Soul of the Fire

  Ann scooted toward her. “Alessandra! Is it Jagang? Is it Jagang in you mind?”

  Alessandra nodded as best she could.

  “Swear loyalty to Richard! Swear it in your heart! It’s the only thing to keep the dream walker from your mind!”

  Falling to the ground, Sister Alessandra twitched in convulsions of pain, at the same time mumbling words Ann couldn’t understand.

  At last, the woman went slack, panting in relief. She sat up and peered up into the wagon.

  “It worked! Prelate, it worked.” She put her hands to her head. “Jagang is gone from my mind. Oh, praise the Creator. Praise the Creator.”

  “How about getting these things off me, and doing your praying later?”

  Sister Alessandra scurried to help. Before long, Ann had her shackles off, and she had been healed. For the first time in what seemed ages, she could again touch her own gift.

  The two of them unhitched the horses and saddled them with tack from the wagon. Ann hadn’t felt so joyous in years. They both wanted to get far away from the Imperial Order army.

  As they made their way through the city, heading north, they came across a square filling with people all carrying candles.

  Ann bent over on her horse to ask one of the women what was going on.

  “It’s a candlelight vigil for peace,” the woman said.

  Ann was dumbfounded. “A what?”

  “A candlelight vigil for peace. We are all gathering to show the soldiers coming into the city a better way, to show them the people are going to insist on peace.”

  Ann scowled. “If I were you, I’d be heading for a hole, because these men don’t believe in peace.”

  The woman smiled in a long-suffering manner. “When they see us all gathered for peace, they will see that we are a force too powerful to overcome with anger and hatred.”

  Ann seized Sister Alessandra’s sleeve. “Let’s get out of here. This is going to be a killing field.”

  “But Prelate, these people are in danger. You know what the soldiers of the Order will do. The women… you know what they will do to the women. And any men who resist will be slaughtered.”

  Ann nodded. “I expect so. But there is nothing we can do about it. They will have peace. The dead will have peace. The living will have peace, too—as slaves.”

  They made it past the square just in time. When the soldiers arrived, it was worse even than Ann had envisioned. The screams followed them for a long way. The cries of the men and the children would end relatively quickly. The screams of the older girls and women had only just begun.

  When at last they reached the countryside, Ann asked, “I told you we had to eliminate the Sisters of the Light who wouldn’t escape. Did you do as you knew I wished, before you escaped with me, Sister?”

  Sister Alessandra stared ahead as she rode. “No, Prelate.”

  “Alessandra, you knew it had to be done.”

  “I want to come back to the Creator’s Light. I couldn’t destroy the life he created.”

  “And by not killing those few, many more could die. A Sister of the Dark would want that. How can I trust you are telling me the truth?”

  “Because I didn’t kill the Sisters. If I were still a Sister of the Dark I would have. I’m telling the truth.”

  It would be wonderful if Alessandra had returned to the Light. That had never happened before. Alessandra could be an invaluable source of information.

  “Or it shows you are lying, and are still sworn to the Keeper.”

  “Prelate, I helped you escape. Why won’t you believe me?”

  Ann looked over at the woman as they rode out toward the wilds, toward the unknown. “I can never fully believe or trust you, Alessandra, not after the lies you have told. That is the curse of lying, Sister. Once you place that crown of the liar upon your head, you can take it off again, but it leaves a stain for all time.”

  Richard turned when he heard the horse approaching from behind. He checked Kahlan, who lay inside the carriage, as he walked beside it. She was asleep, or possibly unconscious. At least he could now recognize a little of her face.

  Richard looked again when the horse was closer, and saw a rider in red. Cara trotted her horse up close and then dismounted. She took the reins and walked up beside him. She had a limp.

  “Lord Rahl, it took me a long time to catch you. Where are you going?”

  “Home.”

  “Home?”

  “That’s right, home.”

  Cara looked up the road. “Where is home?”

