“As we were.” Victor folded his muscular arms in obvious discontent. “We never expected there would be any soldiers out here in these woods. We were sleeping like babies. If you hadn’t been here and intercepted them, they would have soon snuck up on us where we slept. Then we’d likely be the ones feeding the flies and ravens, instead of them.”
Everyone fell silent as they considered the might-have-been.
“Have you been hearing any news of supplies moving north?” Richard asked.
“Sure,” Victor said. “There’s a lot of talk about large quantities of goods going north. Some convoys are accompanied by new troops being sent to the war. What you say about these men scouting for such a convoy makes sense.”
Richard squatted down and pointed. “See these tracks? These are a little more recent than the battle. It was a large contingent—most likely more soldiers who came looking for these dead men. This was as far as they came. These side ridges in the prints show where they turned around, here. It looks like they came in, spotted the dead soldiers, and left. You can see by their tracks as they left that they were in a hurry.”
Richard stood and rested his left hand on the pommel of his sword. “Had you not taken me away right after the battle, these soldiers would have been on us. Fortunately they went back rather than search the woods.”
“Why do you suppose that they would do that?” Victor asked. “Why would they see these men freshly killed and then leave?”
“They probably feared that a large force was lying in wait, so they rushed back to raise an alarm and insure that the supply column was well protected. Since they didn’t even take the time to bury their fellow soldiers, I’d guess that their most urgent concern was getting their convoy out of the area.”
Victor scowled at the tracks and then back in the direction of the dead
soldiers. “Well,” he said as he ran his hand back over his head, wiping away beads of water, “at least we can take advantage of the situation. While Jagang is preoccupied with the war that gives us time down here to work to knock support for the Order’s rule right out from under them.”
Richard shook his head. “Jagang may be preoccupied with the war, but that won’t stop him from moving to restore his authority back here. If there’s one thing we’ve learned about the dream walker, it’s that he’s methodical about annihilating any and all opposition.”
“Richard is right,” Nicci said. “It’s a dangerous error to dismiss Jagang as a mere brute. While he is indeed brutal, he is also a highly intelligent individual and a brilliant tactician. He’s had a lot of experience over the years. It’s nearly impossible to goad him into acting impulsively. He can be bold—when he has good reason to believe boldness will win the day—but he’s more given to calculated campaigns. He acts out of firm convictions, not bruised pride. He’s content to let you think you’ve won—to let you think whatever you want, for that matter—while he methodically plans how he will gut you. His patience is his most deadly quality.
“When he attacks, he is indifferent to how many casualties his army takes, as long as he knows he will have more than enough men left to win. But over the course of his career—until his campaign to take the New World, anyway—he’s tended to experience far fewer casualties than his enemies. That’s because he holds no favor with naive notions of classic battle, of troops clashing on a field of honor. His way is usually to attack with such overwhelming numbers as to grind to dust the bones of his opposition.
“What his horde does to the vanquished is legend. For those in their path, the terror of the wait is unbearable. No sane person would want to be left alive to be captured by Jagang’s men.
“For that reason, many welcome him with open arms, with blessings for their liberation, with supplications to be allowed to convert and join the Order.”
The only sound under the embracing shelter of the trees was the gentle patter of the light rain. Victor did not doubt her word; she had been witness to such events.
At times, the knowledge that she had been a part of that perverted cause, that she had been a party to irrational beliefs that reduced men to nothing more than savages, made Nicci long for death. Certainly she de
served no less. But she was now in the unique position of having the opportunity and ability to help reverse the success of the Order. Setting matters right had become the cause that now drove her, sustained her, gave her purpose.
“It’s only a matter of time before Jagang moves to retake Altur’Rang,” Richard said into the silence.
Victor nodded. “Yes, if Jagang thought the revolution was confined to Altur’Rang then he would logically put all his efforts into taking back the city and being as ruthless about it as Nicci says, but we’re making sure that doesn’t happen.” He showed Richard a grim smile. “We’re lighting fires in cities and towns wherever we can, wherever people are ready to cast off their chains. We’re pumping the bellows and spreading the flames of rebellion and freedom far and wide so that Jagang can’t confine and crush it.”
