“Watch closely,” Cyn said, and stepped carefully onto one of the thick white lines. Magic shimmered through the pattern, a long, delicious shiver. “You’ll try next. Trust me, Ileni. You won’t know what you’re capable of until you do it.”
I can’t, Ileni thought, and a memory struck her: pushing the dagger through Irun’s skin, blood flowing over her hand. The savage joy that ran through her as she wrenched the blade out. Perhaps it was time to stop pretending she was better than the sorcerers, or the assassins, or anyone at all.
“All right,” she said. Her voice trembled, but she swallowed hard and added, “Go ahead. I’m watching.”
That night, Ileni traced a finger along the mirror’s smooth surface, forming the pattern that—if written with chalk on stone, joined with the right words, fueled by enough power—could shatter not just a person, but a mountain. Gray stone, crumbling down and around them, the might of the Empire buried beneath it.
She had managed to keep herself from thinking, until this moment, of the use she could put today’s lesson to. Of what Cyn had foolishly taught her to do.
The lodestones couldn’t be destroyed. But they could be buried, along with every person in this Academy. That would put an end to the Empire’s power, more dramatically than even the assassins had hoped.
Cyn had no idea what Ileni was capable of.
Her finger left no trace on the mirror’s surface. She pressed her fingertip against it, so hard her nail turned white. Another pattern, a much shorter, simpler one, and she could tell Sorin what she knew.
He would want to use it immediately.
She imagined telling him that she wanted to find another way—that she wanted to put an end to the lodestones without killing anyone—and it was all too easy to envision his expression.
She felt again the surge of power going through her, the shattering of rock spraying in a million different directions. She had met Cyn’s smile through a cascade of pebbles and dust.
She hadn’t realized until that moment that she had been smiling, too.
Oh, yes. She could do it.
But she didn’t want to.
I’ll find another way. The hope felt threadbare and forlorn. She didn’t even need Sorin to tell her she was being weak.
She stepped back from the mirror, not much liking what she saw in it.
The next four days sped by like a dream, the type of dream that might at any moment twist into a nightmare. Ileni practiced magic all day with Cyn—and, sometimes, with Evin and Lis—and got used to the odd concoctions the imperial sorcerers called food, many of which she had already tasted in the caves. She passed other sorcerers-in-training, on the ledges and in the passageways, and saw them practicing from afar. They never spoke to her, and she—perhaps influenced by Cyn’s aloofness—never spoke to them. It occurred to her, sometimes, that she might be making a mistake. But she was too busy to dwell on it.
She tried to ask about the lodestones, but it was a slippery subject. She couldn’t even tell whether Cyn was avoiding the topic—it seemed, rather, that there was always something more interesting to talk about—but after four days, she still had no idea where the magic filling the lodestones came from. It was with vague, guilty relief that she eventually gave up. Arxis had promised her the truth. All she had to do was wait. There were eleven days left—and then ten—and then nine—and then just eight.
It was only at night, in the few minutes before sleep, that despair came creeping in. And even then, it wasn’t over magic, and it wasn’t over the lodestones. It was thoughts of Sorin that slid between Ileni and sleep, a sore spot in her heart that she couldn’t stop poking. Over and over, she went through their last encounter, when he had told her he would wait for her.
Over and over, she reminded herself that he was a killer.
The mirror in the corner was a constant taunt, an itch she didn’t dare scratch. It was a trap, somehow—it had to be—though she couldn’t fathom its purpose. More than once, she stood in front of it for minutes she didn’t count. It would be so easy to open the portal again, to see Sorin’s eyes in the glass instead of her own.
Usually, she turned away before her thoughts could lead her down that path. Sometimes, she didn’t turn away until she noticed how wet her eyes were.
And for all the very good reasons she had to turn away, the one that finally spurred her to do it, on those nights, was a simple and stupid one: she didn’t want Sorin to see her cry.
CHAPTER
9
Ileni woke suddenly from a dreamless sleep, not certain where she was. The glowstones flickered dimly, revealing smooth gray stone and dark polished wood in a foreign, too-large room.
Then the glowstones’ light vanished, the room went black and featureless, and someone yanked her blanket off her body.