She stared dumbly, sinking back into her chair. “A thousand?”
He nodded, still not meeting her eyes. “Captain Bradley and his men. The ones you led and fought beside, before.”
Kahlan could feel her face heating. “We need all your troops. Harold, what’s going on?”
He at last met her gaze.
“Queen Cyrilla refused my plan to take our troops south. Shortly after you were there and visited her, she came out of her illness. She was herself again—full of ambition and fire. You know what she was like. She was always tireless in her advocacy for Galea.” His fingers idly tapped the table. “But I’m afraid she has been changed by her infirmity. She fears the Imperial Order.”
“So do I,” Kahlan said with quiet bottled rage. She could feel Richard’s sword pressed against the back of her shoulder. She saw Harold’s eyes take it in. “Everyone in the Midlands fears the Order. That is why we need those troops.”
He was nodding as she spoke. “I told her all that. I did. She said that she is Queen of Galea, and as such, she must put our land first.”
“Galea has joined the D’Haran Empire!”
He opened his hands in a helpless gesture. “When she was ill, she was…unaware of that event taking place. She said she only gave you the crown for the safekeeping of her people, not to surrender their sovereignty.” His hands dropped to his sides. “She claims you never had any such authority and refuses to abide by the agreement.”
Kahlan glanced at the others in the room, sitting mute, like a panel of grim judges.
“Harold, you and I have discussed all this in the past. The Midlands is under threat.” She swept her arm out. “The entire New World is threatened! We must turn back that threat, not take to defending one land at a time—or have each land try to fend for itself. If we do that, we will all fall, one at a time. We must stand together.”
“I agree with you, in principle, Mother Confessor. Queen Cyrilla does not.”
“Then Cyrilla is not recovered, Harold. She is still sick.”
“That may be, but it is not for me to say.”
Elbow on the table, Kahlan rested her forehead against her fingertips. Thoughts were screaming around inside her head, demanding that this not be happening.
“What about Jebra?” Zedd asked from the side of the room. Kahlan was relieved to hear his voice, as if reason were returning to the lunacy of what she was hearing, as if the weight of another voice would set things straight. “We left the seer there to help care for Cyrilla and to advise you. Surely, Jebra must have advised Cyrilla against such actions.”
Harold hung his head again. “I’m afraid that Queen Cyrilla ordered Jebra thrown into a dungeon. Moreover, the queen gave orders that if Jebra speaks one word of her blasphemy—as Queen Cyrilla calls it—she is to have her tongue cut out.”
Kahlan had to tell herself to blink. It was no longer Cyrilla’s behavior that so stunned her. Her words came sparse and brittle, the naked bones of dead respect.
“Harold, why would you follow the orders of a madwoman?”
His jaw took a set, as if injured by her tone. “Mother Confessor, she is not only my sister, but my queen. I am sworn to obey my queen in order to protect the Galean people. All those men of ours out there who have been fighting with your army are also sworn to protect the people of Galea above all else. I’ve already given them our queen’s orders. We must all return to Galea at once. I’m sorry, but that is the way it must be.”
Kahlan pounded her fist on the table and shot to her feet.
“Galea stands at the head of the Callisidrin Valley! It’s a gateway right up the center of the Midlands! Don’t you see what a tempting route it might be for the Imperial Order? Don’t you see how they might want to split the Midlands?”
“Of course I do, Mother Confessor.”
She aimed a stiff arm, pointing at the camp beyond the lodge.
“So you just expect all those men out there to put their lives between you and the Order? You and Queen Cyrilla callously expect all those men out there to die protecting you?—while you sit back in Galea?—hoping they prevent the Order from ever reaching you?”
“Of course not, Mother Confessor.”
“What’s the matter with you! Don’t you see that if you fight with us to halt the Order, you are protecting the people of your homeland?”
Harold licked his lip. “Mother Confessor, all you say is probably true. It is also irrelevant. I am commander of the Galean army. My entire life has been devoted to serving the people of Galea and my sovereign—first my mother and father, and then my sister. From the time I was a boy at my father’s knee, I was taught to protect Galea above all else.”
