Death Marked (21 page)

“I didn’t know you were killing children!”

“We’re not killing anyone!” Karyn snapped. “They’re giving their lives freely.”

“Because you’ve left them no choice!” Ileni stopped and gasped for breath before she could continue. “You’re not even trying to save them. Because their deaths are worth more to you than their lives. They’re useless unless they fill your lodestones, aren’t they?”

“Enough,” Karyn snapped.

“No, it’s not enough! I—”

The violet light around Ileni flashed, blinding her. A sizzle of power went right through her bones and turned her stomach upside down. She tried to throw up a ward, then a counterspell—panicked attempts that drained all the power she had just stolen—but she might as well have been trying
to punch a mountain. Her insides twisted painfully.

She had felt this once before—and it had been Karyn then, too, on the road to her village, with the black mountains rising behind her. Ileni recognized the translocation spell a moment before the ground disappeared from beneath her feet and she was flung into nothingness, Karyn’s taut face replaced by swirling darkness.

The violet light turned white, and then black, and then there was nothing at all.

When the world came back, Ileni was falling—a short, sharp drop that ended in an abrupt thud. She screamed once before her mind caught up with the fact that she was on solid ground. Or at least, her chest was. Her hands and feet were dangling over the edge of . . . something.

A wave of dizziness made her clutch the edge of the
something
. Her fingers pressed against sun-warmed rock and she knew, with sickening certainty, where she was. She forced her eyes open.

She was lying on a narrow, too-small base of solid rock, and all around her was a precipitous drop, leagues of empty space ending in blurred green far below.

From atop its peak, the Judgment Spire was even more
terrifying than from afar. The rock was sloped and bumpy, just enough so that a moment of inattention would send her slipping sideways and down.

And down. And down. And down. She could already hear herself screaming as she plummeted.

She didn’t even have to check—though she did—to know that she had no power left. She could see the training plateau, flat and brown against a bruised lavender sky, but its lodestones were too far away to access.

Ileni would have shuddered if she had dared move that much. She curled up tighter on the slick bumpy stone, closing her eyes to shut out the sight of the space around her.

All she had to do was wait. If Karyn wanted to kill her, she could have done it at Death’s Door. Which meant Karyn still thought she could use Ileni. If neither persuasion nor bribery worked, an imperial sorceress would inevitably turn to fear and pain.

The sorceress was probably watching Ileni now, wrapped in invisibility, waiting for her to show signs of despair. Ileni opened her eyes. Across from her, the other Judgment Spire ended in an empty knobby point. She imagined she heard a snicker, and dug her fingers into the rock. A tiny whimper escaped her.

If she were Sorin, she would call Karyn’s bluff. She would jump.

Her stomach almost rose through her throat. She drew her knees tighter against her chest. She was not Sorin.

How long would Karyn leave her here?

Waiting for your enemy’s move is a sign of weakness
, Sorin had told her once. She thought of his face, his knife-sharp cheekbones and coal-black eyes, as if he was watching her now, as if she could impress him with her actions. It helped her fight down the simmering panic.

She would not leave the decision up to Karyn. There had to be another way to call Karyn’s bluff.

And if it wasn’t a bluff . . . well, at least coming up with a plan would give her something to think about other than falling.

Ileni considered her options—which didn’t take long—then looked again at the green expanse beneath her. This time she managed to keep her eyes open, though her fingers pressed against the rock so hard they hurt. The sides of the spire were completely smooth, no handhold or foothold she could even think about grasping. The other spire was too far to imagine jumping for.

So she didn’t have to imagine it. Good.

She reached for her magic again and felt the familiar painful shock when she came up empty. Even if she survived this, there was no way Karyn would allow her to continue using the lodestones’ magic. Not that Ileni
would
use it, ever again, after what she had seen last night.

Something to worry about later. If there was a later.

Still, the old familiar despair made her reckless. She tilted her head back into the sunlight and said, “I found what we were looking for. Listen quickly. You were right. The sorcerers are—”

A blunt force propelled her sideways off the spire, and she fell.

The wind ripped the scream from her throat. Her flailing hands slammed futilely against the spire’s stone sides. She plummeted downward, tears ripping from her face.

