"Can you help him? Can you save him?"
"The Keeper's mark has been placed upon him. The mark will take the holder to the Keeper. If another's hand is placed over the mark, it will transfer to them, and take them instead, in his place. Richard will not then be pulled to the Keeper. He will live."
Kahlan knew in that instant what she must do. Without hesitation, she leaned over Richard, stretching her hand out. "Then I will take the mark. I will go in his place so that he will live." She spread her fingers to match the black mark. Her hand was only a scant inch above it.
"Kahlan, don't do that."
She looked over her shoulder. "Why? If it will save him, then I am willing to go in his place."
"I know you are, but it is not that simple. We must talk first. It will not be easy, for either of us. It will hurt both of us to really help him."
Kahlan reluctantly sat back down and nodded. She would have agreed to anything, paid any price, even talking to this... woman. She put a hand protectively on Richard as she sat facing Denna. "How do you know who I am?"
Denna grinned, almost laughed. "To know Richard is to know who Kahlan is."
"He told you about me?"
Denna's smile faded. "In a way. I heard your name countless times. When I hurt him until he was delirious, he cried your name. Never another. Not his mother's, nor his father's. Only yours. I hurt him until he didn't know his own name, but he always knew yours. I knew he would find a way to be with you despite your Confessor's power." A little of her smile came back. "I think Richard could find a way to make the sun rise at midnight."
"Why are you telling me this?"
"Because I am going to ask you to help him, and I want you to understand exactly how much you will be hurting him before you agree to it. You must understand what it is you will have to do in order to save him. I won't trick you into doing it. It must be with your full knowledge. Only in that way will you know how to save him. If you don't understand, you could fail.
"He is in danger from more than this mark. He is sick with a madness, madness I put there. It will kill him as surely as will the Keeper's mark."
"Richard is probably the most sane person I know. He has no madness. It is the mark we must remove."
"He is marked in other ways: he has the gift. I knew from the moment he came to kill me. I can see it in him now, the aura of it. I know it is killing him, and I know his time is very short. I don't know how long, only that there is not much time left. We can't save him from the Keeper just to have him die anyway from the gift."
Kahlan nodded as she wiped her nose on the back of her hand. "The Sisters of the Light say they can save him. They say he must put a collar on to save himself. Richard will not put it on. He told me what you did to him, why he won't wear a collar. But Richard is not crazy. He will see in the end what must be done, and do it. That is the way his is. He will see the truth."
Denna shook her head. "What he told you does not scratch the surface of it. You cannot imagine what he has not told you. I know his madness. He will not tell you the rest of it. I must."
Kahlan's anger boiled. "I don't think it would be wise for you to tell me. If he doesn't want to tell me, then I don't think I should know it."
"You must. You must understand him if you are to help him. In some ways, I understand him better than you. I have taken him to the edge of madness, and beyond. I have seen him in a wasteland of insanity.
"I have stood over him and held him there."
Kahlan glared. She recognized the look in Denna's eyes when she looked at Richard. She didn't trust her. "You love him."
Denna stared at her. "He loves you. I used that love to hurt him. I took him to the brink of death and held him there, on the cusp. Others would bring a man to the edge faster, but they couldn't hold him there. They always went one step too far, too quickly, and killed them, ending it before they could extract the most exquisite pain, inflict the cruelest of the insanity. Darken Rahl chose me because I had a talent for keeping them alive and giving them that pain, and then more, and then even more. Darken Rahl himself taught me.
"I had to sit for hours, sometimes, and wait, knowing that if I touched him just once more with the Agiel, it would be one touch too many; it would kill him. As I sat, waiting for him to recover enough so that I might hurt him more, he would whisper your name, over and over, for hours. He wasn't even aware he was doing it.
"You were the thread that kept him alive. It was the one thread that allowed me to give him that extra pain. Allowed me to take him further toward death, deeper into madness. I used his love for you to punish him beyond anything otherwise possible.
"As I would sit there, listening to him whisper your name, I wished it would once, just once, have been my name he called out. It never was. I hurt him more for that than for anything else."
Tears ran down Kahlan's cheeks, falling from her face. "Please Denna, I don't want to hear any more. I can't bear to hear any more—to know I made it possible for you to do what you did."
"You must. I have not yet even begun to tell you what you must hear if you want to help him. You must understand how I used magic against him; why he hates the magic within himself. I understand, because what I did to him was also done to me, by Darken Rahl."
As Kahlan sat shaking, staring blankly at nothing, almost in a trance, Denna began telling her what she had done to Richard. How she used the Agiel. She flinched at the description of every kind of touch, at everything it could do. Kahlan remembered all too well what its touch felt like, the maddening pain. She learned that what she had felt was the least of it.
She cried as Denna told her how Richard had hung in shackles as she pulled his head back by his hair and made him stay perfectly still while she pushed the Agiel in his ear, or risk damage inside his head. And how he had been able to do it because of his love for Kahlan. She shook, when she heard the horrifying description of what it did to him, what the magic did to him; what his own magic did to him. She couldn't look at Denna as the other spoke. Couldn't meet her eyes. And that was only the beginning.
