Death Marked (26 page)

“He’s alive because of me.” Ileni kept her voice mild, not defiant. She didn’t have to prove this. Twenty sorcerers had seen her throw herself in front of Arxis’s dagger.

“How long,” Karyn asked, “have you known there was an assassin among us?”

Ileni had already decided there was no point in lying. “Since I first saw him.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You had just kidnapped me. Remember?”

“But Girad hadn’t.”

Ileni flinched. “I didn’t . . . I thought his target was Evin.”

“Evin,” Karyn repeated flatly. “And he did deserve to die?”

This is war.
But now was not the time to argue. She had to concentrate on getting through this, on convincing Karyn to let her live. Ileni shook her head.

Karyn stepped toward her, a slow, deliberate motion Ileni recognized. That of a predator sensing weakness. “But you weren’t going to stop it. You were going to let Evin die rather than betray your assassin lover.”

She hadn’t just been going to let him die. She had been considering killing him.

“You know they won’t stop,” Karyn said. “The assassins never let someone go, once they are marked for death.” Sorin had told her that once, proudly. “They will send someone else after Girad. Probably soon, while he is weak and helpless and easy to kill. And if the next person fails, they’ll send
another. And another. You might have saved him today, but Girad is dead.”

“No,” Ileni said. The protest was instinctive, but she meant it.

“And then they’ll send someone after Evin,” Karyn said. Whatever reaction she saw on Ileni’s face made her lips compress. “And then, I am sure, after you. I assume you’re more willing to help us now?”

Ileni stepped back. “I want to see Girad. Maybe I can heal him. I ran out of power before, but there might be more I can do.”

Karyn’s face tightened. “You think I’m going to let you keep drawing on the lodestones? After
this
?”

“I don’t want to draw on them,” Ileni said. She meant it, though she couldn’t tell if Karyn believed her. “I don’t want to use this magic anymore. But if I can help Girad. . . .”

Karyn pursed her lips, and for a moment Ileni thought she was going to refuse, just out of spite.

Instead she said, “I’ll take you to him.”

Girad was in a small round room with a bed in its center, so large it dwarfed its tiny occupant. Around the bed, several wooden chairs were arranged on the gray rock. Evin was
slumped in one of those chairs, holding his brother’s hand, eyes half-closed. But when Ileni walked in, he started upright, power coiling in his upraised hand.

No need to ask what he had been dreaming about. “It’s all right,” Ileni said. “It’s me. I just wanted to make sure . . .”

Evin lowered his hand. His eyes were red and hollow. “He’s doing better. I think . . . I think he’s going to make it.” It sounded like hope, not belief. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me,” Ileni said.

Behind her, Karyn stepped out into the hall and closed the door. No doubt she was using magic to listen in on them anyhow.

Ileni walked over to Girad and reached out with her power. She couldn’t feel anything wrong within him—at least, nothing she was skilled enough to detect. If he had simply lost too much blood, there was no spell to give it back. It was one of the few things Renegai magic couldn’t fix.

She had done everything she could when the knife went in, and she had known then that it might not be enough.

“Ileni.” Evin started to get to his feet, then sagged back into the chair. “I don’t understand exactly what’s going on. But I know you saved my brother’s life.”

And had put it in danger in the first place, by keeping quiet about who Arxis was.

Evin clasped his hands in his lap. He was holding a small wooden toy carved in the shape of a dog. “It was the bravest thing I’ve ever seen. I can’t . . . I don’t even know how I can thank you. But if there is ever something I can do for you,
anything
, all you have to do is tell me.”

Ileni couldn’t meet his eyes. “You saved my life, too, you know. More than once. You don’t owe me anything.”

“He’s my brother. I owe you
everything
.”

Was it possible to literally shrivel up from shame? She kept seeing the knife, impossibly huge in that thin chest, the wide-eyed incomprehension on Girad’s round face, the blood everywhere. The smallness of his body as Evin gathered it up.

In the caves, news would have come of this child’s death, and there would have been dancing.

She had danced with them, once. And she hadn’t asked the age of their victim.

She swallowed hard. “Arxis was an assassin. From the caves. Girad was his target all along.”

