She swallowed hard, unbearably grateful for a place of safety—however small, however confined.

Of course, Cadrel had lived in this room a few weeks ago, and Absalm before him. The wards hadn’t kept either of them alive.

To her surprise, the room was decorated, with a brightly colored rug thrown over the stone floor and a tapestry hanging on the wall by the bed. Nothing elaborate, by any means—to most people, the room would probably have appeared sparse—but it was opulent compared to her room in the sorcerers’ training compound, which had been a rectangular cell with a bed, a clothes chest, a small window, and nothing else. And the introduction of beds had been fairly recent, hotly contested and eventually allowed only because mattresses on the floor were more quickly infested by insects. Austerity, they had been told, was necessary for the development of their magic.

She felt her lip start to curl, and turned to Sorin for distraction before the bitterness could come flowing in. She caught him watching her speculatively, and once again had the sense that he was deciding her fate. She met his gaze, feeling like prey. She had seen how fast he moved. If he decided to kill her, she probably wouldn’t realize it until she was already dying.

Maybe that would be a mercy.

But he only leaned back against the doorpost and said, “I’ll show you the training area now. You start teaching tomorrow.”

“In a little while. I’d like to unpack first.”

Sorin looked at her pack, which was barely the size of a cooking pot, and then at her. Ileni smiled blandly.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll return after I report your arrival.”

Ileni waited until he had shut the door behind him, then pulled a roll of clothing out of the pack and emptied the rest of its contents onto the floor.

Twelve flat black stones thudded onto the rug. Ileni tossed the empty pack onto the bed, dropped into a cross-legged position, and carefully arranged the rocks in an asymmetric pattern around her. She worked fast, half her attention on the door, but took an extra moment to make sure the pattern was exactly right. No point in accidentally blowing up her room on the first day. Later, maybe, if it seemed called for.

If she was still able to.

She pushed that thought away, closed her eyes, and envisioned the words she wanted to say. To her they always appeared in color, glowing slightly from within, looped together in the sinuous musical script in which she had learned them. She retrieved the hair she had plucked from Sorin’s neck and held it with the tips of her fingers.

Stringing the syllables of the spell out between her teeth, she touched the hair quickly to each rock, then stretched it taut between her hands. The words of the spell made no noise, though she spoke them; instead of sound, pure power emerged from her mouth. It shattered the air, and she spat the words out faster and faster to keep them from getting away from her. By the time she reached the climax of the spell, she was shouting, though the room was still silent.

With the last syllable, she let go of the hair. Instead of floating downward, it disappeared, as soundlessly as the rest of the spell.

Ileni lowered her hands, throat raw. A bead of sweat tickled the outside corner of one eye. This was getting harder and harder. That spell, a year ago, would have been a warm-up exercise for her. Back then, she could have done it without the stones. Tellis, thankfully, had refrained from mentioning that when he gave them to her.

She hadn’t allowed herself to dwell on Tellis for days, and the sudden memory hurt like a blow to her stomach. Before she could stop them, the images flooded her mind: Tellis’s lean, rugged face, the blond hair falling over his dark blue eyes. The way those eyes had once made her feel, as if she could barely breathe.

His eyes when she emerged from her second Testing. The expression on his face that told her he already knew what the Elders had said. That he accepted what had to happen now.

That look had driven her to accept the Elders’ mission, to come here to these caves filled with killers, where two of her people had died within the past half year. She had sworn to find out why they died, before she met the same fate, but it was an empty promise. What were the chances that she—a seventeen-year-old with rapidly fading powers—could survive whatever had killed two older, seasoned sorcerers?

But she hadn’t cared how dangerous it was, or how lonely. All she had cared about was putting physical distance between herself and all the people who thought she was worthless. No one here would look at her with pity.

Ileni’s lips quirked upward—not much, but it was the first time since the meeting with the Elders that she had seen any humor in her situation at all. The people here wouldn’t pity her because they would be too busy trying to kill her. At least it would be different.

Now that she was leagues away from that humiliating parting, she could finally be glad that Tellis hadn’t allowed her to refuse the warding stones, his last gift. If Sorin tried to harm her in any way, he would find her better defended than she appeared.

The stones tumbled against each other as she gathered them into the pack. One down, several hundred to go.

She pushed the pack under her bed and waited for the assassin to come for her.

Chapter 2

High in a tiny black room carved from stone, the old man watched the slippery rocks outside the Assassins’ Caves, empty now that the sorceress had picked her way across them. A light snow swirled through the cold gray air, already covering the marks of her passage.

It was the first time the Renegai had sent a woman, and it was also the first time they had sent someone so young. The girl was not particularly striking, at least not from this distance: she was thin and short, and her thrown-back hood had revealed matted brown curls. She hadn’t seemed bothered by the snow whispering across her face, and had approached the entrance carefully but without hesitation.

