Death Marked

by Leah Cypess

  If you want the whole truth. She did. Which meant she had to go back to Death’s Door.

  If she left the Academy again, if she snuck down to the city in the middle of the night . . . and if she got caught . . . Karyn would take away her magic. And then she truly would be helpless to find out anything more.

  Ileni bit her lip. Her chest was tight. Go back to what you were, Karyn had warned. How had she known exactly what Ileni was most afraid of?

  Ileni turned on her heel and walked away from Lis’s closed door.

  The path down the mountain was twisty and treacherous in the darkness. The rain had stopped by now, and the moon slid in and out of fragmented clouds, providing a drifting, inconsistent light. Ileni paused before she left the Academy and soaked up all the magic she could, then used a sliver of it to make her shoes glow. The light was just bright enough to let her see where she was stepping, but—she hoped—not bright enough to catch anyone’s attention.

  She didn’t know how to go directly to Death’s Door, so she had to retrace the path to the Black Sisters—which was even darker and more imposing at night, the murmur of the fountains soft and menacing—and then through the narrow streets and crumbling stairways, which now included sudden dark puddles. After she stepped into the first one—and used up some of her magic to get the water out of her shoes—she watched for them carefully, paying equal attention to the ground and to her surroundings. The shops were closed and dark, and men lurked in the shadows on the stairs. They would have been frightening if not for the magic that filled her, but she strode past without slowing down. After days of sparring with Cyn, she knew she could hurt anyone who even thought about threatening her.

  But nobody did. Perhaps her confident stride warned them, marking her as an imperial sorceress, not to be trifled with.

  A vague sense of disappointment pricked her, and she squashed it swiftly. Was this what she had become—someone who wanted to use combat magic, just because she practiced it every day? If the Elders could see her now, they would be horrified.

  If Sorin could see her, he would be proud.

  The memory of his glittering eyes was still in her mind when, with a flicker of power, she unlocked the narrow door on the stairway. Darkness and silence wrapped around her as she crept down the stairs. But in the large fetid room, labored breaths and groans filled the stillness, and a few glowstones in the walls were alight, casting a dim grayness that illuminated rows of narrow beds.

  Ileni bit her lip. It seemed wrong to intrude upon all these suffering people. But Lis’s challenge rang in her ears, mingled with the image of Sorin’s face. She had to know the truth. She could change everything—make things better for all these people. Maybe. But first she had to understand what was going on.

  She crept silently between the rows of beds, trying not to look too hard at the figures in them. A man tangled in his blanket, moaning in his sleep; a woman, still as stone, hair sweat slicked over her forehead; a curled up bundle of blankets with only a wizened hand sticking out. She glanced at the bed where the old man had been tortured, but he was gone. There was a younger man there now. She wondered if he had given in, in the end, or if he had died naturally.

  Or if he had been thrown out into the street for refusing.

  At the end of the room was a shut door. Ileni pulled together magic for an unlocking spell, but the door pulled open without any need for it. Another staircase descended from it, steeper and narrower than the first.

  Go deeper. Ileni licked dry lips and descended the stairs.

  At first glance, the room at the bottom was identical to the one above. Rows of beds, the stink of sweat and pus, the occasional moan. Glowstones flickered sporadically on the walls, casting a dim shifting light, and in it, Ileni saw the difference.

  This room was filled with children.

  Like the people upstairs, they all had power. But they weren’t all sick.

  One boy, sitting up in bed, cradled a twisted arm, but otherwise looked healthy. Another, a girl, had a cleft lip, a gaping empty space connecting her mouth to her nose. In the corner, a boy of about twelve stared at the ceiling with his tongue lolling out, emitting the occasional giggle.

  In the bed nearest to the stairs, a girl who looked just a few years younger than Ileni sat with her back propped up against her pillow, ash blond hair falling to her waist. She was staring straight at Ileni, blue eyes unnervingly direct in a face so pale it was nearly translucent.

  Ileni froze. But when the girl’s voice emerged, it was a whisper. She shivered as she spoke, a series of tremors from head to toe. “Are you here for me?”

  Ileni shook her head.