“I realized that. But I just . . . I don’t understand.” Evin turned the wooden dog over and over in his hands. “Why would they kill a child?”

He really didn’t understand. Once, she wouldn’t have understood either. The words of explanation were on her lips, words she had heard from Sorin: necessity, the greater good, the purpose served by murder. But she remembered how they had danced, and she knew that if she tried to speak, she would choke.

Evin finally looked away from the wooden dog, but still not at her. He fixed his gaze on his brother’s face. “They really hate us that much.”

So maybe he did understand, better than she did, for all the rational arguments she had stored in her mind.

“Yes,” she said. “They really do.”

Karyn wasn’t outside the door when Ileni left—which did not, of course, mean she hadn’t been listening in. Apparently, Ileni was free to go wherever she wanted.

For now.

Ileni went to her room, because there was nowhere else to go. She shut the door, leaned against it, and closed her eyes, feeling that she should cry. But no tears came.

She straightened and walked, steps leaden, to the oval mirror in the corner of the room. She flattened her palm on the cold glass.

The spell in the mirror thrummed against her hand, spanning the distance between her and Sorin. Passing through both sets of wards. She could bring it back to life—she was sure of it. She could look Sorin in the eye and ask if he was going to order the killing of a child.

She could ask if he had ordered Bazel to kill her.

She reached for power—not doing anything with it yet, not even readying it, just knowing it was there. She could. She didn’t know if she should, and she didn’t know if she wanted to, but she knew that she could.

The glass turned black.

Ileni leaped away from the mirror, power sizzling painfully through her palm.

This can’t be good.

She pulled a ward around herself. The mirror was already becoming less black, the shadows inside it swirling into shapes, the shapes taking on form and color. It was a room, square and bare and stark, its floor covered with a chalk pattern that gleamed with silver light. A tall figure sat in the center of the pattern.

Ileni barely breathed as she watched the images solidify. Even though she knew what she was seeing, she couldn’t grasp the final piece, couldn’t believe it, until the figure rose to his feet.

His face was familiar, despite long absence. She knew every inch and angle, every mood of those eyes, every expression those thin lips could twist into.

She doubled over slightly, as if all the air had been driven out of her body with one swift blow.

She met his sky-blue eyes.

“Hello, Tellis,” she said.

CHAPTER

24

T
hey both stood frozen, eyes locked on each other. Tellis’s eyes were wide and blank with pain, riveted to her face as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Ileni felt blank inside, too, but not from pain. It took her a moment to realize what she felt.

Nothing.

That was almost worse than pain. It was staggering. How could she have loved him so much, and now feel
nothing
? She could still remember how her heart had once leaped every time she saw him, how desperately she had wanted to be near him.

She remembered it, and still she felt nothing.

“Ileni,” Tellis whispered. “He was telling the truth?”

“Who was telling the truth?” Ileni said. “Tellis—how did you—”

“I’m here to help you,” Tellis said. “Elder Absalm opened the portal just enough for you to see me. But together, we can open the portal fully, and you can come through.”

Elder Absalm?
“Where
are
you?”

He shuddered slightly, which was answer enough. “Don’t worry. I’m all right. I was just brought here to talk to you, and to help you escape.”

“I don’t need to escape,” Ileni said. He blinked at her. “I’m not trapped here.” Although that wasn’t entirely true. “I’m—it’s complicated. But I know what I’m doing.”

That was entirely
not
true, but Tellis nodded, trusting her. He leaned closer, reaching out a hand, as if he could push it through the spell and touch her. He probably could, if he wanted to. He was more than powerful enough.

“Ileni,” he said, and his voice caught on her name. “I miss you.”

“I—” Ileni began, and then couldn’t think of what to say.
I miss you, too?
She had shattered her heart against memories of him a million times. But now . . . now she was
no longer the girl who had loved Tellis so uncomplicatedly and wholeheartedly.

She missed being that girl more than she missed Tellis.

“I knew I would,” Tellis said. “But I didn’t know . . . I didn’t know it would be so hard. I didn’t know, when I told you to leave, that I was making a mistake.”

