“Wait. I want to ask you—” He looked down at the wooden dog in his hand, and held it out to her. “Can you give this back to Girad?”
Ileni took the dog, knowing that wasn’t what he had meant to say. She nodded, then turned and ran.
She caught up to Lis on the ledge near the beginning of the bridge. When Ileni grabbed her arm, Lis jerked away, almost throwing the two of them off the mountain. Ileni used a thrust of magic to push herself closer to the gray mountainside.
Lis didn’t. She crouched near the edge of the abyss, her heels at the very rim of the drop. As if she didn’t care whether she fell.
She could fly, of course. But still, unease lodged in Ileni’s throat, choking off her accusation. She recognized that sort of despair.
“What?” Lis said wildly. “What do you want? Do you have more useless warnings to throw at me?”
“I didn’t have to warn you,” Ileni said slowly. “Did I? You already knew what he was.”
Lis laughed, and something about it made Ileni want to back away. She pressed against the mountainside.
“Oh, yes,” Lis said. “But unlike you, I know what we are.”
“And what are we?” Ileni said.
“We’re killers, too.” Lis straightened, but didn’t step away from the edge. “I kept Arxis’s secret because he was right. It’s that simple.”
It’s never that simple. But Ileni had once thought it could be. That right was a simple concept, that she could make a choice that didn’t take into account who she was and who she loved and what she wanted.
“Arxis was just using you,” Ileni said. “You were his way to Evin, who was his way to Girad.”
“You don’t know anything,” Lis snapped. “I was far more important to the assassins than that.”
To the assassins?
It all came together with a click, so fast Ileni wondered if some part of her had already known. Lis and Arxis, heads bent together. His taunt. The assets we already have here.
And the question she had never managed to answer.
Ileni gaped for a moment, then found her voice. “That’s how Sorin knew I was here. You’re a spy.”
Lis smiled, arch and smug. “So tell Karyn. Do you think she’ll believe you? Think you’re better off than I am? I know what Karyn has planned for you.”
“How did you even know I was in the Academy?” Ileni demanded. “When Karyn brought me here, nobody—”
“Karyn told me.” Lis laughed. “Evin and Cyn were putting down a riot, and she needed my help to set up extra wards around you.”
“Your help?” Ileni said, and heard a moment too late how much she sounded like Cyn.
Lis flushed, dark red. “Yes. Mine. I’m not as worthless as my sister thinks. Karyn told me not to tell anyone about you . . . and I didn’t. Not anyone here.”
“How did you tell the assassins? I thought the wards—”
“The wards are quite effective, yes. In the Academy.” Lis shook her head, hair swinging back and forth. “But when I go to battles . . . or riots . . . to harvest the wounded, there are no wards there. And it’s easy enough to send messages to the caves.”
Ileni’s feet were fused to the rock. “But how—how did you—”
“The master sent Arxis here for two reasons.” Lis’s eyes shone with a worshipful fervor Ileni had seen before. Obviously, no one had told her the master was dead. “The first was to recruit me.”
Ileni flinched, involuntarily, at the mention of the master. It didn’t surprise her that he had known, from his black caves high in the distant mountains, that here in the Academy a girl was angry and disillusioned and ripe to turn on everyone she knew.
It didn’t surprise her that Lis had been manipulated, expertly, from the very start.
“And the second reason,” Ileni hissed, “was to kill Girad.”
A muscle twitched in Lis’s cheek. “Yes.”
“And you don’t care.”
“I’ve seen lots of people die. I’ve harvested their power myself, to feed it to the Empire. I know what the assassins are fighting against.” Lis was shouting now. “There is no room for pity in war. Arxis knew that.”
“You’re a tool,” Ileni spat. “You don’t know anything about the people you’re serving. Arxis didn’t need a reason not to care. He just didn’t. Not about anything. He thought that was a virtue.”
Lis’s jaw clenched, her face a stolid mask.
Ileni thrust quickly, looking for something that would hurt enough to keep that mask from closing. “He didn’t care what his death would do to you. He didn’t care about you at all.”
“He was willing to make sacrifices,” Lis hissed. “He did what was right, even though he loved me.”
Ileni heard her own laugh, with an edge to it that would have made a sane person back away. Lis stepped closer.
“He loved me!”
“Oh, did he? Would he have stayed his hand if you asked him to? Let Girad live?”
“I didn’t ask him to!” Lis shouted. Hair blew across her face. “I didn’t know it would be Girad. He never told me . . . and even if he had, I wouldn’t have stood in his way. He did what had to be done. This the only way.”