Faith of the Fallen (2 page)

“Richard,” Kahlan whispered, “I won’t have you begging on my account.”

The corners of his mouth tightened with the hint of a smile. “If I want to beg, I shall do so.” He pulled her blanket up a little, making sure she was snugly covered, even though she was sweating. “I didn’t know you were awake.”

“How long have I been asleep?”

“A while.”

She figured it must have been quite a while. She didn’t remember arriving at this place, or him building the house that now stood around her.

Kahlan felt more like a person in her eighties than one in her twenties. She had never been hurt before, not grievously hurt, anyway, not to the point of being on the cusp of death and utterly helpless for so long. She hated it, and she hated that she couldn’t do the simplest things for herself. Most of the time she detested that more than the pain.

She was stunned to understand so unexpectedly and so completely life’s frailty, her own frailty, her own mortality. She had risked her life in the past and had been in danger many times, but looking back she didn’t know if she had ever truly believed that something like this could happen to her. Confronting the reality of it was crushing.

Something inside seemed to have broken that night—some idea of herself, some confidence. She could so easily have died. Their baby could have died before it even had a chance to live.

“You’re getting better,” Richard said, as if in answer to her thoughts. “I’m not just saying that. I can see that you’re healing.”

She gazed into his eyes, summoning the courage to finally ask, “How do they know about the Order way up here?”

“People fleeing the fighting have been up this way. Men spreading the doctrine of the Imperial Order have been even here, to where I grew up. Their words can sound good—almost make sense—if you don’t think, if you just feel. Truth doesn’t seem to count for much,” He added in afterthought. He answered the unspoken question in her eyes. “The men from the Order are gone. The fools out there were just spouting things they’ve heard, that’s all.”

“But they intend us to leave. They sound like men who keep the oaths they’ve sworn.”

He nodded, but then some of his smile returned. “Do you know that we’re very close to where I first met you, last autumn? Do you remember?”

“How could I ever forget the day I met you?”

“Our lives were in jeopardy back then and we had to leave here. I’ve never regretted it. It was the start of my life with you. As long as we’re together, nothing else really matters.”

Cara swept in through the doorway and came to a halt beside Richard, adding her shadow to his across the blue cotton blanket that covered Kahlan to her armpits. Sheathed in skintight red leather, Cara’s body had the sleek grace of a falcon: commanding, swift, and deadly. Mord-Sith always wore their red leather when they believed there was going to be trouble. Cara’s long blond hair, swept back into a single thick braid, was another mark of her profession of Mord-Sith, member of an elite corps of guards to the Lord Rahl himself.

Richard had, after a fashion, inherited the Mord-Sith when he inherited the rule of D’Hara, a place he grew up never knowing. Command was not something he had sought; nonetheless it had fallen to him. Now a great many people depended on him. The entire New World—Westland, the Midlands, and D’Hara—depended on him.

“How do you feel?” Cara asked with sincere concern.

Kahlan was able to summon little more voice than a hoarse whisper. “I’m better.”

“Well, if you feel better,” Cara growled, “then tell Lord Rahl that he should allow me to do my job and put the proper respect into men like that.” Her menacing blue eyes turned for a moment toward the spot where the men had been while delivering their threats. “The ones I leave alive, anyway.”

“Cara, use your head,” Richard said. “We can’t turn this place into a fortress and protect ourselves every hour of every day. Those men are afraid. No matter how wrong they are, they view us as a danger to their lives and the lives of their families. We know better than to fight a senseless battle when we can avoid it.”

“But Richard,” Kahlan said, lifting her right hand in a weak gesture toward the wall before her, “you’ve built this—”

“Only this room. I wanted a shelter for you first. It didn’t take that long—just some trees cut and split. We’ve not built the rest of it yet. It’s not worth shedding blood over.”

If Richard seemed calm, Cara looked ready to chew steel and spit nails. “Would you tell this obstinate husband of yours to let me kill someone before I go crazy? I can’t just stand around and allow people to get away with threatening the two of you! I am Mord-Sith!”