Kahlan did her best to control her voice. “Harold, Cyrilla is obviously still sick. If you are honestly interested in protecting your people, you must see that what you’re doing is not the way to accomplish it.”
“Mother Confessor, I have been charged by my queen with protecting the people of Galea. I know my duty.”
“Duty?” Kahlan wiped a hand across her face. “Harold, you can’t blindly follow that woman’s whim. The route to life and liberty exists only through reason. She may be queen, but reason can be your only true sovereign. To fail to use reason in this, to fail to think, is intellectual anarchy.”
He looked at her as if she were some poor child who didn’t understand the world of adult responsibility.
“She is my queen. The queen is devoted to the people.”
Kahlan drummed her fingers on the table. “What Cyrilla is, is deluded by ghosts that still haunt her. She is going to bring harm to your people. You are going to aid her in delivering your people into ruin because you wish something to be true, even though it is not. You are seeing her as she once was, not as she is now.”
He shrugged. “Mother Confessor, I can understand why you think what you think, but it can change nothing. I must do as my queen commands.”
Elbows on the table, Kahlan held her face in her hands for a time, trembling with anger at the insanity of what she was hearing. She finally looked up, meeting her half brother’s gaze.
“Harold, Galea is part of the D’Haran Empire. Galea has a queen only at the indulgence of the Empire. Queen though she may be, even if she does not recognize the rule of the D’Haran Empire, she is still, as she always has been, subordinate to the Mother Confessor of the Midlands. As Mother Confessor, as well as the leader of the D’Haran Empire in Lord Rahl’s absence, I formally terminate that indulgence. Cyrilla is now without authority and is removed from office. She is no longer the queen of anything, much less Galea.
“You are ordered to return to Ebinissia, to put Cyrilla under arrest for her own protection, to release Jebra, and to return to this army with the seer and all Galean forces except a home guard for the crown city.”
“Mother Confessor, I’m sorry, but my queen has ordered—”
Kahlan slammed the flat of her hand down on the table. “Enough!”
He fell silent as Kahlan rose. With her fingertips pressed to the table, she leaned closer to him.
“As Mother Confessor, I am commanding you to carry out my orders at once. That is final. I will hear no more.”
The room seemed gripped by the grave consequence of what was happening. Each forbidding face watched, waiting to see how it was going to go.
Harold spoke in a voice that reminded Kahlan of her father’s.
“I realize that it may make no sense to you, Mother Confessor, but I must choose my duty to my people above my duty to you. Cyrilla is my sister. King Wyborn always told me to run a good army. An officer must obey his queen. My men down here are ordered by their queen to return at once to protect Galea. I am a man bound by my honor to protect my people, as ordered by my queen.”
“You pompous fool. How dare you speak to me of your honor? You are sacrificing the lives of innocent people to your delusions of honor. Honor is honesty to what is, not blind duty to what you wish to be. You have no honor, Harold.
”
Kahlan sank into her chair. She looked past him, to the side, staring into the hearth, into the flames.
“I have given you my orders. Do you refuse to obey them?”
“I must refuse, Mother Confessor. Let me say only that it is not out of malice.”
“Harold,” she said in a flat tone without looking at him, “you are committing treason.”
“I realize that you may see it that way, Mother Confessor.”
“Oh, I do. I do indeed. Treason to your people, treason to the Midlands, treason to our D’Haran union against the Imperial Order, and treason against the Mother Confessor. What do you suppose I ought to do about it?”
“I would expect that if you feel so strongly, you would have me put to death, Mother Confessor.”
She looked up at him. “If you have enough sense to realize that, then what good will it do for you to stick to the orders of a madwoman? It will only bring your death, and then you will not be able to carry out your queen’s orders. Staying to your course can only leave your people without your aid, which is what you claim to put above all else. Why not simply do the right thing and help us to help your people? Since you refuse, you have shown yourself, in truth, to be without common sense, much less honor.”