  “Please.” The girl’s teeth chattered. “I’m ready.”

  Ileni braced herself and stepped forward, next to the bed. The girl was so hot Ileni could almost feel it, and she reeked of sweat.

  “Why—” Ileni had to stop and clear her throat. “Why are you here?”

  The girl’s eyes dropped, and her cheeks reddened. “My baby. I got sick right after she was born, and I can’t . . .” She had to stop to catch her breath. “I want the Black Sisters to take her. You can have my life if you promise me that.”

  “Um,” Ileni said, and shifted her weight to back away.

  The girl grabbed Ileni’s wrist. Her grasp was so feeble Ileni could have shaken it off without trying. “Please. I would wait for a Gatherer, but I don’t know if I’ll last that long. Please.”

  The last word was a sob, and the girl had to stop so she could keep breathing, fast and shallow. Ileni did shake off her grasp, and grabbed her wrist instead.

  “You’re not going to die,” she said.

  The girl flinched at the fury in her voice, and Ileni probably should have explained that it wasn’t aimed at her. But she was busy calling up her magic as she focused on the girl, confirming her guess.

  Childbed fever. It was common, and the Renegai had half a dozen spells to counteract it. None of them were simple or easy, but Ileni had healed this malady dozens of times in training. She could do it again.

  She also thought she remembered being told that if childbed fever wasn’t healed swiftly, it would be too late, and would only hasten the inevitable death. Who had told her that? Tellis? Or maybe he had been talking about some other illness. . . .

  She couldn’t remember. And anyhow, she couldn’t tell whether it was too late for this girl.

  Ileni gathered up her power and placed her hands on the girl’s stomach. The power spread, pulsing, to her fingers. The girl jerked, but didn’t protest. Ileni closed her eyes and felt the girl’s swollen womb, the wrongness within it.

  The infection was widespread and strong. Most fevers could be cured with a simple, easy spell, but this would take every bit of power Ileni still had stored within her. She took a deep, hopeful breath and whispered the spell.

  The magic shot from her fingertips into the girl’s body, a series of painful surges. Finally, when she had given all she had, Ileni let go and stepped back. Emptiness clawed at her from the inside. The girl blinked at her, confused, and her hand dropped limply to the bed. She looked even weaker than before. Possibly she didn’t even realize what Ileni had done.

  “My daughter,” the blond girl managed.

  “You’ll take care of her yourself,” Ileni promised. “You’ll be all right now.”

  The girl looked at her blankly, eyes glazed with pain, and doubt stabbed Ileni. But healing was often painful and disorienting. She still had vivid memories of having a fever healed when she was seven years old, of how confused and frantic her thoughts had been afterward. So maybe this was normal. Maybe she had succeeded.

  The girl sagged back against the pillow, eyes fluttering closed. Ileni hesitated. But if the girl was dying, there was nothing else she could do. She straightened and looked at the boy with the broken arm.

  “Why are you here?” she said.

  The boy’s eyes were wide and bright. “It set wrong. Can you heal me, too?”

  Th
e lack of magic yawned inside Ileni. The room was filled with at least fifty children, and she felt like they were all watching her. “I . . . not now. But I can come back.”

  The brightness left the boy’s eyes. “It will be too late.”

  “Come with me, then,” Ileni said. “You shouldn’t be here. You won’t die of a broken arm.”

  “I can’t live with it, either,” the boy said. “Can’t take care of my brother. But the Black Sisters will.”

  “No,” Ileni said. “You don’t have to—”

  The boy with the cleft lip spoke in a garbled voice. “Don’t be stupid.”

  Ileni looked from him, to the boy with the broken arm, then around the room again. She took a step back, then another.

  The blond girl’s eyes popped open. “Don’t go!”

  “It’s all right,” Ileni said, though it wasn’t.

  “No! Take it.” The girl’s voice rose, shrill and piercing. “I don’t have long. I can’t wait.”

  A door slammed. All the glowstones went on, blindingly bright, and across the room, a boy sat up in his bed and screamed.

  Ileni spun and ran for the stairs. Behind her, the blond girl shouted, “Stop!” and the boy’s scream went on and on. Another patient began wailing.

