In the complete silence that followed, Ileni felt not relief, not joy, but an odd whirling . . . disappointment?
Because he’s lying to me. But she didn’t really believe that. And a moment later he added, “But I will if I have to. And someday, I will have to.”
No. He wasn’t lying.
“Arxis’s mission was necessary,” Sorin added.
Racing through the corridors, running this conversation through her mind, she had planned to be furious. She should be furious. Instead she was suddenly, deeply sad.
“No,” she said. “You didn’t have to kill Girad. You could have found another way. You wanted to kill him. You wanted to kill him because he’s a child and because killing children inflicts the greatest possible pain.”
“Yes,” Sorin said, utterly calm. “This was about inflicting pain. We accept that necessity.”
Her voice was still working, despite the pain in her chest. “You accept it far too easily.”
“It’s not easy,” Sorin said, but for the first time, his gaze wavered.
This time, he was lying. It was easy. Their goal, their lives, their purpose, was to kill. Of course it was easy.
She was still holding Girad’s wooden dog, so tightly her hand hurt.
“The Empire kills children, too,” Sorin said. “In a dozen ways. By sacrificing their parents in its wars and then allowing them to starve. By waiting until they’re too ill to recover and then taking their power when they die.”
“Yes. And you kill them by selecting them as targets and slitting their throats with knives.”
He lifted one shoulder. “What does it matter? The children are just as dead.”
It does matter, Ileni thought; but if she said it, he would ask her why, and she had no answer that would convince him. These were the rules of this unending war, the rules the assassins had played by for centuries.
Sorin hated rules . . . or she had believed he did. But maybe all he had ever wanted was to be the one making them.
“You knew I was here,” she whispered. “You knew why. I could have ended all of this. Why kill a child when I might be about to end the entire war?”
Something flickered across Sorin’s eyes, something she had seen so often—from the assassins and the imperial sorcerers both—that she recognized it instantly.
Pity.
Are all Renegai as deliberately simpleminded as you?
She had forgotten—had allowed herself to forget—what the assassins were.
That they didn’t look for reasons to avoid killing.
Would he still be a killer, she had wondered once, if this war didn’t require it?
How stupid she was. He would always be a killer. He didn’t want to be anything else.
“You need to come back,” Sorin said.
She stared at him as if he had started babbling ancient poetry.
His face was still expressionless, but his voice was low and urgent. “You’re in danger now, more than before. You need to come through, back to—to the caves.”
“I can’t,” Ileni said.
“Then open the portal farther, and I’ll come through to you. You have to, Ileni. They’re going to kill you—torture you, and then kill you. Now that they know you could have told them about Arxis—”
“Arxis failed,” Ileni said. “I stopped him.”
Sorin said nothing. Maybe he had already known. His face was still the impenetrable mask it had been months ago, when they first met. She couldn’t guess what was behind it.
A hysterical laugh rose in her. “Are you going to kill me for that?”
She knew it was stupid to ask. But she wanted to break that mask, to make him show some sort of emotion.
She wanted him to be something he wasn’t.
And it worked. For a moment the mask vanished, and his face burned. Pain and longing and love, all directed at her—at her—with an intensity that scorched everything else away.
He said, “No. I’m not going to kill you.”
She couldn’t breathe. She certainly couldn’t say, So there’s one person in the world you can’t kill.
It’s not enough.
And she knew, suddenly, why a part of her had wanted to hear a different answer, when she’d asked him if he had killed a child. She had been disappointed because, if he’d said yes, that would have been the end. It would have been over. The knowledge would have broken her free of him, forced her to go through that pain and see if she came out on the other side.
If she didn’t love him, everything would be so much easier.
“I can’t kill you,” Sorin said, almost steadily. “I know I should. But I can’t.”
“But you’ll kill him,” Ileni said. “Gi—the child. You’ll send someone else after him. Won’t you?”
He didn’t respond, which was answer enough.
Ileni searched his face, looking for a trace of . . . shame? If he were an imperial sorcerer, that would have been the reason for his silence. But he wasn’t a sorcerer. He was an assassin, and all she saw on his face was resolve.
Her chest hurt. Her eyes burned. She whispered, “I love you.”