Death Sworn (8 page)

Sorin shook his head. “Every leader makes decisions about other people’s lives. Didn’t your Elders do the same, when they decided to send you here?”

She stepped back as if from a physical blow. “And who did
you
kill, on your last mission? What purpose did that murder serve?”

He turned his head away from her, and for a moment, in profile, looked as dangerous as she knew he must be. “An imperial noble. Do you have a problem with
that
?”

She shouldn’t have asked. He had ended someone’s life, plunged a man into terror and pain and watched the hope die from his eyes, and he was
proud
of it.

“Does it matter if I do?” she asked.

Sorin regarded her with narrowed eyes. When he finally spoke, his voice was very soft, and a shiver ran up Ileni’s spine. “No. It’s just . . . surprising.”

“That I’m the only one in these caves who knows what life is worth?”

“I don’t think you do.” His eyebrows slanted in thin lines downward. “How can you know what your life is worth if you don’t know what you would trade it for?”

“Get out of my way.” She forced the words out, before her throat closed up and made speech impossible.

He stepped aside without a word, but she could feel him watching her as she walked back down the dark passageway.

Chapter 8

I
t took three days for Ileni’s magic to come trickling back, heartbreakingly slowly. Dozens of times a day, she reached deep within herself, worrying at the emptiness where her power had been. Every time she did, it made her stomach twist, but she was unable to stop.

She had plenty of time to brood about it. She taught her three classes every morning, reviewing skills her students already knew, dodging their veiled and not-so-veiled demands to learn more. She devised dozens of ways to teach magic without spending any herself. Most of them involved insulting their competence and skills, something she found dangerously satisfying. Her unhappiness made her sharp-tongued and vicious, and even Irun began to hesitate before challenging her. At least, she thought he did.

After her third class each morning, Sorin took her to the midday meal and then to her room, where she was left to do whatever she wanted until he came to pick her up for dinner. In theory, she was supposed to be spending some of that time building up the wards around the caves, wards strengthened for centuries by generations of Renegai tutors. She wondered how long it would be before anyone noticed she wasn’t doing that part of her task.

Advanced sorcerers required uninterrupted stretches of solitude for practice and preparation exercises. If she’d still had her power, those long afternoons and evenings would barely have been enough time. She had once gone through the mental exercises for hours each day, then spent more hours memorizing the rituals and incantations that enabled more complicated spells, repeating the hand motions and words endlessly until they were second nature, drawing thousands of warding patterns until she could get them right every time.

Now she had nothing to do but stare at the walls, fight off memories, and wait for whatever pathetic remnant of her power returned to her.

She tried to think of other ways to investigate Cadrel’s and Absalm’s murders. There must be methods that didn’t require magic—questions she could ask, places she could search—but it all seemed so tenuous, so unlikely to produce answers. The knife was her best clue. And she needed her magic to pursue that.

What she did, for the most part, was sleep: for hours and hours, until it made her feel heavy and groggy instead of alert. Back home, she had slept grudgingly, always trying to get away with as little as she could. She had needed those extra hours for practice, or studying new spells, or—more and more, especially over the past year—being with Tellis. She had often thought, back then, that she was tired. But that was nothing compared to how she felt now, when the tiredness came from within her, as if her body simply had no interest in remaining awake.

On the third day after Sorin showed her the knife, she finally felt power begin to coil within her, enough for her mind to grasp and use. A part of her wanted to hold off, to let the magic build, to feel it flow . . . but that wasn’t what she was here for. Besides, who knew if it would ever happen? Maybe this was all she would get.

And more than that . . . she wanted to
use
the magic. She felt the power tugging at her, waiting to be shaped and unleashed on the world.

The problem was that now that she had the power, she no longer had the knife, and she couldn’t think of how to get her hands on it again. Unless . . . she blushed, a tingle running through her. She could think of one obvious excuse for sneaking into Sorin’s room, and the idea was surprisingly tempting. But she didn’t trust herself to pull off a seductress act, not with Sorin. He would probably just throw her out.

She lived in danger of imminent death, yet she was afraid of a little humiliation? Ileni shook her head at her own stupidity, but abandoned that particular idea. She would have to use the magic for something else.

That night, she pulled the warding stones from under her bed, arranged them on the floor, and placed a strand of Irun’s hair inside the pattern.

