“You know they won’t stop,” Karyn said. “The assassins never let someone go, once they are marked for death.” Sorin had told her that once, proudly. “They will send someone else after Girad. Probably soon, while he is weak and helpless and easy to kill. And if the next person fails, they’ll send another. And another. You might have saved him today, but Girad is dead.”
“No,” Ileni said. The protest was instinctive, but she meant it.
“And then they’ll send someone after Evin,” Karyn said. Whatever reaction she saw on Ileni’s face made her lips compress. “And then, I am sure, after you. I assume you’re more willing to help us now?”
Ileni stepped back. “I want to see Girad. Maybe I can heal him. I ran out of power before, but there might be more I can do.”
Karyn’s face tightened. “You think I’m going to let you keep drawing on the lodestones? After this?”
“I don’t want to draw on them,” Ileni said. She meant it, though she couldn’t tell if Karyn believed her. “I don’t want to use this magic anymore. But if I can help Girad. . . .”
Karyn pursed her lips, and for a moment Ileni thought she was going to refuse, just out of spite.
Instead she said, “I’ll take you to him.”
Girad was in a small round room with a bed in its center, so large it dwarfed its tiny occupant. Around the bed, several wooden chairs were arranged on the gray rock. Evin was slumped in one of those chairs, holding his brother’s hand, eyes half-closed. But when Ileni walked in, he started upright, power coiling in his upraised hand.
No need to ask what he had been dreaming about. “It’s all right,” Ileni said. “It’s me. I just wanted to make sure . . .”
Evin lowered his hand. His eyes were red and hollow. “He’s doing better. I think . . . I think he’s going to make it.” It sounded like hope, not belief. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me,” Ileni said.
Behind her, Karyn stepped out into the hall and closed the door. No doubt she was using magic to listen in on them anyhow.
Ileni walked over to Girad and reached out with her power. She couldn’t feel anything wrong within him—at least, nothing she was skilled enough to detect. If he had simply lost too much blood, there was no spell to give it back. It was one of the few things Renegai magic couldn’t fix.
She had done everything she could when the knife went in, and she had known then that it might not be enough.
“Ileni.” Evin started to get to his feet, then sagged back into the chair. “I don’t understand exactly what’s going on. But I know you saved my brother’s life.”
And had put it in danger in the first place, by keeping quiet about who Arxis was.
Evin clasped his hands in his lap. He was holding a small wooden toy carved in the shape of a dog. “It was the bravest thing I’ve ever seen. I can’t . . . I don’t even know how I can thank you. But if there is ever something I can do for you, anything, all you have to do is tell me.”
Ileni couldn’t meet his eyes. “You saved my life, too, you know. More than once. You don’t owe me anything.”
“He’s my brother. I owe you everything.”
Was it possible to literally shrivel up from shame? She kept seeing the knife, impossibly huge in that thin chest, the wide-eyed incomprehension on Girad’s round face, the blood everywhere. The smallness of his body as Evin gathered it up.
In the caves, news would have come of this child’s death, and there would have been dancing.
She had danced with them, once. And she hadn’t asked the age of their victim.
She swallowed hard. “Arxis was an assassin. From the caves. Girad was his target all along.”
“I realized that. But I just . . . I don’t understand.” Evin turned the wooden dog over and over in his hands. “Why would they kill a child?”
He really didn’t understand. Once, she wouldn’t have understood either. The words of explanation were on her lips, words she had heard from Sorin: necessity, the greater good, the purpose served by murder. But she remembered how they had danced, and she knew that if she tried to speak, she would choke.
Evin finally looked away from the wooden dog, but still not at her. He fixed his gaze on his brother’s face. “They really hate us that much.”
So maybe he did understand, better than she did, for all the rational arguments she had stored in her mind.
“Yes,” she said. “They really do.”
Karyn wasn’t outside the door when Ileni left—which did not, of course, mean she hadn’t been listening in. Apparently, Ileni was free to go wherever she wanted.
For now.
Ileni went to her room, because there was nowhere else to go. She shut the door, leaned against it, and closed her eyes, feeling that she should cry. But no tears came.
She straightened and walked, steps leaden, to the oval mirror in the corner of the room. She flattened her palm on the cold glass.
The spell in the mirror thrummed against her hand, spanning the distance between her and Sorin. Passing through both sets of wards. She could bring it back to life—she was sure of it. She could look Sorin in the eye and ask if he was going to order the killing of a child.