The rain drummed without letup against the roof. Other than that, the dank husk of a house was dead quiet. Life seemed all the more fleeting in the abandoned home. The forsaken place gave Richard the chills.
“You saved my life, Nicci. I remember being afraid I was going to die. But you saved my life.” He touched his fingertips to her cheek. “Thank you. I wish there was a better way to say it, a better way to tell you how much I appreciate what you did, but I can’t think of any.”
Nicci’s small smile and simple nod told him that she grasped the depth of his sincerity.
Another thought struck him. “Do you mean to say that using Subtractive Magic caused some kind of…problem?”
“No, no, Richard.” Nicci squeezed his arms as if to allay his fears. “No, I don’t think that it caused any harm.”
“What do you mean, you don’t think it did?”
She hesitated a moment before explaining. “I’ve never done anything like that before. I’ve never even heard of it being done. Dear spirits, I didn’t even know that it could be done. As I’m sure you can imagine, using Subtractive Magic in such a way is risky, to put it mildly. Anything living touched by it would also be destroyed. I had to use the core of the arrow itself as a pathway into you. I was as careful as I could possibly be that I only eliminated the arrow…and the spent blood.”
Richard wondered what happened to things when Subtractive Magic was used—what would have happened to his blood—but his head was already spinning with the story and he most wanted her to get to the point.
“But between all that,” Nicci added, “between the massive loss of blood, the injury, the dire condition of not being able to get enough air, the stress you underwent while I used regular Additive Magic to heal you—to say nothing of the unknown element that Subtractive Magic added into the mix—you were going through an experience that can only be described as unpredictable. Such a terrible crisis can cause unexpected things to happen.”
Richard didn’t know what she was getting at. “What unexpected things?”
“There’s no telling. I had no choice but to use extreme methods. You were beyond what I thought were all limits. You have to try to understand that you were not yourself there for a while.”
Cara hooked a thumb behind her red leather belt. “Nicci is right, Lord Rahl. You weren’t yourself. You were fighting us. I had to hold you down just so she could help you.
“I’ve stood over men at the cusp of death. Strange things happen when they’re in that place. Believe me, you were there a long time into that first night.”
Richard knew very well what she meant when she said that she had stood over men on the cusp of death. The profession of Mord-Sith had been torture—at least it had been until he changed all that. He carried the Agiel of Denna, the Mord-Sith who had once stood over him in that ca
pacity. She had given him her Agiel as a solemn gift in gratitude for freeing her from the madness of her terrible duty…even though she had known that the price of that freedom was to be his sword through her heart.
Right then Richard felt a very long way from the peaceful woods where he’d grown up.
Nicci spread her hands as if imploring him to try harder to understand. “You were unconscious and then asleep for quite a time. I had to revive you enough to get you to drink water and a broth, but I needed you to stay in a deep sleep so that you could begin to recover your strength. I had to use a spell to keep you in that state. You’d lost a lot of blood; had I allowed you to awake too soon it would have sapped your tenuous strength and you still could have slipped away from us.”
Died, that was what she meant. He could have died. Richard took a deep breath. He’d had no idea of everything that had gone on over the last three days. He basically recalled the battle and then waking when he heard the wolf howl.
“Nicci,” he said, trying to show her that he could be calm and understanding even though he felt neither, “what does this have to do with Kahlan?”
Her features were set in an uneasy mix of empathy and disquiet. “Richard, this woman, Kahlan, is just a product of your mind when you were in that confused state of shock and delirium before I could heal you.”
“Nicci, I wasn’t imagining—”
“You were at the brink of death,” she said as she held up a hand, commanding silence and for him to listen. “In your mind you were grasping for someone to help you—someone like this person, Kahlan. Please believe me when I say that it’s understandable. But you’re awake now and must face the truth. She was figment born of your dire condition.”
Richard was dumbfounded to hear her even suggesting such a thing. He turned to Cara, imploring her to come to her senses, if not his rescue. “How could you possibly think such a thing? How could you believe it?”
“Haven’t you ever had a dream where you were terrified and then your long-dead mother was there, alive, and she was going to help you?” Cara’s unblinking blue eyes seemed focused elsewhere. “Don’t you remember waking after such dreams and feeling sure that it had been real, that your mother was alive again, really alive, and that she was going to help you?