His eyes turned to her, filled with smoldering anger. The knuckles of his fists went white.
“I will be heard, now, Mother Confessor. If I stand by my honor, even if it costs me my life, it will be honoring my family, my sister, my queen, and my homeland. A homeland forged by my father, King Wyborn, and my mother, Queen Bernadine. When I was young, my father, my sovereign king, was taken from my mother, my family, and my homeland of Galea, by the Confessors, taken by a Confessor’s power for their selfish desire of a husband for your mother, for her selfish desire for a strong man to father her a child—you. Now, you, Mother Confessor—the daughter of that theft of that beloved man from us when I was but a boy—you would take me from my sister? Take her, too, from our land? Take me from my duty to serve my queen, my land, and above all my people? The last duty my father charged me with before your mother took him from us and destroyed him for no reason but that he was good and she wanted him, was that I should always honor my duty to my sister and my land. I will carry out my father’s last charge to me, even if you think it madness.”
Kahlan stared at him in cold shock.
“I’m sorry you feel that way, Harold.”
His face had aged and hardened. “I know that you are not responsible for all that happened before you came to be, and I will always love that part of you that is my father, but I am still the one who must live with it all. Now I must be true to myself, to my own feelings.”
“Your feelings,” she repeated.
“Yes, Mother Confessor. Those are my feelings, and I must put my faith in them.”
Kahlan swallowed past the painful constriction in her throat. Her fingers, lying limply on the table before her, tingled.
“Faith and feelings. Harold, you are as mad as your sister.”
She drew herself up straight and folded her hands. She shared a last look with her half brother, a man she had never known, except in name, as she pronounced sentence on him.
“Beginning at sunrise tomorrow, the D’Haran Empire and Galea are at war. After sunrise tomorrow, if you are seen by me or any of our men, you will be put to death for the crime of treason.
“I will not allow those brave men out there to die for traitors. The Imperial Order will, in all likelihood, turn north up the Callisidrin Valley. You will be alone. They will butcher every man in your army, just as they butchered the people of Ebinissia. Jagang will give your sister to his men, as a whore.
“It will be by your doing, Harold, for refusing to use your ability to think, and instead following your feelings and faith in what does not exist.”
Harold, hands clasped behind his back, chin held up, said nothing as Kahlan continued.
“Tell Cyrilla that she had better hope for the fate I have just described, because if the Order does not come through Galea, I will. I have promised no mercy to the Order. Galea’s treason condemns her to the same fate as the Order. If the Order does not get Cyrilla, then I swear I will, and when I get her, I am going to take her back to Aydindril and I’m going to personally throw her back down into that pit from which you rescued her, and I am going to leave her down there with every criminal brute I can find for as long as she lives.”
Harold’s jaw dropped. “Mother Confessor…you wouldn’t.”
Kahlan’s eyes told him otherwise. “You be sure to tell Cyrilla what’s in store for her. Jebra probably tried to tell her, and was thrown in a dungeon for it. Cyrilla is refusing to see the open pit before her, and you are walking into it with her. Worse, you are taking your innocent people with you.”
Kahlan drew her royal Galean sword. She grasped either end in a hand. Gritting her teeth, she pulled the flat of the blade against her knee. The steel bent, then finally snapped with a loud report. She tossed the broken blade on the floor at his feet.
“Now get out of my sight.”
He turned to leave, but before he took a step, Zedd stood, holding out a hand as if to ask him to remain where he was.
“Mother Confessor,” Zedd said, choosing his words carefully. “I believe you are letting your emotions get in the way.”
Harold gestured to Kahlan, relieved to hear Zedd’s intercession. “Tell her, Wizard Zorander. Tell her.”
Kahlan couldn’t believe her ears. She remained where she was, staring into Zedd’s hazel eyes. “Then would you mind explaining my error of emotion, First Wizard?”