Her predecessor had been visibly shaking as he walked across the rocks. And his predecessor, grandiose from the start, had levitated several feet above the rocks and sailed coolly to the entrance.

The door opened behind him. The sound didn’t surprise the old man; he knew exactly how long it would take Sorin to escort the sorceress to her room, and he had been sure the girl would ask for some time alone. The only thing he hadn’t been certain of was whether the boy would change his clothes before coming here. He had mused it over for a minute or two and guessed that he would.

He had guessed wrong—something that rarely happened to him anymore. He could smell the damp sweat clinging to the boy’s tunic as Sorin crossed the small room and bowed low. “Master.”

“Sorin,” the master of the assassins said, and his disciple rose from his bow with sinuous grace.

“The new Renegai tutor is here,” Sorin said. “I was watching the entrance when she arrived, so I escorted her to her room.”

His voice revealed no anger over the fact that he had not been told to expect a sorcerer, which pleased his master. Sorin must realize that this was a test: that he had been assigned to watch the entrance this week, and not told what to expect, on purpose.

“What do you think of her?”

“Nothing,” Sorin said instantly. “I interacted with her for no more than a few minutes. Any thoughts about her now would be premature, and merely prejudice me later.”

“Very good,” the master said. “That is the correct response. Now, tell me what you really think.”

Sorin turned, young dark eyes staring straight into old blue ones. Not many students in the caves could hold their master’s gaze for more than a few seconds. “That is what I really think, Master,” he said.

The master believed him, and that made the second time he had been wrong in the space of an hour. A lesser man might have been irritated, but he was intrigued. There was very little that could still take him by surprise. “You will rise high, Sorin,” he said. “And there will come a day when you will not be able to gather all the information you require, and will have no choice but to guess, based on nothing more substantial than what you saw today.”

“Of course,” Sorin said. “But I have no reason to believe that this is that day.”

The master smiled, pleased and amused. “Well, gather information as swiftly as you can. I am making her your responsibility.”

“Yes, Master.”

The old man regarded him, wondering how much the boy suspected. He still remembered the day Sorin had been brought into these caves, half-crazed and all-wild, willing to die for the sake of nothing but his fury. Now that anger had been channeled and focused, making Sorin an exemplary assassin—one of the best, but still a tool, even if a finely honed one. Sharp, deadly, but very straightforward.

So his master thought, most of the time. But then there were those moments when his guesses turned out wrong.

He still hadn’t figured out why, so he kept throwing tests Sorin’s way. If nothing else, this assignment should provide him with new and interesting information about the boy. Even if Sorin died, that information would be useful.

Information always was.

“Go, then,” he said. “Make sure you take her to the training area while the advanced students are practicing, so she can see what we are capable of.” He chuckled, more to himself than to the boy. “Or rather, some of what we are capable of. The rest can wait a few days.”

“Yes, Master.”

Sensing a note of doubt in Sorin’s voice, the old man stopped smiling and met his eyes. Sorin jerked, then bowed his head as if under a sudden weight.

“Go,” the master said coldly. “She is your charge. Take this assignment very seriously. I don’t want what happened to the others to happen to her.”

What did one say when strolling through an underground corridor with a trained killer? As she followed Sorin through a passageway lit by glowstones, Ileni came up with and discarded several possible openings, ranging from The weather down here is surprisingly pleasant to So, how many people have you killed? Sorin, striding grimly a step ahead of her, showed no inclination to start a conversation on his own.

The corridor sloped downward in a steady curve, which made Ileni feel vaguely nauseated. By the time they encountered an actual staircase, they had walked in what she was sure was a complete circle, which meant they were a full level below her room. And now they were going even lower. The stone walls closed in on her. Her vision blurred, and she couldn’t breathe.

Stop it. She would be underground for the rest of her life. She had better get used to it.

The staircase was a steep spiral of rough white rock, so narrow that at times Ileni had to slow down to squeeze herself through. At irregular intervals, the stairs were interrupted by equally narrow passageways, each with several sharp turns. The way was well lit by the glowing stones set in the walls, but the effect was still macabre. Every time Ileni turned, she had to keep herself from cringing, her body expecting someone—or something—to be waiting for her.

The stairs were also, she noted, defensible. In case of attack, the interior of the caves could be defended by a few men against an army. The famed impregnability of these caves was no myth.

At the bottom of the third staircase, they stepped into a large cavern. This one had three passages branching off from it, and only the middle was lit.

“The left-hand passage leads to the main training area,” Sorin said.

Ileni squinted. She didn’t see any stones set in the walls. “It’s dark.”

“So it is.”

She was not going to give him an excuse to be amused at her expense. “You first, then.”

Sorin held up one palm, which began to glow with a yellow light. He walked into the passageway, holding his hand out to light the way.

Ileni followed cautiously. The passageway grew narrower as they walked, until there wasn’t enough room for two people to walk side by side. “A regular magelight would be a lot simpler.”

“Sometimes, I’m not simple.”