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  　"I made her much the same offer I am making you. I begged her to release me. She would not. I was forced to kill her.

  　"Not one of you could ever hope to be good enough to lick her boots. She did as she did because she was tortured and broken, made mad enough to use a collar to hurt people. She did it against her nature.

  　"You . . ." His gaze swept all the eyes watching him. "You do it because you think it is your right. You enslave in the name of your Creator. I don't know your Creator. The only one beyond this world who I know would do as you do is the Keeper." The crowd gasped. "As far as I'm concerned, you may as well be the Keeper's disciples."

  　Little did he know that some of them were.

  　"If you do as she, and use this collar to bring me pain, the truce will be ended. You may think you hold the leash to this collar, but I promise you, if the truce ends, you will find that what you hold is a bolt of lightning."

  　The room was as silent as a tomb.

  　He was alone, defiant, in the midst of hundreds of sorceresses who knew how to harness every nuance of the power with which they were born; he knew next to nothing of his ability, and was collared by a Rada'Han besides. In this, he may have been a stag, but a stag challenging a congregation of lions. Hungry lions.

  　Richard rolled up his left sleeve. He drew his sword - a sword! - in defiance of the prodigious power arrayed before him. The distinctive ring of steel filled the silence as the blade was brought free.

  　Nicci stood spellbound as he listed his conditions.

  　He finally pointed back with the sword. "Sister Verna captured me. I have fought her every step of this journey. She has done everything short of killing me and draping my body over a horse to get me here. Though she, too, is my captor and enemy, I owe her certain debts. If anyone lays a finger to her because of me, I will kill that person, and the truce will be ended."

  　Nicci couldn't fathom such a strange sense of honor, but somehow she knew it fit what she saw in his eyes.

  　The crowd gasped as Richard drew his sword across the inside of his arm. He turned it, wiping both sides in the blood, until it dripped from the tip. Nicci could plainly see, even if the others could not much as she saw in his eyes a quality others did not see - that the sword united with, and completed, magic within him.

  　His knuckles white around the hilt, he thrust the glistening crimson blade into the air.

  　"I give you a blood oath!" he cried out. "Harm the Baka Ban Mana, harm Sister Verna, or harm me, and the truce will be ended, and I promise you we will have t, war! If we have war, I will lay waste to the Palace of the Prophets!"

  　From the upper balcony, where Richard couldn't see him, Jedidiah's mocking voice drifted out over the crowd. "All by yourself?"

  　"Doubt me at your peril. I am a prisoner; I have nothing to live for. I am the t flesh of prophecy. I am the bringer of death."

  　No answer came in the stupefied silence. Probably every woman in the room knew of the prophecy of the bringer of death, though none was certain of its intended meaning. The text of that prophecy, along with all the others, was kept in the vaults deep under the Palace of the Prophets. That Richard knew it, that he dared declare it aloud in such company, augured the worst possible interpretation. Every lioness in the room retracted her claws in caution. Richard drove his sword home into its scabbard as if to punctuate his threat.

  　Nicci knew that the profound importance of what she had seen in his eyes and in his presence would forever haunt her.

  　She knew, too, that she must destroy him.

  　Nicci had to surrender favors and commit to obligations she never imagined she would have willingly done, but in return, she became one of Richard's six teachers. The burdens she had taken on in return for that privilege were all worth it when she sat alone with him, across a 【创建和谐家园】all table in his room, lightly holding his hands - if one could be said to lightly grasp lightning - endeavoring to teach him to touch his Han, the essence of life and spirit within the gifted. Try as he might, he felt nothing. That, in itself, was peculiar. The inkling of what she felt within him, though, was often enough to leave her unable to bring forth more than a few sparse words. She had casually questioned the others, and knew they were blind to it.

  　Although Nicci could not comprehend what it was about his intellect that his eyes and his conduct revealed, she did know that it disturbed the numb safety of her indifference. She ached to grasp it before she had to destroy him, and at the same time ached to destroy him before she did.

  　Whenever she became confident that she was beginning to unravel the mystery of his singular character, and thought she could predict what he would do in a given , situation, he would confound her by doing something completely unexpected, if not impossible. Time and again he reduced to ashes what she had thought was the foundation of her understanding of him. She spent hours sitting alone, in aby【创建和谐家园】al misery, because it seemed to be in plain sight, yet she couldn't define it. She knew only that it was some principle important beyond measure, and it remained beyond her .: grasp.

  　Richard, never happy about his situation, became increasingly distant as time passed. Forlorn of hope, Nicci decided that the time had come.

