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She couldn't allow herself to believe that evil would darken the world.
A knock on the door made her jump. She pressed her hand over her racing heart. Her Han hadn't warned her that someone was about.
"Yes?"
"A
A
"Come in, dear," she said as she opened the door, smiling at Richard's sister. "Thank you for the plate of food." She held an arm back toward the table. "Would you like to share it with me?"
Je
"Yes," A
Je
"Nathan always expects people to squeak when he pinches." A
Je
A
Je
CHAPTER 10
In a broad weeping willow growing on the grassy slope leading down to the graveyard, a mockingbird was spending its night repeating a variety of strident calls meant to defend its territory against interlopers. Ordinarily, a mockingbird's calls, although intended as threats to others of its kind, to A
Plowing through the long, wild grasses, Je
Sweating from the long hike, A
A
"Are you sure Tom is still down here?"
Je
"For what? To fight off the other body snatchers?"
"I don't know, maybe," Je
A
"Maybe Nathan just wanted company," A
"I don't think that was it." Je
Nathan liked being in charge; A
Actually, right then, A
In all the centuries she had known him, Nathan had at times been secretive, deceptive, and occasionally dangerous, but never to evil ends —although that hadn't always been apparent at the time. During most of his captivity at the Palace of the Prophets he had tried the Sisters' patience until they were ready to scream and tear out their hair, yet he wasn't maliciously willful or contemptuous of good people. He had an abiding hatred of tyra
Almost since the begi
A
It suddenly occurred to A
The absence of such an inherent, elemental nucleus of the gift not only made the pristinely ungifted immune to magic, but since they could not interact with what to them did not exist, it also made them invisible to the power of the gift.
If even one parent possessed the pristinely ungifted trait, then it was always passed on to the offspring. These people had originally been banished to preserve the gift in mankind's nature. It had been a terrible solution, to be sure, but as a result the gift had survived in the human race. Had such a solution not been undertaken, magic would long ago have ceased to exist.
Because prophecy was magic, it too was blind to these people. No book of prophecy had ever had anything at all to say about the pristinely ungifted, or about the future of mankind and magic now that Richard had discovered these people and ended the banishment. What would happen now was completely unknown.
A
In all things in life, and in magic especially, there had to be balance. In a way, Richard's acts of free will were the balance to prophecy. He was the center of a vortex of forces. With Richard, prophecy was attempting to predict the unpredictable. And yet, it had to.