Absalm pressed his lips together. Sorin waited just long enough to make sure the rebuff would sting, then softened the insult with a question. “Do you think she suspected how we knew she was there?”
“No,” Absalm said. His tone was surly, but there was respect in it, too—real respect, not the pretense he had been displaying for the past few days. “That was excellently done. I don’t think she suspected a thing.”
CHAPTER
2
Lies spun in Ileni’s mind as she looked across the stone room at the black-haired sorceress. Karyn was wearing a loose white gown, and her face was even more grim than usual, which Ileni hadn’t thought possible. Three days ago, right before transporting her to this room, Karyn had made a promise: I will kill you if you don’t cooperate.
Secret communications with the Assassins’ Caves likely did not count as cooperating.
Ileni’s feet dangled a yard above the floor, and Karyn’s spell pressed her hard against the rough wall. She tried to think up an excuse—an explanation—anything to buy her time, to convince Karyn she was too valuable to kill. But she, who had lied for weeks to the assassins around her, was suddenly afraid that she couldn’t pull it off, that Karyn would see right through anything but the truth. As if, exhausted by the strain of constant deception, she could no longer pull up another lie.
She had told her last lie in the caves without even intending to, right before she had walked away, the black mountains a shadow on her back. Only three days ago, she had promised Sorin: I’m not going back to the Renegai village. She had meant it. But half a day later, as she strode down the winding trail with her pack digging into her shoulders, she had realized it was impossible.
Sorin or any of the other assassins would have known exactly which roads led to the Empire, and could have journeyed there with no more provisions than she carried in her pack. But Ileni had never been trained to leave her village at all. And that village was the only place she knew how to get to.
Even if it was the last place she wanted to go.
Ileni had a lot of practice, by then, in doing things she didn’t want to do. So she had set her face toward her village, promising herself it would only be a short detour, trying not to think about how she would explain why she had left her exile in the caves. Or—even more unthinkably—why she was headed into the Empire.
Then Karyn had ambushed her.
Ileni supposed she should feel some measure of gratitude to the imperial sorceress. She hadn’t had to return, to face her people after failing them twice. She hadn’t had to see Tellis. Instead she had been taken—magically transported, even—straight to the center of the Empire’s power: the Imperial Academy. The source of the magic that kept the Empire running, and the ideal place to discover if that Empire was as evil as she had always been taught.
To decide if she was, in fact, going to help destroy it.
Assuming the imperial sorcerers didn’t just kill her, this had actually worked out quite well. The trouble was, Ileni couldn’t think of a single reason why they wouldn’t kill her.
She had spent the last three days locked in a stone room, and as far as she could tell, no one but Karyn knew she was there. The fact that Karyn hadn’t killed her already was her one slim thread of hope.
She had only a brief memory of the encounter with Karyn, the two of them facing each other on the narrow road. Then Karyn had flung out her hand in a flash of violet light, and the next thing Ileni remembered was waking up in this windowless room. It had taken her only a few minutes to sense the wards around her and realize where she was.
Since then, food had appeared regularly on a tray on the floor, and her chamberpot had occasionally disappeared and reappeared—casual uses of magic she had once been accustomed to. But she’d had no contact with any human being. How long would Karyn have left her here if Sorin hadn’t forced her hand?
The magic holding Ileni loosened, and the stone wall scraped against her back as she slid to the floor. Karyn lifted one hand, and blue-white light sizzled between her fingers. “If you helped an assassin breach our wards, I will kill you right now. So I suggest you explain what just happened.”
Fortunately, Ileni had just spent several weeks keeping fear hidden. It was instinctive by now. “Don’t be ridiculous. You know I have no magic left. I can’t help anyone do anything.”
“Every sorcerer in the Academy felt the magic coming from this room. Your presence here is no longer a secret.”
So it had been a secret? Interesting.
“I wasn’t doing anything,” Ileni said. “Someone was trying to contact me.”
“Someone from the Renegai village?”