Cara hadn't understood what Nicci had meant.

"All for nothing," Nicci mumbled to herself.

Everything was lost. All the work had been for nothing. All that Nicci had accomplished had unraveled, melting away in a dark shadow's echoing laughter. All the studying, the piecing together, the monumental effort to finally understand how it all actually functioned, the work to invoke such power, to control it, to direct it-all of it had been in vain.

It had been one of the most difficult things she had ever done . . . and now it was all in ashes.

Cara dunked a cloth in a basin of water on a side table. Water ran back as she wrung the cloth. The sound of each drop falling back into the basin was pronounced, penetrating, painful.

Rather than a blur of shapes and shadows, as it had been when she'd first awakened, now everything had focused into raw sharpness. Colors seemed blindingly bright, sounds strident. The dozen candles in the nearby stand shone like twelve little suns.

Cara pressed the damp cloth to Nicci's forehead. The red color of the Mord-Sith's leather outfit hurt Nicci's eyes, so she closed them. The cloth felt like a thorned hedge being pressed against her tender flesh.

"There is other trouble," Cara said in a quiet, confidential voice.

Nicci opened her eyes. "Other trouble?"

Cara nodded as she blotted the cloth on the sides of Nicci's neck.

"Trouble with the Keep."

Nicci glanced past the foot of her bed to the heavy dark blue and gold drapes over the narrow window. The drapes were drawn closed, but there was no light at all leaking in, so she realized that it had to be nighttime.

As she looked back at Cara, Nicci frowned even though doing so hurt. "What do you mean, trouble with the Keep? What sort of trouble?"

Cara opened her mouth to speak, but then turned at the sound of a commotion coming from behind her across the room.

Zedd swooped into the room without knocking, his elbows pumping up and out to the sides in time with each long stride, his simple robes billowing behind him as if he were the king of the place come to see to kingly business. Nicci supposed that, in a way, he was.

"Is she awake?" he demanded of Cara before he had even arrived at the bedside. His wavy white hair seemed especially disheveled.

"I'm awake," Nicci answered for herself.

Zedd came to an abrupt halt, looming over her. He leaned down, scowling, having a look for himself as if not trusting her word for it.

He pressed the tips of his long, bony fingers to her forehead. "Your fever has broken," he announced.

"I had a fever?"

"Of a sort."

"What do you mean, of a sort? A fever is a fever."

"Not always. The fever you had was induced by the exertion of forces, rather than by illness. In this case, to be precise, your own forces. The fever was your body's reaction to the stress of it. Rather like the way a piece of metal gets hot when you bend it back and forth."

Nicci pushed herself up on her elbows. "You mean I had a fever caused by what Six did to me?"

Zedd straightened his robes on his angular shoulders. "In a way. The stress of exerting force against all that witchery she was doing threw your body into a feverish condition."

Nicci looked from one to the other. "Why weren't you affected? Or Cara?"

Zedd impatiently tapped his temple. "Because I was smart enough to cast a web. It protected Cara and me, but you were too far away. At that distance its protective properties weren't adequate to keep you from harm, but I dared not try any harder. Even though it wasn't enough to protect you from all harm, it was enough to at least save your life."

"Your spell protected me?"

Zedd shook a finger at her as if she had misbehaved. "You certainly weren't doing anything to defend yourself."

Nicci blinked in surprise. "Zedd, I was trying. I don't think I've ever tried harder to use my Han. I tried with all my strength to cast my power-I swear. It just wouldn't work."

"Of course not." He threw his arms up in exasperation. "That was your problem."

"What was my problem?"

"You were trying too hard!"

Nicci sat up the rest of the way. The world suddenly started spinning. She had to put a hand over her eyes. The spinning was making her sick to her stomach.

"What are you talking about?" She lifted her hand just enough to squint up at him in the candlelight. "What do you mean I was trying too hard?"

She thought she might throw up. As if annoyed by the distraction, Zedd pushed his sleeves up his arms and then reached out, pressing a finger of each hand to the opposite sides of her forehead. Nicci recognized the tingling sensation of Additive Magic crawling under her skin. It felt a little odd to her not to feel any of the Subtractive side as an element of his power, but he had no Subtractive Magic.

The sick feeling lifted.

"Better?" he asked in a tone that suggested he thought it had all been her own fault.

Nicci turned her head this way and that, stretching the muscles of her neck, testing her equilibrium. She tried to feel the nausea, fearing it would well up suddenly, but it didn't.

"Yes, I guess I am."

Zedd smiled at the small triumph. "Good."

"What do you mean I was trying too hard?"

"You can't fight a witch woman the way you were trying to do it- especially not a witch woman as powerful as that one. You were pushing too hard."

"Pushing too hard?" She felt as uncomfortable as she had as a novice when she'd been unable to grasp a lesson being taught by an impatient Sister. "What do you mean?"

Zedd gestured vaguely. "When you use your force to try to push against what she's doing, she simply turns it back around on you. You can't reach her with your power because the force you use hasn't yet established a foundational link between the two of you, between principal and object; it's still in its free-floating, formative stage."

Nicci understood what he was saying, in theory, she just didn't know if it fit in this case.

"Are you trying to say that it's like lightning needing to find a tree, or something tall, to anchor its connection to the ground so it can ignite? That if there is no place within range to link to, it simply jumps back and ignites within the cloud? Turns in on itself?"

"I never thought of it in those terms, but I guess you could say that it's something like that. You might say that your power turned back in on you, like lightning turns back within a cloud when it isn't able to make it to ground. A witch woman is one of the few people who instinctively understands the precise nature of the exertion of force, the intricacies of its needs for connections, and the ways in which specific spells link at both ends."

"You mean she knows how lightning works," Cara said, "and she pulled the rug out from under Nicci."

Zedd shot the woman a dumbfounded look. "You really don't know anything about magic, do you? Or about a mixed-up token turn of a phrase."

Cara's expression darkened. "If I pull that rug out from under you, I think you'll understand it well enough."

Zedd rolled his eyes. "Well, it's an oversimplification, but I guess you could put it that way. . . . Sort of," he added under his breath.

Nicci wasn't really listening; her mind was elsewhere. She remembered that she herself had done something involving those same relationships of power and connections when the beast had been attacking Richard in the shielded part of the Keep. She had created a linking node but denied that link the power to complete it. That expectancy, without being fulfilled, drew the nearest power-lightning-to the beast, eliminating it for the moment. Because the beast was not really alive, though, it couldn't actually be destroyed, in much the same way a corpse, because it was already dead, couldn't be killed, or made any more dead.