Authors: Leah Cypess
It hurt to think, like pushing her mind through a fog of needles. It was so hard to fight—and what, really, was she fighting for? What was worth all this pain? All she wanted was to slip back into the peaceful blackness.
So she did.
W
hen she woke again, she woke fighting. Ileni did not recognize the figure looming over her—she didn’t know if she was really awake, or really alive—but a sense of danger shot through her, real and sharp as pain. She surged upward, her back against the wall, hands up and curled into claws.
”Well,” Arxis said, “I think she’s feeling better.”
Ileni snarled at him, even as she noted that she
was
feeling better. Her body was slick with sweat and grime, her eyelashes coated with gunk, her limbs trembling—but they were working, and so was her mind.
She realized that Arxis wasn’t talking to
her
a moment
before she registered the faint light of a glowstone, and the figure holding it stepped close enough for her to see him.
Evin.
The tension drained out of her, and the trembling weakness in her legs took over. She slid to the stone floor. “What—” Her voice didn’t work. It took her two attempts to manage more than a raspy whisper. “What are you doing here?”
“Rescuing you,” Arxis said. “You’re welcome.”
He reached for her, and she struck at him with all her strength—which wasn’t enough for him to bother noticing. He grabbed her wrist, pressed a finger to her pulse, and nodded. As soon as his grip loosened, Ileni jerked her hand away so hard her elbow thudded into the wall behind her.
“Someday,” Evin said, “one of you is going to have to tell me about your history. It must be an interesting story.”
Arxis laughed, but Ileni was too occupied with the pain ricocheting up her arm to respond. She gritted her teeth, waiting for it to pass. Evin moved forward to stand beside Arxis.
“I’m sure you won’t be happy to hear it,” Evin added, “but you sort of owe Arxis your life now.”
His voice carried its usual light tone, and he stood in his
usual half-slouch, but there was something . . . off . . . about it. Like a hastily assumed disguise. Ileni frowned at him.
“Karyn told us she had banished you from the Academy, and you had gone back to your people,” Evin said. “But Arxis told me once that you would never go back. We’ve been searching for you for days.”
“You were half-dead when we found you,” Arxis added. His eyes were deep in shadow, the planes of his face blurred by darkness. “Evin’s been dribbling broth into your mouth for nearly an hour.”
“You did the rest,” Evin said.
That was when Ileni realized he was holding a lodestone in his other hand. She closed her eyes, just for a second, as magic flowed through her skin. Her mind was clear, and when she rolled her shoulders back, they moved without complaint. She had a vague memory, now, of working a healing spell, of Evin gently urging her on.
“Why?” she said to Arxis.
“Why what?”
“Why did you save my life?”
Arxis shrugged. “Evin insisted.”
Trying to think made her lightheaded. She scrubbed her eyes with one hand. “Where am I?”
“We’re in the Academy,” Evin said.
“But—
where
in the Academy?”
Evin and Arxis exchanged glances. Then Evin closed his eyes, clenched his fists, and opened his mouth.
No sound emerged; his moving lips screamed the spell into nothingness, and the magic engulfed the sound as he spoke. Ileni had worked spells this powerful before, but never on her own, without a preexisting spell anchored to a solid object. Yet Evin was holding nothing, using nothing but his own power. He squeezed his eyes shut, face twisted with effort. A trickle of sweat ran down the side of his neck as he released the spell.
The walls shimmered and were gone, and sunlight flooded through the sides of the room, making Ileni flinch. She covered her eyes and concentrated on the sun beating at her skin, warming her bare forearms and her hair.
When she slowly uncovered her eyes, the brightness made her blink back tears, and rainbow shimmers danced across her vision. Then they cleared, and she walked slowly over to one of the now-invisible walls.
Empty space stretched ahead of her and plummeted to a ground she couldn’t see from this angle. A Judgment Spire soared upward across from her, stark gray against a brilliant blue sky.
One
Judgment Spire. She stretched up an arm to brush her fingers against the solid rock ceiling above her, and understood. They were inside the other spire.
“How did you know I was here?” she asked. When she turned, the sunlight warmed her shoulders and back.
