Faith of the Fallen (28 page)

He looked like a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders. A smile spread on his face as he pulled her into an embrace. His fingers combed into her hair and cradled her head as she rose to his kiss. Her hands slipped up the backs of his shoulders as she held him. It only lasted a moment, but in that moment of stolen bliss, they shared a world of emotions.

All too soon the kiss, the embrace, was over. His warm presence swirled away from her, allowing the awful weight of doom to settle firmly down atop her. Richard briefly hugged Cara before he hefted his pack onto a shoulder. He turned back at the bedroom doorway.

“I love you, Kahlan. Never anyone before you, nor ever after. Only you.” His eyes said it even better.

“You’re everything to me, Richard. You know that.”

“I love you, too, Cara.” He winked at her. “Take good care of the both of you until I’m back.”

“I will, Lord Rahl. You have my word as Mord-Sith.”

He gave her a crooked smile. “I have your word as Cara.”

And then he was gone.

“I love you, too, Lord Rahl,” Cara whispered to the empty doorway.

Kahlan and Cara ran into the main room and stood in the doorway watching him running across the meadow.

Cara cupped her hands around her mouth. “I love you too, Lord Rahl,” she shouted.

Richard turned as he ran and acknowledged her words with a wave.

Together, they watched Richard’s dark figure flying through the dead brown grass, his fluid gait swiftly carrying him away. Just before he disappeared into the trees, he stopped and turned. Kahlan shared a last look with him, a look that said everything. He turned and vanished into the woods, his clothes making him impossible to distinguish from the trees and undergrowth.

Kahlan collapsed to her knees, sitting back on her heels as she lost control of her emotions. She wept helplessly, her head in her hands, at what seemed the end of the world.

Cara squatted beside her to put an arm around her shoulders. Kahlan hated to have Cara see her cry that way, cry in such weakness. She felt a distant gratitude when Cara held her head to her shoulder and didn’t say anything.

Kahlan didn’t know how long she sat on the dirt floor in her white Confessor’s dress, sobbing, but after a time, she was able to make herself stop. Her heart continued to spiral down into hopeless gloom. Each passing moment seemed unendurable. The bleak future stretched out before her, a wasteland of agony.

She finally looked up and gazed about at the house. Without Richard it was empty. He had given it life. Now it was a dead place.

“What do you wish to do, Mother Confessor?”

It was getting dark. Whether it was the sunset, or the clouds getting thicker, Kahlan didn’t know. She wiped at her eyes.

“Let’s begin to get our things together. We’ll stay here a few days, like Richard asked. After that, anything the horses can’t carry that will spoil, we’d better bury. We should board up the windows. We’ll close up the house good and tight.”

“For when we return to paradise, someday?”

Kahlan nodded as she looked about, trying desperately to focus her mind on a task and not on that which would crush her. The worst part, she knew, was going to be night. When she was alone in bed. When he wasn’t with her.

Now, the valley seemed more like paradise lost. She had trouble believing that Richard was really gone. It seemed as if he were just off to catch some fish, or hunt berries, or scout the hills. It seemed as if, surely, he would be coming back soon.

“Yes, for when we return. Then it will be paradise again. I guess when Richard returns, wherever we are will be paradise.”

Kahlan noticed that Cara didn’t hear her answer. The Mord-Sith was staring out through the doorway.

“Cara, what is it?”

“Lord Rahl is gone.”

Kahlan rested a comforting hand on Cara’s shoulder. “I know it hurts, but we must put our minds to—”

“No.” Cara turned back. Her blue eyes were strangely troubled. “No, that’s not what I mean. I mean that I can’t sense him. I can’t feel the bond to Lord Rahl. I know where he is—he’s going up the trail up to that pass—but I can’t feel it.” She looked panicked. “Dear spirits, it’s like going blind. I don’t know how to find him. I can’t find Lord Rahl.”

Kahlan’s first flash of fear was that he fell and was killed, or that Nicci had executed him. She used reason to force the fear aside.

“Nicci knows about the bond. She probably used her magic to cloak it, or to sever it.”

“Cloaked it, somehow.” Cara rolled her Agiel in her fingers. “That’s what it has to be. I can still feel my Agiel, so I know that Lord Rahl has to be alive. The bond is still there…but I cannot feel it to sense where he is.”

Kahlan sighed with relief. “That has to be it, then. Nicci doesn’t want to be followed, so she cloaked his bond with magic.”

Kahlan realized that to be protected from the dream walker by the bond to Richard, people would now have to believe in him without the reassurance of feeling the bond. Their link would have to remain true in their hearts if they were to survive.