She had retrieved the hair from his rug after class that day. But now that she was ready, she felt a sudden, overwhelming weariness. She stared at the pattern and couldn’t bring herself to sit down and start the chant.

Irun was too obvious a bully to be a real threat. The dangers in these caves wouldn’t be that straightforward. She couldn’t enact a protection spell against every hot-blooded young killer who wanted to prove he couldn’t be controlled by a woman.

. . . Couldn’t she? It had been her original intent, when she took the stones from Tellis.

With a sickening wrench, she recognized what lay behind her reluctance: fear. She was afraid her magic would fizzle out halfway through the spell.

She dropped down cross-legged with such force that she banged her ankles painfully against the floor. Judging by how empty she felt, she might live long enough to see all her magic gone. And that had never been part of the plan.

A sudden, sharp memory pierced her: the day she had first learned to use the warding stones. The Renegai didn’t have many stored spells, and though they required little power, they called for great skill—that much power, wrongly handled, could easily shatter a sorcerer’s control. Only she, Tellis, and two other students had been permitted to try the stones that day. Tellis had always been quicker with new spells, but she had mastered the stones first. He had been furious, and she had laughed at him, which had made it worse. He hadn’t spoken to her for days. And then, when he finally had . . .

She tried to push the memories away, to focus on the stones in front of her, the threats all around her. But it was too late. Tellis’s arms around her. Tellis on the grass beside her, staring up at the stars, telling her things he’d never told another living soul. Tellis watching her at practice, as if she was the only other person in the stadium. The first time he had kissed her, leaning forward fast and suddenly. Telling her afterward that he hadn’t planned to, had thought he should wait longer, but wanted to so badly that he couldn’t.

He was leagues away. And even if he wasn’t, it wouldn’t make a difference. She would still be powerless, and she still couldn’t have Tellis.

Ileni found herself sitting on the floor with her back against the bed, arms wrapped around her body, feeling as if something inside her had frozen and cracked. She had been so loved, once. She hadn’t even realized how lucky she was, to be the center of someone’s world, to have someone who would always be there. And now she was alone, a helpless girl in a labyrinth of caves, surrounded by people who would kill her at a word. Even back in the Renegai compound, not a single person still cared about her day-to-day life. Everyone had put her out of their minds. She was in the Assassins’ Caves, no longer a part of their lives.

No longer a part of anyone’s life.

It’s better,
she told herself. Better than staying while her magic dimmed, being an object of pity and charity. Watching Tellis find someone else to love. Even now, though she tried not to, she wondered who that girl would be, and hated her.

Not for the first time, she wished she could hate
him
. It would have made her life so much easier. He didn’t deserve it, but it wouldn’t hurt him, since she would never see him again.

After several long seconds, she got up and flung herself into her narrow cot as if she was trying to hurt
it
. Or herself. She closed her eyes before tears could come, and kept them that way until she was no longer conscious of forcing them shut.

The next morning, she woke early and couldn’t remember why. Her sleep had, thankfully, been deep and dreamless. She lay in her cot, blinking at the black stone ceiling. Then, with a gasp, she dropped out of bed and onto her knees beside the warding stones.

She had just
left
them there—an unthinkable lack of discipline, the sort of carelessness that got sorcerers killed. A lifetime of training dropped in one hysterical bout of self-pity. If an assassin with power had come in here, and found them all set out like this, waiting to be ignited . . . an assassin who, of course, wouldn’t know what he was doing . . .

He would likely have killed himself. And her. And possibly brought the mountain crashing down over their heads.

Maybe not such a bad thing.

She knelt and rearranged the stones, breaking up the warding pattern and forming a new design—slightly asymmetric, with an off-center focus that hurt her eyes. Using the stones for anything other than their intended purpose was dangerous, but if she didn’t take the risk, she had no chance to find the answers she was looking for. If the spell failed, that would mean she couldn’t accomplish anything in these caves anyhow, and if so, she might as well die. And she might as well do it spectacularly.

She touched one smooth rock, feeling the magic coiled within it. The warding spell she had already set against Sorin was so strong that its energy was easy to redirect—deceptively easy—requiring only the faintest flicker of power from her. But it took all her skill to keep control of the spell, to twist it exactly the way she wanted it to go.

