Death Marked

by Leah Cypess

  “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 learned to eat 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 pursue 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 only turned away when 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.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  Ileni 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 yards 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 h
er 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 pink 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.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll tell you. But first, give me my magic back.”

  The sky outside her window was faintly pink when Ileni left her room, tingling all over with magic, aching with guilt. Karyn, though clearly not finished, had left for “a meeting with the skyriders’ battle commander.” “But this is most useful,” she had added. “I hadn’t realized their fire spells were still so primitive. I will be back for another talk soon.”

  “What are the skyriders?” Ileni had asked. But Karyn had simply vanished.

  The assassins’ fire spells were, in fact, far from primitive. Ileni had done her best to mix falsehoods with truths, supplying as much misinformation as she thought Karyn would believe. Which wasn’t much, but was better than nothing. It seemed she had gotten away with it. Next time, when she wasn’t caught off guard, she could probably get away with more. . . .

  Next time. The contents of her stomach surged upward, making her clamp her mouth shut. How many mornings could she play the betrayer—be the betrayer—with an imperial sorceress, spilling secrets the assassins had kept for centuries?

  Why not end it now? Sorin whispered in her mind, and she had no coherent answer. But she never had, in the face of his certainty.

  She reached for magic—finally, even though she didn’t deserve to—and called up a magelight. Power rushed through her like cool water, a thread of joy even in her turmoil.

  Maybe she could get in some early practice today.

  By now she knew her way through the corridors, so she kept the magelight dim, just enough of a glow to prevent her from walking into a wall. She didn’t want to attract attention—not because she was afraid, but because she was in no mood to talk to anyone. When she heard a door creak, she stopped and snuffed the magelight out, standing cloaked in darkness until whoever it was could pass and leave her alone.

  A new magelight flickered on—also softly, but bright enough to illuminate the face of the person closing the door.

  Arxis.

  And judging by the rumpled state of his clothes, the room he was coming out of wasn’t his own.

  Ileni froze, and Arxis looked straight at her despite the darkness. Then he continued down the hall and disappeared around a curve.

  Ileni stood with her back pressed against the wall, heart pounding. She wasn’t sure why this bothered her so much. Something about his expression . . . as if he was saying, I fooled you. Perhaps she should wonder if someone was dead in that room, but . . .

  Assassins were not discouraged from assignations outside the caves, and their appeal to women was legendary. What would it have been like to meet Sorin on a mission, to sense the undercurrent of danger in him without knowing its source? She would have been drawn to him even more strongly, surely, if she hadn’t known he was a murderer. She felt a stab of sympathy for whoever was in that room, followed swiftly by wariness.

  Seduction was a perk, but it was also a tool. Her attraction to Sorin had been part of the master’s plan. This assignation might be part of a plan, too.

  Which meant Ileni had to know who that room belonged to. Ignoring a squeamish reluctance, she whispered a spell, silent and invisible, to tell her who was still in the room Arxis had left.

  She cast the spell, not sure she would recognize whoever it was. But she did, instantly, and heard her own gasp tear through the darkness.

  So much for silence.

  Fortunately, there was no one to hear. Arxis was long gone. And the spell showed Lis fast asleep in her room, hair lying in tangled black strands over her face.

  This might mean nothing. It could be that Arxis was dallying with Lis just for fun. But if so . . . why Lis and not Cyn? Cyn was the prettier twin—which sounded ridiculous, but was true nonetheless. Ileni had no doubt, either, that Arxis could have found his way into Cyn’s room if he wanted to.Was Lis a way to Arxis’s target? The duke of Famis had been killed when his wife’s assassin lover coated her skin with poison. But Evin and Lis barely spoke, so that didn’t make sense . . . unless Evin wasn’t Arxis’s target after all. Ileni’s mind whirled, her suspicions tilting on their axis.

  Why should it matter to me?

  She scowled and continued to the training area. She didn’t want to think about any of this, not now, not when her mind was already cluttered with shame and confusion. All she wanted was to use her magic, and do it alone, in silence.

  So of course, when she got to the plateau, Evin was already there.

  The sky was ligh
ter by then, the hazy beginnings of sunrise pouring over the tops of the mountains, gathering strength to break through the dusky gray sky. Evin sat on the plateau with his back to the bridge. The air around him shimmered with color, as if he was in the center of a rainbow bubble. The spell he was using—multiple spells, she realized, all working simultaneously—were immensely powerful, and he played with them as lightly as if they were magelights or umbrella shields.

  A hard, hot knot coalesced deep in Ileni’s gut. Evin glanced over his shoulder at her, and she snapped, “Can you take up a little less space with your pretty colors? I need to practice.”

  Evin leaped to his feet in a graceful arc, using a hint of power to propel himself. He braced his legs apart and murmured swiftly and musically under his breath. The colors swirled and gathered in toward him, then exploded above his head, a burst of spectacular light and color shooting upward into the sky.

  They lasted only a moment before fading into sparkles, and then into nothing. The plateau seemed empty and dull, the only colors the stark contrast of gray stone and paler gray sky.

  “All yours,” Evin said, with a sweeping bow.

  A shard of guilt pricked Ileni. “I didn’t say you had to get rid of it. You could have just made it smaller.”

  Evin sat back on the ground with a thud and leaned back on his elbows. “I could have, but it would have been greatly taxing.”

  That was a lie—Evin had enough skill to contain a spell without even noticing. The knot in Ileni’s gut tightened. She strode to the other end of the plateau and focused on the latest thing Cyn had taught her—a complicated spell to call up and focus rain. Water, it turned out, could be an extremely effective weapon.

  With her back to the bridge, Ileni found herself facing a range of mountains so high that the clouds floated beneath their snow-splattered peaks. They reared toward the horizon in a way that made the sky look low, rather than the mountains high. Above and between them, a formation of black figures circled against the gray sky; it took Ileni a moment to realize they weren’t birds, but people. Skyriders, presumably. She could feel, even from this far away, the massive amounts of magic surrounding them.