“Don’t fool yourself,” Richard said. “Altur’Rang is his home city. It’s where the revolt against the Order began. A popular uprising in the very city where Jagang was building his grand palace undermines everything the Imperial Order teaches. It was to be the city, the palace, from where Jagang and the high priests of the Fellowship of Order were for all time to rule over mankind in the name of the Creator. The people destroyed that palace and instead embraced freedom.
“Jagang will not allow such subversion of his authority to stand. He must crush the rebellion there if the Order is to survive to rule the Old World—and the New. It will be a matter of principled belief for him; he considers opposition to the ways of the Fellowship of Order to be blasphemy against the Creator. He will not be shy about throwing his most brutal and experienced soldiers into the task. He will want to make a bloody example of you. I’d expect such an attack sooner rather than later.”
Victor looked unsettled but not entirely surprised.
“And don’t forget,” Nicci added, “the Brothers of the Fellowship of Order who escaped will be among those working to help to reestablish the Order’s authority. Such gifted men are no ordinary foe. We’ve hardly begun to root them out.”
“All true enough, but you can’t work iron to your will until you get it good and hot.” Victor tightened a defiant fist before them. “At least we’ve begun to do what must be done.”
Nicci conceded that much with a nod and a small smile to soften the
dark picture she had helped paint. She knew that Victor was right, that the task had to begin somewhere and at some point. He had already helped ring the hammer of freedom for a people who had all but given up hope. She just didn’t want him to lose sight of the reality of the difficulty that lay ahead.
Nicci would have been relieved to hear Richard dealing logically with the important matters at hand, but she knew better. When Richard locked on to something vital to him, he might address peripheral issues when necessary but it would be a grave mistake to think that it diminished in the least his focus on his objective. In fact, he had delivered his warnings to Victor in swift summary—a mere matter to be gotten out of the way. She could see in his eyes that he was preoccupied with matters of far more importance to him.
Richard finally turned his riveting gray eyes on Nicci.
“You weren’t with Victor and his men?”
In a sudden flash of comprehension, Nicci realized why the matter of the soldiers and their supply convoy was important to him: It was a mere element of a greater equation. He was trying to unravel how and if the convoy figured into the illusion he still clung to. It was that calculation he was working to resolve.
“No,” Nicci said. “We’d had no word and didn’t know what had happened to you. In my absence, Victor left to begin searching for you. Not long after, I returned to Altur’Rang. I found out where Victor had gone and set out to join him. I was still some distance behind at the end of my second day of travel, so the third day I started out before dawn, hoping to catch up with him. I’d been traveling for almost two hours when I arrived nearby and heard the battle. I reached the fighting right at the end.”
Richard nodded thoughtfully. “I woke and Kahlan was gone. Since we were close to Altur’Rang, my first thought was that if I could find you, then maybe you could help me find Kahlan. That’s when I heard the soldiers coming through the woods.”
Richard gestured up a rise. “I heard them coming through those trees, there. I had darkness on my side. They hadn’t seen me yet, so I was able to surprise them.”
“Why didn’t you hide?” Victor asked.
“More were coming down from that way, and others were coming in from that direction. I didn’t know how many there were, but the way they
were fanned out suggested to me that they were searching the woods. That made hiding risky. As long as there was any possibility that Kahlan might be close and maybe hurt, I couldn’t run. If I hid and waited until the soldiers had a chance to find me then I would lose the element of surprise. Worse yet, dawn was approaching. Darkness and surprise worked to my advantage. With Kahlan missing I didn’t have a moment to lose. If they had her, I had to stop them.”
No one commented.
Richard turned to Cara, next. “And where were you?”
Cara blinked in surprise. She had to think a moment before she could answer. “I…I’m not exactly sure.”
Richard frowned. “You’re not sure? What do you remember?”
“I was on watch. I was checking some distance out from our camp. I guess something must have aroused my concern and so I was making sure the area was clear. I caught a whiff of smoke and was starting to investigate that when I heard battle cries.”
“So you rushed back?”
Cara idly pulled her braid forward over her shoulder. She looked to be having difficulty remembering clearly. “No…” She frowned in recollection. “No, I knew what was happening—that you were being attacked—because I heard the clash of steel and men dying. I had only just realized that it was Victor and his men camped off in that direction, that it was the smoke from their campfire I smelled. I knew that I was much closer to them than you, so I thought that the smartest thing to do would be to rouse them and bring their help with me.”
