Ileni blinked. He smiled at her, sly and proud, and she stopped paying attention to her ward. “How?”
“That’s not important. Can you find out who used it on him?”
Her throat felt suddenly like a block of wood.
“Well?” he said impatiently. She felt the whoosh of his breath on her cheek.
She tried to pull up some power, knowing it would be futile. The effort—and the sickening lack of response—made her faintly nauseated. She did her best to hide it as she bent forward to examine the knife. Her mind whirled, frantically and uselessly. “I . . . I can’t. Not here. There’s not enough space.”
Sorin rested one finger against his chin. “You think I can’t tell that you’re lying? We’re trained to read people. Do it now, Sorceress.”
She moved carefully this time and managed to lean against the wall without scraping any part of her body against stone. She put her hand on the knife hilt, right next to Sorin’s fingers. His skin brushed hers, dry and warm, as he edged his hand away. She closed her eyes, assumed what she hoped was an expression of deep concentration, and murmured some random spell-words. They sounded thin and weak in the dry air. But when she opened her eyes, Sorin was waiting expectantly.
She took her hand away, a dull leadenness in her chest. “It’s been too long, been handled by too many people. The traces of whoever used it to kill Cadrel are gone.”
Sorin looked disappointed, but not—thankfully—suspicious. “Are you sure? Is there another spell—”
“No,” she said. Too swiftly? She tried to sound angry and disappointed. “Nothing. Magefire!”
Sorin didn’t move. He was so close she imagined she could hear his heartbeat. “You’re sure?”
Ileni shifted. “I’m sure.”
The space felt oppressive and small. She should have been afraid—and she was, a little bit; what if he realized she was lying?—but mostly she was ashamed. Tears pressed at the insides of her eyes. She had the knife, and yet she was not one step closer to learning who had used it, because she wasn’t strong enough.
I’m sorry, Cadrel.
She clenched her jaw and let the silence stretch longer, so she could gain control of her voice. She had no idea what Sorin was thinking. She was sure he could feel her inadequacy radiating off her.
“Well,” she said finally. Her voice was almost steady. “If that’s all . . .”
When he didn’t move, she lowered herself to the floor and began inching her way under the stones. Sorin landed on the ground behind her with a quiet thud, then shot past her. She pulled herself halfway through, then rolled over onto her stomach and crawled the rest of the way. When she was finally out, she turned away from him as she pushed her hair from her face and combed her fingers through it to get the dust out.
Sorin’s voice was sharp. “What is that?”
She stiffened. “What?”
He reached forward and brushed her hair away from her neck. The touch sent a shiver through her, and she went even stiffer.
His breath whispered against the back of her neck. “What is that?”
Suddenly she understood. She felt his finger press against her skin, right below the hairline. “What does it look like to you?”
He didn’t move or speak for so long that, if not for his breath against her skin and the finger still resting on her neck, she would have turned to see if he had gone. It should have made her afraid, his hands so close to her throat—all he had to do was slip them forward and close them, and he could strangle her before she had a chance to call for help. It should have, but it didn’t. She had to force herself not to turn around and meet his eyes.
“Like a picture,” he said finally. “One man walking, one man falling.”
“That’s how it was, when the Empire exiled us. Half of us died before we reached the mountains. From starvation, from exhaustion, from arrows. Some of the emperor’s archers came after us and picked us off. We managed to capture one and ask him why. He said it was for fun.”
She did turn then, after the silence got long enough. Sorin was staring at her as if he had never seen her before. “That was four hundred years ago,” he said.
“Yes. We don’t forget.” She reached back and touched the tattoo. Her fingers brushed his, and he snatched his hand back as if suddenly noticing where it was. “We make sure to never forget, because someday we will return.”
He kept looking at her, and this was different from his usual controlled silence. She had actually put him at a loss for words. Finally he said, “You’re all tattooed?”
“Every last one of us.”
“But Absalm wasn’t. . . .”
“Our parents choose where to put the tattoo. Some families like for it to be more visible than others.” Tellis’s tattoo was on his shoulder.
His fingers twitched, but he didn’t reach for her neck again. “Then shouldn’t you be glad to tutor us? Our goal is the same as yours. We also want to release the world from the Empire’s grip. We also want to make the Rathians pay for all they have done.”
“Our methods are not the same.” She smoothed her hair back over her shoulder, and it brushed across her neck, hiding the tattoo again. “The Renegai don’t murder innocents.”
“What we do is not murder.” The contempt in his voice stung her. He wasn’t trying to convince her; he was explaining the obvious to a slow child. “Every person we kill dies to serve a greater purpose.”
“I’m sure they would be happy if they knew it,” Ileni said sarcastically, but her voice sounded weak even to her. “If you would explain it to them, perhaps they would volunteer for your knives.”
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
It 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 . . .