When he pushed her away, she clung to him blindly. It didn’t matter, of course, not against his strength. He held her in front of him, eyes black and blazing.
Betray me, he whispered, before pulling her in and kissing her again, or don’t. But make a decision before it’s too late.
Ileni woke with her heart pounding, her stomach clenched tight. She doubled over in her bed, not sure whether she was going to cry or puke or both.
She waited for several minutes before she realized that she was going to do neither. Instead, she threw her blanket against the wall and pulled the wardrobe doors open with a surge of angry power. They flew apart with a clash, and she yanked out the first dress she saw. It snagged on the edge of a door and ripped, a jagged tear across the seam of its neckline.
Calm down. She managed to get the next dress across the room intact but didn’t bother with changing its size. It shifted loosely across her shoulders as she hurried out of her room.
The halls were unusually busy—she had overslept—but Ileni had to ask four students before she found one who knew Arxis. The student, a plump girl with mint-green hair, nodded. “Arxis? He’s in the beginner’s class.”
“Right. Can you take me there?”
The girl gave her one of those looks Ileni was becoming used to. She had asked something stupid, missed something obvious. Revealed yet again how vastly ignorant she was.
“All right,” the girl said finally. “This way.”
She led Ileni through a curving corridor to the top of a spiral staircase, then gestured curtly at the stairs and walked away.
The stairs wound their way down a narrow column inside the mountain and ended in a large cavern, walls studded with a mix of glowstones. A dozen students stood in the center of the cavern, in a circle around a tall man holding up a lodestone while demonstrating a spell. Arxis looked exactly like the other students, right down to his rigid posture and the attentive angle of his jaw.
Ileni settled on the base of the bottom step, jiggling her foot against the stone floor. The instructor was running through a fairly simple sound-enhancing spell, one every Renegai sorcerer perfected by the age of five. Ileni had figured it out at the age of two and a half. It had been the earliest sign of her great potential.
When it was the students’ turn to attempt the spell, half of them fumbled it, and one managed to make herself deaf—Ileni felt that spell going wrong and winced, but remained where she was, hidden in the dimness of the stairwell. Arxis was one of the students who failed, but as the spell fizzled out around him, he looked over his shoulder directly at Ileni.
She should have realized he would know she was there. Giving in to her escalating impatience, Ileni got to her feet and walked into the cavern.
The instructor held up a hand to silence the students. He had a gaunt, dark face, with white markings coiling up his right cheek.
“I need to speak to Arxis,” Ileni said.
She had no idea how he would react—among the Renegai, interrupting a lesson would have earned her at least an evening of kitchen duty, and in the caves it might have gotten her killed. But the instructor just nodded. “Take it outside.”
They walked in silence until almost the top of the spiral staircase, where Arxis stopped. The threat in his stance made Ileni pull her power in tighter, readying it for a spell.
Arxis’s voice was flat. “Coming here wasn’t particularly discreet. You’re an advanced student. You’re supposed to ignore me.”
“Like Evin does?” Like Lis does? she almost added, but didn’t quite dare.
“Everyone knows Evin doesn’t care about his status. That doesn’t mean I can rub shoulders with all of you. I am trying not to stand out, you know.”
“Your secrets are not my concern,” Ileni retorted, keeping her voice low. Even with the sound-enhancing spells, the students in the cavern below shouldn’t be able to hear them, but there was no point in taking chances. Well. Unnecessary chances. “I need you to take me to the source of the lodestones. Now.”
Arxis stepped up one stair. “I thought we discussed this. You have four days left.”
She had to crane her neck to look up at him, which she didn’t like; but he was standing in the middle of the stair, so she couldn’t step up without pushing him out of the way. Or trying to push him out of the way.
“Take me,” she said, “or I’ll expose you.”
“Will you, indeed?”
“Yes.”
Arxis leaned against the wall. “And yet I could keep you from exposing me—or annoying me—in just a second, couldn’t I? I could make it look like a fall. Or an accident. I could be far away by the time they found you. Do you believe me?”
She did. Ileni stepped up next to him on the stairs. “Then why are you talking about it, instead of doing it?”
Back when she had entered the Assassins’ Caves, she had managed to say things like that without the slightest tremor. But somewhere in the interim, she had started to care again whether she lived.
That was going to be very inconvenient.