  “Hartland. Maybe to the west—in the mountains. There are some nice places there, places I’ve always wanted to take Kahlan.”

  She seemed to accept this and walked silently beside him for a time, leading her horse along behind.

  “Lord Rahl, what about everything else? D’Hara. The Midlands. All the people.”

  “What about them?”

  “Well, they will be waiting for you.”

  “They don’t need me. I quit.”

  “Lord Rahl, how can you say such a thing?”

  “I have violated every wizard’s rule I know. I’ve…”

  He let it go. He didn’t care.

  “Where is Du Chaillu?” Cara asked.

  “I sent her home to her people. Her task with us was done.” Richard glanced over. “She had her baby. A beautiful little girl. She named it Cara, after you.”

  Cara beamed. “Then I am glad it was not ugly. Some babies are ugly, you know.”

  “Well, this one was beautiful.”

  “Did it look like you, Lord Rahl?”

  Richard scowled at her. “No.”

  Cara peered into the carriage. Her blond braid slipped forward over her shoulder.

  “What happened to the Mother Confessor?”

  “I just about got her killed.”

  Cara didn’t say anything.

  “I heard you were captured. Are you all right?” he asked.

  Cara pushed her braid back over her shoulder. “They were fools. They didn’t take my Agiel. When you fixed the magic, I made them all curse their mothers for ever meeting their fathers.”

  Richard smiled. That was the Cara he knew.

  “And then I killed them,” she added.

  She held out the broken top of a black bottle. It still had the gold filigree stopper. “Lord Rahl, I failed. I didn’t bring you your sword. But… but I managed to break the black bottle from the Wizard’s Keep with the sword, at least.” She stopped, her blue eyes brimming with tears. “Lord Rahl, I’m sorry. I failed. I tried my best, I swear, but I failed.”

  Richard stopped then. He put his arms around her. “No, you didn’t fail, Cara. Because you broke that bottle with the sword, we were able to get magic back to right.”

  “Really?”

  He nodded as he looked her in the eye. “Really. You did right, Cara. I’m proud of you.”

  They started walking again.

  “So, Lord Rahl, how far to home?”

  He thought it over a few minutes. “I guess Kahlan is my family, so that makes it home wherever we are. As long as I’m with Kahlan, I’m home.

  “Cara, it’s over. You can go home now. I release you.”

  She stopped. Richard walked on.

  “But I don’t have a family. They are all dead.”

  He looked back at her, standing in the road, looking as forlorn as anything he had ever seen.

  Richard went back, put an arm around her shoulders, and started walking with her.

  “We’re your family, Cara, Kahlan and me. We love you. So I guess you should come home with us.”

  That seemed to suit her.

  “Will there be people at this home place who need killing?”

  Richard smiled. “I don’t think so.”

  “Then why would we want to go there?”

  When he only smiled, she said, “I thought you wanted to take over the world. I was looking forward to you being a tyrant. I say you should do it. The Mother Conf
essor would agree with me. That makes it two against one. We win.”

  “The world didn’t want me. They took a vote and said no.”

  “A vote! There was your problem.”

  “I won’t do it again.”

  Cara limped along beside him for a time and then said, “They will all find you, you know. The D’Harans are bonded to you. You are the Lord Rahl. Everyone will find you.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “Richard?” came a soft voice.

  He pulled the team up and went to the side of the carriage.

  Kahlan was awake. He took her hand.

  “Who’s that?” she asked.

  Cara leaned in. “Just me. I had to come back. You see what kind of trouble you get into when I’m not watching over you?”

  Kahlan smiled a little smile. She released Richard’s hand and took Cara’s.

  “Glad you’re home,” Kahlan whispered.

  “Lord Rahl said I saved the magic. Can you imagine? What was I thinking? I had the chance to rid myself of magic, and instead I saved it.”

  Kahlan smiled again.

  “How are you feeling?” Richard asked.