Zedd glanced at Harold and then back to Kahlan. “Mother Confessor, Queen Cyrilla is obviously deranged. Prince Harold is not only doing her a disservice, but enabling her to bring only the specter of death to her people. If he chose the side of reason, he would be protecting his people, and honoring his sister’s past admirable service when she was of sound mind.
“Instead, he has betrayed his duty to his people by embracing what he wishes to be true about her instead of facing what is true. In this way, he is embracing death, and in this case, embracing death for his people, too.
“Prince Harold has been justly found guilty of treason. Your emotions for him are interfering with your judgment. Obviously, he is now a danger to our cause, to the lives of our people, and to the lives of his own people. He cannot be allowed to leave.”
Harold looked thunderstruck. “But Zedd…”
Zedd’s hazel eyes, too, were a terrible pronouncement of guilt. He waited, as if challenging the man to further prove his treason. Harold’s mouth moved, but he could offer no words.
“Does anyone disagree with me?” Zedd asked.
He looked at Adie. She shook her head. Verna likewise shook her head. Warren stared at Harold for a moment, then shook his head.
Harold’s expression turned indignant. “I’m not going to stand for this. The Mother Confessor has given me until dawn to withdraw. You must honor her sentence.”
He took two strides toward the door, but then paused, clutching his chest. Twisting slowly as he started to sink, his eyes rolling up in his head. His legs folded and he crashed to the floor.
Kahlan sat stunned. No one moved or said anything. General Meiffert went down on one knee beside the body, checking Prince Harold for breath or pulse. The general looked up at Kahlan and shook his head.
She passed her gaze from Zedd, to Adie, to Verna, to Warren. None revealed anything in their expression.
Kahlan stood and spoke softly. “I don’t ever want to know which one of you did this. I’m not saying you were wrong… I just don’t want to know.”
The four gifted people nodded.
At the door, Kahlan stood in the bright sunlight a moment, feeling the cold air on her face, searching, until she saw Captain Ryan leaning against a stout young maple tree. He stood at attention as she strode out to him through the snow.
“Bradley, did Prince Harold tell
you why he was coming here?”
Calling him by his given name, rather than his rank, changed the nature of the question. His rigid posture slackened.
“Yes, Mother Confessor. He said he had to tell you that he had been ordered back by his queen to defend Galea, and that he was further ordered to bring his men serving with you back to Galea with him.”
“Then what are you doing here? Why did you and your men come along, if he was to take everyone back?”
He lifted his square jaw and looked at her with clear blue eyes. “Because we deserted, Mother Confessor.”
“You what?”
“Prince Harold gave me his orders, as I just reported them. I told him that it was wrong, and could only harm our people. He said it was not for me to decide such things. He said it was not for me to think, but to follow orders.
“I’ve fought with you, Mother Confessor. I believe I know you better than Prince Harold does—I know you are devoted to protecting the lives of the people of the Midlands. I told him that what Cyrilla was doing was wrong. He was angry, and said it was my duty to follow my orders.
“I told him that, in that case, I was deserting the Galean army and was going to stand with you, instead. I thought he was going to have me put to death for disobeying him, but he would have had to put all thousand of us to death because all the men felt the same way. A good many came forward to tell him so. The fire seemed to go out of him, then, and he let us ride down here with him.
“I hope you aren’t angry with us, Mother Confessor.”
Kahlan couldn’t force herself to be the Mother Confessor at that moment. She put her arms around him.
“Thank you, Bradley.”
She gripped his shoulders and smiled at him through her watery vision. “You used your head. I couldn’t be angry with that.”
“You told us once we were a badger trying to swallow an ox whole. Looks to me you’ve taken to trying to do the same thing. If there ever was a badger who could swallow an ox whole, it would be you, Mother Confessor, but I guess we wouldn’t want you to try it without us to help you do it.”
They turned then and saw General Meiffert directing some of his men. They were carrying Prince Harold’s limp body out of the lodge, holding him by the shoulders and feet. His hands dragged through the snow.
Faith of the Fallen Page 51