Cara took her job of protecting Richard—the Lord Rahl of D’Hara—and Kahlan very seriously. Where Richard’s life was concerned, Cara was perfectly willing to kill first and decide later if it had been necessary. That was one of the things for which Richard had no tolerance.

Kahlan’s only answer was a smile.

“Mother Confessor, you can’t allow Lord Rahl to bow to the will of foolish men like those. Tell him.”

Kahlan could probably count on the fingers of one hand the people who, in her whole life, had ever addressed her by the name “Kahlan” without at minimum the appellation “Confessor” before it. She had heard her ultimate title—Mother Confessor—spoken countless times, in tones ranging from awed reverence to shuddering fear. Many people, as they knelt before her, were incapable of even whispering through trembling lips the two words of her title. Others, when alone, whispered them with lethal intent.

Kahlan had been named Mother Confessor while still in her early twenties—the youngest Confessor ever named to that powerful position. But that was several years past. Now, she was the only living Confessor left.

Kahlan had always endured the title, the bowing and kneeling, the reverence, the awe, the fear, and the murderous intentions, because she had no choice. But more than that, she
was
the Mother Confessor—by succession and selection, by right, by oath, and by duty.

Cara always addressed Kahlan as “Mother Confessor.” But from Cara’s lips the words were subtly different than from any others. It was almost a challenge, a defiance by scrupulous compliance, but with a hint of an affectionate smirk. Coming from Cara, Kahlan didn’t hear “Mother Confessor” so much as she heard “Sister.” Cara was from the distant land of D’Hara. No one, anywhere, outranked Cara, as far as Cara was concerned, except the Lord Rahl. The most she would allow was that Kahlan could be her equal in duty to Richard. Being considered an equal by Cara, though, was high praise indeed.

When Cara addressed Richard as Lord Rahl, however, she was not saying “Brother.” She was saying precisely what she meant: Lord Rahl.

To the men with the angry voices, the Lord Rahl was as foreign a concept as was the distant land of D’Hara. Kahlan was from the Midlands that separated D’Hara from Westland. The people here in Westland knew nothing of the Midlands or the Mother Confessor. For decades, the three parts of the New World had been separated by impassable boundaries, leaving what was beyond those boundaries shrouded in mystery. The autumn before, those boundaries had fallen.

And then, in the winter, the common barrier to the south of the three lands that had for three thousand years sealed away the menace of the Old World had been breached, loosing the Imperial Order on them all. In the last year, the world had been thrown into turmoil; everything everyone had grown up knowing had changed.

“I’m not going to allow you to hurt people just because they refuse to help us,” Richard said to Cara. “It would solve nothing and only end up causing us more trouble. What we started here only took a short time to build. I thought this place would be safe, but it’s not. We’ll simply move on.”

He turned back to Kahlan. His voice lost its fire.

“I was hoping to bring you home, to some peace and quiet, but it looks like home doesn’t want me, either. I’m sorry.”

“Just those men, Richard.” In the land of Anderith, just before Kahlan had been attacked and beaten, the people had rejected Richard’s offer to join the emerging D’Haran Empire he led in the cause of freedom. Instead, the people of Anderith willingly chose to side with the Imperial Order. Richard had taken Kahlan and walked away from everything, it seemed. “What about your real friends here?”

“I haven’t had time… I wanted to get a shelter up, first. There’s no time now. Maybe later.”

Kahlan reached for his hand, which hung at his side. His fingers were too far away. “But, Richard—”

“Look, it’s not safe to stay here anymore. It’s as simple as that. I brought you here because I thought it would be a safe place for you to recover and regain your strength. I was wrong. It’s not. We can’t stay here. Understand?”

“Yes, Richard.”

“We have to move on.”

“Yes, Richard.”

There was something more to this, she knew—something of far greater importance than the more immediate ordeal it meant for her. There was a distant, troubled look in his eyes.

“But what of the war? Everyone is depending on us—on you. I can’t be much help until I get better, but they need you right now. The D’Haran Empire needs you. You are the Lord Rahl. You lead them. What are we doing here? Richard…” She waited until his eyes turned to look at her. “Why are we running away when everyone is counting on us?”

“I’m doing as I must.”

“As you must? What does that mean?”

