Near the window where Spirit stood watching out, Kahlan called the chipmunk again. The chipmunks were held spellbound by the soft voice Kahlan used when she talked to them. When he heard her, the furry little striped creature stood on his hind legs for a moment, stiff and still, checking that all was clear, and when he was sure it was safe, scurried to her. Kahlan squatted and rolled the apple core out of her hand onto the ground.
“Here you go, sweetheart,” she cooed. “A nice apple for you.”
Chippy wasted no time starting in on his treat. Kahlan’s cheeks hurt from smiling at the way the chipmunk nibbled his way around the apple core as it rolled along the ground. She rose to her feet, brushing her hands clean as she watched, captivated by the little creature at his feverish work.
He suddenly flinched with a squeak and froze.
Kahlan looked up. She was staring right into a woman’s blue eyes.
The woman stood not ten feet away in a pose of cool scrutiny. Kahlan’s throat locked the gasp in her lungs. The woman had seemed to appear in the middle of nowhere, out of nowhere. Icy gooseflesh prickled up the backs of Kahlan’s arms.
The woman’s long blond hair cascaded over the shoulders of an exquisite black dress. She was of such shapely beauty, her face of such pure perfection, but especially her eyes were of such intelligent lucid witnesses to all around her, that she could only be a creature of profound integrity…or unspeakable evil.
Kahlan knew without doubt which it was.
This woman made Kahlan feel as ugly as a clod of dirt, and instinctively as helpless as a child. She wanted nothing so much as to shrink away. Instead, she stared into the woman’s blue eyes for what couldn’t have been more than a second or two, but in that span of time an eternity seemed to pass. In those knowing blue eyes flowed some formidable, frightful current of contemplation.
Kahlan remembered Captain Meiffert’s description of this woman. For the life of her, though, Kahlan couldn’t just then recall her name. It seemed trivial. What mattered was that this woman was a Sister of the Dark.
Without speaking a word, the woman lifted her hands out a little and turned her palms up, as if humbly offering something. Her hands were empty.
Kahlan committed to the vault through space necessary to close the distance. She committed to unleashing her power. With her resolution, the act had in a way already commenced. But she desperately needed to get closer if it was to be meaningful, or effective.
As she began to move, to make that reckless leap, the world went white in a bloom of pain.
Chapter 21
Richard heard an odd sound that stopped him in his tracks. He felt a thump through the ground and deep in his chest. He thought he’d seen a flash in the treetops, but it had been so quick he wasn’t sure.
It was the sound, though, as if some great hammer had struck off the top of a mountain, that made his blood go cold.
The house wasn’t far off through the trees. He dropped the string of trout and the jar of minnows, and ran.
At the edge of the woods where it opened into the meadow, he skidded to a halt. His pounding heart felt as if it had risen up into his throat.
Richard saw the two women not far away, in front of the house, one dressed in white, and one in black. They were connected by a snaking, undulating, crackling line of milky white light. Nicci’s arms were lifted slightly with her hands turned palms up and a little farther apart than the width of her hips.
The milky light went from Nicci’s chest, across the space between the two women, and pierced Kahlan through the heart. The wavering aurora between the two turned blindingly bright, as if twisting in an agony it was unable to escape.
Seeing Kahlan trembling with the fury of that lance of light pinning her to the wall, Richard was paralyzed by fear for her, fear he knew all too well, from when she had been on the cusp of death. That bolt pierced Nicci’s heart, too, connecting the two women. Richard didn’t understand the magic Nicci was using, but he instinctively recognized it as profoundly dangerous, not only to Kahlan, but to Nicci as well, for she, too, was in pain. That Nicci would put herself at such risk gripped him with dread.
Richard knew he had to remain calm and keep his wits about himself if Kahlan was to have a chance. He viscerally wanted to do something to strike Nicci down, but he was certain that it wouldn’t be as simple as that. Zedd’s oft-repeated expression—nothing is ever easy—flashed into Richard’s mind with sudden and tangible meaning.