Could they do that? Could they believe in that way?

Cara stared out the doorway, across the meadow to the mountains where Richard had disappeared. The blue-violet sky behind the blue-gray mountains was slashed with blazing orange gashes. The snowcaps were lower than they had been. Winter was racing toward them. If Richard didn’t soon escape and return, Kahlan and Cara would have to be gone before it arrived.

Bouts of dizzying grief threatened to drown her in a flood of tears. Needing to do something, she went to her room to take off her Confessor’s dress. She would set to work with the task of closing up the house and preparing to leave.

As Kahlan pulled her dress off, Cara appeared in the doorway.

“Where are we going to go, Mother Confessor? You said we were going to leave, but you never said where we were going to go.”

Kahlan saw
Spirit
standing in the window, fists at her sides as she looked out at the world. She lifted the carving off the sill and trailed her fingers over the flowing form.

Seeing the statue, touching it, feeling the power of it, made Kahlan want to reach deep inside for resolve. Once before, she had been hopeless, and Richard carved this for her. Her other hand fell to her side, and her fingers found Richard’s sword lying across their bed. Kahlan focused her mind, ordering the turbulent swirl of despair thickening into wrath.

“To destroy the Order.”

“Destroy the Order?”

“Those beasts took my unborn child, and now they’ve taken Richard. I will make them regret it a thousand times over and then another thousand. I once swore an oath of death without mercy to the Order. The time has come. If killing every last one of them is the only way to get Richard back, then that’s what I will do.”

“You swore an oath to Lord Rahl.”

“Richard said nothing about not killing them, just about how. My oath was not to try to drive a sword through their heart. He said nothing about bleeding them to death with a thousand cuts. I won’t break my oath, but I intend to kill every last one of them.”

“Mother Confessor, you must not do that.”

“Why?”

Cara’s blue eyes gleamed with menace. “You must leave half for me.”

Richard had stopped to turn back and look at her only once as he ran, just before he went into the trees. She was standing in the doorway in her white Confessor’s dress, her long thick hair tumbling down, her form the embodiment of feminine grace, looking as beautiful as the first time he saw her. They held each other’s gaze for a brief moment. He was too far away to see the green of her eyes, a color he’d never beheld on anyone else, a color of such heart-piercing perfection that it sometimes would stop his breathing, and at other times quicken it.

But it was the mind of the woman behind those eyes that in reality captivated him. Richard had never met her equal.

He knew he was cutting the time close. As much as he hated the idea of turning his gaze away from Kahlan, her life hung in the balance. His purpose was clear. Richard had plunged into the woods.

He had traveled the trail often enough; he knew where he could run, and where he had to be careful. Now, with little time left, he couldn’t afford to be too careful. He didn’t try for a glimpse of the house.

He was alone in the woods as he ran, his thoughts but salt in a raw wound. For once he felt out of place in the woods—powerless, insignificant, hopeless. Bare branches clattered together in the wind, while others creaked and moaned, as if in mock sorrow to see him leaving. He tried not to think as he ran.

Fir and spruce trees took over as the ground rose out of the valley. His breath came in rapid pulls. In the cold shadows of the forest floor, the wind was a distant pursuer far overhead, chasing after him, shooing him along, hounding him away from the happiest place he had ever been. Spongy mounds of verdant moss lay dotting the forest floor in the low places where mostly cedars grew, looking like wedding cakes done up in an intense green, sprinkled over with tiny, chocolate brown, scale-like cedar needles.

Richard tiptoed on rocks sticking up above the water as he crossed a small stream. As the little brook tumbled down the slope, it went under rocks and boulders in places, making an echoing drumming sound, announcing him to the stalwart oaks along his march into imprisonment. In the flat gray light, he failed to see a reddish loop of cedar root. It caught his foot and sent him sprawling facedown in the trail, a final humiliation on his judgment and sentence of banishment.

As Richard lay in the cold, damp, discarded leaves, dead branches, and other refuse of the forest, he considered not getting up ever again. He could just lie there and let it all end, let the indifferent wind freeze his limbs stiff, let the sneaky spiders and snakes and wolves come to bite him and bleed him to death, and then finally the uncaring trees would cover him over, never to be missed except by a few, his vanishing a good riddance to most.

A messenger with a message no one wanted to heed.

A leader come too soon.

Why not just let it end, let silent death take them both to their peace and be done with it?

The scornful trees all watched to see what this unworthy man might do, to see if he had the courage to get to his feet and face what was ahead. He didn’t know himself if he did.

Death was easier, and in that bottomless moment, less painful to consider.

