Authors: Leah Cypess
What was wrong with her, that she could so easily forget what people truly were? First Sorin, now Cyn.
Cyn rolled her eyes. “Calm down. I didn’t really hurt her.” She sauntered to the center of the plateau, avoiding Ileni’s eyes, and summoned up a piece of chalk with a snap of her fingers. “I just scared her.”
Ileni swallowed, and what went down tasted thick and bitter.
Cyn dropped to her knees and began drawing a pattern, the scratching of chalk almost frenzied against the stone ground. The pattern was like nothing Ileni had ever seen before, everything about it off-center and unbalanced. When Cyn stood, the chalk snapped in two in her hand.
“My sister likes self-righteousness almost as much as she likes self-pity,” she said. “But she’s wrong. I do terrible things, but only because I have to.”
I’ve heard that before.
Ileni didn’t dare say it.
“This is what I did,” Cyn said. “This is how I won the battle without a single imperial soldier lost. I fashioned the spell myself.”
Ileni tried to make sense of the elements of the pattern. “It’s for . . . breaking something?”
“Not some
thing
.”
A chill crept under Ileni’s skin. “You used this against
people
?”
“Froze their bodies and shattered them into a million tiny pieces,” Cyn said. “It tends to have a devastating effect on their fellow rebels, too, especially those who get hit by pieces of their dead friends.”
“That’s how you won the battle?” Ileni’s voice cracked.
“Evin and I are the only ones who can do it,” Cyn said. There was pride—
pride
—in her voice.
The pause seemed to demand a response. Ileni came up with, “Oh.”
Cyn flung both pieces of chalk behind her. “Do you think
you
could?”
“
No
,” Ileni said, and realized it wasn’t true as she said it. The spell was intricate and tricky, but well within her skill. And Cyn knew it.
“I’ll teach you,” Cyn said, her voice suddenly silken. “We can practice on rocks.”
Ileni resisted the urge to back away. Using a spell like this, letting her mind coil around such destructive magic, would be a betrayal of everything she was.
Then again, so was everything she had done lately. This would be no different from learning to fight with Sorin,
throwing knives into people-shaped targets, over and over until her muscles ached.
“I don’t want to do it,” she said. “Let’s work on something else.”
“No.” Cyn’s eyes narrowed until they were slits in her face. “Let’s work on
this.
”
She should have been more careful. Should have remembered that these were imperial sorcerers. Why should
anything
they did horrify her?
“Watch closely,” Cyn said, and stepped carefully onto one of the thick white lines. Magic shimmered through the pattern, a long, delicious shiver. “You’ll try next. Trust me, Ileni. You won’t know what you’re capable of until you do it.”
I can’t
, Ileni thought, and a memory struck her: pushing the dagger through Irun’s skin, blood flowing over her hand. The savage joy that ran through her as she wrenched the blade out. Perhaps it was time to stop pretending she was better than the sorcerers, or the assassins, or anyone at all.
“All right,” she said. Her voice trembled, but she swallowed hard and added, “Go ahead. I’m watching.”
That night, Ileni traced a finger along the mirror’s smooth surface, forming the pattern that—if written with chalk on
stone, joined with the right words, fueled by enough power—could shatter not just a person, but a mountain. Gray stone, crumbling down and around them, the might of the Empire buried beneath it.
She had managed to keep herself from thinking, until this moment, of the use she could put today’s lesson to. Of what Cyn had foolishly taught her to do.
The lodestones couldn’t be destroyed. But they could be buried, along with every person in this Academy.
That
would put an end to the Empire’s power, more dramatically than even the assassins had hoped.
Cyn had no idea what Ileni was capable of.
Her finger left no trace on the mirror’s surface. She pressed her fingertip against it, so hard her nail turned white. Another pattern, a much shorter, simpler one, and she could tell Sorin what she knew.
He would want to use it immediately.
She imagined telling him that she wanted to find another way—that she wanted to put an end to the lodestones without killing anyone—and it was all too easy to envision his expression.
She felt again the surge of power going through her, the shattering of rock spraying in a million different directions.
She had met Cyn’s smile through a cascade of pebbles and dust.
