“The captain here will explain my orders,” Richard said as he put a foot in the stirrup and swung up onto the saddle. “I have to go.”
“We will have every wagon checked, Lord Rahl,” the captain said. “Will you be going with some of the men, then?”
Richard had to have the wagons searched, just in case, but he doubted that they would find her. There was more to this, something that he had not yet figured out.
He thought about the machine’s warning that the hounds would take her from him. He thought about all the trouble that had started after they had seen the boy, Henrik, down in the market the morning after Cara’s wedding.
Their recent troubles seemed bound up in prophecy. A number of representatives had decided that they wanted to follow Hannis Arc from Fajin Province because he used prophecy. That was why so many had left that night.
One of the first omens had been “Queen takes pawn.” Nicci had told Richard that the prophecy was also a move in a game called chess, a game that was played in Fajin Province in the Dark Lands. Henrik, the sick boy who had given the first warning that there was darkness in the palace, had been to a place called Kharga Trace in the Dark Lands of Fajin Province.
Richard remembered the boy’s mother saying that she had taken him to see the Hedge Maid in Kharga Trace. He remembered the way her eyes had darted about when she had mentioned the Hedge Maid. He also remembered how nervous Abbot Dreier had gotten at the mention of the Hedge Maid.
Nicci had warned Richard about how dangerous Hedge Maids were.
He also remembered the boy’s mother saying that Henrik had been bothered by hounds coming around their tent.
The captain was still waiting for Richard to tell him where he was going.
“I’m not going with any of the men to search the wagons.” Richard’s horse danced around, eager to be away. “Tell General Meiffert and Zedd that I’m going to Kharga Trace and I don’t have the time to wait for them. I don’t have a moment to waste, and besides, they would only slow me down.”
“Kharga Trace?” one of the men of the patrol asked. “In the Dark Lands?”
Richard nodded. “You know the place?”
The man stepped forward. “I know that you don’t want to go there, Lord Rahl.”
“Why’s that?”
“I’m from Fajin Province. You don’t want to go to Kharga Trace. Desperate people go there to see some kind of woman said to have dark powers. A lot of people who go there, though, don’t come back. That kind of thing isn’t all that unusual in the Dark Lands. I was happy to leave to join the D’Haran army. I was fortunate enough to be accepted into the First File so that I might serve here. I don’t ever want to go back.”
Richard wondered if the man might simply be superstitious. When he had been a woods guide, back in the Hartland woods of Westland, he never encountered any dark malevolence haunting the trackless forests, but he did encounter country people who feared such things and believed wholeheartedly in them. Such stories, though, didn’t tarnish his fond memories of home.
“Now that the war is over,” he said to the soldier, “you really don’t want to go home?”
“Lord Rahl, I don’t know much about the gift, but in the war I came to see a great deal of magic to fear. What’s back in the Dark Lands is different. The cunning folk there, as they’re called, use occult conjuring— dark magic— that deals in things dead. It’s very different in the Dark Lands than the magic of the gift I’ve seen since leaving.”
“Different? Different in what way?”
The man looked around, almost as if he feared that the shadows might be listening. “The dead walk the Dark Lands.”
Richard rested his forearm over the pommel of the saddle and frowned down at the man. “What do you mean, the dead walk the Dark Lands?”
“Just what I said. The Dark Lands are demon ground, hunted by scavengers of the underworld. If I never go back there it will be too soon for me.”
Richard thought such superstitious fears sounded even more strange coming from a strong young man, a man who had faced war and terrors no one should ever have to face.
But then he remembered Nicci telling him that a Hedge Maid’s powers were different and that he had no defense against them. Nicci had not only once been known as Death’s Mistress, she had been a Sister of the Dark and had served the cause of the Keeper of the underworld. She knew about such things.
The thought of Kahlan going to a place like that had his heart pounding. Richard knew that the one place he didn’t want Kahlan going to was the Dark Lands, and especially to the Hedge Maid. But too many things pointed in that direction to be coincidence.
Richard nodded. “Thanks for the warning, soldier. I hope to catch up with the Mother Confessor long before then.”
The man clapped a fist to his heart. “May you come home soon, Lord Rahl. Come back safe with the Mother Confessor before you ever have to set foot in the Dark Lands.”
Richard tightened the reins to keep the horse still. “Captain, be sure to tell Nicci, too, where I’m going. Be sure to tell her that I said that I think the Mother Confessor may be headed to the Hedge Maid in Kharga Trace. I am going to try to catch her before she can get there.”
One of the other soldiers ran up and threw saddlebags over the back of the horse. “At least take some supplies, Lord Rahl.”
Richard lifted his sword from its scabbard just a bit and let it drop back, making sure that it was clear. He nodded his thanks to the men and then urged the horse toward the road that led down the side of the plateau.
As Richard gave the horse reins and leaned over its withers, it complied instantly and thundered off into the night.
CHAPTER 77
Kahlan woke with a start. She squinted out at the surrounding woods in the faint, first light of dawn. She didn’t see the hounds down on the ground, at least, not yet.
They always came back.
She knew that it was only a matter of time.