Even Kahlan, as much as he loved her, wanted something from him he could not give her: a lie. She wanted him to tell her that something he knew to be so, was not. He would do anything for her, but he couldn’t change what was. At least she had enough faith in him to let him lead her away from the shadows of tyranny darkening the world. Even if she didn’t believe him, she was probably the only one willing, of her own free will, to follow him.

In truth, he lay on the ground for only seconds, regaining his senses from the fall and catching his breath as the thoughts flooded through his mind—brief seconds in which he allowed himself to be weak, in exchange for how hard he knew everything to come would be.

Weakness, to balance the strength he would need. Doubt, to balance his certainty of purpose. Fear, to balance the courage he would have to call upon.

Even as he wondered if he could get up, he knew he would. His convulsion of self-pity ended abruptly. He would do anything for her. Even this. A thousand times over, even this.

With renewed resolve, Richard forced his mind away from the dominion of dark thoughts. It wasn’t so hopeless; he knew better. After all, he had faced trials much more difficult than this one Sister of the Dark. He had once gotten Kahlan out of the clutches of five Sisters of the Dark. This was but one. He would defeat her, too. Anger welled up at the thought of Nicci thinking she could make them dance at the end of her selfish strings.

Despair extinguished, rage flooded in.

And then he was running again, dodging trees as he cut corners off the trail. He hurdled fallen trees and leaped over gaps in the rock shelves, rather than taking the safe route down and up. Each shortcut or leap saved him a few precious seconds.

A broken tree limb snagged his pack, yanking it from his shoulder. He tried to hang on to it as he flew past, but it slipped from his grasp and spilled across the ground.

Richard exploded in fury, as if the tree had done it on purpose just to taunt him in his rush. He kicked the offending branch, snapping it out of its dry socket. He fell to his knees and scooped his things back into the pack, clawing up moss along with gold and silver coins, and a pine seedling along with the soap Kahlan had given him. He didn’t have time to care as he shoved it all back in. This time, he put the pack onto his back, rather than letting it hang from one shoulder. He had been trying to save time before, and it had cost him instead.

The path, which in places was no more than sections of animal trails, began to rise sharply, occasionally requiring that he use both hands to hold on to rocks or roots as he climbed. He’d been up it enough times to know the sound handholds. As cold as the day was, Richard had to wipe sweat from his eyes. He skinned his knuckles on rough granite as he jammed his fingers into cracks for handholds.

In his mind’s eye, Nicci was riding too swiftly, covering too much ground, getting too far ahead. He knew it had been foolhardy to take so much time before leaving, thinking he could make up for it on the trail. He wished he could have taken more time, though, to hold Kahlan.

His insides were in agony at the thought of how heartbroken Kahlan was. He felt, somehow, that it was worse for her. Even if she was free, and he was not, that made it worse for her because, in her freedom, she had to restrain herself when she wanted nothing more than to come after him. In bondage to a master, Richard had it easy; he had only to follow orders.

He burst out of the trees onto the wider trail at the top of the pass. Nicci was nowhere to be seen. He held his breath as he looked to the east, fearing to spot her going down the back side of the pass. Beyond the high place where he stood, he could see forests spread out before him with mountains to each side lifting the carpet of trees. In the distance, greater mountains yet soared to dizzying heights, their peaks and much of their slopes stark white against the gloom of heavy gray sky.

Richard didn’t see any horse and rider, but since the trail twisted down into the trees not far beyond where he stood, that didn’t really prove anything. The top of the pass was a bald bit of open ledge, with most of the rest of the horse trail winding through deep woods. He quickly inspected the ground, casting about for tracks, hoping she wouldn’t be too far ahead of him and he could catch her before she did something terrible. His sense of doom eased when he found no tracks.

He peered out at the valley far below, across the straw-brown meadow, to their house. It was too far away to see anyone. He hoped Kahlan would stay there for a few days, as he had asked. He didn’t want her going to the army, going to fight a losing war, endangering her life for nothing.

Richard understood Kahlan’s desire to be with her people and to defend her homeland. She believed she could make a difference. She could not. Not yet. Maybe not ever. Richard’s vision was really nothing more than the acceptance of that reality. Shaking your sword at the sky didn’t keep the sun from setting.

Richard cast an appraising squint at the clouds. For the last two days, he had thought that the signs pointed to the first snow of the season soon rolling down onto their valley home. By the look of the sky and the scent in the wind, he judged he was right.

He knew he wasn’t going to be able to escape Nicci so easily as to be able to get back to Kahlan within a few days. He had invented that story for another reason. Once the weather shifted and the snow arrived up in these mountain highlands, it tended to come in an onslaught. If the storm was as big as he estimated by the signs it could be, Kahlan and Cara would end up being stuck in their house until spring. With all the food they’d put up, as well as the supplies he’d brought in, they had plenty to last the two of them. The firewood he’d cut would keep them warm.