She hadn’t realized until that moment that she had been smiling, too.
Oh, yes. She could do it.
But she didn’t want to.
I’ll find another way.
The hope felt threadbare and forlorn. She didn’t even need Sorin to tell her she was being weak.
She stepped back from the mirror, not much liking what she saw in it.
The next four days sped by like a dream, the type of dream that might at any moment twist into a nightmare. Ileni practiced magic all day with Cyn—and, sometimes, with Evin and Lis—and got used to the odd concoctions the imperial sorcerers called food, many of which she had already tasted in the caves. She passed other sorcerers-in-training, on the ledges and in the passageways, and saw them practicing from afar. They never spoke to her, and she—perhaps influenced by Cyn’s aloofness—never spoke to them. It occurred to her, sometimes, that she might be making a mistake. But she was too busy to dwell on it.
She tried to ask about the lodestones, but it was a slippery
subject. She couldn’t even tell whether Cyn was avoiding the topic—it seemed, rather, that there was always something more interesting to talk about—but after four days, she still had no idea where the magic filling the lodestones came from. It was with vague, guilty relief that she eventually gave up. Arxis had promised her the truth. All she had to do was wait. There were eleven days left—and then ten—and then nine—and then just eight.
It was only at night, in the few minutes before sleep, that despair came creeping in. And even then, it wasn’t over magic, and it wasn’t over the lodestones. It was thoughts of Sorin that slid between Ileni and sleep, a sore spot in her heart that she couldn’t stop poking. Over and over, she went through their last encounter, when he had told her he would wait for her.
Over and over, she reminded herself that he was a killer.
The mirror in the corner was a constant taunt, an itch she didn’t dare scratch. It was a trap, somehow—it had to be—though she couldn’t fathom its purpose. More than once, she stood in front of it for minutes she didn’t count. It would be so easy to open the portal again, to see Sorin’s eyes in the glass instead of her own.
Usually, she turned away before her thoughts could
lead her down that path. Sometimes, she didn’t turn away until she noticed how wet her eyes were.
And for all the very good reasons she had to turn away, the one that finally spurred her to do it, on those nights, was a simple and stupid one: she didn’t want Sorin to see her cry.
I
leni woke suddenly from a dreamless sleep, not certain where she was. The glowstones flickered dimly, revealing smooth gray stone and dark polished wood in a foreign, too-large room.
Then the glowstones’ light vanished, the room went black and featureless, and someone yanked her blanket off her body.
“Get up,” Karyn said, and all the glowstones turned bright at once. The sorceress stood over Ileni’s bed, dressed in a lacy black tunic and purple leggings. “I have some questions.”
Ileni was already upright in bed, heart pounding, mind forming the pattern of an attack spell. The bolt of fire shot straight toward Karyn’s face, but Karyn blocked it with an impatient wave of her hand. The backlash of repelled magic hit Ileni like a punch.
“You need to calm down,” Karyn said. She lowered her hand, and her flowing sleeve fell over her wrist, but not before Ileni saw the metallic bracelet clamped around it. “You’re not among assassins anymore. No one
here
is trying to kill you.”
Ileni wasn’t even sure how that was ironic, but she knew it was. She pulled the blanket back over her bare legs. “It’s a bit early.”
“This is when I have time. Get dressed.”
As slowly as she dared, Ileni got out of bed and walked to the wardrobe. When she had fastened a long gray skirt over her sleeping tunic and slipped on shoes, Karyn said, “Sit down.”
Ileni glanced at the chair, then whispered a quick spell under her breath. She drew her legs up and crossed them beneath her, sitting calmly on empty air, floating several feet above the ground.
Karyn rolled her eyes. Then she muttered a spell. A gash
tore down the skin of her own forearm and immediately filled with blood.
Ileni flinched. Karyn held out her arm. “Teach me how to heal it.”
Ileni had managed not to think about this: how she had promised to betray not just herself, not just the assassins, but her own people. As she watched the blood spill onto Karyn’s skin, her fear and longing and confusion struck against something deep within her, something rock solid. No. She wasn’t going to do
this
. Not for any reason.
She laughed.
A muscle twitched in Karyn’s sharp chin. “Is something amusing?”