  　When she went to his room for what she meant to be his final lesson and his end, he surprised her by offering her a rare white rose. Worse, he offered it with a 【创建和谐家园】ile and no explanation. As he held it out, she was so petrified that she could only manage to say, "Why, thank you, Richard." The white roses were from only one kind of place: dangerous restricted areas no student should ever have been able to enter. That he apparently could, and that he would so boldly offer her the proof of his trespass, startled her. She held the white rose carefully between a finger and thumb, not knowing if he was warning her - by giving her a forbidden thing - that he was the bringer of death, and she was being marked, or if it was a gesture of simple, if strange, kindness. She erred on the side of caution. Once again, his nature had stayed her hand.

  　The other Sisters of the Dark had plans of their own. Richard's gift, as far as Nicci was concerned, was probably the least remarkable and by far the least important thing about him, yet Liliana, one of his other teachers, a woman of boundless greed and limited insight, thought to steal the innate ability of his Han for herself. It sparked a lethal confrontation which Liliana lost. The six of them, their leader, Ulicia, and Richard's five remaining teachers - having been discovered, escaped with their lives and little else, only to end up in Jagang's clutches.

  　In the end, Nicci understood that quality in his eyes no better than the first moment she had seen it.

  　It had all slipped through her fingers.

  　The girl ran for her mother when Nicci released her grip on the studded strap around her neck.

  　"Well?" Commander Kardeef shrieked. He planted his fists on his hips. "Are you through with your games? It's time these people learned the true meaning of ruthless!"

  　Nicci stared into the depths of his dark eyes. They were defiant, angry, and determined - yet they were nothing at all like Richard's eyes.

  　Nicci turned to the soldiers.

  　She gestured. "You two. Seize the commander."

  　The men blinked dumbly. Commander Kardeef's face went red with rage. "That's it! You've finally gone too far!" He wheeled to his men, a whole field of them - two thousand of them. He pointed a thumb back over his shoulder at Nicci. "Grab this lunatic witch!"

  　Half a dozen men nearest to her drew weapons as they rushed her. Like all Order field troops, they were big, strong, and quick. They were also experienced.

  　Nicci thrust a fist out in the direction of the closest as he lifted his whip to lash out and entangle her. With the speed of thought, both Additive Magic and Subtractive twined together in a lethal mix as she unleashed a focused bolt of power. It produced a burst of light so hot and so white that for an instant it made the sunlight seem dim and cold by comparison.

  　The blast blew a mellon-sized hole through the center of the soldier's chest. For an instant, before the internal pressure forced his organs to fill the sudden void, she could see men behind through the gaping hole in his chest.

  　The afterimage of the flare lingered in her mind's eye like lightning's arc. The acrid 【创建和谐家园】ell of scorched air stung her eyes. The clap of her power's thunder rumbled out across the surrounding green fields of wheat.

  　Before the soldier hit the ground, Nicci unleased her power on three more of the charging men, taking off one's entire shoulder, the wallop whirling him around like a ghastly fountain, the dangling limb flinging off into the crowd. A third man was cut almost in two. She felt the concussion of the following bolt deep in her chest and, amid a blinding flash, the fourth man's head came apart in a cloud of red mist and bony debris.

  　Her warning gaze met the eyes of two men with knives gripped in white-knuckled fists. They halted. Many more took a step back as the four reports, to her so separate yet so close atop one another that they almost merged into one ripping blast, still echoed off the buildings.

  　"Now," she said in a quiet, calm, composed voice that by its very gentleness betrayed how deadly earnest was the threat, "if you men do not follow my orders, and seize Commander Kardeef, I will seize him myself. But, of course, not until after I've killed every last one of you."

  　The only sound was the moan of wind between the buildings.

  　"Do as I say, or die. I will not wait."

  　The big men, knowing her, made their decision in the instant they knew was all she would grant them, and leaped to seize the commander. He managed to draw his sword. Kadar Kardeef was no stranger to pitched battle. He screamed orders as he fought them off. More than one man fell dead in the melee. Others cried out as they took wounds. From behind, men finally caught the deadly sword arm. Additional men piled on the commander until they had him disarmed, down on the ground, and finally under control.

  　"What do you think you're doing?" Kadar Kardeef roared at her as the men pulled him to his feet.

  　Nicci closed the distance between them. The soldiers held his arms twisted behind his back. She stared into his wild eyes.

  　"Why, Commander, I am merely following your orders."

  　"What are you talking about!"

  　She 【创建和谐家园】iled without humor just because she knew it would further madden him.

  　One of the men glanced back over his shoulder. "What do you want done with him?"