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roared out: “A woman? Where’s the Healer ? Teganne has deceived us!”
    Shapes like flat diamonds glinted and rose around her. She fought to focus her eyes, and soon realized a cadre of guards with raised spears surrounded the Ring. Her heart almost leapt into her skull.
    Gunjan launched himself over the guards’ heads, screeching, “She IS the Healer, she IS the Healer!” Even after the men reluctantly lowered their spears, their contemptuous expressions displayed their thoughts: A woman, a Tegannese Healer—a sorceress!
    Varene glared back, swimming in a sea of adrenaline fury. Flight wasn’t an option—she had no power to go back through the Ring. That left only fight, and she was alone and unarmed. She bit her tongue and took a shaky breath, struggling for control.
    A dubious guardsman poked his spear into her canvas sack of herbs and remedies. The liquid silverwort she’d carefully sealed in a pig’s bladder welled up through the slice.
    Lout! She pinned the guard with her gaze. “What manner of Kaddite idiot are you?”
    The beefy guard, clearly unwilling to accept impertinence from an infidel female, raised his palm to strike her. She kicked up, and the surprise in his eyes as he doubled over, wheezing and gripping his groin, was a momentary salve to her pride. Too late, she realized she’d worsened things. The next guard rushed her, cocking his fist.
    A man behind her boomed, “Halt, Liro!” Before she even had a chance to turn, she’d been pinioned horizontally under the boomer’s exceedingly large and hairy arm.
    “Let me go!” She twisted, struggling, but he strode into a broad hallway with her dangling beneath his tree-trunk arm like a child’s straw doll. Another guardsman swung her pack into his arms and a second followed, while the others stayed behind to guard the Ring.
    “Don’t shake that!” she yelled at the oaf with the pack.
    “Obey her order,” rumbled her captor.
    My order? Varene, pinned and staring down at the marble floors speeding past, choked back an ironic laugh.
    The hairy man’s arms clamped her ribs like a vise until she could barely breathe. Enough! Writhing like a snake, she managed to squirm from his grasp. She dove behind him to grab her pack, but the other guards scrambled to seize her, their big sandaled feet slip-sliding on the polished marble, arms flailing at the shrieking jencel as he swooped and clawed.
    When Varene turned and spied an astonished audience, she knew she stood before the court of the sultan. Her gaze swerved instinctively to the dais and the dominant stance of the dark-haired man upon it.
    The sultan whose tale of deathly illness had tugged her from her homeland wasn’t at his children’s bedsides, as Alvarr or Jilian or any caring parent would have been. He was holding court over a throne room full of lavishly dressed and bejeweled noblemen, as though nothing were wrong.
    “You!” she shouted at him, struggling to free herself from the guard’s relentless grip. “Is this how you treat the Healers you beg to come to your family’s aid? Call off your dogs!”
    A hush befell the room. Varene, still shaking in rage, took a harder look at the Great Sultan.
    Eyes as green as the merciless ocean stared down at her, and the onyx curl that strayed over his forehead in no way eased the force of his gaze. He’d set his mouth in a feral line that could have tipped toward kindness or to cruelty in a second. The vee of chest bared by his low kaftan displayed the powerful muscles of a soldier who understood the right of might. The snowy pearl dangling from his left ear only augmented the hardness of his expression.
    As her courage traitorously deserted her and she swallowed, his voice roared out like a thunderclap.
    “Leave me. All of you but her !”
    Gunjan, her unexpected ally against the guards, emitted a shivery cheep and soared away. One of the guards pushed her into the throne room. As one, the troop executed a deep bow and backed out of