What kind of life could she have?
It would be for the best, this way.
The time had come.
Chapter 8
Before she could begin, Nicci saw something that ignited her indignation. She whirled to a nearby woman.
“Where is there a washtub?”
Surprised by the question, the woman pointed a trembling finger toward a two story building not far off. “There, Mistress. In the yard behind the pottery shop are laundry tubs where we were washing clothes.”
Nicci seized the woman by her throat. “Get me a pair of scissors. Bring them to me there.”
The woman stared in wide-eyed fright. Nicci shoved her.
“Now! Or would you prefer to die on the spot?”
Nicci yanked free a well-worn, reserve studded strap bunched with several others and secured over Commander Kardeef’s shoulder. He made no effort to stop her, but as she gathered up the strap, he seized her upper arm in his powerful grip.
“You had better be planning on drowning this little brat—or maybe cutting off hunks of her hide and then stabbing out her eyes.” His breath smelled of onion and ale. He smirked. “In fact, you start in on her, and while she’s screaming and begging for her life, I’ll begin separating out some young men, or perhaps I’ll select some women to be an example. Which would you prefer, this time?”
Nicci turned her glare down at his fingers on her arm. He removed them as he growled a warning. She turned to the girl and whipped the strap twice around her neck to serve as a collar, twisting it into a handle in the back so she could control the girl with it. The girl squeaked in choked surprise.
She had probably never been handled so roughly in her entire life. Nicci forced her ahead, toward the building the woman had pointed out.
Seeing how angry Nicci had suddenly become, no one followed. A woman not far off, undoubtedly the girl’s mother, began to cry out in protest, but then fell silent as Kardeef’s men turned their attention on her. By then Nicci already had the perplexed girl around the corner.
Out back, drab laundry, deformed and crumpled from its ordeal on the washboard, and now stretched and pinned to lines, twisted in the wind as if struggling to escape. Smoke from the fire pit peeked over the top of the building. The nervous woman waited with a large pair of shears.
Nicci marched the girl up to a tub of water, drove her down on her knees, and shoved her head under the water. While the girl struggled, Nicci snatched the scissors from the woman. Her chore completed, the woman held her apron up over her mouth to muffle her wails as she ran off in tears, not wanting to watch a child being murdered.
Nicci pulled the girl’s head up out of the water, and while she sputtered and gasped for air, began clipping her dark, soaking wet hair close to the scalp. When Nicci had finished cutting it off in sodden clumps, she dunked the girl again while leaning over and scooping up a cake of pale yellow soap from the washboard on the ground beside the tub. Nicci hauled the girl’s head up and then began scrubbing. The girl screeched, flailing her spindly arms and clawing at the strap around her neck by which Nicci controlled her. Nicci realized she was probably hurting her, but from within the grip of rage, it was only a dim realization.
“What’s the matter with you!” Nicci shook the gasping girl. “Don’t you know you’re crawling with lice?”
“But, but—”
The soap was harsh and as rough as a rasp. The girl squealed as Nicci bent her over and put more muscle into the scouring.
“Do you like having a head full of lice?”
“No—”
“Well, you must! Why else would you have them?”
“Please! I’ll try to do better. I’ll wash. I promise!”
Nicci remembered how much she hated catching lice from the places her mother sent her. She remembered scrubbing herself, using the harshest soap she could find, only to again be sent off to another place, where she would get infested with the hated things all over again.
When Nicci had scrubbed and dunked a dozen times, she finally dragged the girl to a tub of clean water and swished her head about in it to rinse her off. The girl blinked furiously, trying to clear her eyes of the stinging, soapy water as it streamed down off her face.
Gripping the girl’s chin, Nicci peered into her red eyes. “No doubt your clothes are lousy with nits. You’re to scrub your clothes every day—underthings, especially—or the lice will just be right back.” Nicci squeezed the girl’s cheeks until her eyes watered. “You are better than to be filthy with lice! Don’t you know that?”
The girl nodded, as best as she could with Nicci’s strong fingers holding her face. The big, dark, intelligent eyes, although red from the water and wide with shock, were still filled with that rare sense of wonder.
As painful and frightening as the experience was, this had not dispelled it.
“Burn your bedding. Get new.” Given the way these people lived and worked, it seemed a hopeless challenge. “Your whole family must burn their bedding. Wash all their clothes.”
The girl nodded her oath.
Task completed, Nicci marched the girl back toward the gathered crowd.
Forcing her along by the studded strap used as a collar, Nicci was unexpectedly struck by a memory.
It was a memory of the first time she had seen Richard.
Nearly every Sister at the Palace of the Prophets had been gathered in the great hall to see the new boy Sister Verna had brought in. Nicci lingered at the mahogany rail, twining around her finger a lace dangling from her bodice, only to pull the lace straight and then to twine it again, when the pair of thick walnut doors opened. The rumbling drone of conversation, sprinkled with bright laughter, trailed to an expectant hush as the group, led by Sister Phoebe, marched into the chamber, past the white columns topped by gold capitals, and in under the huge vaulted dome.
The birth of gifted boys was rare, and a cause of expectant delight when they were discovered and finally brought to live at the palace. A grand banquet was planned for that evening. Most of the Sisters, dressed in their finery, stood on the floor below, eager to meet the new boy. Nicci remained near the center of the lower balcony. She didn’t care whether she met him or not.
It came as something of a shock to see how Sister Verna had aged on her journey. Such journeys typically lasted at most a year; this one, beyond the great barrier to the New World, had taken nearly twenty. Events beyond the barrier being uncertain, Verna had apparently been sent off on her mission too far in advance.
Life at the Palace of the Prophets was as long as it was serene. No one at the Palace of the Prophets appeared to have aged at all in so trifling a span of time as two decades, but away from the spell that enveloped the palace, Verna had. Verna, probably close to one hundred and sixty years old, had to be at least twenty years younger than Nicci; yet she now looked twice Nicci’s age. People outside the palace aged at the normal rate, of course, but to see it happen so rapidly to a Sister . . .
As the roaring applause thundered on in the huge room, many of the Sisters wept over the momentous occasion. Nicci yawned. Sister Phoebe held up her hand until the room fell silent.
“Sisters.” Phoebe’s voice trembled. “Please welcome Sister Verna home.”
She finally had to raise a hand to again bring the clamor of applause to a halt.
When the room had quieted, she said, “And may I present our newest student, our newest child of the Creator, our newest charge.” She turned and held an arm out in introduction, wiggling her fingers, urging the apparently timid boy forward as she went on. “Please welcome Richard Cypher to the Palace of the Prophets.”
Several of the women stepped back out of the way as he strode forward.
Nicci’s eyes widened; her back straightened. It was not a young boy. He was grown into a man.
The crowd, despite their shock, clapped and cheered with the warmth of their welcome. Nicci didn’t hear it. Her attention was riveted by those gray eyes of his. He was introduced to s
ome of the nearby Sisters. The novice assigned to him, Pasha, was brought before him and tried to speak to him.
Richard brushed Pasha aside, a stag dismissing a vole, and stepped out alone into the center of the room. His whole bearing conveyed the same quality Nicci beheld in his eyes.
“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 set 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 understanding 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 brin
ger 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.
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