Author: Leah Cypess

Sorin leaned forward, poised and deadly. Ileni could feel his eagerness. The gleam was back in his eyes.

Irun crossed his arms over his chest and sneered. “What, were you commanded to guard her against insults, too?”

Ileni laughed. It started out too loud and forced, but her hysteria gave it an edge, made it real. Every face in the room turned to stare at her.

“It’s adorable,” she told Irun, “that you think anything that comes out of your mouth could bother me enough to count as an insult.”

His face went blank with shock, as if a dog had started lecturing him.

“If you’re done eating,” Ileni added, “you should spend your time working on your hand motions for the fifth exercise. They were quite sloppy.”

In the utter silence, she got to her feet and started toward the door. She hadn’t gone two steps before Sorin was beside her.

She managed to walk steadily until she reached the hall outside, and then the rubbery feeling in her legs was too much. She knew, dimly, that she should keep up the pretense in front of Sorin, but she couldn’t. She leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes.

No tears. She at least wasn’t going to do that in front of him. She squeezed her eyes shut so tightly it made her head hurt.

After a few moments, while Sorin did nothing—what had she thought he would do?—she opened them again. He was leaning across the opposite wall, which seemed as far from her as he could possibly get.

“That wasn’t wise,” he said.

“Which part?”

“Any of it.”

“Including calling Irun an imperial dog and telling him you would fight him over a coin?”

A smile seized Sorin’s mouth and was gone, so fast she wasn’t sure she had seen it. “I tend not to be at my wisest around Irun.”

Ileni wrapped her arms around herself. “I don’t think he likes me.”

Sorin laughed, startling her. The laugh was astonishing. It softened the sharp lines of his face, just a little bit—but it was enough. Suddenly he didn’t look dangerous at all. He looked . . . handsome. In another time, another place, he might have looked a bit like Tellis.

But it was an illusion, Ileni reminded herself.

Sorin shifted his weight away from the wall. “He won’t hurt you. I won’t let him.”

“Thank you,” she whispered, and then realized she shouldn’t thank him. He was following orders.

“Try to make my task easier, by keeping your . . . opinions . . . to yourself. Especially about the master.” He lowered his voice as he mentioned his leader, reverence slipping into his cool tone. “You can’t say things like that. When you’ve been here longer, when you see how his plans unfold and realize what he’s capable of, you’ll understand why we follow him.”

“Sorry,” Ileni said, before she had time to wonder whether she should. Even she could hear the lack of sincerity in her voice.

Sorin’s long jaw clenched. “You asked, last night, if I am just his tool. The answer is that I am. We all are, and we’re proud to be. Whatever he demands, whatever he does, it’s worth being part of.” He did look at her then, and a self-mocking expression crossed his face. “Never mind. You don’t need to understand. You don’t need to know anything, really.”

She slid across the wall, farther away from him.

Sorin looked at her carefully, his face . . . not softening, exactly, but becoming a bit less harsh. “You don’t have to be afraid of me.”

It would be extremely stupid to believe that, no matter how badly she wanted to. Ileni met his eyes.

Sorin blinked. Then he held his hand out abruptly. “Here. A peace offering.”

At first she couldn’t see what was in his palm. Something small and round and dark. She looked up at Sorin’s expectant face, trying to guess how that could be a weapon.

“Dessert,” he said. She thought she read a challenge in his eyes.

“Poison?” she said, as archly as she could. She wondered if her ward would react if it was. Probably not. He must know a dozen subtle ways to kill her without triggering the ward.

Sorin snorted. “Your class wasn’t that bad.”

What game was he playing at? She reached instinctively for magic, to tell her what he held, and the master’s voice whispered in her mind: You’ll need to preserve your power, won’t you? For as long as you can.

Her stomach twisted into a knot. She reached out, plucked the ball from his hand, and popped it into her mouth.

It tasted bitter and sweet, solid and melting all at once, and lingered in her mouth as if she would taste it forever. She gaped at Sorin. “Chocolate?”

“You like it?” Sorin said.

This wasn’t a gift. It was a bribe—or a promise of future bribes. What did he want from her?

She was sure she would find out soon enough.

Ileni decided not to think about that, because the velvety taste was still lingering in her mouth, coating it with rich sweetness. She ran her tongue around the inside of her teeth. She had only had chocolate a few times in her life—it was made in the southern continent and was incredibly expensive. The few traders who ventured this far into the mountains rarely bothered to carry it.

“Where did you get it?”

He looked at her. She sighed. “Let me guess. This is one of the things I don’t need to know.”

“You’re learning,” he said approvingly.

Ileni crossed her arms. She didn’t need—or want—the approval of a killer. “And is this allowed? Should you be giving me . . . gifts?”

“Definitely not.”

“Then why are you doing it, if it’s against the rules?”

“That is why.” The gleam was back in his eyes, this time accompanied by the hint of a grin.

I don’t believe you. She turned away.