Don’t you remember how much you wanted to cling to that feeling? Don’t you remember how desperately you wanted it to be real?”
Nicci lightly touched the place where the arrow had been, where his flesh was now whole. “After I’d healed you to the point that you were past the worst of the crisis, you went into a long dreaming state of sleep. You carried these desperate illusions forward with you. You dreamed about them, added to them, lived with them longer than any ordinary sleep. This prolonged dream, this comforting illusion, this divine longing, had time to seep into every corner of your thoughts, saturate every part of your mind, and became real to you, just as Cara says, but, because of the length of time you were asleep, it gained even more power. Now that you’ve only just come awake from that protracted sleep you are merely having a little trouble filtering out what part of your ordeal was a dream and what was real.”
“Nicci is right, Lord Rahl.” Richard couldn’t remember Cara ever looking so dead serious. “You just dreamed it—like you dreamed that you heard a wolf howl. It sounds like a nice dream—this woman you dreamed you married—but that’s all it is: a dream.”
Richard’s mind reeled. The concept of Kahlan being nothing more than a dream, a figment of his imagination born in his delirium, was, at its core, terrifying. That terror stormed unchecked through him. If what they were saying was true, then he didn’t want to be awake. If it was true, then he wished that Nicci had never healed him. He didn’t want to live in a world where Kahlan wasn’t real.
He groped for solid ground in a sea of dark disorder, too stunned to think of a way to fight such a shapeless threat. He felt confused by his ordeal and that he didn’t remember much of it. His certainty in what he regarded as truth began to crumble.
He caught himself. He knew better than to believe a fear and thus give it life. While he could not fathom how they’d latched on to such a monstrous idea, he knew that Kahlan wasn’t a dream.
“After all that you’ve both shared with her, how can you two possibly say that Kahlan is just a dream?”
“How indeed,” Nicci asked, “if what you’re saying were true?”
“Lord Rahl, we would never be so cruel as to try to deceive you about something so important to you.”
Richard blinked at them. Could it be? He frantically tried to imagine if there was any possibility that what they were saying could be true.
His fists tightened. “Stop it—both of you!”
It was a plea for a return of sanity. He hadn’t meant for it to come out as threatening, but it did. Nicci took half a step back. Cara’s face lost a little of its color.
Richard couldn’t slow his breathing, his racing heart.
“I don’t remember my dreams.” He looked at each of them in turn. “Not since I was little. I don’t remember any dreams while I was hurt, or while I slept. None. Dreams are meaningless. Kahlan is not. Don’t do this to me—please. This isn’t helping anything, it’s only making it worse. Please, if something has happened to Kahlan, I need to know.”
That had to be it. Something had happened to her and they just didn’t think he was strong enough yet to handle the news.
A worse fear by far welled up when he recalled Nicci saying that she couldn’t raise the dead. Could they be trying to shield him from that?
He gritted his teeth with the effort not to scream at them, to keep his voice level and in control. “Where is Kahlan?”
Nicci cautiously dipped her head, as if beseeching his forgiveness. “Richard, she is just in your mind. I know that such things can seem very real, but it’s not. You dreamed her up while you were hurt…nothing more.”
“I did not dream up Kahlan.” He again turned his plea to the Mord-Sith. “Cara, you’ve been with us for more than two years. You’ve fought with us, fought for us. Back when Nicci was a Sister of the Dark and she brought me down here to the Old World, you stood in for me and protected Kahlan. She has protected you. You’ve shared and endured things that most people could never even imagine. You’ve become friends.”
He gestured to her Agiel, the weapon that looked like nothing more than a short, thin red leather rod hanging by a thin gold chain from her right wrist.
“You even named Kahlan a sister of the Agiel.”
Cara stood stiff and mute.
Cara’s conferring on Kahlan the title of sister of the Agiel had been an informal but deeply solemn accolade from a former mortal enemy to a woman she had come to respect and trust.
“Cara, you may have started out as a protector to the Lord Rahl, but you’ve become more than that to Kahlan and me. You’ve become like family.”
Cara would willingly and without hesitation sacrifice her life to protect Richard. She was not only ruthless but fearless in her defense of him.
The one thing Cara did fear was disappointing him.
That fear was clearly evident in her eyes.
“Thank you, Lord Rahl,” she finally said in a meek voice, “for including me in your wonderful dream.”