The thought crept into her mind, stark and inescapable:
I’m going to hurt him.

Once, she would have been savagely glad of that.
He
had hurt her, after all, so badly she hadn’t known how she would survive it. But that felt like so long ago. She
had
survived it. She had come out on the other side. And she no longer cared enough about Tellis to want to hurt him.

“Thank you,” she said, and immediately hated herself for how stupid it sounded—for not coming up with something better. The intensity on Tellis’s face made her heart twist. But she forced herself to meet his eyes, letting her own face show . . . whatever it showed. And she forced herself not to turn away when he searched her face, the hope in his eyes slowly dying. His throat pulsed, and he was the one to finally drop his eyes.

“So you’re a weapon,” he said.

“I—what?”

“The assassin leader said . . . he said you had a way to destroy the imperial sorcerers. Is it true?”

“What on earth were you doing with Sor—with the assassin leader?”

“It’s a long story,” Tellis said. “But he wanted me to talk to you. To find out what you were doing. What was stopping you from proceeding with the plan.”

Curse you, Sorin.

Ileni had thought she understood what it felt like to be the betrayer, to become loathsome in the eyes of everyone she knew. Now she had an inkling of what it would truly feel like. Her insides clamped shut, shrinking into a thick, agonizing knot.

“It’s . . . not that simple,” she said, hearing and hating the weakness in her voice.

Tellis blinked at her, not angry as Sorin would have been, merely confused. “You’re in the
Empire
. They drove us into exile, they kill by the thousands, they pervert magic. Why is it not simple?”

For a moment Ileni couldn’t remember why. What Tellis was saying was true. Everything else was just complications.

She opened her mouth, then closed it. There was no point. She understood Tellis perfectly; she had
been
him, just
a year ago. With no idea of how much she didn’t know.

Suddenly she couldn’t bear it anymore. She didn’t want him to know what she had become. Not because she was ashamed—or not only because she was ashamed. But because someone should still be apart from all the death and the compromises and the terrible choices. Some part of the world should still be simple and pure.

Even if that part couldn’t be hers anymore.

“Tellis,” she said. “Are you trapped there? In the caves?”

“No,” Tellis said. “The assassin leader said I can go back as soon as I talk to you.”

“Then go,” Ileni said fiercely. “Go back to the village, right away. Promise me.”

“I will. Of course. But—”

She drew in magic, hoping Tellis couldn’t sense it through the portal, and said, “There’s no time. The portal is closing. Tellis—”

He leaned forward, but she hadn’t planned an end to that sentence. She cut it off by slamming the portal shut, using all her strength and all her skill.

The last thing she saw, before the room went black and vanished, was Tellis’s face. There was no horror on it, no anger, no betrayal. There was only bewilderment.

Ileni was almost too tired to cry.

Almost. But not quite.

She tried to be angry at Sorin, but the feeling got lost in the ache inside her. How did he know her so well? How did he know that sending Tellis to talk to her would cut so deep—would bring back everything she had once believed, and make her ashamed of what she had become?

And not because he was Tellis, but because he was
her
, what she had once been. She had grown up wishing daily for the destruction of the Empire, and now she had the chance to actually accomplish it. This wasn’t about betraying Sorin, or Tellis, or the Renegai. It was about betraying the person she had thought she was.

When she finally fell asleep, tears still tracking down her cheeks, she dreamed of the girl at Death’s Door. Blond hair blew across blue eyes that were wide and desperate and without hope.
I want the Black Sisters to take her. You can have my life if you promise me that.

The girl had slit her own throat, but that didn’t change the fact that she had been murdered—she and thousands like her, systematically and methodically, all through the Empire. And it would go on forever, death fueling power
fueling death, unless someone did something.

Unless she did something.

She was a weapon forged to strike the Empire a killing blow, and that weapon could be used now or never.

Her mind whirled and spun, and her thoughts kept curving back to Girad’s blood spilling over her hands, his wide uncomprehending eyes, to Evin’s almost inhuman howl of grief. Sorin had explained it to her once, without a hint of regret.
One death in exchange for avoiding hundreds.