“There’s a bespelled key that allows entrance and exit from the spire cells,” Evin said. “Karyn left it on her desk.”
Each of those sentences demanded a million questions. Ileni chose, rather randomly, “What were you doing in Karyn’s room?”
“Trying to find out what she had done to you.”
“But wasn’t that dangerous?”
“I’m incredibly brave,” Evin said. “Haven’t you noticed?”
“I don’t . . .” She struggled to think. “I don’t understand. Why would you risk so much to rescue me?”
“I’m not risking much.”
She couldn’t tell if that was true. “But you don’t even like me.”
Evin cocked an eyebrow. “Actually, I like you quite a lot. You’re confused by the fact that
you
don’t like
me
.”
Her face burned. “That’s—that’s not—”
“It’s all right.” Evin shrugged. “I don’t require people to like me before I decide to like them. That would be
giving too much weight to their opinion of me.”
“You are a very strange person,” Ileni said slowly. “I assume you know that?”
“It’s been mentioned. Usually people have the courtesy to do it behind my back.”
Arxis rolled his eyes. “Ileni’s not big on courtesy.”
“I know. It’s one of the things I like about her.”
“How nice for both of you,” Arxis said. “Before this becomes predictable, I propose we find out if Evin can use this spell to get us
out
of here.”
“You don’t know?” Ileni said.
“I’m almost sure I can do it,” Evin said. “There’s no way to know for certain until I try.”
“
He
’s almost sure,” Arxis said. “My certainty is at a far lower level than
almost
.”
Ileni looked away from Evin, which was a relief, to focus on Arxis. “Then why did
you
come and risk being trapped here?”
“The confidence you both have in me is truly inspiring,” Evin said. His habitual half-smile was back, his eyes light and dancing. “If you would be quiet a moment and let me concentrate, I’ll do my best to exceed it.”
Before Ileni could apologize, Evin held out a large silver key and focused on it.
He clearly didn’t need to concentrate too hard. He lowered his hands, and the key floated in midair before him, ordinary looking but humming with power. Evin murmured a single word, then released that power with a casual motion of his hand.
Ileni felt the spell unleash, a sizzle that shot through her body from scalp to toe, making the world dissolve into chaotic fragments. Then her feet hit solid ground, and she lurched forward, hitting her hip on the corner of a desk that hadn’t been there a moment ago. When she reached out blindly to break her fall, her hand knocked over a stack of papers. They flew sideways and scattered, a frantic flutter of white sliding across the stone floor.
“Don’t vomit!” Evin said. “We can’t leave any sign we were here.”
The warning was just in time. Ileni clamped her lips shut. She fought her instincts, kept her mouth closed, and—with a whimper of revulsion—swallowed. The bile burned its way down her throat.
“A little late for that, don’t you think?” Arxis said as the last paper fluttered against the far wall.
“We can clean that up,” Evin said. “Karyn is disorganized. If they’re out of order, she’ll assume it was her fault.”
That didn’t sound like Karyn, but Ileni was in no state to argue. Her mouth hurt. Power tingled in the air, tantalizingly distant, and she reached for it and drew it in. Karyn’s office must be just close enough to the testing arena. She could use magic to . . .
No. She stopped herself. Not
this
magic. Never again.
But she remembered the helplessness of falling through the air, of lying trapped in the dark, and she didn’t let the magic go.
They were in a square, windowless chamber, its white rock walls lined with an assortment of bookcases, boxes, and large statuelike objects whose purpose Ileni couldn’t begin to guess at. Boxes and papers and food-stained bowls were piled around the walls and filled much of the floor space.
“I’m sorry,” Evin said. “Transportation is exhausting, even for me. I should have made it smoother.”
Ileni swallowed hard before attempting to speak. Her mouth tasted foul. “Since your transportation spell also saved my life, I’ll forgive you.”
He grinned, which sent a surge of unexpected gladness through her. “I assume that comes with an offer to help clean up? We have some time, but not much—Karyn is in the city fixing the sandstorm shields.”
Arxis was already collecting and stacking papers, with the same efficiency assassins used to spar—or kill. Evin joined him, slow and lumberish by comparison. A zigzag pattern of glowstones near the ceiling lit the chamber brightly. High on one of the walls, across from Karyn’s desk, hung a large parchment map.