Richard’s flesh prickled as a wave of cold dread washed up through him. Overwhelmed, he pressed his hand to his forehead, pushing back his hair. These two women were not inventing some story for fear of telling him bad news. They were telling him the truth.
The truth as they saw it, anyway. The truth somehow twisted into a nightmare.
He couldn’t make any of it work in his mind, couldn’t make any sense of it. After all they had shared with Kahlan, all they had been through with her, all their time together, it was impossible for him to understand how these two women could be saying this to him.
And yet, they were.
Although he couldn’t conceive of the cause, something was obviously and dreadfully wrong. A suffocating sense of foreboding settled over him. It felt as if the whole world had been turned upside down and now he couldn’t make the pieces fit back together.
He had to do something—what he had been about to do just before the soldiers had attacked them. Maybe it wasn’t too late.
Richard knelt beside his bedroll and started jamming clothes into his pack. The cold drizzle he could see through the small window didn’t look like it would be ending anytime soon, so he left his cloak out.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Nicci asked.
He spotted a cake of soap lying nearby and snatched it up. “What does it look like I’m doing?”
He had already lost far too much time; he’d lost days. There was no time to waste. He shoved the cake of soap, packets of dried herbs and spices, and a pouch of dried apricots down into the pack before quickly furling his bedroll. Cara abandoned questioning or objecting and instead set about packing her own things.
“That’s not what I mean and you know it.” Nicci squatted down beside him and took hold of his arm, pulling him around to look at her. “Richard, you can’t leave. You need to rest. I told you, you lost a lot of blood. You aren’t strong enough yet to go running off chasing phantoms.”
He stifled an indignant reply and yanked tight a leather thong around his bedroll. “I feel fine.” He didn’t, of course, but he felt good enough.
Nicci had just spent days of intense effort saving his life. Besides being worried for him, she was exhausted and probably wasn’t thinking clearly. All of those things likely contributed to her believing he was acting irresponsibly.
Still, he bristled that she didn’t give him more credit.
Nicci insistently gripped a fistful of his shirt as he cinched the second thong tight. “You don’t yet realize how weak you really are, Richard. You’re jeopardizing your life. You need to rest in order for your body to be able to recover. You haven’t had nearly enough time to build your strength.”
“And how much time does Kahlan have?” He seized Nicci’s upper arm and in heated frustration pulled her close. “She’s out there, somewhere, in trouble. You don’t realize it, Cara doesn’t realize it, but I do. Do you think
I can just lie around here when the person I love more than anything in the world is in peril?
“If it were you in trouble, Nicci, would you wish me to so easily give up on you? Wouldn’t you want me to try? I don’t know what’s gone wrong, but something has. If I’m right—and I am—then I can’t even begin to guess at the implications or imagine the consequences.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if you’re right then I’m just imagining things out of my dreams. But if I’m right—and since it’s pretty obvious that you and Cara can’t both be sharing the same mental disorder—that would have to mean that whatever is happening has a cause that isn’t benevolent. I can’t afford to delay and risk everything while I try to convince you of the seriousness of the situation. Too much time has already been lost. Too much is at stake.”
Nicci looked too startled by the notion to speak. Richard released her and turned back to fasten down the flap on his pack. He didn’t have the time to try to solve the puzzle of whatever was going on with Nicci and Cara.
Nicci finally found her voice. “Richard, don’t you see what you’re doing? You’re beginning to invent absurd notions in order to justify what you want to believe. You said it yourself—Cara and I can’t both be sharing the same disorder of the mind. Stay and rest. We can try to discover the nature of this dream that has taken such strong root in your mind and hopefully set it right. I probably caused it with something I did when I was trying to heal you. If so, I’m sorry. Please, Richard, stay for now.”
She was focused only on what she saw as the problem. Zedd, his grandfather, the man who had helped raise him, had often said as Richard was growing up,
Don’t think of the problem, think of the solution.
The solution he needed to concentrate on, now, was how to find Kahlan before it was too late. He wished he had Zedd’s help to find the solution to where she was.
“You aren’t out of serious danger yet,” Nicci insisted as she dodged drips of rainwater trickling through holes in the roof. “Pushing yourself too hard could be fatal.”
“I understand—I really do.” Richard checked the knife he wore at his belt and then slipped it back into its sheath. “I don’t intend to ignore your advice. I’ll take it as easy as I can.”