“That makes sense,” Richard said. He wearily wiped beads of rain from his face.
“That’s right,” Victor said. “Cara was right there close when I heard the clash of steel as well. I remember because I was lying awake in the quiet.”
Richard’s brow drew together. He looked up. “You were awake?”
“Yes. The howl of a wolf woke me.”
With sudden intensity Richard leaned in a little toward the blacksmith. “You heard wolves howl?”
“No,” Victor said as he frowned in recollection, “there was just one.”
The three of them waited in silence as Richard stared off into the distance, as if he were mentally trying to fit together the pieces of some great puzzle. Nicci glanced over her shoulder at the men back near the maple tree. Some yawned as they waited. Some had found seats on a fallen log. A few were engaged in hushed conversation. Others, arms folded, leaned against the trunks of trees and watched the surrounding woods as they waited.
“It didn’t happen this morning,” Richard whispered to himself. “When I was waking up this morning, when I was still half asleep, I was really remembering what had happened the morning Kahlan disappeared.”
“The morning of the battle,” Nicci said softly in correction.
Lost in thought, Richard didn’t appear to hear her correction. “I must have been remembering, for some reason, what happened back when I woke that morning.” He turned suddenly and seized her arm. “A rooster crowed when I was being carried back to the farmhouse.”
Surprised by his abrupt change of subject, and not knowing what he was getting at, Nicci shrugged. “I suppose it could have. I don’t remember. Why?”
“There was no wind. I remember hearing the rooster crow and looking up and seeing motionless tree limbs above me. There was no wind at all. I remember how dead still it was.”
“You’re right, Lord Rahl,” Cara said. “I remember when I ran into Victor’s camp seeing the smoke from the fire going straight up because the air was dead calm. I think that was why we could hear the clash of steel and the cries from so far away—because there wasn’t even a breath of breeze to cut the sound from carrying.”
“If it helps,” the blacksmith said, “there were a few chickens roaming
around when we brought you to the farm. And you’re right, there was a rooster and it did crow. Matter of fact, we were trying not to be found so that Nicci could have the time to heal you, and I was afraid that the rooster might attract unwanted attention, so I told the men to cut its throat.”
After hearing Victor’s account, Richard drifted back into thought. He tapped a finger against his lower lip as he considered yet another piece of his puzzle. Nicci thought he might have forgotten they were standing there.
She leaned a little closer to him. “So?”
He blinked and finally looked at her. “It had to be that when I woke today I was really remembering that morning—remembering for a reason. Sometimes you do that—remember because there was some part of it that doesn’t make sense, remember for some reason.”
“What reason?” Nicci asked.
“The wind. There was no wind that morning. But I remember that when I woke that morning, in the faint light of false dawn, I saw tree limbs moving, like in a breeze.”
Nicci was not just confused by his concern for wind, but worried for his state of mind. “Richard, you were asleep and just waking up. It was dark. You probably just thought you saw the tree branches moving.”
“Maybe” was all he said.
“Maybe it was the soldiers coming,” Cara offered.
“No,” he said, dismissing her suggestion with an irritable wave of his hand, “that was a little later, after I’d discovered that Kahlan was missing.”
Seeing that neither Victor nor Cara was going to argue the point, Nicci decided to hold her tongue as well. Richard seemed to put the puzzle from his mind. He turned a deadly serious expression on the three of them.
“Look, I have to show you all something. But you need to realize, despite how little you may be able to make out, that I know what I’m talking about. I don’t expect you to take my word, but you need to understand that I have a lifetime of experience in this and routinely used such ability. I trust each of you in your area of expertise. This is mine. Don’t close your minds to what I have to show you.”
Nicci, Cara, and Victor shared a look.
With a nod to Richard, Victor set his reservations aside and turned to the men. “You boys keep your eyes open, now.” He circled a finger in the air. “There could be soldiers about, so let’s keep it quiet and stay alert. Ferran, double-check the area.”
The men nodded. Some came to their feet, apparently glad to have something to do other than just sit there wet and cold. Four men set out through the trees to set up guard.