She’d gotten only a few hours of sleep, and it was neither good nor enough. At least she hadn’t fallen out of the tree. The lap of several branches had made a somewhat safe, if uncomfortable, place to rest.
The days of terror seemed endless and had blended one into another until she had completely lost track of time. She was exhausted from the relentless chase. Overwhelming fatigue was the only thing that brought on sleep.
At night, when it got dark enough, the hounds would seem to disappear for the night. She thought that maybe they went off at night to search for food and to rest. At first, she had entertained the hope that they had tired of the chase and had given up.
The first few nights after leaving the palace, when she had still been out on the Azrith Plain and the hounds had vanished at night, Kahlan had thought that it was her chance to escape, to put distance between her and her pursuers, but no matter how fast she ran, no matter how many hours, no matter if she rode all night without stopping, the hounds were always right there when day broke, and then they would come for her again.
Because the sun rose ahead and to the right and set behind her, she knew that she was headed roughly northeast. That told her the direction that the palace would be in. She had tried several times after the hounds had disappeared at night to circle around and head back, but doing so took her back into an ambush by the dogs. She had barely escaped with her life. As they came after her she had to turn back to the northeast, her only thought to outrun them, to put distance between her and her would-be assassins.
There were times when she had wanted to give up, to simply quit running and let it end. But the memory of Catherine’s gruesome end was too horrifying to allow Kahlan to surrender. She kept telling herself that if she could stay alive, if she could stay ahead of the pack of wild dogs, she had a chance. As long as she could outrun them she would stay alive. As long as she was alive, there was hope.
The thought of Richard also kept her from giving up. The thought of him finding her torn apart by the hounds was so cru
shingly heartbreaking that it made her fight all the harder to stay alive.
After she had left the Azrith Plain and had gotten into mountainous terrain, it had become, for the most part, impossible for her to run the horse at night. She was afraid of the animal breaking a leg in the dark. Without the horse, the dogs would easily catch her.
The horse was her lifeline. She took good care of it. At least, she took as good care of it as was possible. She knew that if she lost the horse, she would be dead in short order. On the other hand, if she didn’t push the horse hard enough, the hounds would pull her down.
Kahlan looked down from her place in the branches. The horse was tied to a nearby limb of the tree, but on a long rope so that it could graze on anything it could find close enough. If she needed the horse in a hurry she had the end of the rope at hand so that she could pull the animal in close and climb down onto it.
For some reason, the hounds ignored the horse. They wanted Kahlan, not the horse, and they never attacked it. She couldn’t understand it. The horse, though, was not comforted by their disinterest. Their mere presence set the horse into a panic.
Kahlan looked down, checking where the horse was. Despite how weary she was, she knew that she would have to leave soon lest the dogs arrive and terrify the horse. In its panic, the horse could be hurt. If it broke a leg, she would be done.
If she let the hounds somehow trap her up in the tree, she would have trouble getting the horse close enough to the growling, barking, snapping animals. She didn’t like the thought of being trapped and risking that the horse would break loose in the confusion and get away without her. Just as soon as there was enough light to see, she would leave.
She hadn’t eaten much other than some travel biscuits, a few nuts from time to time, and bit of dried meat she had in her pack. She still felt sick to her stomach and really didn’t want to eat anything at all, but she knew that she needed to keep up her strength, so she forced herself.
She had a fever, and her arm throbbed painfully. She was nauseous and constantly feared that she would have to throw up. She remembered waking back in the Garden of Life with the splitting headache and vomiting uncontrollably. While she knew that she had to eat or she would get sicker, she couldn’t afford to throw up, so she ate only as much as she thought she had to.
As she searched the surrounding area for any sign of the dogs, she thought she spotted something off among the trees.
It looked human.
Kahlan was about to call out to try to get some help, when she saw the way the thing moved. It didn’t walk, exactly. It was more like it glided along through the shadows.
She leaned out on the branch, trying to see better. Just then, the first rays of sunlight came through the treetops.
Kahlan saw then that what she had thought was a person was actually a dog— a big black dog. It was the leader of the pack, stalking out of the trees.
She couldn’t grasp how she could have thought it was a person. With the terror of seeing the pack leader, panic welled up in her and all she could think about was getting away.
Kahlan leaned down and pulled in the rope hand over hand as fast as she could, drawing the horse close to the tree before the hounds could come in close and spook it away.
When the horse was below her, she climbed down to a lower branch of the oak tree and then dropped onto the horse’s back.
Kahlan looked back and saw the pack of dogs coming through the trees. When they saw her they started in howling. Kahlan leaned forward over the horse’s withers as it bolted.
The chase was back on.
CHAPTER 78
As Kahlan guided her horse among immense pines, she frequently looked back over her shoulder to keep track of how close the dogs had gotten. The colossal trees towering above her cut off almost every bit of sky. The lower branches were far out of reach overhead. Iron gray clouds made it even darker, leaving a gloomy world in the undergrowth for the horse to try to navigate.