  “Terrible.”

  “You don’t look so bad,” Cara told her. “I’ve been much worse.”

  Richard gently stroked Kahlan’s hand. “You’ll get better. I promise. And wizards always keep their promises.”

  “Cold,” she said. Her teeth were beginning to chatter.

  Richard spotted the blanket Dalton Campbell had put on the side and pulled it closer.

  The Sword of Truth fell out. He stood staring at it.

  “The sword has come home, too, I guess,” Cara said.

  “I guess it has.”

  END

  ~

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  Weary of bloodletting and the incessant infighting and intriguing of his allies, Richard realizes that he can’t defeat the Imperial Order by military might alone.

  Instead, he will embark on a course of action that will leave his people feeling betrayed and vulnerable, and which will take both he and Kahlan away from the protection of the D’Haran armies.

  But he has little choice. Richard, who distrusts prophecy more than anyone, has had a vision. A vision he is compelled to follow, a vision that will separate him from Kahlan, a vision that will take him deep into the Old World and into the heart of the Imperial Order.

  Can’t wait? Buy it here now!

  1

  She didn’t remember dying.

  With an obscure sense of apprehension, she wondered if the distant angry voices drifting in to her meant she was again about to experience that transcendent ending: death.

  There was absolutely nothing she could do about it if she was.

  While she didn’t remember dying, she dimly recalled, at some later point, solemn whispers saying that she had, saying that death had taken her, but that he had pressed his mouth over hers and filled her stilled lungs with his breath, his life, and in so doing had rekindled hers. She had had no idea who it was that spoke of such an inconceivable feat, or who “he” was.

  That first night, when she had perceived the distant, disembodied voices as little more than a vague notion, she had grasped that there were people around her who didn’t believe, even though she was again living, that she would remain alive through the rest of the night. But now she knew she had; she had remained alive many more nights, perhaps in answer to desperate prayers and earnest oaths whispered over her that first night.

  But if she didn’t remember the dying, she remembered the pain before passing into that great oblivion. The pain, she never forgot. She remembered fighting alone and savagely against all those men, men baring their teeth like a pack of wild hounds with a hare. She remembered the rain of brutal blows driving her to the ground, heavy boots slamming into her once she was there, and the sharp snap of bones. She remembered the blood, so much blood, on their fists, on their boots. She remembered the searing terror of having no breath to gasp at the agony, no breath to cry out against the crushing weight of hurt.

  Sometime after—whether hours or days, she didn’t know—when she was lying under clean sheets in an unfamiliar bed and had looked up into his gray eyes, she knew that, for some, the world reserved pain worse than she had suffered.

  She didn’t know his name. The profound anguish so apparent in his eyes told her beyond doubt that she should have. More than her own name, more than life itself, she knew she should have known his name, but she didn’t. Nothing had ever shamed her more.

  Thereafter, whenever her own eyes were closed, she saw his, saw not only the helpless suffering in them but also the light of such fierce hope as could only be kindled by righteous love. Somewhere, even in the worst of the darkness blanketing her mind, she refused to let the light in his eyes be extinguished by her failure to will herself to live.

  At some point, she remembered his name. Most of the time, she remembered it. Sometimes, she didn’t. Sometimes, when pain smothered her, she forgot even her own name.

  Now, as Kahlan heard men growling his name, she knew it, she knew him. With tenacious resolution she clung to that name—Richard—and to her memory of him, of who he was, of everything he meant to her.

  Even later, when people had feared she would yet die, she knew she would live. She had to, for Richard, her husband. For the child she carried in her womb. His child. Their child.

  The sounds of angry men calling Richard by name at last tugged Kahlan’s eyes open. She squinted against the agony that had been tempered, if not banished, while in the cocoon of sleep. She was greeted by a blush of amber light filling the small room around her. Since the light wasn’t bright, she reasoned that there must be a covering over a window muting the sunlight, or maybe it was dusk. Whenever she woke, as now, she not only had no sense of time, but no sense of how long she had been asleep.