His voice stopped her. “You really thought it might be poison, didn’t you?”

Without turning around, she said, “Yes.”

“Then why did you eat it?”

She looked at him over her shoulder. “You,” she said, “haven’t learned anything at all.”

He made no response. In the echoing silence, she started down the corridor toward the training cavern. She didn’t look back, and he walked in perfect silence, but she knew he was following her.

Sorin escorted her to the front of the class, then went to sit on his mat. Ileni looked at him, then at the nineteen other faces staring at her. Irun was one of them, leaning back slightly and smirking at her. Some of the other boys exchanged glances. They had all heard the argument in the dining cavern, and it seemed to her their stares held an edge that hadn’t been there yesterday, a scarcely veiled hostility.

She was not finished proving herself.

But after her ill-advised defense spell in the master’s chamber, her power was weaker than ever. She had intended to stall for a few days, until some of it came back, but that was clearly out of the question. She was fairly sure that if she spent the class reviewing meditation—the Elders’ suggestion, back in another world—Irun would start flinging spells around just to force her to react. And when she couldn’t, they would know the truth.

She didn’t know what the consequences would be . . . especially since their master already knew. Why hadn’t he told them? What was his plan, and how did her powerlessness serve it? Because she was sure it did. Everything that happened in these caves served his purposes, somehow. She remembered his dark eyes, his pitiless smile, and dread crept into her.

He had brought her here to die. She knew it, deep in her bones. Maybe this was some sort of test he had devised for his students. A game. Maybe there would be a reward for the first assassin to figure out her secret and kill her for her deception.

“Today,” she said, “fire spells.”

Irun came to attention, his dark hair flipping back. Ileni looked away from him and said, “Bazel. You first.”

Bazel was the round-cheeked boy Irun had attacked yesterday. He gave her a startled look, as if surprised she had noticed he was there. As he rose smoothly to his feet and made his way toward the front of the training room, she had the sense that he walked closer to the walls than any of the other boys would have; and when he came to stand beside her, he stood with his hands clasped behind his back, staring down at the floor instead of meeting her eyes. He had none of Irun’s easy arrogance, none of Sorin’s sense of controlled power.

He did have, without question, the most powerful magic in these caves.

Even just standing next to him, Ileni could feel it radiating from him: magical potential, power he was barely tapping into for these beginners’ spells. He might never have the skill to use it fully, of course—strength and talent did not always go together—but had she been up against him in a Renegai magic contest, she would have been wary. He had almost as much power as she’d once had. Probably as much as Tellis did, and Tellis was—now—the most powerful Renegai alive.

She was going to have to be very careful to keep Bazel from realizing his full potential, which was why she had called him up first. She didn’t want him to watch the others before making his own attempt.

“All right,” she said. “All of you listen carefully, because this is complicated.”

“We always listen carefully.”

Irun, of course. If she had to contend with him all morning, somebody was going to end up dead. Probably her. “Noted,” she said. “Now, you start by forming a mental image of a flame, and then—”

“Absalm said we would learn the spell best by watching him do it.”

Ileni narrowed her eyes. Irun was sitting as upright as everyone else, his face blank, yet somehow he managed to give the impression that he was slouching back and smirking at her. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not Absalm.”

“I’ve noticed.” He said it flatly, without expression, but one of the other students snickered. A brief, quickly swallowed sound, but one that rang in the stillness like a bell.

Ileni allowed herself to imagine how Irun would react if she demonstrated by setting his clothes on fire. Suddenly she was too aware of the power next to her, leaking from Bazel’s skin and sizzling against hers. It made her itch with the desire to somehow draw it in and use it, unleash it, be herself again.

She had heard of taking another’s power for your own, methods the imperial sorcerers had perfected—but that was evil magic, and her people had rejected it when they broke from the Rathian Empire centuries ago. Even if she had been tempted, Ileni had no idea how that kind of spell worked.

“If you’re such an expert, why don’t you try it first?” she snapped. No, that was a bad idea. She wished her head felt clearer. “Actually, why don’t you all try it at the same time? Bazel, back to your mat. All of you, do as I say.”

Bazel slunk back. He had not, as far as she could tell, changed expression once. She sneaked a glance at Sorin, not wanting to look at Irun. Sorin hadn’t changed expression either. Of course.

Too late to back out. She cleared her throat. “Start with the following phrase . . .”

After ten minutes of instruction, they were ready. She watched as they spoke and gestured in unison, feeling the power build around her, battering at her, taunting her. Sorin’s face was fierce with concentration. It was a difficult spell.

It wasn’t until the last line of the spell that she realized she had failed to properly explain how to shift the accent mid-phrase. By then, it was too late to stop them. The room echoed with the last triumphant word, and the power let loose. Floating balls of water burst into being over the assassins’ heads, then exploded. Water rained down in the small cavern, sluiced through hair and thin gray tunics, then ran in dozens of rivulets over the stone floor and out the opening that led into the main training area.