Drizzle collected on the pine needles until the drops grew fat enough to fall. It was distracting when those fat, random drops splashed against her face. Kahlan was cold, wet, and miserable. She had to concentrate to find the indistinct trail among the nursery of small pines carpeting the lower reaches of the dense forest.
In many places they overgrew a trail too seldom used to keep open. In other places, beds of thick ferns covered over any hint of the little-traveled route through the forest wilderness.
Having grown up in a palace, Kahlan had never known much about following obscure trails. In her duties as a Confessor, she had always traveled the roads and well-used paths between population centers of the Midlands. She had also always been escorted by a wizard. That seemed so long ago that it felt like another lifetime.
To an extent, the hounds helped guide her in the sense that they left her only one real direction she could go. She just had to find enough footing for the horse. Even though the dogs were never far behind, she dared not let the horse panic and run on its own. If they left the trail there was no telling what trouble they could get into. Holes among rocks and fallen timber off the trail could catch and break the horse’s legs. They might suddenly come to a cliff, or an impassable gorge, or a place so dense as to be impenetrable. If that happened, the pack of wild dogs would have her trapped and it would be all over.
She didn’t want to die out in the middle of a trackless forest, taken down by dogs, torn apart, devoured and left for scavengers to pick clean.
She needed to stay on the relative safety of the trail in order to stay ahead of her pursuers. It was Richard who had taught her about following poorly marked trails that were rarely used and difficult to make out. Besides looking for small indications close by, she continually scanned the broader area ahead, looking for telltale signs of where the trail went.
The thought of Richard gave her an agonizing stab of longing. She hadn’t thought about him much in recent days. She was so desperate to get away that she was hardly able to think about anything other than running and staying away from the baying pack of dogs.
Her arm hurt. Her head throbbed. She was so exhausted that she could hardly sit upright atop the horse anymore. Worse, she was so sick with fever that she feared she might pass out.
She supposed that if she was unconscious it might be the best way to die. It might be a blessing to lose consciousness when the pack got to her.
With the back of her hand, Kahlan wiped a tear from her cheek. She missed Richard so much. He must be frantic with worry about her being missing for so long. She felt shame for not somehow letting him know what had happened.
Several of the dogs suddenly ran in out of the brush at the side, lunging at her legs. In a panic, Kahlan urged the horse into a run. Limbs flashed by. Pine boughs slapped her as she raced headlong through the woods. One branch hit her shoulder, almost knocking her off her horse.
Abruptly, the horse skidded to a halt. The ground ahead dropped away over the rim of a rocky ledge. The horse couldn’t take the steep, plunging descent. She feared that they had gotten off the trail, and now they were trapped. Kahlan looked back. The hounds were coming.
As the dogs started yelping and howling in anticipation of having her cornered, the frightened horse suddenly reared up. Without a saddle there was precious little to hold on to. Kahlan snatched for the mane as she started slipping off the horse’s back. She missed.
Before she knew it, she landed with a heavy thud. Stunned from hitting the ground so hard, she groaned in pain. She had landed on her infected arm. With her good arm she cradled her sore arm to her abdomen.
Before Kahlan could grab the rope, the horse bolted away into the woods. In mere seconds she couldn’t see it anymore. But she could see the dogs bounding toward her, the lead dog barking with savage hunger to get at her.
Kahlan turned and practically dove down the steep drop. In places she leaped from ledges of rocks above to rocks below in a series of jarring, barely controlled falls from ledge to ledge. She was racing d
ownward so fast that she didn’t have time to think about it before each leap. She knew how dangerous it was to descend like that, but she was possessed by the panicked drive to escape the terror coming for her.
Kahlan slipped on loose gravel and fell into a slide down a channel of debris and loose ground. Rock and small shrubs flashed by as she slid downward.
Behind her the dogs leaped across the rocks as if they were made for it. They were closing on her.
With a hard impact she hit the bottom and fell sprawling on her face. Without taking the time to feel sorry for herself she pushed herself up. The way ahead looked flatter, but it also looked wet. Mist drifted among the dense trees, so she couldn’t see very far ahead in the gloom.
What she could see was a thick tangle of growth. Vines trailed down from above. Heavy vegetation blocked the way off to the sides.
But she saw that she hadn’t lost the trail after all. It was right in front of her, tunneling ahead through the dense underbrush.
A short-haired brown dog crashed down from the steep trail, rolling as it landed behind her. As he scrambled to get to his feet, his jaws snapped, trying to get Kahlan’s leg in his teeth.
Kahlan sprang up and started running headlong into the burrow through the brush. The passage through the undergrowth seemed endless. Vegetation flashed by as she ran. She couldn’t see the end up ahead. Dogs barked as they chased her through the tangled green warren.
Abruptly, she burst out of the thick underbrush into a more open, swampy area. Trees with smooth gray bark and fat bottoms of tangled, spreading roots stood in stretches of stagnant water.
Kahlan’s boots sank into mud and she fell. As she struggled to get free, she admonished herself for paying too much attention to the dogs chasing her and inadvertently leaving the trail. The only good thing was that the mud slowed the dogs as well. They circled around behind her, jumping from dry spots to clumps of grasses, looking for a way to come in from the side.