“Many things,” Ileni said. “But at the moment, mostly your arrogance.”
“Indeed.”
“It took me years to get to the point where I could heal myself.” Ileni leaned back, extending her spell so her hands, too, could support her on thin air. Blood spread over Karyn’s arm, but the sorceress didn’t even glance at it. “You’re not going to learn it in a morning. First you have to master the basic patterns of healing spells—they’re very different from other spells—and then you need to
understand what’s inside a person’s body, and
then
—
”
“Understood,” Karyn snapped. “Unfortunately, I have no interest in devoting my life to becoming a Renegai healer. I have a war to win.”
“Unfortunately for who?” Ileni said coolly.
“For you.” Karyn stretched both hands high above her head, fingertips pointing up. Blood curved down her left arm. Ileni felt the magic coiling in Karyn’s hands and pulled in as much magic as she could from the lodestones, but then didn’t know what to do with it. She didn’t recognize Karyn’s spell.
Karyn’s eyes glinted. She brought her arms down sharply, all her fingertips pointed at Ileni.
Ileni threw her power into a ward. It was unplanned and messy—her Renegai teachers would have been appalled—and Karyn batted it aside with a flippant hand gesture. Then she whispered a word and released her spell.
A wave of dizziness, tinged with nausea, ran through Ileni. With a suddenness that made her scream, she fell several feet to the ground.
The impact thudded all the way up her spine. But the collision didn’t hurt as much as the sudden absence within her. She reached desperately for the lodestones, knowing what she would find.
Nothing. She couldn’t draw on the magic anymore. It was gone.
As she had always known, deep down, it would be.
That pain should have been familiar to her by now, but it still felt like someone had scooped out a part of her soul. She didn’t even try to get to her feet. Instead, she heard herself say, “I could help you defeat the assassins.”
Karyn looked both interested and unsurprised. “Could you indeed?”
“I—” What was she saying? What was she
thinking
? “I mean—I don’t—”
“Because if you could,” Karyn purred, “that would be reason to allow you to stay.”
Ileni was so hot with shame it was hard to think.
Betrayer
. Just a week ago, she had sworn she would never do this.
She could only be glad that no one but an imperial sorceress was here to see how loathsome she was. How weak.
Karyn murmured a word, and a white cloth appeared in her right hand. She pressed it to her arm, and it turned swiftly crimson as blood soaked it. “But if you can’t, I’m afraid it’s not just a question of letting you leave. It’s a question of letting you live.”
Ileni couldn’t even manage to be afraid. “If you kill me,”
she said, “the assassins will stop at nothing until you’re dead.”
“Oh, indeed? Are they stopping at something now?” Karyn snorted. “I wonder if I was this stupid when I was young, or if it’s only assassins who turn girls’ heads around. Are you implying that the blond killer you were so dove-eyed with in the caves would change his strategy because of
you
?”
“Yes,” Ileni said. The thought of Sorin steadied her, and she tried to think of what he would do, if he were here. He would never dream of accepting Karyn’s offer. . . .
Except he would. Of course he would. As a ruse.
The fog of shame lifted, leaving her head a bit clearer. It
could
be a ruse. She knew an assassin who had lived at the emperor’s court for forty years, then accomplished his mission and walked away. He hadn’t been seduced from his cause. Surely she could manage that kind of steadfastness for a few weeks.
Surely. Except her heart was already pounding, fast and eager, at the thought of getting the magic back.
Karyn’s face pulled into a sneer. “Really? Even after you’ve polluted yourself with imperial magic? He must truly love you.”
“He does,” Ileni said, without hesitation.
“So he wouldn’t betray you?”
“Oh, no,” Ileni said. “He would.”
Karyn blinked. Then she leaned forward. “So I suppose it’s only fair that you would betray him as well.”
Ileni paused for only a moment before she nodded.
Karyn lifted the blood-soaked cloth from her arm. “You will tell me all about their magical training, what spells they know, what defenses they have. And about the wards around the caves.” She crumpled the cloth into a ball. “To start with.”
It won’t matter
, Ileni thought. Once she put an end to the Empire, it wouldn’t matter what Karyn knew.