There, she would be safe. With the army, she would be in constant danger.

The dappled mare walked out of the trees, coming around a bend not far away. Nicci’s blue eyes were on Richard from the first instant she appeared.

At the time the Sisters of the Light had taken him to the Palace of the Prophets in the Old World, Richard had mistakenly believed Kahlan wanted him taken away. He didn’t know or understand she had sent him away to save his life. Richard thought she didn’t ever want to see him again.

While in captivity at the palace, Richard thought Nicci was the personification of lust. He was hardly able to find his voice when around her. He had hardly been able to believe a creature of such physical perfection existed, other than in daydreams.

Now, as he watched her swaying gently in her saddle as she walked her horse up the trail, her intense blue eyes locked on his, it seemed to him she wore her beauty with a kind of grim acceptance. She had so completely lost her stunning presence that he couldn’t even envision any reason for his onetime sentiment about her.

Richard had since learned the true depths of what a real woman was, what real love was, and what real fulfillment was. In that light, Nicci paled into insignificance.

As he watched her coming closer, he was surprised to realize she looked sad. She seemed almost to be sorry to find him there, but more than that, there seemed to be a shadow of relief passing across her countenance.

“Richard, you lived up to my faith.” Her voice suggested that it had been tenuous as best. “You’re in a sweat; would you like to rest?”

Her feigned kindness drove hot blood all the way up to his scalp. He pulled his glare from her gentle smile and turned to the trail, walking ahead of her horse. He thought it best if he not say anything until he could get a grip on his rage.

Not far down the trail they came to a black stallion with a white blaze on its face. The big horse was picketed in a small grassy patch of open ground among towering pines.

“Your horse, as I promised,” she said. “I hope you find him to your liking. I judged him to be big and strong enough to carry you comfortably.”

Richard checked and found the smooth snaffle bit to his approval; she wasn’t abusing the animals with cruel bits used to dominate, as he knew some of the Sisters did. The rest of the tack appeared sound. The horse looked healthy.

Richard took a few moments to introduce himself to the stallion. He reminded himself that the horse was not the cause of his problems, and he shouldn’t let his attitude toward Nicci affect how he treated this handsome animal. He didn’t ask the horse’s name. He let it sniff his hand beneath its curled muzzle, then stroked the stallion’s sleek black neck. He patted its shoulder, conveying a gentle introduction without words. The powerful black stallion stamped his front hooves. He was not yet all that pleased to meet Richard.

For the time being, there was no choice of routes; there was only the one trail and it ran from the direction of the house where Kahlan was back to the east. Richard took the lead so that he wouldn’t have to look at Nicci.

He didn’t want to jump right on the stallion at first sight and make a bad impression that would take a lot of work to overcome. Better to let the horse get to know him, first, if just for a mile or so. He held the reins slack under the stallion’s jaw and walked in front of him, letting him get comfortable with following this strange new man. Putting his mind to the task of working with the horse helped divert him from thoughts that threatened to drag him under a sea of sorrow. After a time, the stallion seemed at ease with his new master and Richard mounted without any ado.

The narrow trail precluded Nicci walking her horse beside his. Her dappled mare snorted its displeasure at having to follow the stallion. Richard was pleased to know that he had already upset the order of things.

Nicci offered no conversation, sensing, he supposed, his mood. He was going with her, but there was no way she could hope to make him happy about it.

When it started getting dark, Richard simply dismounted beside a small brook where the horses could have a drink, and tossed his things on the ground. Nicci wordlessly accepted his choice of campsite, and unstrapped her bedroll from her saddle after she’d taken it down off her horse. She sat on her bedroll, looking a little downcast, more than anything else, and ate some sausage along with a hard biscuit washed down with water. After her first bite, she lifted the sausage to him, meeting his gaze in a questioning manner. He didn’t acknowledge the offer. Nicci assumed he declined, and went back to eating.

When she was finished and had washed in the brook, she went behind the thick undergrowth for a time. When she came back, she crawled into her bedroll without a word, turned away from him, and went to sleep.

Richard sat on the mossy ground, arms folded, leaning the small of his back against his saddle. He didn’t sleep the entire night. He sat watching Nicci sleep in the light of the overcast sky lit from the other side by a nearly full moon, watching her slow even breathing, her slightly parted lips, the slow pulse in the vein at the side of her throat, thinking the whole time how he might overcome what she had done to them. He thought about strangling her, but he knew better.