She clutched her stomach and held a trembling hand to her mouth to keep from vomiting as Denna described one unspeakable act after another. Kahlan couldn't make herself stop crying. She gagged as she closed her eyes tight.
As she listened, she prayed to the good spirits that Denna wouldn't tell her the one thing she knew she couldn't bear to hear.
But then Denna told her. Told her what a Mord-Sith did to her mate, why their mates didn't live long. Every intimate detail. And what she had done to Richard that she had done to no other mate.
With a wail, Kahlan turned away, crawled a short distance, and started throwing up. With one hand holding herself up, and the other across her abdomen, she cried and heaved and gagged. Denna's hands were there, holding her hair back as Kahlan emptied the contents of her stomach onto the dirt. She vomited until her insides were heaved dry.
She felt Denna's warm tingling touch on her back. She wanted to call forth the lightning, but was too sick to find the power. She was torn between wanting to throw herself on Richard and comfort him, and ripping this woman apart with the magic of the Con Dar, the blood rage.
Between gagging, and panting, and crying, Kahlan managed to get the words out. "Take... your hands... off me." The hand holding her hair slipped away. The one on her back lifted. Her stomach heaved again in a dry convulsion. "How many times did you do that to him?"
"Enough. It does not matter."
Kahlan turned in a rage, clenching her fists as she screamed. "How many times!"
Denna's voice was soft and calm. "I'm sorry, Kahlan, I don't know. I didn't keep a tally. But he was with me a long time. Longer than any other mate. I did it almost every night. The things I did, I did to no other, because none had the strength Richard did, the strength of his love for you. The others would have died the first time. He fought me, for a long time. I did it enough, that's all. Enough."
"Enough! Enough for what!"
> "Enough to drive a part of him mad."
"He's not mad! He's not! He's not!"
Denna watched as Kahlan shook with pain and rage. "Kahlan, listen to me. Anyone else would have been broken by what I did. Richard saved himself by partitioning his mind. He locked the core of himself away where I couldn't get to it, where the magic couldn't get to it. He used the gift to do that. It saved the core of himself from the insanity. But in the darkest corners of his mind, lurks madness. I used his magic against him, to drive him insane. He couldn't protect all of himself from the things I did.
"I told you what I did so you could see the truth of his madness. He had to sacrifice that part to save the rest. To save the rest for you. I wish I could have done the same when it was done to me."
Kahlan lifted Richard's hand in hers, holding the back of it to her heart. "How could you do those things?" she cried. "Oh, my poor Richard. How could you? How could you do that to anyone?"
"We all have our own little bits of insanity. Some more than others. My life was a darkness of it."
"Then how could you! How could you, knowing what it was like!"
Denna watched her from under her eyebrows. "You have done terrible things too. You have used your power to hurt people."
"But they were people guilty of horrible crimes!"
"All of them?" she asked quietly. "Every one?"
Kahlan's breath caught with the memory of using her power against Brophy.
"No," she whispered. "But I didn't do it because I wanted to. I had to. It is my job. Who I am. What I am."
"But you did it. And what of Demmin Nass?"
The words cut through her. Her mind flooded with the memory, the sweet memory, of castrating that beast of a man. She sank forward with a wail. "Oh, dear spirits, am I no better than you?"
"We all do what we must, whatever the reasons." Her glowing, diaphanous fingers lifted Kahlan's chin. "I do not tell you these things to hurt you, Kahlan. The telling of them wounds me more than you can know. I tell you because I want to save Richard, so that he doesn't die before his rightful time, and so that the Keeper does not escape."
Kahlan clutched Richard's hand tighter to her breast as she wept. "I'm sorry Denna... but I don't have it in me to forgive you. I know Richard does... but I do not. I hate you."
"I would not expect you to forgive me. I only wish you to understand the truth of what I am telling you, the truth of Richard's madness."
"Why! To what purpose!"
"So that you will understand what you must do. Wearing a collar is the core of that insanity. It symbolizes everything I did to him. In his mind, magic is madness, torture. A collar is madness, torture. Insanity.
"The thought of having a collar around his neck brings that madness out of the darkest corners of his being, brings out his deepest fears. He is not exaggerating when he says he would rather die than put a collar around his neck. He will not do it to save himself. If he doesn't, he will die. There is only one thing in the world that will make him put on the collar."
Kahlan's head snapped up. Her eyes were wide. "You want me to ask him to put a collar around his neck." She went weak with dread. "You would have me do that to him? After what you have told me?"
Denna nodded. "He will do it if you tell him to. He will not do it for any other reason. None."
Richard's limp arm slipped from Kahlan's shaking hands. Her fingers covered her mouth. Denna was right. After what she knew now, what she had heard, she knew Denna was right.
She knew now what it had been that she had seen in Richard's eyes when he looked at the collar the Sisters held out to him. It had been madness. Richard would never put a collar around his neck of his own accord. Never. She knew that now. Really knew it.
A small cry escaped her throat. "If I make him put on the collar, he will think I have betrayed him. In his madness, he will think I want to hurt him." Pain welled up inside her, and she started to cry all over again. "He will hate me."