In a desperate search for answers, everything Richard knew about magic cascaded in a torrent through his mind. None of it told him what to do, but it did tell him what he must not do. Kahlan’s life hung in the balance.
Just then, Cara came flying out of the house. She was stark naked. It somehow didn’t look all that odd. Richard was accustomed to the shape of her body in her skintight leather outfits. Other than the color, this didn’t look all that different. She was dripping wet. Her hair was undone, which seemed more outlandishly indecent to him than her naked body. He was used to seeing her with a braid all the time.
Cara’s fist clutched the red leather rod—her Agiel—as she crouched. The muscles of her legs, arms, and shoulders strained with tension demanding release.
“Cara! No!” Richard cried out.
He was already tearing across the meadow as Cara sprang and slammed her Agiel against the side of Nicci’s neck.
Nicci shrieked in pain that dropped her to her knees. Kahlan cried out in equal pain and crumpled to her knees as well, her movement a close match to Nicci’s.
Cara seized Nicci’s hair in a fist and yanked her head back. “Time to die, witch!”
Nicci was doing nothing to stop Cara as the Agiel hung only inches from her throat.
Richard dove toward the Mord-Sith, desperately hoping he wouldn’t be too late. Cara’s Agiel just grazed Nicci’s throat as Richard tackled her around the middle, ramming her backward. The feel of her was briefly surprising—silky soft flesh over iron-hard muscle. The impact drove the wind from her when they hit the ground.
Cara was so enraged and in such a combative state that she lashed out with her Agiel at Richard, not really realizing it was him, knowing only that she was being prevented from protecting Kahlan.
The violent impact of the weapon to the side of Richard’s face felt like a blow by an iron bar followed immediately by a lightning strike. The crack of pain through his skull was momentarily blinding. His ears rang. The jolt took his breath, staggering him, and brought back in a single instant an avalanche of macabre memories.
Cara was riveted on the kill and furious at any interference. Richard regained his senses just in time to seize her wrists and pin her to the ground before she could pounce on Nicci. A Mord-Sith was formidable, to be sure, but such a woman was instilled with the ability to counter magic, not muscle. That was why she had been trying to goad Nicci into using her power; only in that way could she capture the enemy’s magic and so overpower her.
Cara’s writhing naked body under him hardly registered in Richard’s mind. He tasted blood in his mouth. His attention was focused on her Agiel and making sure she couldn’t use it on him. His head throbbed with a painful ringing, and he had to fight not only Cara, but encroaching unconsciousness. It was all he could do to hold Cara down.
At that moment, the Mord-Sith was more of a threat to Kahlan’s life than Nicci was. If Nicci intended to kill Kahlan, he was sure she could have already done so. Richard might not have understood specifically what Nicci was doing, but by what he had already seen, he grasped the general nature of it.
Blood dripped down onto Cara’s bare chest, vivid red against the expanse of her white skin.
“Cara, stop!” His jaw worked, if painfully, so he reasoned it wasn’t broken. “It’s me. Stop. You’ll kill Kahlan.” Cara stilled under him, staring up in angry confusion. “What you do to Nicci happens to Kahlan, too.”
“You had better listen to him,” Nicci said from behind him in that velvety voice of hers.
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br /> Cara reached up when Richard released her wrists and touched the side of his mouth. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, realizing what she had done. Her tone told him she meant it. Richard nodded and then stood, pulling her up by her hand before rounding on Nicci.
Nicci stood tall, in that proud and proper posture she had. Her attention and her magic was focused on Kahlan. The calm but violent power from within him had awakened, waiting to be commanded. Richard didn’t know how to use it to stop Nicci. He held back, fearing that anything he did would only make Kahlan’s peril worse.
Kahlan was on her feet, too, but once again pinned to the wall of the house by the milky rope of light. Her green eyes were wide with the trembling torment of whatever it was Nicci was doing.