Shadow shrouded his face as he looked away.

“I’ve…had a vision.”

“A vision?” Kahlan said in open astonishment.

Richard hated anything to do with prophecy. It had caused him no end of trouble.

Prophecy was always ambiguous and usually cryptic, no matter how clear it seemed on the surface. The untrained were easily misled by its superficially simplistic construction. Unthinking adherence to a literal interpretation of prophecy had in the past caused great turmoil, everything from murder to war. As a result, those involved with prophecy went to great lengths to keep it secret.

Prophecy, at least on the face of it, was predestination; Richard believed that man created his own destiny. He had once told her, “Prophecy can only say that tomorrow the sun will come up. It can’t say what you are going to do with your day. The act of going about your day is not the fulfillment of prophecy, but the fulfillment of your own purpose.”

Shota, the witch woman, had prophesied that Richard and Kahlan would conceive an infamous son. Richard had more than once proven Shota’s view of the future to be, if not fatally flawed, at least vastly more complex than Shota would have it seem. Like Richard, Kahlan didn’t accept Shota’s prediction.

On any number of occasions, Richard’s view of prophecy had been shown to be correct. Richard simply ignored what prophecy said and did as he believed he must. By his doing so, prophecy was in the end often fulfilled, but in ways that could not have been foretold. In this way, prophecy was at once proven and disproved, resolving nothing and only demonstrating what an eternal enigma it truly was.

Richard’s grandfather, Zedd, who had helped raise him not far from where they were, had not only kept his own identity as a wizard secret. In order to protect Richard, he also hid the fact that Richard had been fathered by Darken Rahl and not George Cypher, the man who had loved and raised him. Darken Rahl, a wizard of great power, had been the dangerous, violent ruler of far-off D’Hara. Richard had inherited the gift of magic from two different bloodlines. After killing Darken Rahl, he had also inherited the rule of D’Hara, a land that was in many ways as much a mystery to him as was his power.

Kahlan, being from the Midlands, had grown up around wizards; Richard’s ability was unlike that of any wizard she had ever known. He possessed not one aspect of the gift, but many, and not one side, but both: he was a war wizard. Some of his outfit came from the Wizard’s Keep, and had not been worn in three thousand years—since the last war wizard lived.

With the gift dying out in mankind, wizards were uncommon; Kahlan had known fewer than a dozen. Among wizards, prophets were the most rare; she knew of the existence of only two. One of those was Richard’s ancestor, which made visions all the more within the province of Richard’s gift. Yet Richard had always treated prophecy as a viper in his bed.

Tenderly, as if there were no more precious thing in the whole world, Richard lifted her hand. “You know how I always talk about the beautiful places only I know way back in the mountains to the west of where I grew up? The special places I’ve always wanted to show you? I’m going to take you there, where we’ll be safe.”

“D’Harans are bonded to you, Lord Rahl,” Cara reminded him, “and will be able to find you through that bond.”

“Well, our enemies aren’t bonded to me. They won’t know where we are.”

Cara seemed to find that thought agreeable. “If people don’t go to this place, then there won’t be any roads. How are we going to get the carriage there? The Mother Confessor can’t walk.”

“I’ll make a litter. You and I will carry her in that.”

Cara nodded thoughtfully. “We could do that. If there were no other people, then the two of you would be safe, at least.”

“Safer than here. I had expected the people here to leave us to ourselves. I hadn’t expected the Order to foment unrest this far away—at least not this quickly. Those men usually aren’t a bad lot, but they’re working themselves up into a dangerous mood.”

“The cowards have gone back to their women’s skirts. They won’t be back until morning. We can let the Mother Confessor rest and then leave before dawn.”

Richard cast Cara a telling look. “One of those men, Albert, has a son, Lester. Lester and his pal, Tommy Lancaster, once tried to put arrows into me for spoiling some fun Tommy was about to have hurting someone. Now Tommy and Lester are missing a good many teeth. Albert will tell Lester about us being here, and soon after, Tommy Lancaster will know, too.

“Now that the Imperial Order has filled their heads with talk of a noble war on behalf of good, those men will be fancying what it would be like to be war heroes. They aren’t ordinarily violent, but today they were more unreasonable than I’ve ever seen them.

