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?"

"Ann, it's me, Jennsen," came the muffled voice from the other side of the door.

Ann replaced the stylus and tucked the journey book in her belt as she slid her chair back. She smoothed her skirts and took a deep breath to try to slow her heart back to normal.

"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?"

Jennsen shook her head. "No, thank you." Her face, framed by red ringlets, was a picture of concern. "Ann, Nathan sent me. He wants you. He was quite urgent about it. You know how Nathan gets. You know how his eyes get all big and round when he's excited about something."

"Yes," Ann drawled, "he does tend to get that way when he's digging up mischief."

Jennsen blinked, looking a little startled. "I fear you may be right, he told me in no uncertain terms to come get you and bring you there straightaway."

"Nathan always expects people to squeak when he pinches." Ann gestured for the young woman to lead the way. "I guess I'd best see to it. Where is the prophet, then?"

Jennsen held her lantern up to light her way as she started out of the little room. "He's at a graveyard."

Ann caught the sleeve of Jennsen's dress. "A graveyard? And he wants me to come to this graveyard?" Jennsen looked back over her shoulder and nodded. "What is he doing in a graveyard?"

Jennsen swallowed. "When I asked him that, he said he was digging up the dead."

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 Ann's ear could be quite lovely, but in the dead-still quiet of night, such piercing whistles, chatters, and whoops were jarring to her nerves. She could hear another mockingbird in the distance making similar threats. Even the birds couldn't achieve peace.

Plowing through the long, wild grasses, Jennsen pointed as she held the lantern up with her other hand so that Ann could see her way. "Tom said that we would find him down there."

Sweating from the long hike, Ann peered down into the darkness. She couldn't imagine what the prophet was up to. In all the time that she had known the man he had never done such a strange thing. He had done any number of strange things, to be sure, but this just wasn't one of them. As old as he was, one would think that he would want to avoid spending time in a graveyard any sooner than he had to.

Ann followed Richard's younger sister as she started down the hill, trying to keep up without running. It seemed like they had already walked half the night and she was winded. Ann hadn't known of this graveyard, all but forgotten out in a distant, uninhabited expanse of wilderness. She wished that she had thought to bring along some of the food sitting on the plate back in her room.

"Are you sure Tom is still down here?"

Jennsen looked back over her shoulder. "He should be. Nathan wanted him to stand guard."

"For what? To fight off the other body snatchers?"

"I don't know, maybe," Jennsen said without so much as a hint of a giggle.

Ann wasn't very good at making people laugh. She was good at making their knees tremble, but she just wasn't all that good at jokes. She guessed that a graveyard on a dark night wasn't a good place for jokes. It certainly was a good place to make the knees tremble.

"Maybe Nathan just wanted company," Ann suggested.

"I don't think that was it." Jennsen found a fallen section in the split-rail fence that surrounded the place of the dead and stepped over it. "Nathan asked me to bring you out here and he wanted Tom to stay and stand guard over the graveyard, I think to make sure there was no one around that he didn't know about."

Nathan liked being in charge; Ann guessed that being a gifted Rahl he could do no less. It was always possible that the whole thing was a pretense just to get Jennsen, Tom, and Ann to run around doing his bidding. The prophet was given to a sense of drama and a graveyard did tend to set a mood.

Actually, right then, Ann would have been happy were it nothing more than some idiosyncratic diversion of Nathan's. Unfortunately, she had the queazy feeling that it was something not at all so simple, or so innocuous as a bit of theatrics.

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 tyranny and an almost childlike glee about life. No matter how exasperating the man could be at times, and he could be exasperating in the extreme, Nathan had a good heart.

Almost since the beginning, despite the circumstances, he had been Ann's confidant and ally against the Keeper getting a foothold in the world of life and against evil people having their way over the innocent. He had worked hard to help stop Jagang. He had, after all, been the one to first show her a prophecy about Richard, five hundred years before he would be born.

Ann found herself wishing that it wasn't dark, and that they weren't in a graveyard. And that Jennsen didn't have such long legs.

It suddenly occurred to Ann why Nathan would need Tom to stand guard and "make sure no one was around that they didn't know about," as Jennsen had put it. Just like Jennsen, the people in Bandakar were pristinely ungifted. They were devoid of that infinitesimal spark of the Creator's gift carried by everyone else in the world. That essential connection made everyone else subject to the reality and nature of magic. But for these people magic did not exist.

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.

Ann supposed that Richard would have it no other way. He did not exactly enthusiastically embrace prophecy. Despite what prophecy had to say about him, Richard by and large discounted it. He believed in free will. He took a dim view of the notion that there were things about himself that were predestined.

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.