“Get up,” Karyn said, and all the glowstones turned bright at once. The sorceress stood over Ileni’s bed, dressed in a lacy black tunic and purple leggings. “I have some questions.”
Ileni was already upright in bed, heart pounding, mind forming the pattern of an attack spell. The bolt of fire shot straight toward Karyn’s face, but Karyn blocked it with an impatient wave of her hand. The backlash of repelled magic hit Ileni like a punch.
“You need to calm down,” Karyn said. She lowered her hand, and her flowing sleeve fell over her wrist, but not before Ileni saw the metallic bracelet clamped around it. “You’re not among assassins anymore. No one here is trying to kill you.”
Ileni wasn’t even sure how that was ironic, but she knew it was. She pulled the blanket back over her bare legs. “It’s a bit early.”
“This is when I have time. Get dressed.”
As slowly as she dared, Ileni got out of bed and walked to the wardrobe. When she had fastened a long gray skirt over her sleeping tunic and slipped on shoes, Karyn said, “Sit down.”
Ileni glanced at the chair, then whispered a quick spell under her breath. She drew her legs up and crossed them beneath her, sitting calmly on empty air, floating several feet above the ground.
Karyn rolled her eyes. Then she muttered a spell. A gash tore down the skin of her own forearm and immediately filled with blood.
Ileni flinched. Karyn held out her arm. “Teach me how to heal it.”
Ileni had managed not to think about this: how she had promised to betray not just herself, not just the assassins, but her own people. As she watched the blood spill onto Karyn’s skin, her fear and longing and confusion struck against something deep within her, something rock solid. No. She wasn’t going to do this. Not for any reason.
She laughed.
A muscle twitched in Karyn’s sharp chin. “Is something amusing?”
“Many things,” Ileni said. “But at the moment, mostly your arrogance.”
“Indeed.”
“It took me years to get to the point where I could heal myself.” Ileni leaned back, extending her spell so her hands, too, could support her on thin air. Blood spread over Karyn’s arm, but the sorceress didn’t even glance at it. “You’re not going to learn it in a morning. First you have to master the basic patterns of healing spells—they’re very different from other spells—and then you need to understand what’s inside a person’s body, and then—”
“Understood,” Karyn snapped. “Unfortunately, I have no interest in devoting my life to becoming a Renegai healer. I have a war to win.”
“Unfortunately for who?” Ileni said coolly.
“For you.” Karyn stretched both hands high above her head, fingertips pointing up. Blood curved down her left arm. Ileni felt the magic coiling in Karyn’s hands and pulled in as much magic as she could from the lodestones, but then didn’t know what to do with it. She didn’t recognize Karyn’s spell.
Karyn’s eyes glinted. She brought her arms down sharply, all her fingertips pointed at Ileni.
Ileni threw her power into a ward. It was unplanned and messy—her Renegai teachers would have been appalled—and Karyn batted it aside with a flippant hand gesture. Then she whispered a word and released her spell.
A wave of dizziness, tinged with nausea, ran through Ileni. With a suddenness that made her scream, she fell several feet to the ground.
The impact thudded all the way up her spine. But the collision didn’t hurt as much as the sudden absence within her. She reached desperately for the lodestones, knowing what she would find.
Nothing. She couldn’t draw on the magic anymore. It was gone.
As she had always known, deep down, it would be.
That pain should have been familiar to her by now, but it still felt like someone had scooped out a part of her soul. She didn’t even try to get to her feet. Instead, she heard herself say, “I could help you defeat the assassins.”
Karyn looked both interested and unsurprised. “Could you indeed?”
“I—” What was she saying? What was she thinking? “I mean—I don’t—”
“Because if you could,” Karyn purred, “that would be reason to allow you to stay.”
Ileni was so hot with shame it was hard to think. Betrayer. Just a week ago, she had sworn she would never do this.
She could only be glad that no one but an imperial sorceress was here to see how loathsome she was. How weak.
Karyn murmured a word, and a white cloth appeared in her right hand. She pressed it to her arm, and it turned swiftly crimson as blood soaked it. “But if you can’t, I’m afraid it’s not just a question of letting you leave. It’s a question of letting you live.”
Ileni couldn’t even manage to be afraid. “If you kill me,” she said, “the assassins will stop at nothing until you’re dead.”