  She worked her tongue against the pasty dryness in her mouth. Her body felt leaden with the thick, lingering slumber. She was as nauseated as the time when she was little and had eaten three candy green apples before a boat journey on a hot, windy day. It was hot like that now: summer hot. She struggled to rouse herself fully, but her awaking awareness seemed adrift, bobbing in a vast shadowy sea. Her stomach roiled. She suddenly had to put all her mental effort into not throwing up. She knew all too well that in her present condition, few things hurt more than vomiting. Her eyelids sagged closed again, and she foundered to a place darker yet.

  She caught herself, forced her thoughts to the surface, and willed her eyes open again. She remembered: they gave her herbs to dull the pain and to help her sleep. Richard knew a good deal about herbs. At least the herbs helped her drift into stuporous sleep. The pain, if not as sharp, still found her there.

  Slowly, carefully, so as not to twist what felt like double-edged daggers skewered here and there between her ribs, she drew a deeper breath. The fragrance of balsam and pine filled her lungs, helping to settle her stomach. It was not the aroma of trees among other smells in the forest, among damp dirt and toadstools and cinnamon ferns, but the redolence of trees freshly felled and limbed. She concentrated on focusing her sight and saw beyond the foot of the bed a wall of pale, newly peeled timber, here and there oozing sap from fresh axe cuts. The wood looked to have been split and hewn in haste, yet its tight fit betrayed a precision only knowledge and experience could bestow.

  The room was tiny; in the Confessors’ Palace, where she had grown up, a room this small would not have qualified as a closet for linens. Moreover, it would have been stone, if not marble. She liked the tiny wooden room; she expected that Richard had bu
ilt it to protect her. It felt almost like his sheltering arms around her. Marble, with its aloof dignity, never comforted her in that way.

  Beyond the foot of the bed, she spotted a carving of a bird in flight. It had been sculpted with a few sure strokes of a knife into a log of the wall on a flat spot only a little bigger than her hand. Richard had given her something to look at. On occasion, sitting around a campfire, she had watched him casually carve a face or an animal from a scrap of wood. The bird, soaring on wings spread wide as it watched over her, conveyed a sense of freedom.

  Turning her eyes to the right, she saw a brown wool blanket hanging over the doorway. From beyond the doorway came fragments of angry, threatening voices.

  “It’s not by our choice, Richard…. We have our own families to think about…wives and children…”

  Wanting to know what was going on, Kahlan tried to push herself up onto her left elbow. Somehow, her arm didn’t work the way she had expected it to. Like a bolt of lightning, pain blasted up the marrow of her bone and exploded through her shoulder.

  Gasping against the racking agony of attempted movement, she dropped back before she had managed to lift her shoulder an inch off the bed. Her panting twisted the daggers piercing her sides. She had to will herself to slow her breathing in order to get the stabbing pain under control. As the worst of the torment in her arm and the stitches in her ribs eased, she finally let out a soft moan.

  With calculated calm, she gazed down the length of her left arm. The arm was splinted. As soon as she saw it, she remembered that of course it was. She reproached herself for not thinking of it before she had tried to put weight on it. The herbs, she knew, were making her thinking fuzzy. Fearing to make another careless movement, and since she couldn’t sit up, she focused her effort on forcing clarity into her mind.

  She cautiously reached up with her right hand and wiped her fingers across the bloom of sweat on her brow, sweat sown by the flash of pain. Her right shoulder socket hurt, but it worked well enough. She was pleased by that triumph, at least. She touched her puffy eyes, understanding then why it had hurt to look toward the door. Gingerly, her fingers explored a foreign landscape of swollen flesh. Her imagination colored it a ghastly black-and-blue. When her fingers brushed cuts on her cheek, hot embers seemed to sear raw, exposed nerves.