“They’ll go drinking to fortify their courage. Tommy and Lester will be with them by then, and their tales of how I wronged them and how I’m a danger to decent folks will get everyone all worked up. Because they greatly outnumber us, they’ll begin to see the merit in killing us—see it as protecting their families and doing the right thing for the community and their Creator. Full of liquor and glory, they won’t want to wait until morning. They’ll be back tonight. We have to leave now.”

Cara seemed unconcerned. “I say we wait for them, and when they come back, we end the threat.”

“Some of them will bring along other friends. There will be a lot of them by the time they get here. We have Kahlan to think about. I don’t want to risk one of us being injured. There’s nothing to be gained by fighting them.”

Richard pulled the ancient, tooled-leather baldric, holding the gold-and-silver-wrought scabbard and sword, off over his head and hung it on the stump of a branch sticking out of a log. Looking unhappy, Cara folded her arms. She would rather not leave a threat alive. Richard picked his folded black shirt off the floor to the side, where Kahlan hadn’t seen it. He poked an arm through a sleeve and drew it on.

“A vision?” Kahlan finally asked again. As much trouble as the men could be, they were not her biggest concern just then. “You’ve had a vision?”

“The sudden clarity of it felt like a vision, but it was really more of a revelation.”

“Revelation.” She wished she could manage more than a hoarse whisper. “And what form did this vision revelation thing take?”

“Understanding.”

Kahlan stared up at him. “Understanding of what?”

He started buttoning his shirt. “Through this realization I’ve come to understand the larger picture. I’ve come to understand what it is I must do.”

“Yes,” Cara muttered, “and wait until you hear it. Go ahead, tell her.”

Richard glared at Cara and she answered him in kind. His attention finally returned to Kahlan.

“If I lead us into this war, we will lose. A great many people will die for nothing. The result will be a world enslaved by the Imperial Order. If I don’t lead our side in battle, the world will still fall under the shadow of the Order but far fewer people will die. Only in that way will we ever stand a chance.”

“By losing? You want to lose first, and then fight?… How can we even consider abandoning the fight for freedom?”

“Anderith helped teach me a lesson,” he said. His voice was restrained, as if he regretted what he was saying. “I can’t press this war. Freedom requires effort if it is to be won and vigilance if it is to be maintained. People just don’t value freedom until it’s taken away.”

“But many do,” Kahlan objected.

“There are always some, but most don’t even understand it, nor do they care to—the same as with magic. People mindlessly shrink from it, too, without seeing the truth. The Order offers them a world without magic and ready-made answers to everything. Servitude is simple. I thought that I could convince people of the value of their own lives, and of liberty. In Anderith they showed me just how foolish I had been.”

“Anderith is just one place—”

“Anderith was not remarkable. Look at all the trouble we’ve had elsewhere. We’re having trouble even here, where I grew up.” Richard began tucking in his shirt. “Forcing people to fight for freedom is the worst kind of contradiction.

“Nothing I can say will inspire people to care—I’ve tried. Those who value liberty will have to run, to hide, to try to survive and endure what is sure to come. I can’t prevent it. I can’t help them. I know that now.”

“But Richard, how can you even think of—”

“I must do what is best for us. I must be selfish; life is far too precious to be casually squandered on useless causes. There can be no greater evil than that. People can only be saved from the coming dark age of subjugation and servitude if they, too, come to understand and care about the value of their own lives, their freedom, and are willing to act in their own interest. We must try to stay alive in the hope that such a day will come.”

“But we can prevail in this war. We must.”

“Do you think that I can just go off and lead men into war, and because I wish it, we will win? We won’t. It takes more than my wishing it. It will take vast numbers of people fully committed to the cause. We don’t have that. If we throw our forces against the Order, we will be destroyed and any chance for winning freedom in the future will be forever lost.” He raked his fingers back through his hair. “We must not lead our forces against the army of the Order.”

He turned to pulling his black, open-sided tunic on over his head. Kahlan struggled to give force to her voice, to the magnitude of her concern.

