it worked. For a moment the mask vanished, and his face burned. Pain and longing and love, all directed at her—at her—with an intensity that scorched everything else away.

He said, “No. I’m not going to kill you.”

She couldn’t breathe. She certainly couldn’t say, So there’s one person in the world you can’t kill.

It’s not enough.

And she knew, suddenly, why a part of her had wanted to hear a different answer, when she’d asked him if he had killed a child. She had been disappointed because, if he’d said yes, that would have been the end. It would have been over. The knowledge would have broken her free of him, forced her to go through that pain and see if she came out on the other side.

If she didn’t love him, everything would be so much easier.

“I can’t kill you,” Sorin said, almost steadily. “I know I should. But I can’t.”

“But you’ll kill him,” Ileni said. “Gi—the child. You’ll send someone else after him. Won’t you?”

He didn’t respond, which was answer enough.

Ileni searched his face, looking for a trace of . . . shame? If he were an imperial sorcerer, that would have been the reason for his silence. But he wasn’t a sorcerer. He was an assassin, and all she saw on his face was resolve.

Her chest hurt. Her eyes burned. She whispered, “I love you.”

Sorin opened his mouth, and she drew the power back. Then the mirror was just a mirror, and she was staring at her own stricken face.

The emptiness in her chest was even worse than the ache of lost magic. The emptiness had teeth, and would never let her go. But Ileni reached through it and clung to the memory of how she had stood here earlier, looking at Tellis and feeling nothing.

If she had felt that way about Tellis, one day she would feel that way about Sorin, too.

It helped, but only in a vague, distant way. She wanted to close the connection between them—to slam it shut, so he would be leagues and leagues away and have no way to talk to her ever again.

But she didn’t. She held the portal open, delicately—not wide enough to let someone through, just enough to keep it from closing entirely. It required every ounce of her Renegai training. It almost slipped from her, twice, but each time she managed to hold it back.

She dropped to the floor, snatched up one of the broken pieces of chalk, and drew a swift pattern over the one that was already there. She took the time to check the overlay of the two patterns, then placed Girad’s wooden dog in its center and placed both hands on it. It had been worn smooth, and felt almost like warm glass. This was a toy that had been much-handled, deeply loved by a child.

But there was nothing else at hand she could use. I’m sorry, Girad.

She ran the words of the spell through her mind once, then began tapping her fingers along the toy in patterns she had memorized long ago. Halfway through, she got her finger pattern mixed up, and the building power shuddered and vanished. She gritted her teeth in frustration and began again.

The second time, she faltered over a word.

Focus. If she had been in the Renegai village, two tries would have been all she got; her teachers would have insisted she stop and replenish her strength. But here, she had an endless supply of power. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, pressed her fingertips into the wood, and began again.

The third time, she got it right. As soon as the magic spiraled into the end of the spell, she let out her breath and opened her eyes. She let go of the wooden dog, and it rose into the air, undulating faintly.

Behind it, the mirror was dull and lifeless, the magic torn from it and instilled in the toy dog. The toy, now, held one end of the portal.

The other was still in the caves.

She couldn’t bring herself to touch the wooden dog. She let it hover in the air in front of her when she was done, let it float before her all the way down the narrow hallway and the narrower ledge and across the swaying bridge.

Karyn and Evin were on the plateau, colored lightning zigzagging over their heads, frantic bursts of savagely beautiful lights. When Ileni stepped off the bridge, the brilliant zigzags disappeared before she could get a close look at them. But she knew what Evin was doing. Turning art into combat magic.