Death Sworn by Leah Cypess

who that girl would be, and hated her.
    Not for the first time, she wished she could hate him . It would have made her life so much easier. He didn’t deserve it, but it wouldn’t hurt him, since she would never see him again.
    After several long seconds, she got up and flung herself into her narrow cot as if she was trying to hurt it . Or herself. She closed her eyes before tears could come, and kept them that way until she was no longer conscious of forcing them shut.
     
    The next morning, she woke early and couldn’t remember why. Her sleep had, thankfully, been deep and dreamless. She lay in her cot, blinking at the black stone ceiling. Then, with a gasp, she dropped out of bed and onto her knees beside the warding stones.
    She had just left them there—an unthinkable lack of discipline, the sort of carelessness that got sorcerers killed. A lifetime of training dropped in one hysterical bout of self-pity. If an assassin with power had come in here, and found them all set out like this, waiting to be ignited . . . an assassin who, of course, wouldn’t know what he was doing . . .
    He would likely have killed himself. And her. And possibly brought the mountain crashing down over their heads.
    Maybe not such a bad thing.
    She knelt and rearranged the stones, breaking up the warding pattern and forming a new design—slightly asymmetric, with an off-center focus that hurt her eyes. Using the stones for anything other than their intended purpose was dangerous, but if she didn’t take the risk, she had no chance to find the answers she was looking for. If the spell failed, that would mean she couldn’t accomplish anything in these caves anyhow, and if so, she might as well die. And she might as well do it spectacularly.
    She touched one smooth rock, feeling the magic coiled within it. The warding spell she had already set against Sorin was so strong that its energy was easy to redirect—deceptively easy—requiring only the faintest flicker of power from her. But it took all her skill to keep control of the spell, to twist it exactly the way she wanted it to go.
    The magic surged against her, wanting to be loose in the world. She twined her mind around it, struggling to outwit it as it slipped and slid against the bonds she was trying to set. For one terrifying second, it almost got away, and she braced herself for an explosive death even as she fought to regain control.
    And then, all at once, she had it. It was hers.
    She closed her eyes as the magic rushed through her, clear and cool and sweet. She had forgotten how good it felt.
    Reluctantly, she opened her mouth and let the spell rush from her, a torrent of words that pulled out the magic, leaving her once again aching and jagged inside. When she opened her eyes, her vision was blurred with tears.
    She swept the stones back into the bag and stood. The redirected warding spell now gave her an awareness of Sorin’s location, a warning tingle designed to help her stay away from him. The purpose of the spell was to avoid him, but she could use that same knowledge to find him—and, more importantly, to find the knife that had killed Cadrel. Sorin had to be keeping it in his room. Once she got her hands on it, she would find out who had stabbed it into Cadrel’s back.
    It felt good to step out of her room and stride in the direction that screamed danger at her. She had woken earlier than usual, so it would be some time before Sorin arrived to bring her to breakfast. From her strained conversations with him, Ileni knew the assassins studied a variety of skills when they weren’t in the training arena: language, spatial memorization, lock picking, skulking. (Though she suspected “skulking” had been Sorin’s idea of a joke.) He had mentioned once that he had some sort of training in the morning, before breakfast, which meant he would probably be leaving his room shortly. If she could make it there before he left, she could wait outside and then get at the knife