“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.”
She knew he expected her to leave it at that. “If it became so clear and is unambiguous,” she pressed, “you must be able to express it in words.”
Richard slipped the baldric over his head, laying it over his right shoulder. As he adjusted the sword against his left hip, light sparkled off the raised gold wire woven through the silver wire of the hilt to spell out the word TRUTH.
His brow was smooth and his face calm. She knew she had at last brought him to the heart of the matter. His certainty would afford him no reason to keep it from her if she chose to hear it, and she did. His words rolled forth with quiet power, like prophecy come to life.
“I have been a leader too soon. It is not I who must prove myself to the people, but the people who must now prove themselves to me. Until then, I must not lead them, or all hope is lost.”
Standing there, erect, masculine, masterful in his black war wizard outfit, he looked as if he could be posing for a statue of who he was: the Seeker of Truth, rightfully named by Zeddicus Zu’l Zorander, the First Wizard himself—and Richard’s grandfather. It had nearly broken Zedd’s heart to do so, because Seekers so often died young and violently.
While he lived, a Seeker was a law unto himself. Backed by the awesome power of his sword, a Seeker could bring down kingdoms. That was one reason it was so important to name the right person—a moral person—to the post. Zedd claimed that the Seeker, in a way, named himself by the nature of his own mind and by his actions, and that the First Wizard’s function was simply to act on his observations by officially naming him and giving him the weapon that was to be his lifelong companion.
So many different qualities and responsibilities had converged in this man she loved that she sometimes wondered how he could reconcile them all.
“Richard, are you so sure?”
Because of the importance of the post, Kahlan and then Zedd had sworn their lives in defense of Richard as the newly named Seeker of Truth. That had been shortly after Kahlan had met him. It was as Seeker that Richard had first come to accept all that had been thrust upon him, and to live up to the extraordinary trust put in him.
His gray eyes fairly blazed with clarity of purpose as he answered her.
“The only sovereign I can allow to rule me is reason. The first law of reason is this: what exists, exists; wh
at is, is. From this irreducible, bedrock principle, all knowledge is built. This is the foundation from which life is embraced.
“Reason is a choice. Wishes and whims are not facts, nor are they a means to discovering them. Reason is our only way of grasping reality—it’s our basic tool of survival. We are free to evade the effort of thinking, to reject reason, but we are not free to avoid the penalty of the abyss we refuse to see.
“If I fail to use reason in this struggle, if I close my eyes to the reality of what is, in favor of what I would wish, then we will both die in this, and for nothing. We will be but two more among uncounted millions of nameless corpses beneath the gray, gloomy decay of mankind. In the darkness that will follow, our bones will be meaningless dust.
“Eventually, perhaps a thousand years from now, perhaps more, the light of liberty will again be raised up to shine over a free people, but between now and then, millions upon millions of people will be born into hopeless misery and have no choice but to bear the weight of the Order’s yoke. We, by ignoring reason, will have purchased those mountains of broken bodies, the wreckage of lives endured but never lived.”
Kahlan found herself unable to summon the courage to speak, much less argue; to do so right then would be to ask him to disregard his judgment at a cost he believed would be a sea of blood. But doing as he saw they must would cast her people helpless into the jaws of death.
Kahlan, her vision turning to a watery blur, looked away.
“Cara,” Richard said, “get the horses hitched to the carriage. I’m going to scout a circle to make sure we don’t have any surprises.”
“I will scout while you hitch the horses. I am your guard.”
“You’re my friend, too. I know this land better than you. Hitch the horses and don’t give me any trouble about it.”
Cara rolled her eyes and huffed, but marched off to do his bidding.
The room rang with silence. Richard’s shadow slipped off the blanket. When Kahlan whispered her love to him, he paused and looked back. His shoulders seemed to betray the weight he carried.
“I wish I could, but I can’t make people understand freedom. I’m sorry.”
From somewhere inside, Kahlan found a smile for him. “Maybe it isn’t so hard.” She gestured toward the bird he had carved in the wall. “Just show them that, and they will understand what freedom really means: to soar on your own wings.”
Richard smiled, she thought gratefully, before he vanished through the doorway.
Chapter 3
All the troubling thoughts tumbling through her mind kept Kahlan from falling back to sleep. She tried not to think about Richard’s vision of the future. As exhausted as she was by pain, his words were too troubling to contemplate, and besides, there was nothing she could do about it right then. But she was determined to help him get over the loss of Anderith and focus on stopping the Imperial Order.
It was more difficult to shake her thoughts about the men who had been outside, men Richard had grown up with. The haunting memory of their angry threats echoed in her mind. She knew that ordinary men who had never before acted violently, could, in the right circumstances, be incited to great brutality. With the way they viewed mankind as sinful, wretched, and evil, it was only a small step more to actually doing evil. After all, any evil they might do, they had already rationalized as being predestined by what they viewed as man’s inescapable nature.
It was unnerving to contemplate an attack by such men when she could do nothing but lie there waiting to be killed. Kahlan envisioned a grinning, toothless Tommy Lancaster leaning over her to cut her throat while all she could do was stare helplessly up at him. She had often been afraid in battle, but at least then she could fight with all her strength to survive. That helped counter the fear. It was different to be helpless and have no means to fight back; it was a different sort of fear.