“Richard, listen to me,” Nicci said, rubbing her fingers against her temple as if her head was aching, “it’s more than that alone.”
She paused to run her hand back over her hair as she searched for the words. “You aren’t invincible. You may carry that sword, but it can’t always protect you. Your ancestors, every Lord Rahl before you, despite their mastery of the gift, still kept bodyguards close at hand. You may have been born with the gift but even if you were competent in its use such power is no assurance of protection—
especially
not now.
“That arrow only served to show how vulnerable you really are. You may be an important man, Richard, but you are just a man. We all need you. We all so desperately need you.”
Richard looked away from the anguish in Nicci’s blue eyes. He knew very well how vulnerable he was. Life was his highest value; he didn’t take it for granted. He almost never objected to Cara being close at hand. She and the rest of the Mord-Sith as well as other bodyguards he seemed to have inherited had proven their worth more than once. But that didn’t mean that he was helpless or that he could allow caution to prevent him from doing what was necessary.
More than that, though, he grasped Nicci’s larger meaning. He had learned while at the Palace of the Prophets that the Sisters of the Light believed that he was deeply enmeshed in ancient prophecy—that he was a central figure around whom events revolved.
According to the Sisters, if their side was to prevail over the dark forces arrayed against them, it would only be if Richard led them to victory. Prophecy said that without him all would be lost. Their prelate, Annalina, had spent a great deal of her life manipulating events to make sure that he survived to grow up and lead them in this war. Ann’s hopes for everything they held dear, to hear her tell it, rested on his shoulders. At least Kahlan had thankfully taken the fire out of Ann in that regard. He knew, though, that many others still held the same view. He knew, too, that his leadership had galvanized a great many people who longed to simply live free.
Richard had been down in the vaults at the Palace of the Prophets and had seen some of the most important and well-guarded books of prophecy in existence. He had to admit that some of it was pretty uncanny. Nevertheless, his experience had been that prophecy seemed to say whatever it was people wanted it to say.
He had personal experience with prophecy involving Kahlan and himself, especially those prophecies of Shota, the witch woman. As far as he
was concerned, prophecy had proven itself to be of little value and great trouble.
Richard forced a smile. “Nicci, you’re sounding like a Sister of the Light.” She didn’t look to be amused. “Cara will be with me,” he said, trying to ease her mind.
He realized, after he’d said it, that having Cara with him hadn’t stopped the arrow that had taken him down. Come to think of it, where had she been during the battle? He didn’t remember her being there with him. Cara didn’t fear a fight; a team of horses couldn’t drag her away from protecting him. Surely, she must have been close beside him, but he just didn’t recall seeing her.
He picked up his big leather over-belt and fastened it around his waist. He had gotten the belt and other parts of the outfit, which had once belonged to a great wizard, from the Wizard’s Keep, where Zedd now stood guard, protecting the Keep from Emperor Jagang and his horde from the Old World.
Nicci heaved an impatient sigh—a glimpse of a stern and implacable side of her that Richard knew all too well. He knew, though, that this time it was powered by sincere concern for his well-being.
“Richard, we simply can’t afford this distraction. There are important things we need to talk about. That’s why I was coming to you in the first place. Didn’t you get the letter I sent?”
Richard paused. Letter…letter…“Yes,” he said, at last remembering. “I did get your letter. I sent word to you—with a soldier Kahlan had touched with her power.”
Richard caught Cara’s brief glance up at Nicci—a surprised look that said that she didn’t recall any such thing.
Nicci appraised him with an unreadable look. “The word you sent never found me.”
Somewhat surprised, Richard gestured toward the New World. “His primary mission was to go north and assassinate Emperor Jagang. He was touched by a Confessor’s power; he would die before ever abandoning her command. If he couldn’t find you, he would have gone after Jagang. I suppose it’s also possible that something happened to him first. There are perils enough in the Old World.”
The look on Nicci’s face made him feel like he had just offered her
further evidence that he was losing his mind. “Do you honestly think, even in your wildest imaginings, that the dream walker can be so easily eliminated?”
“No, of course not.” He pushed the bulge of a cooking pot in his pack back into place. “We expected that the soldier would probably be killed in the attempt. We sent him after Jagang because he was a murdering thug and deserved to die. But I also thought that there was a possibility that he might succeed. Even if he didn’t, I wanted Jagang to at least lose some sleep knowing that any of his men could be assassins.”
