“I have something to say.”
The vast chamber fell to an astonished hush.
His gaze swept the room. Nicci’s breath caught when, for an instant, their eyes met, as he probably met countless others.
Her trembling fingers clutched the rail for support.
Nicci swore at that moment to do whatever was necessary to be named as one of his teachers.
His fingers tapped the Rada’Han around his neck.
“As long as you keep this collar on me, you are my captors, and I am your prisoner.”
Murmurs hummed in the air. A Rada’Han was put around a boy’s neck not just to govern him, but to protect him as well. The boys were never thought of as prisoners, but wards who needed security, care, and training. Richard, though, did not see it that way.
“Since I have committed no aggression against you, that makes us enemies. We are at war.”
Several older Sisters teetered on their heels, nearly fainting. The faces of half the women in the room went red. The rest went white. Nicci could not have imagined such an attitude. His demeanor kept her from blinking, lest she overlook something. She drew slow breaths, lest she miss a word. Her pounding heart, though, was beyond her ability to control.
“Sister Verna has made a pledge to me that I will be taught to control the gift, and when I have learned what is required, I will be set free. For now, as long as you keep that pledge, we have a truce. But there are conditions.”
Richard lifted a red leather rod hanging on a fine gold chain around his neck. At the time, Nicci hadn’t known it to be the weapon of a Mord-Sith.
“I have been collared before. The person who put that collar on me brought me pain, to punish me, to teach me, to subdue me.”
Nicci knew that such could be the only fate of one like him.
“That is the sole purpose of a collar. You collar a beast. You collar your enemies.
“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 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 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 small 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 understand
ing of him. She spent hours sitting alone, in abysmal 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 smile 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.