Tellis blinked at her, not angry as Sorin would have been, merely confused. “You’re in the Empire. They drove us into exile, they kill by the thousands, they pervert magic. Why is it not simple?”
For a moment Ileni couldn’t remember why. What Tellis was saying was true. Everything else was just complications.
She opened her mouth, then closed it. There was no point. She understood Tellis perfectly; she had been him, just a year ago. With no idea of how much she didn’t know.
Suddenly she couldn’t bear it anymore. She didn’t want him to know what she had become. Not because she was ashamed—or not only because she was ashamed. But because someone should still be apart from all the death and the compromises and the terrible choices. Some part of the world should still be simple and pure.
Even if that part couldn’t be hers anymore.
“Tellis,” she said. “Are you trapped there? In the caves?”
“No,” Tellis said. “The assassin leader said I can go back as soon as I talk to you.”
“Then go,” Ileni said fiercely. “Go back to the village, right away. Promise me.”
“I will. Of course. But—”
She drew in magic, hoping Tellis couldn’t sense it through the portal, and said, “There’s no time. The portal is closing. Tellis—”
He leaned forward, but she hadn’t planned an end to that sentence. She cut it off by slamming the portal shut, using all her strength and all her skill.
The last thing she saw, before the room went black and vanished, was Tellis’s face. There was no horror on it, no anger, no betrayal. There was only bewilderment.
Ileni was almost too tired to cry.
Almost. But not quite.
She tried to be angry at Sorin, but the feeling got lost in the ache inside her. How did he know her so well? How did he know that sending Tellis to talk to her would cut so deep—would bring back everything she had once believed, and make her ashamed of what she had become?
And not because he was Tellis, but because he was her, what she had once been. She had grown up wishing daily for the destruction of the Empire, and now she had the chance to actually accomplish it. This wasn’t about betraying Sorin, or Tellis, or the Renegai. It was about betraying the person she had thought she was.
When she finally fell asleep, tears still tracking down her cheeks, she dreamed of the girl at Death’s Door. Blond hair blew across blue eyes that were wide and desperate and without hope. I want the Black Sisters to take her. You can have my life if you promise me that.
The girl had slit her own throat, but that didn’t change the fact that she had been murdered—she and thousands like her, systematically and methodically, all through the Empire. And it would go on forever, death fueling power fueling death, unless someone did something.
Unless she did something.
She was a weapon forged to strike the Empire a killing blow, and that weapon could be used now or never.
Her mind whirled and spun, and her thoughts kept curving back to Girad’s blood spilling over her hands, his wide uncomprehending eyes, to Evin’s almost inhuman howl of grief. Sorin had explained it to her once, without a hint of regret. One death in exchange for avoiding hundreds.
She forced herself to wait until the sky outside her window was stained pink before she left her room. Outside the door to the sickroom, she heard soft voices murmuring. Two voices.
Girad? Her heart leaped almost painfully in her chest as she pushed the door open.
But Girad hadn’t woken. It was Karyn in the room, talking to Evin in low tones, across the room from Girad’s still figure.
Ileni froze, suddenly afraid. Yesterday, she had been more than ready for Karyn to take her magic away; it was magic she shouldn’t be using. Today . . . she still believed that. Yet dread rippled through her body, making her reluctant to step forward and catch Karyn’s attention.
She watched from the doorway—not Karyn, not the body in the bed, but Evin. Her heart hurt at the slump of his shoulders, the defeated set of his face. He looked ten years older than he had the day before.
No. She couldn’t care about him. She couldn’t care about any of them.
She couldn’t forget that she was an assassin, too.
“Evin.” Karyn’s voice was soft, falsely so. “You can’t sit here all day.”
“If he wakes—”
Karyn met Ileni’s eyes over Evin’s bowed head. Ileni reached out, with a nudge of power, and pushed the boy’s restless sleep into something deeper and more healing. She wasn’t skilled enough to fix him, but she could do that.
She didn’t think, until after she did it, about the fact that she had used power from the lodestones. Again.
“He won’t wake,” she said. “Not for several hours. You should sleep, Evin.”
Evin’s laugh was broken. “I can’t sleep. I keep seeing . . . over and over . . .”
“Then prepare,” Karyn said.