He could see by Nicci’s too-calm expression that she thought that this, too, was no more than part of his elaborate delusion about a woman he had dreamed.
Richard recalled, then, what else had happened. “Nicci, I’m afraid that shortly after Sabar delivered your letter we were attacked. He died in that fight.”
A furtive glance to Cara brought a nod in confirmation.
“Dear spirits,” Nicci said in sorrow at hearing the news about young Sabar. Richard shared her sentiment.
He remembered Nicci’s urgent warning in the letter about how Jagang had started to create weapons out of gifted people, as had been done three thousand years before in the great war. It was a frightening development that had been thought impossible, but Jagang had discovered a way to accomplish the task by using the Sisters of the Dark he held captive.
During the attack on their camp, Nicci’s letter had been knocked into the fire. Richard hadn’t had the chance to read the whole letter before it had been destroyed. He’d read enough, though, to understand the danger.
When he made for the table, where his sword lay, Nicci stepped in front of him. “Richard, I know it’s hard, but you have to put this dream business behind you. We don’t have time for it. We need to talk. If you got my letter, then at least you know that you can’t—”
“Nicci,” Richard said, silencing her, “I must do this.” He laid a hand on her shoulder and spoke as patiently as he could, considering his sense of urgency, but by his tone let her know that he was not going to discuss it further. “If you come with us then we can talk later, when there is time and it doesn’t interfere with what I need to do, but right now I don’t have the time and neither does Kahlan.”
Pressing the back of his hand against the side of her shoulder, Richard moved her aside and strode to the table.
As he lifted his sword by its polished scabbard, he briefly wondered why, when he had heard the wolf howl and he woke up, he’d thought the sword had been lying on the ground beside him. Maybe he had remembered a fragment of a dream. Impatient to get going, he dismissed it.
He slipped the ancient tooled-leather baldric over his head and quickly adjusted the scabbard at his left hip, making sure it was securely fastened. With two fingers he lifted the sword by the downswept crossguard, not only to be sure that it was clear in its sheath, but to check that the blade was sound. He couldn’t remember everything that had happened in the fight and he didn’t recall putting the sword away himself.
The polished steel gleamed through a film of dried blood.
Fragmented memories of the battle flashed through his mind. It had been sudden and unexpected, but once he had pulled the sword free in anger, unexpected no longer mattered. Being so heavily outnumbered, though, had mattered. He understood all too well that Nicci was right about him not being invincible.
Not long after he’d met Kahlan, Zedd, in his capacity as First Wizard, had named Richard to the post of Seeker and had given him the sword. Richard had hated the weapon because of what he mistakenly thought it represented. Zedd told him that the Sword of Truth—as it was named—was but a tool and that it was the intent of the individual wielding a sword that gave it meaning. That had never been so true as it was with this particular weapon.
The sword was now bonded to Richard, bonded to his intent, driven by his purpose. From the beginning, his intent and purpose had been to protect those he loved and cared about. To do that, he had come to realize that he had to help shape a world in which they could live in safety and peace.
It was that intent that gave the sword meaning for him.
The steel hissed as he slid it back into its scabbard.
His intent now was to find Kahlan. If the sword could help him accomplish that goal then he would not hesitate to put it to use.
He hoisted his pack and swung it around, settling it onto its familiar place on his back as he scanned the nearly barren room for any of his things he might have missed. On the floor beside the hearth he saw dried
meat and travel biscuits. Beside them lay other bundled foodstuffs. Richard’s and Cara’s simple wooden bowls were there as well, one with broth and the other holding the remnants of porridge.
“Cara,” he said as he swept up three waterskins and hung their straps around his neck, “be sure to get all the food that can travel and bring it along. Don’t forget the bowls.”
Cara nodded. She packed methodically, now that she realized he had no intention of leaving her behind.
Nicci caught his sleeve. “Richard, I mean it, we have to talk. It’s important.”
“Then do as I asked; get your things and come with me.” He snatched up his bow and quiver. “You can talk all you want as long as you don’t hold me up.”
With a nod of resignation, Nicci finally abandoned her arguments and rushed to the back room to gather her own things. Far from minding having Nicci along, Richard wanted her help; her gift might be useful in finding Kahlan. In fact, finding Nicci so she could help him had been his intention when he first awoke before the attack and realized that Kahlan was missing.