Aware that it was rude not to help clean up, Ileni walked to the map. There were no words on it, and she couldn’t tell what the symbols meant, but she could see that it covered a vast territory. The Empire?
She lifted a hand toward the map, then snatched it away when the parchment’s surface shimmered and changed. Another map, filled with curving lines and angles that seemed oddly familiar, covered the parchment.
The sudden stillness made her aware that the cleaning had stopped. She wasn’t surprised when Arxis stepped up beside her. But there was something so predatory about his movement—as if he had dropped his mask—that only her fascination with the map kept her from stepping away from him.
“What is this?” Arxis asked. His voice was light and nonchalant, at odds with his grim expression.
“I don’t know.” Evin, still behind them, couldn’t see
the fierceness in Arxis’s eyes. He sounded as casual as the assassin was pretending to be. “The first map is the Empire, of course. This one shows whatever specific area Karyn’s been looking at most recently.”
Of course. Those curves, those lines—they were familiar to Ileni because she had memorized them, once.
It was a map of the Assassins’ Caves.
Karyn had mapped them when she was there. And now she was using what she knew to plan an assault.
This map was of the
inside
of the caves, not the mountains around them. Karyn must have gotten farther into the caves than anyone had realized, back when she had been posing as a trader.
But Sorin knew about the river entrance now, which meant he would be guarding it— or, more likely, had blocked it off entirely. Whatever attack Karyn had planned was no longer feasible.
I’m right back where I started,
she had told Ileni.
Karyn hadn’t given up, clearly. She was still searching for a way in. Still readying an attack.
How soon would it come? Ileni’s heart pounded. Her choice lay in front of her, stark and clear. She could prevent this attack. With the Academy in ruins and the lodestones buried—with Karyn dead—this plan would die stillborn.
“I don’t think you have much choice,” Evin said.
Ileni half-turned, tearing her eyes from the map. “What?”
“Karyn will realize you’ve escaped. The only way to stay out of her reach is to go back to your own people. I know you don’t like the idea. . . .” He hesitated. “I don’t like it, either. But in the mountains, you’ll be safe.”
Would she?
For a moment the prospect was unbearably tempting. She could go back to being a Renegai, wrapped in empty dreams of someday—
someday
—making a difference.
But those dreams were gone, and she could never get them back. When she had believed she could learn the truth and make her own choice, she hadn’t realized that truths could not be unlearned, that knowledge would rob her of choices as well.
She turned her back on the map, just in time to see Evin hold up the silver key and mutter a quick spell. The key sparkled briefly, and Evin placed it on top of one of the towering piles of paper on Karyn’s desk.
Ileni blinked. “That’s where you found it?”
Evin shrugged. “Karyn’s messy.”
“And busy planning a war,” Arxis added. A hint of steel pierced his voice, then vanished, and he slouched against the
white stone wall. “Which is probably distracting.”
Ileni opened her mouth, then shut it.
She
was part of Karyn’s plan for that war. She didn’t believe for one second that Karyn would have been careless with the key to Ileni’s prison. Not if Karyn really wanted her to die.
Karyn had intended for Evin to find the key.
A long shudder ran through Ileni. There was nothing heartwarming about this revelation. If Karyn didn’t want Ileni dead, it was only because she still had some use for her. She still thought Ileni might be turned against the assassins, might choose the Empire, even after what she had seen.
Was she banking on Ileni’s need for power? Did she really think Ileni would turn her back on everything she believed so she could keep using magic?
Or had she planned for
Evin
, specifically, to rescue Ileni? Was she hoping Ileni’s gratitude would keep her from doing anything that would hurt her rescuer?
And was she right?
Ileni’s head hurt. She missed Sorin. He never had doubts. If he was here, maybe he could convince her not to have doubts, either.
Sorin would say they all deserved to die.
But she was not Sorin, and she didn’t have to play by his
rules. She could use the shattering spell, bury the lodestones—but warn the others first. Evin, especially, deserved that from her. Cyn, too . . . even Lis. She would get them out somehow, protect them.