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.
She shook her head and turned back into the dark, trying to remember the way she had come.
Within seconds, she was completely lost.
After a turn that she thought would take her back to the staircase, she found herself instead in a large cavern full of knives, hundreds of them, hanging on racks stretched across the back of the room. Targets hung on the wall, heavy cloths cut into the shapes of people, with circles drawn over various body parts. One of the targets was child sized. She stared at them, feeling her stomach tighten. Then she turned back to the doorway, and collided with a bare, muscular chest.
She shrieked and raised her hands. Large hands gripped her upper arms, hard enough to hurt, holding her motionless. She looked up into Irun’s rugged face.
“Teacher,” he said, his tone a mockery of respect. “What are you doing here? And without your guardian, too. Not very wise.”
She didn’t bother to struggle, vividly recalling how he had leaped obstacles with a stone slab on his back. She didn’t bother to reply, since she had nothing to say. She met Irun’s hard almond-shaped eyes and did not move.
His thick eyebrows lifted. Then he let her go, though he didn’t move from the doorway. Ileni used every bit of willpower she possessed and did not step back. The marks of his fingers were painful on her arms.
“Good,” she said, hoping her haughty tone would disguise her fear. “I’m glad you’re here. You can lead me back to my room.”
Irun laughed. “I don’t think so. This is a good opportunity for the two of us to talk.”
Ileni tried to look past him, to see if anyone else was coming. The entrance to the cavern was empty. It was just her and Irun in a room full of glistening knives.
With an effort, she hung onto her haughtiness, though she doubted it would fool him. “Talk about what?”
Irun’s smirk made her attempt seem infantile. “Two weeks before you arrived, Teacher, I returned from a successful mission. Do you know who I killed?”
She didn’t trust her voice, or her expression. She shook her head.
“The high sorcerer at the emperor’s court.”
She blinked, shocked despite herself. Irun shifted position and nodded. “Nobody truly believed it could be done. Certainly not that I could do it and survive. But Absalm’s lessons . . . they came in very handy.”
“Did you kill Absalm, too?” Her voice shook, which she hated, but Irun obviously liked. His eyes glittered.
“No. Nor Cadrel. And I won’t kill you, either, if you cooperate.”
“With what?”
“Next time I kill a sorcerer, I don’t want to just take his life. I want to take his power.”
Ileni choked. Irun waited, with exaggerated patience, for her to regain her composure. Then he added, “I want you to tell me how to do it.”
“I don’t know how!”
“That’s . . . unfortunate.” His disbelief was palpable. “Because it means you serve no purpose here.”
He moved with swift, brutal efficiency. All at once she was flat on her stomach on the stone floor, her wrist screaming in pain, her face crushed into the black stone.
“Perhaps your successor will be more amenable,” Irun said, stepping back.
Her mouth filled with pieces of grit. She pulled up her power, but it was so little, so weak.
This would make three Renegai killed in these caves. She wondered who the Elders would send next.