The magic surged against her, wanting to be loose in the world. She twined her mind around it, struggling to outwit it as it slipped and slid against the bonds she was trying to set. For one terrifying second, it almost got away, and she braced herself for an explosive death even as she fought to regain control.

And then, all at once, she had it. It was hers.

She closed her eyes as the magic rushed through her, clear and cool and sweet. She had forgotten how good it felt.

Reluctantly, she opened her mouth and let the spell rush from her, a torrent of words that pulled out the magic, leaving her once again aching and jagged inside. When she opened her eyes, her vision was blurred with tears.

She swept the stones back into the bag and stood. The redirected warding spell now gave her an awareness of Sorin’s location, a warning tingle designed to help her stay away from him. The purpose of the spell was to avoid him, but she could use that same knowledge to find him—and, more importantly, to find the knife that had killed Cadrel. Sorin had to be keeping it in his room. Once she got her hands on it, she would find out who had stabbed it into Cadrel’s back.

It felt good to step out of her room and stride in the direction that screamed
danger
at her. She had woken earlier than usual, so it would be some time before Sorin arrived to bring her to breakfast. From her strained conversations with him, Ileni knew the assassins studied a variety of skills when they weren’t in the training arena: language, spatial memorization, lock picking, skulking. (Though she suspected “skulking” had been Sorin’s idea of a joke.) He had mentioned once that he had some sort of training in the morning, before breakfast, which meant he would probably be leaving his room shortly. If she could make it there before he left, she could wait outside and then get at the knife while he was gone.

The sense of danger pulled her through several dark, curving corridors, down a short flight of stairs, and into another of those narrow passageways that made her feel as if the black stones were pressing in on her from both sides. Farther and farther into the mountains. Fewer wooden doors interrupted the walls of rugged stone, replaced by rough arches and irregularly shaped openings in the rock. She didn’t look through those openings, focused as she was on the spell, but what she glimpsed as she passed sent shivers through her: a cavern full of hanging ropes, crisscrossed with wooden beams; the replica of some sort of throne room; a cave divided in half by a shiny length of wood studded with sharp metal spikes.

She gritted her teeth and kept going. Finally, something wafted toward her, something she hadn’t smelled in so long it took her a moment to identify it. Fresh air.

She breathed deeply, then hurried forward. The passageway ended abruptly in a wall, which she found by walking straight into it. In a blur of confused pain, she realized it wasn’t a dead end, but rather a sharp turn. She followed the turn, more cautiously, her head still ringing. But she forgot the pain when the passageway truly did come to an end—not in a wall, but in an exit to the outside world.

The sky was dusky blue, streaked with pink-gray clouds, and there was no sign of the sun—but it was still lighter than it ever was within the caves, the sort of light that filled the world instead of coming from tiny stones. It was cold, too, and she welcomed that. The breeze brushed across her face, and she breathed it in, icy and sweet. She had almost forgotten what it felt like to have air move against her face. She leaned into it, her skin coming alive.

Before her stretched a large, rocky valley—surrounded by towering black rock on all sides, so not a way out after all, but it was still
outdoors
. Of course, they must have outdoor training areas, so they could learn to fight in snow and rain . . . even as she thought that, she became conscious of the unnaturally even sound of feet thudding against the ground. She drew back swiftly, just as the assassins came into sight.

A dozen of them, running single file, wearing nothing but breeches and packs. She recognized some from her first class. The oldest students, the closest to being sent out into the Empire. An older man, one of the teachers, was running behind them. His voice pierced the silence: “Faster! You call that running?
Faster!
”

The rocks on the ground were not, after all, haphazard; they were obstacles, and as she watched, the runners leaped over each one and kept running. Their uniform pace and set faces suggested they had been doing it for a long time.

When the one in the lead got close enough for Ileni to see him clearly, she realized that those weren’t packs on their backs. They were slabs of stone. They must have weighed more than she could easily lift.

She retreated farther back into the cave, but not before she recognized one of the runners, his blond hair slicked back against his head.

She had been wrong. Sorin had left his room long ago.

What now?
she asked herself, and had no answer. She sighed and let the remnant of the altered warding spell go, then stood pressed against the rock until the sound of pounding feet passed her and grew distant. A part of her wanted to go outside again, to feel the breeze on her skin.