Nicci’s hands lifted. She laid her palms to her heart, over the light. Her back was to Richard, but he could see the light through her, like fire eating through the center of a piece of paper, the incandescent hole expanding outward, appearing to consume her. The twisting flare of light was doing the same thing to Kahlan, seeming to burn through her, yet Richard could see that she was not being killed by it. She was still breathing, still moving, still alive—not reacting at all the way a person would if they were really having holes burned through them. With magic, he knew better than to believe his eyes.
At the center of Nicci’s chest, under her hands, she began to become solid again, re-forming where the light had spent itself in glowing rays working out toward the edges of her.
The light cut off. Kahlan, her own hands pressed to the wall behind her, sagged in relief as it extinguished, her eyes closing as if it was too much to endure looking at the woman standing before her.
Richard was restrained fury. His muscles screamed to be released. The magic within was a coiled viper waiting to strike. He wanted almost more than anything to cut down this woman. The only thing he wanted more was for Kahlan to be safe.
Nicci smiled pleasantly at Kahlan before turning to Richard. Her calm blue eyes momentarily took in his white-knuckled fist on the hilt of his sword.
“Richard. It’s been a long time. You look well.”
“What have you done?” He growled through gritted teeth.
She smiled. It was a smile a mother gave a child—a smile of indulgence. She took a breath, as if recovering from a difficult bit of labor, and lifted a hand to indicate Kahlan.
“I have spelled your wife, Richard.”
Richard could hear Cara’s breath close behind his left shoulder. She was staying out of the way of his sword arm.
“To what end?” he asked.
“Why, to capture you, of course.”
“What’s going to happen to her? What harm have you done?”
“Harm? Why, none. Any harm that comes to her will only be by your hand.”
Richard frowned, understanding her, but wishing he were wrong. “You mean, if I hurt you, Kahlan will suffer it, too?”
Nicci smiled with the same discerning, disarming smile she used to have when she came to give him lessons. He could hardly believe that he used to imagine that she must look like nothing so much as a good spirit in the flesh.
Richard could sense the magic crackling around this woman. He had come to know in most cases, through his own gift, when a person had the gift. What others couldn’t see, he saw. He could see it in their eyes, and sometimes sense the aura of it around them. He had rarely met gifted women who made the very air about them sizzle with their power. Worse, though, Nicci was a Sister of the Dark.
“Yes, and more. Much more. You see, we are now linked by a maternity spell. Odd name for a spell, yes? The name, in part, is derived from the spell’s nurturing aspects. As in lifegiver—the way a mother nurtures her child and keeps it alive.
“That light you saw was an umbilical cord of sorts: an umbilical cord of magic. By bending the nature of this world, it links our lives, no matter the distance between us. Just as I am the daughter of my mother and nothing could ever change that, so neither can this magic be altered by anyone else.”
She spoke as an instructor, as she had once spoken to him at the Palace of the Prophets when she had been one of his teachers. She always spoke with a quiet economy of words that he had once thought added an air of nobility to her bearing. Back then, Richard couldn’t have imagined coarse words coming from Nicci’s mouth, but the words she spoke now were vile.
She still moved with an unmatched, slow elegance. He had always thought her movements seductive. He now saw them as the sinuous movements of a snake.
The magic of his sword thundered through him, screaming to be loosed. The sword’s magic had been created specifically to combat what the sword’s wielder considered evil. At that moment, Nicci fit the requirement to such an extent that the magic of the sword was close to overpowering him, near to taking command in order to destroy this threat. With the pain from the Agiel still throbbing in his head, it was a struggle to maintain his control over the power of the sword. Richard could feel the raised gold letters of the word TRUTH on the hilt pressing into his palm.
This was a time, perhaps more than any other, that he knew had to be faced with truth, and not his raw wishes. Life and death hung in the balance.