  Light flooded the stairway. A bearded man stormed down the steps, holding a long, curved knife that gleamed in the sudden brightness.

  If she’d had any magic left, Ileni wouldn’t have given the knife a second thought. The man advanced, and fear shot through her. In the beds all around her, children stirred and moaned. But Ileni was only vaguely aware of them.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to the man with the knife, as coolly as she could manage. She had to raise her voice to be heard over the screaming. “I—I didn’t mean to—” To what? “To, uh, disturb. You. Or anyone.”

  The man’s eyes flickered over her. “You’re from the Academy?”

  “Yes.”

  He came closer, and now she was within easy reach of his blade. She forced herself to remain still, tried not to even look at the knife, as if it was of no relevance to her. “We weren’t told to expect anyone.”

  “Um,” Ileni said. “I—uh—we—”

  “She’s here for me,” the blond girl said. “I’m ready.”

  The bearded man slipped past Ileni, nodded quickly—approvingly?—and slid something small and sharp into the blond girl’s hand.

  “Wait,” Ileni said.

  The blond girl met her eyes. Her chin trembled. “Take care of my baby. Promise.”

  And then, without hesitating, she lifted the blade to her throat and slashed it across her smooth skin.

  Ileni had seen people die before, and that was the only thing that kept her from screaming. The blond girl gasped, and her mouth opened, as if in protest. The knife dropped to the bed, and blood flowed through her now-limp fingers, soaking the thin blanket.

  Power rushed from her into Ileni.

  Ileni gasped, first with shock and then with joy. The flood of power was so bright and brilliant it lit her up from the inside. She was too dazzled to see.

  With the power came knowledge: the bright glow of the girl’s life, the confusion and dizziness of her fever, the pain and terror and despair as blood flowed out of her body. Ileni could feel the frantic beat of her heart, her blood struggling to circulate. It was an echo of a pain she recognized.

  She knew how much it hurt to die.

  But that pain was hers for only a second before the power rushed over it, overwhelmed it, drowned it. And after that, she felt nothing but joy.

  By the time she blinked back to reality, the girl was dead. Her slim body was slumped back against the pillow, blue eyes closed, blood soaking into her shirt and blanket. A stillness subtly but dreadfully different from sleep.

  Alive just a moment ago, and now irretrievably gone. Ileni began to shake. Did that part ever get easier to understand?

  The bearded man scowled at her. “Where’s the lodestone? What kind of game are you playing?”

  “I—” It was too much. She couldn’t think. “Karyn—I have to go—”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but you’re not going anywhere until I find out.”

  With the magic flowing through her, Ileni was able to ignore that. He couldn’t make her do anything. She could throw him across the room with a thought, if she wanted to.

  And she wanted to.

  But she controlled herself, and merely said, “Get out of my way.”

  He started to say something, took another look at her face, and changed his mind. Grudgingly, he moved to the foot of the bed. Ileni strode past him up the stairs.

  She had just reached the top step when a surge of magic eddied around her, almost knocking her off-balance. She forced herself forward, through the narrow doorway, into the upper room of Death’s Door.

  Where Karyn was waiting for her.

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

  Ileni flung up a defensive spell, using the power she had taken from the blond girl. It was too late. Pain surged through her body, and violet light wrapped around her and squeezed. All at once she was fighting to breathe, much less utter the words of a spell.

  “Mistress Karyn,” the bearded man said, “this student took a girl’s magic for herself.”

  Ileni tried to whirl on him and discovered that she couldn’t move.

  The man brushed past her and bowed briefly. “I had not heard from you, and it seemed irregular—”

  “It certainly was.” Karyn’s fury was so palpable that only the violet light kept Ileni from flinching. “You were right to summon me.”

  Ileni discovered that even though she couldn’t move, she could suck in enough air to speak. “You’re too late. I know now.”

  “Know what?” Karyn’s voice was a savage hiss. “You don’t know anything you didn’t know before.”

  “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 hands and chest were. Her feet were dangling over the edge of . . . something.

  A wave of dizziness made her clutch the edge of the something. Her fingers dug into 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.