Then she jerked to a stop, halfway down the spire, the mountains and treetops spread like a tiny painting below her.

She kept screaming for a full minute before she managed to stop. Her eyes stung, and drool hung from the corner of her lip. Slowly, she curled herself upward and turned in the air, not bothering to wipe away the wetness streaked across her face.

“Who were you talking to?” Karyn inquired.

She sat cross-legged in midair several feet from Ileni, leaning back on both hands, as if supported by a pane of glass.

It was a moment before Ileni could make her throat work. “Isn’t it obvious? And they can still hear us, in case you were wondering.”

Karyn narrowed her eyes. “I don’t sense any spell.”

“No,” Ileni said. “You wouldn’t. The spell is in the ear of the person I was speaking to.”

Karyn’s mouth went as narrow as her eyes, skepticism engraved in her face. But her hands clenched. By now, Karyn was well aware that she didn’t know everything the Renegai were capable of.

“Be careful,” Karyn said softly. “I don’t have much reason to keep you alive any more. Given your self-righteous horror at Death’s Door, I can’t imagine you’re still considering joining our side.”

She paused, clearly waiting for Ileni to contradict her. And though it would have been the smart thing to do, Ileni couldn’t find the words.

Karyn’s mouth twisted. “Right. It was worth a try, but you’ve been indoctrinated too thoroughly. So tell me why I shouldn’t kill you now.”

Ileni’s voice came out far less bold than she had intended.
“Since you haven’t yet, you obviously have a reason. Why don’t you tell me what
that
is?”

The world dropped away again, just long enough to rip another scream from her, then jerked to a stop. Karyn floated lazily down after her.

“Guess,” she suggested.

Ileni blinked away tears and let out two short gasps. “Because you still want answers. About who I’m talking to, and why, and what they have planned.”

“That’s right,” Karyn said. The menace in her voice was soft, almost casual. “I do. And you’re going to tell me.”

“Why would I?” Ileni managed. “You’ll kill me anyhow.”

Karyn’s smile was almost as terrifying as the drop below. “And you think you won’t tell me just to gain another few seconds of life? Another minute before you fall?”

Ileni couldn’t speak. She had never known that fear could be as intense as pain. Karyn was right. She would say anything, anything at all, to stave off that fall for as long as she could.

Karyn’s smile widened as she leaned forward—and then it disappeared. She looked over Ileni’s shoulder, her posture rigid. After an agonizing moment, Ileni twisted her head to follow Karyn’s gaze.

The sun shone straight through the clouds in a curtain of faint white light, softening the mountain peaks behind it. Three figures hovered directly in the curtain of sunlight, one with waist-length black hair whipping about her body. They were too far for Ileni to make out their expressions, but they were unnaturally still, nothing moving but their hair and the hem of one girl’s flame-red dress.

Ileni’s heart lifted—then plummeted as she realized they weren’t moving toward her. They were just watching. She felt a rush of anger. And then another rush, this one of realization.

Maybe all they had to do was watch.

Karyn’s lips were pressed together tightly. Ileni said, “Are you going to kill me in front of them?”

If Karyn had been an assassin, she wouldn’t have hesitated. If she had been the master, she would have summoned Cyn and told
her
to kill Ileni, and Cyn would have done it.

But this was the Empire, and Karyn did hesitate, glancing from the watching students to Ileni.

Ileni’s heart froze in her chest. Beneath her, the ground yawned, terribly far away.

“No,” Karyn said finally. “But I won’t have to.” She stretched into a standing position.

Karyn’s flickering hand motion was by now familiar to Ileni, as was the sharp twist of the spell that accompanied it. So she was ready for the impact, the sickening lurch, and—this time, with relief—the blackness.

Once again, she knew where she was while her eyes were still shut. It was so familiar . . . the darkness, the smallness, the sense of oppressive weight pressing in above her. She was deep in the bowels of the earth again. She was back in the caves.

”Sorin?” Ileni cried, and the sound of her own voice—lost and hopeless—shocked her. She sat up. Blackness, blackness . . . she touched her eyelids with her fingertip to make sure she had really opened them. She had, but it made no difference. There was no light to see with.

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.