“Richard,” Kahlan said in a level voice. She waited until his eyes met hers. “Kill her.” She spoke with a quiet authority that demanded obedience. In her white Mother Confessor’s dress, her words carried the unequivocal weight of command. “Do it. Don’t wait another moment. Kill her. Don’t think about it, do it.”
Nicci calmly watched to see what he might do. What he would finally decide seemed no more than a matter of curiosity to her. Richard had no need to think or to decide.
“I can’t,” he said to Kahlan. “That would kill you, too.”
Nicci lifted one eyebrow. “Very good, Richard. Very good.”
“Do it!” Kahlan shrieked. “Do it now, while you still have the chance!”
“Keep still,” he said in a calm voice. He looked back at Nicci. “Let’s hear it.”
She clasped her hands in the way the Sisters of the Light were wont to do. Only she was not a Sister of the Light. There looked to be something deeply felt behind that blue-eyed gaze, but what those feelings could be, he didn’t know and feared to imagine. It was one of those intense gazes that held a world of emotion, everything from longing to hatred. One thing he was sure he saw was a dead serious determination that was more important to her than life itself.
“It’s like this, Richard. You are to come with me. As long as I live, Kahlan will live. If I die, she dies. It’s as simple as that.”
“What else?” he demanded.
“What else?” Nicci blinked. “Nothing else.”
“What if I decide to kill you?”
“Then I will die. But Kahlan will die with me—our lives are now linked.”
“That’s not what I mean. I mean, you must have some purpose. What else will it mean if I decide to kill you.”
Nicci shrugged. “Nothing. It’s up to you to decide. Our lives are in your hands. Should you choose to preserve her life, you will have to come with me.”
“And what do you intend to do with him?” Kahlan asked as she edged her way over to Richard’s side. “Torture a sham confession out of him, so that Jagang can put him on some kind of show trial followed by a very public execution?”
If anything, Nicci looked surprised, as if such a thought had never occurred to her, and she found it abhorrent. “No, none of that. I intend him no harm. For now, anyway. Eventually, of course, I will most likely have to kill him.”
Richard glared. “Of course.”
When Kahlan made a move forward, he caught her arm and restrained her. He knew what she intended. He didn’t know exactly what would happen if Kahlan unleased her Confessor’s power on Nicci while they were both linked by the spell, but he had no intention of finding out, since he was sure it could come to no good end. Kahlan was far too ready, as far as he was concerned, to forfeit her life to save his.
Kahlan threw her arm out, pointing. “She just admitted she intends to kill you!”
Nicci smiled reassuringly. “Don’t worry about that for now. If it comes to that, it will not likely be for a long time. Perhaps even a lifetime.”
“And in the meantime?” Kahlan asked. “What plans do you have for him before you discard his life as if it were insignificant?”
“Insignificant…?” Nicci opened her hands in an innocent gesture. “I have no plans. I expect only to take him away.”
Richard had thought he understood what was going on, but he was less and less sure with everything Nicci said. “You mean, you want to take me away so that I can’t fight against the Imperial Order?”
Her brow twitched. “If you wish to think of it in those terms, I admit it is true that your time as the leader of the D’Haran Empire is over. But that is not the point. The point is that everything about your life up until now”—Nicci glanced pointedly at Kahlan—“is over.”
Her words seemed to chill the air. They surely chilled Richard.
“What’s the rest of it?” He knew there had to be more, something that would make sense of it all. “What other terms are there if I want to keep Kahlan alive?”
“Well, no one is to follow us, of course.”
“And if we do?” Kahlan snapped. “I might follow you and kill you myself, even if it means the end of my own life.” Kahlan’s green eyes shone with icy resolve as she cast a threatening glare on the woman.
Nicci lifted her brows deliberately as she leaned ever so slightly toward Kahlan, the way a mother would in cautioning a child. “Then that will be the end of it—unless Richard stops you from doing such a thing. That is all part of what he must decide to do. But you make a miscalculation if you think I care one way or the other. I don’t, you see. Not at all.”
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