“I could help you,” Ileni said. “I lived in the caves for weeks. I might know things that would be useful to you.”
Karyn tilted her head sideways, a pose that could have been mistaken for amusement if not for the suspicion in her eyes. A tic started in Ileni’s eyelid as the silence stretched. Then the sorceress said, “All right. You can stay.”
“I—” She managed not to say what or why, mostly by biting her lip so hard it hurt.
“For now,” Karyn added. “But I’ll be watching you.”
Ileni nodded.
Karyn slowly opened her hand. The blue-white light was gone. “I’ll find a way to explain the breach—say it was a mistake during your preliminary testing. And then I’ll have you enrolled as a new student. Nobody has to know where you came from.” She flexed her fingers. “You realize that if anyone discovers you used to be an assassin, you won’t survive a day here.”
“I wasn’t an assassin.”
“You taught them magic, didn’t you? Trained them to kill us?”
The bite in Karyn’s voice killed Ileni’s next question. There could be only one reason Karyn was letting her stay: because she believed Ileni could help her fight the assassins. But did she really believe Ileni had turned traitor? Or did she have some other plan, a way to use Ileni against her will?
Well. That would be nothing new.
Karyn crossed the room and touched her finger to the mirror. “Right now, I’ll summon the nearest sorcerer. Some luckless student will be here shortly to escort you to the testing arena.”
She closed her eyes and murmured a brief spell. A shimmer of magic, distant and tantalizing, brushed Ileni’s skin, and she shivered despite herself.
Karyn’s eyes opened just in time to catch that. She watched Ileni from beneath hooded eyelids. “I have access to as many lodestones as I want. If you had known that, I assume you wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble to steal the one I had last time we met.” She pursed her lips. “Though I suppose if you had managed to hold onto it, you could have tasted power again.”
It was such an obvious, childish taunt. It shouldn’t have worked.
“It’s interesting, though.” Karyn was practically purring. “How do you think you’ll feel, being surrounded by sorcerers-in-training? Once you would have been the best of them, isn’t that right?”
Ileni knew exactly how it would feel. She had left her own people for the Assassins’ Caves just so she would never have to feel like that again.
She didn’t trust herself to control her expression. She turned away from Karyn just in time to see two young men appear in the doorway.
Literally, appear: a second ago, the space outside the door had been empty.
“Good,” Karyn said, still sounding like a stroked cat. “This is Ileni. She’ll be—”
One of the new arrivals looked at Ileni. She froze when she recognized him, but his face remained perfectly pleasant, as if he had no idea who she was. He bent toward his boot, a smooth feline movement, without losing his placid expression for a second.
Ileni went for her dagger, but he was faster.
Assassins always were.
“Whoa,” the other boy said mildly, and Karyn snapped, “Ileni!”
The assassin’s hand was around her wrist, tight enough to hurt, yet he exhibited no strain. His other hand was curled but empty. Too late, Ileni realized that he hadn’t been reaching for a blade. He had merely been bending to wipe off his breeches, which were marked by a long smudge of chalk.
“What are you doing?” the assassin asked, voice high-pitched and shaking. His eyes were wide, his breath fast, as if he was the one who was afraid. But his eyes glinted with amusement that only she could see.
Ileni’s heart sank. She didn’t dare look at Karyn. She forced her fingers open and heard her dagger clatter to the floor.
The assassin didn’t glance down, and he didn’t let go of her wrist. He was wiry and muscular, with a crop of unruly red hair, and was wearing green and black instead of the assassins’ typical gray.
“Sorry,” Ileni said. Her voice emerged high and scratchy. “I . . . thought you were someone else.”
She didn’t check to see if anyone believed her; she knew for certain that Karyn wouldn’t. She kept her eyes on the assassin, to find out if she was going to die for her mistake.
A moment of silence. Two. The killer’s pale blue eyes stared into hers. Then he let go of her wrist and stepped back, and she couldn’t help a sigh of relief that sounded long and loud in the small room.
“I think,” he said, “you know exactly who I am.”
Ileni’s mouth was too dry for speech, even if she had been able to think of something to say.
“Arxis?” the other boy said.
The assassin glanced at him sideways. “I traveled with a band of traders, for a while. One of our ventures into the mountains took us to Ileni’s village, and she and I . . . well. Apparently, she thought it was more than it was.”
“We did not—” Ileni began hotly, and stopped. The glint in his eyes was no longer amused. She recognized that coldness.