Denna's voice came in a soft whisper. "I am sorry, Kahlan. That could be the truth of it. We can't know for sure, but he may very well see it that way. I don't know how much the madness will take over when he knows he must put on the collar, when you tell him he must. But he loves you more than life itself, and will put it on for no other reason."
"Denna, I don't know if I could do that to him. Not after what you have told me."
"You must, or he will die. If you love him enough, you must do this. You must be strong enough in your love for him to force him to do it, knowing the pain it will bring him. You may have to act as I would have acted, to frighten him enough to do as you say. You may have to bring the madness to full flower, make him think the way he did when he was with me, when he would have done anything he was told.
"You may lose his love. He may hate you forever. But if you really love him, you will see that you are the only one who can help him; the only one who can save him."
Kahlan snatched desperately for a way out. "But in the morning, we were going to go to Zedd, a wizard, who might be able to help him control the gift. Richard thinks Zedd will know what to do; that he will be able to help him."
"That may be true. I'm sorry, Kahlan, I don't know the answer to that. It may work. But I do know that the Sisters of the Light have the power to save him. If they come, and he turns them down for the third time, he will forever lose the opportunity to get their help. If it turns out that this wizard can't help Richard, then he will die. His time is short, days at most.
"Do you understand what that means, Kahlan? He won't just die; the Keeper will have him, have everyone. Richard is the only one who can close the veil."
"How? Do you know how he can close it?"
"I'm sorry, I don't. I know only that it must be torn the rest of the way from this side. That is why the Keeper has agents on this side. That is why Darken Rahl came here. Somehow, Richard is the only one who can stop them, and also the only one with the power to repair what has been rent.
"If he turns the Sisters down, and this wizard can't help him, then he dies, soon, and it will be as if the mark itself took him to the Keeper. If he can get to this wizard before he turns the Sisters down for the third time, he can learn whether he can be helped without them... without the collar. But if they come before he can get to Zedd, I must have your promise you will do what must be done to save him."
"There is time. The Sisters won't be back for at least a few days. We can get to Zedd first. There is time!"
"I hope you are right, I really do. I'm sure you won't believe me, but I don't want Richard to ever have to wear a collar, to ever face that madness again. But if you can't get to Zedd, then you must promise me you won't allow him to miss the chance at life the Sisters offer."
Tears streamed from Kahlan's burning eyes. Richard would hate her if she made him put on the collar; she knew he would. He would think she had betrayed him.
"But what of the mark? He still has the mark on him"
Denna watched her a long time. Her voice came so softly Kahlan could scarcely hear it. "I will take the mark. I will go to the Keeper in his place." A shimmering tear ran down her cheek. "But I will only do it, I will only give up my soul, if I know it gives him a chance."
Kahlan stared incredulously. "You would do that for him?" she whispered. "Why?"
"Because after all I had done to him, he cared about my pain. He is the only one who ever did anything to stop my pain. When Darken Rahl beat me, he cried, and he made a potion to take away my pain, though I had never once stopped torturing him no matter how much he begged. Not once.
"And after all the things I have told you I did to him, he forgave me. He understood what I had suffered. He took my Agiel to wear around his neck and promised to remember me, to remember that I was more than a Mord-Sith; to remember that I was once just Denna."
Another shimmering tear ran down. "And because I love him. Even in death, I love him. Though I know my love will never be requited, I still love him."
Kahlan looke
d at Richard as he lay on his back, unconscious, helpless, with the Keepers mark, black and bleeding, on his chest. The black and white mud painted everywhere on him made him look wild, savage, but he wasn't; he was the gentlest person she had ever known. She realized then that she would do anything to save him. Anything.
"I will do it," she whispered. "I promise. If we can't find Zedd before the Sisters come back for the third time, I will make him put on the collar, no matter what it takes. Even if it makes him hate me. Even if it kills me."
Denna's hand reached out to her. "An oath then, between the living and the dead, to do what must be done to save him."
Kahlan stared at the hand before her. "I still can't forgive you. I won't forgive you."
The hand stayed where it was, waiting. "The only forgiveness I need has already been granted."
Kahlan stared at the hand, and then reached out and took it. "An oath then, to save the one we love."
They clasped hands, and shared a silent joining.
Denna took away her hand. "Time is short for him. It must be now." Kahlan nodded. "When it is done, get help for him. Though the pull of the mark will be removed, the wound will still be there, and it is a serious one."
Kahlan nodded. "There is a healer here. She will help him."
Denna's eyes were filled with compassion. "Thank you, Kahlan, for loving him enough to help him. May the good spirits be with you both." She gave a small, frightened smile. "Where I am going, I will never see any of them, or I would send them to help you."
Kahlan touched the back of the other's hand, offering a silent prayer for strength.
Denna returned the touch to Kahlan's cheek, and then knelt next to Richard. Her hand went to the mark, covering it, dissolving into it. Richard's chest heaved.
Denna's features twisted in pain. She threw her head back with a piercing scream that shot through Kahlan.
And then she was just gone.
Richard groaned. Kahlan bent over him, caressing him. Crying.