Ferran handed his pack and bedroll to one of the other men for safekeeping before nocking an arrow and slipping quietly into the brush. The young man was learning the trade of blacksmithing from Victor. Raised on a farm, he also had a natural talent for scouting unseen in the woods. He idolized Victor. Nicci knew that Victor was fond of the young man as well, but because he was fond of him he was probably harder on him than on the other men. Victor had told her once, referring to his tough demands of his apprentice, that you had to pound the imperfections out of iron and work it hard if you wanted to shape it into something truly worthwhile.
Since the battle, Victor had had sentries and lookouts on constant watch while Ferran and several of the others scouted the surrounding forest. None of them had wanted to take any chance that enemy soldiers would unexpectedly come upon them while Nicci was trying to save Richard’s life. After she had done all she could for Richard, Nicci had healed a nasty gash to one man’s leg and taken care of a few other less serious wounds suffered by a half-dozen other men.
Since the morning of the battle and Richard being hurt, she had gotten little sleep. She was exhausted.
After watching the men set about the tasks assigned them, Victor clapped Richard on the shoulder. “Show us, then.”
Richard lead Cara, Victor, and Nicci past the clearing with the dead men and then off through the woods. He took a route between trees where the ground was more open. At the crest of a gentle rise, he stopped and crouched down.
Seeing Richard on bended knee, his cloak draped over his back, his sword in a gleaming scabbard at his hip, his hood pushed back to expose strands of wet hair lying against his muscular neck, his bow and quiver strapped over his left shoulder, he looked at once regal—a warrior king—and at the same time like nothing so much as the wilderness guide from a distant land that he had once been. With intimate familiarity, his fingers brushed the pine needles, twigs, crumbles of leaves, bark, and loam. Nicci could sense, just by that touch, his breadth of understanding of the seemingly simple things spread out before them, yet to him those things revealed another world.
Richard remembered, then, his purpose and gestured, urging them to squat down close beside him.
“Here,” he said, pointing. “See this?” His fingers carefully traced a vague depression in the dense tangle of forest litter. “This is Cara’s footprint.”
“Well, that’s no surprise,” Cara said. “This is the way we came in from the road on our way to where we set up camp back there.”
“That’s right.” Richard leaned out a little, pointing as he went on. “See here, and then off there? Those are more of your tracks, Cara. See how they come in here in a line showing where you were walking?”
Cara shrugged suspiciously. “Sure.”
Richard moved to his right. They all followed. He again carefully traced a depression so they could make it out. Nicci couldn’t see anything at all in the forest floor until he carefully drew the outline with a finger just above the ground. In doing so, he seemed to make the footprint magically appear for them. After he pointed it out, Nicci could tell what it was.
“This is my track,” he said, watching it as if fearing that were he to look away it might vanish. “The rain works to wear them down—some places more than others—but it hasn’t made all of them disappear.” With a finger and thumb, he carefully lifted a wet, brown oak leaf from the center of the print. “Look, you can see under here how the pressure of my weight under the ball of my foot broke these small twigs. See? Rain can’t obliterate things like that.”
He looked up at them to make sure they were all paying attention and then pointed off into the shadowy mist. “You can see my tracks coming in this direction, toward us, just like Cara’s.” He stretched out and quickly traced two more vague depressions in the matted forest floor to show them what he meant. “See? You can still make them out.”
“What’s the point?” Victor asked.
Richard glanced back over his shoulder again before gesturing between the sets of tracks. “See the distance between Cara’s tracks and mine? When we walked in here I was on the left and Cara was to my right. See how far apart our tracks are?”
“What of it?” Nicci asked as she pulled the hood of her cloak forward, trying to shield her face from the frigid drizzle. She pulled her hands back under the cloak and snugged them in her armpits for warmth.
“They’re that far apart,” Richard said, “because when we walked through here Kahlan was in the middle, between us.”
Nicci stared again at the ground. She was no expert, so she wasn’t especially surprised that she couldn’t see any other tracks. But this time, she didn’t think that Richard could, either.
“And can you show us Kahlan’s tracks?” she asked.
Richard turned a look on her of such intensity that it momentarily halted the breath she was about to take.