If she had to, she could always resort to her Confessor’s power, but in her condition that was a dubious proposition. She had never had to call upon her power when in anything like the condition in which she now found herself. She reminded herself that the three of them would be long gone before the men returned, and besides, Richard and Cara would never let them get near her.
Kahlan had a more immediate fear, though, and that one was all too real. But she wouldn’t feel it for long; she would pass out, she knew. She hoped.
She tried not to think of it, and instead put her hand gently over her belly, over their child, as she listened to the nearby splashing and burbling of a stream. The sound of the water reminded her of how much she wished she could take a bath. The bandages over the oozing wound in her side stank and needed to be changed often. The sheets were soaked with sweat. Her scalp itched. The mat of grass that was the bedding under the sheet was hard and chafed her back. Richard had probably made the pallet quickly, planning to improve it later.
As hot as the day was, the stream’s cold water would be welcome. She longed for a bath, to be clean, and to smell fresh. She longed to be better, to be able to do things for herself, to be healed. She could only hope that as time passed, Richard, too, would recover from his invisible, but real, wounds.
Cara finally returned, grumbling about the horses being stubborn today. She looked up to see the room was empty. “I had better go look for him and make sure he’s safe.”
“He’s fine. He knows what he’s doing. Just wait, Cara, or he will then have to go out and look for you.”
Cara sighed and reluctantly agreed. Retrieving a cool, wet cloth, she set to mopping Kahlan’s forehead and temples. Kahlan didn’t like to complain when people were doing their best to care for her, so she didn’t say anything about how much it hurt her torn neck muscles when her head was shifted in that way. Cara never complained about any of it. Cara only complained when she believed her charges were in needless danger—and when Richard wouldn’t let her eliminate those she viewed as a danger.
Outside, a bird let out a high-pitched trill. The tedious repetition was becoming grating. In the distance, Kahlan could hear a squirrel chattering an objection to something, or perhaps arguing over his territory. He’d been doing it for what seemed an hour. The stream babbled on without letup.
This was Richard’s idea of restful.
“I hate this,” she muttered.
“You should be happy—lying about without anything to do.”
“And I bet you would be happy to trade places?”
“I am Mord-Sith. For a Mord-Sith, nothing could be worse than to die in bed.” Her blue eyes turned to Kahlan’s. “Old and toothless,” she added. “I didn’t mean that you—”
“I know what you meant.”
Cara looked relieved. “Anyway, you couldn’t die—that would be too easy. You never do anything easy.”
“I married Richard.”
“See what I mean?”
Kahlan smiled.
Cara dunked the cloth in a pail on the floor and wrung it out as she stood. “It isn’t too bad, is it? Just lying there?”
“How would you like to have to have someone push a wooden bowl under our bottom every time your bladder was full?”
Cara carefully blotted the damp cloth along Kahlan’s neck. “I don’t mind doing it for a sister of the Agiel.”
The Agiel, the weapon a Mord-Sith always carried, looked like nothing more than a short, red leather rod hanging on a fine chain from her right wrist. A Mord-Sith’s Agiel was never more than a flick away from her grip. It somehow functioned by means of the magic of a Mord-Sith’s bond to the Lord Rahl.
Kahlan had once felt the partial touch of an Agiel. In a blinding instant, it could inflict the kind of pain that the entire gang of men had dealt Kahlan. The touch of a Mord-Sith’s Agiel was easily capable of delivering bone-breaking torture, and just as easily, if she desired, death.
Richard had given Kahlan the Agiel that had belonged to Denna, the Mord-Sith who had captured him by order of Darken Rahl. Only Richard had ever come to understand and empathize with the pa
in an Agiel also gave the Mord-Sith who wielded it. Before he was forced to kill Denna in order to escape, she had given him her Agiel, asking to be remembered as simply Denna, the woman beyond the appellation of Mord-Sith, the woman no one but Richard had ever before seen or understood.
That Kahlan understood, and kept the Agiel as a symbol of that same respect for women whose young lives had been stolen and twisted to nightmare purposes and duties, was deeply meaningful to the other Mord-Sith. Because of that compassion—untainted by pity—and more, Cara had named Kahlan a sister of the Agiel. It was an informal but heartfelt accolade.
“Messengers have come to see Lord Rahl,” Cara said. “You were sleeping, and Lord Rahl saw no reason to wake you,” she added in answer to Kahlan’s questioning look. The messengers were D’Haran, and able to find Richard by their bond to him as their Lord Rahl. Kahlan, not able to duplicate the feat, had always found it unsettling.
“What did they have to say?”
Cara shrugged. “Not a lot. Jagang’s army of the Imperial Order remains in Anderith for the time being, with Reibisch’s force staying safely to the north to watch and be ready should the Order decide to threaten the rest of the Midlands. We know little of the situation inside Anderith, under the Order’s occupation. The rivers flow away from our men, toward the sea, so they have not seen bodies to indicate if there has been mass death, but there have been a few people who managed to escape. They report that there was some death due to the poison which was released, but they don’t know how widespread it was. General Reibisch has sent scouts and spies in to learn what they will.”
“What orders did Richard give them to take back?”
“None.”