He didn’t sound condescending, but he did sound amused. Gullible, romantic village girls, Arxis had said. Ileni bristled. “It’s not what he said. It was a misunderstanding.”
“Do you always solve your misunderstandings with knives?”
“I find it saves time.”
He looked at her sideways and grinned. “I’d better be careful what I say around you, then.”
“I would advise it.”
Evin’s eyebrows rose. Ileni knew she sounded unfriendly, but that was all right. He was an imperial sorcerer. She had grown up hating him, even if he had grown up not knowing who her people were. “How long has he been here?”
“Arxis? Not long,” Evin said.
“What does he—” she began, but then they turned a corner and, all at once, weren’t underground anymore.
They never had been.
They were standing on a ledge on the side of a mountain. Below the ledge—very, very far below—a mass of tiny treetops swept downhill in a cascade of blurry green. Above, the sky unfurled, brilliantly blue. The rocks stretched up behind her, steep and craggy, with a hardy bush clinging to a crack in the cliff face above her.
“What is this?” she breathed.
“The way to the testing arena, of course.” Evin was already walking along the ledge—which, Ileni realized, was actually a path that hugged the side of the mountain. His feet practically touched the edge of the ledge, but he seemed not to notice the precipitous drop. “The Academy spans a couple of mountain peaks. You can see why it’s the ideal location for magic-users.”
Ileni didn’t see that at all. But she nodded. “Right. Of course.”
Evin continued down the path, clearly expecting her to follow. Ileni wanted nothing more than to shrink back into the darkness of the cave, far from the vast space below. She couldn’t make her feet move forward.
We know how to overcome fear, Sorin had told her once. She could imagine his scorn. He might have been afraid, if he was here, but he would never let fear stop him.
She set her jaw and took one step out, then another. The ledge was solid white stone, but terribly narrow. She put one hand flat on the pitted rock of the mountainside and inched forward. She kept her eyes focused straight ahead and did not—did not—look down.
Evin glanced back. His surprise was a prickle of heat against her skin, but she couldn’t force herself to move faster. Once, she would have been as fearless as he was, but now she didn’t have the safeguard of magic. One misstep and she would fall, shattered to pieces far below.
Her life was full of fears like that now, reminders of small safeties she no longer had.
By the time she caught up to Evin, her entire body was shaking, little tremors that made her legs weak and her hands unsteady. Evin waited for her at an archway that led back inside the mountain. The opening, where light shaded into darkness, was such a welcome sight that Ileni stopped caring how pathetic she looked. She lunged past Evin into the dimness, pressed her back against the rock, and took several deep breaths.
“Fear of heights?” Evin said sympathetically. His face was open and earnest, his mouth twisted slightly, but with empathy rather than mockery—another difference from the caves. “I’ve seen it before. It will pass.”
Ileni wanted to say something nonchalant, but she couldn’t stop trembling. She closed her eyes and tried to think of something calming. It had been a long time since anything in her life could be described as calming, but she reached all the way back, to before Karyn had grabbed her, before she had been sent to the Assassins’ Caves, before the Elders had told her she was losing her magic. She remembered sitting with Tellis in one of the Renegai practice rooms, back to back, focusing on the rhythms of a relaxation spell.
She had let her discipline go in the caves, hadn’t bothered with the mental exercises designed to hone magic she no longer had. Now they came slowly and jerkily, and she forced them gracelessly through her mind. Eventually the rhythms came back to her, halting but effective, and her breath fell into the pattern. No magic accompanied the rhythm, of course, a lack that scraped sharply and painfully against her concentration. But slowly, steadily, her muscles relaxed.
She wasn’t sure how long it took. When she opened her eyes, her hands were steady, and Evin was leaning on the opposite wall watching her. There was no hint of impatience in his stance, which probably meant he was very good at hiding it.
“Thank you for waiting,” Ileni said. “I’m ready to continue now.”
“Of course,” Evin replied, his voice as neutral as hers. His brown eyes were calm and steady, shaded by long dark lashes. “It wouldn’t be fair to test you when you were shaken up. The testing arena is this way.”