“That’s the point.” He held up a finger with the same deliberate care with which he lifted his blade. “Her tracks are gone. Not washed away by the rain, but gone…gone as if they were never there.”
Victor let out a very quiet and very troubled-sounding sigh. If she was shocked, Cara hid it well. Nicci knew that he hadn’t told them all of what he had to say, so she remained guarded in her question.
“You’re showing us that there are no tracks from this woman?”
“That’s right. I’ve searched. I found my tracks and Cara’s tracks in various places, but where Kahlan’s tracks should be there are none.”
In the uncomfortable silence no one wanted to say anything. Nicci finally took it upon herself to do so.
“Richard, you have to know why that is. Don’t you see, now? It’s just your dream. There are no tracks because this woman doesn’t exist.”
With him there on his knees before her, looking up at her, it seemed she could see his soul laid bare in his gray eyes. She would have given nearly anything at that moment to be able to simply comfort him. But she couldn’t do that. Nicci had to force herself to go on.
“You said yourself that you know about tracking and yet even you can’t find any tracks left by this woman. This should put the matter to rest. This should finally convince you that she just doesn’t exist—that she never did exist.” She took a hand from under her cloak, from its warm resting place, and gently laid it on his shoulder in an effort to soften her words. “You need to let it go, Richard.”
He looked away from her eyes as he drew his lower lip through his teeth. “It’s not as simple a picture as you’re painting it,” he said in a calm voice. “I’m asking you all to look—just look—and try to understand the significance of what it is I’m showing you. Look at how far apart Cara and my tracks are. Can’t you see that there was a third person there, between us, as we walked?”
Nicci wearily rubbed her eyes. “Richard, people don’t always walk close together. Maybe you and Cara were both looking around for any
sign of threat as you walked through here, or maybe you were both just tired and not paying attention. There could be any number of simple explanations as to why you two weren’t walking closer together.”
“When only two people walk together they don’t habitually walk this far apart.” He pointed behind them. “Look at the tracks we made coming over her. Cara again walked to my right. Look at how much closer together the tracks are. That’s typical of two people walking side by side. You and Victor were behind us. Look at how close together your tracks are.
“These tracks are different. Can’t you see by their nature that they’re this far apart because there was another person walking between us?”
“Richard…”
Nicci paused. She didn’t want to argue. She was tempted to keep quiet and let him have his way, let him believe what he wanted to believe. And yet, silence would be feeding a lie, lending life to an illusion. While she ached for his difficulty and wanted to be on his side, she couldn’t let him delude himself or she would be causing him greater harm. He could never get better, never fully recover, until he faced the truth of the real world. Helping him see reality was the only way she could really help him.
“Richard,” she said softly, trying to get that truth through to him without sounding harsh or condescending, “your tracks are there, and Cara’s tracks are there. We can see that—you showed us. There are no others. You showed us that, too. If she was there, between you and Cara, then why are her tracks not?”
They all hunched their shoulders in the wet and cold as they waited. Richard finally gathered his composure and spoke in a clear, firm voice.
“I think Kahlan’s tracks were erased with magic.”
“Magic?” Cara asked, suddenly alert and ill-tempered.
“Yes. I think that whoever took Kahlan erased her tracks with magic.”
Nicci was dumbfounded and made no attempt to conceal it.
Victor’s gaze shifted back and forth between Nicci and Richard. “Can that be done?”
“Yes,” Richard insisted. “When I first met Kahlan, Darken Rahl was after us. He was close on our trail. Zedd, Kahlan, and I had to run. If Darken Rahl had caught us we would have been finished. Zedd’s a wizard but he isn’t as powerful as Darken Rahl was, so Zedd cast some magic dust back down the trail to hide our tracks. That has to be what happened here. Whoever took Kahlan covered their tracks with the use of magic.”
Victor and Cara glanced at Nicci for confirmation. As a blacksmith, Victor was not familiar with magic. Mord-Sith didn’t like magic and pointedly avoided the details of its workings; their well-honed instinct was simply to violently eliminate anyone with magic if they posed even a potential threat to the Lord Rahl. Both Victor and Cara waited to hear what Nicci had to say about the possibility of using magic to cover tracks.
Nicci hesitated. Her being a sorceress didn’t mean that she knew everything there was to know about magic. But still…