"The rules of the game."

He was not intimidated by her knowledge, nor particularly startled--but then again he had always been fairly good at keeping his cool under most kinds of pressure.

"If you do in fact care about balance, then you know this has to be a fair fight. There is something our side has not yet been told." A brief, mirthless smile tugged at his lips but died before it could reach his eyes. "The endgame is for us to decipher. But we're at the beginning now, and unless we have some sort of message, the scales remain unbalanced."