“But what about all those who are prepared to fight—all the armies already in the field? There are good men, able men, ready to go against Jagang and stop his Imperial Order and drive them back to the Old World. Who will lead our men?”

“Lead them to what? Death? They can’t win.”

Kahlan was horrified. She reached up and snatched his shirtsleeve before he could lean down to retrieve his broad over-belt. “Richard, you’re only saying this, walking away from the struggle, because of what happened to me.”

“No. I had already decided it that same night, before you were attacked. When I went out alone for a walk, after the vote, I did a lot of thinking. I came to this realization and made up my mind. What happened to you made no difference except to prove the point that I’m right and should have figured it out sooner. If I had, you would never have been hurt.”

“But if the Mother Confessor had not been hurt, you would have felt better by morning and changed your mind.”

Light coming through the doorway behind him lit in a blaze of gold the ancient symbols coiled along the squared edges of his tunic. “Cara, what would happen if I’d been attacked with her, and we had both been killed? What would you all do then?”

“I don’t know.”

“That is why I withdraw. You are all following me, not participating in a struggle for your own future. Your answer should have been that you would all fight on for yourselves, for your freedom. I have come to understand the mistake I’ve made in this, and to see that we cannot win in this way. The Order is too large an opponent.”

Kahlan’s father, King Wyborn, had taught her about fighting against such odds, and she had practical experience at it. “Their army may outnumber ours, but that doesn’t make it impossible. We just have to outthink them. I will be there to help you, Richard. We have seasoned officers. We can do it. We must.”

“Look how the Order’s cause spreads on words that sound good”—Richard swept out an arm—“even to distant places like this. We know beyond doubt the evil of the Order, yet people everywhere passionately side with them despite the ghastly truth of everything the Imperial Order stands for.”

“Richard,” Kahlan whispered, trying not to lose what was left of her voice, “I led those young Galean recruits against an army of experienced Order soldiers who greatly outnumbered us, and we prevailed.”

“Exactly. They had just seen their home city after the Order had been there. Everyone they loved had been murdered, everything they knew had been destroyed. Those men fought with an understanding of what they were doing and why. They were going to throw themselves at the enemy with or without you commanding them. But they were the only ones, and even though they succeeded, most of them were killed in the struggle.”

Kahlan was incredulous. “So you are going to let the Order do the same elsewhere so as to give people a reason to fight? You are going to stand aside and let the Order slaughter hundreds of thousands of innocent people?

“You want to quit because I was hurt. Dear spirits, I love you Richard, but don’t do this to me. I’m the Mother Confessor; I’m responsible for the lives of the people of the Midlands. Don’t do this because of what happened to me.”

Richard snapped on his leather-padded silver wristbands. “I’m not doing this because of what happened to you. I’m helping save those lives in the only way that has a chance. I’m doing the only thing I can do.”

“You are doing the easy thing,” Cara said.

Richard met her challenge with quiet sincerity. “Cara, I’m doing the hardest thing I have ever had to do.”

Kahlan was sure now that their rejection by the Anderith people had hit him harder than she had realized. She caught two of his fingers and squeezed sympathetically. He had put his heart into sparing those people from enslavement by the Order. He had tried to show them the value of freedom by allowing them the freedom to choose their own destiny. He had put his faith in their hands.

In a crushing defeat, an enormous majority had spurned all he had offered, and in so doing devastated that faith.

Kahlan thought that perhaps with some time to heal, the same as with her, the pain would fade for him, too. “You can’t hold yourself to blame for the fall of Anderith, Richard. You did your best. It wasn’t your fault.”

He picked up his big leather over-belt with its gold-worked pouches and cinched it over the magnificent tunic.

“When you’re the leader, everything is your fault.”

Kahlan knew the truth of that. She thought to dissuade him by taking a different tack.

“What form did this vision assume?”

Richard’s piercing gray eyes locked on her, almost in warning.

“Vision, revelation, realization, postulation, prophecy…understanding—call it what you will, for in this they are all in one the same, and unequivocal. I can’t describe it but to say it seems as if I must have always known it. Maybe I have. It wasn’t so much words as it was a complete concept, a conclusion, a truth that became absolutely clear to me.”