“No, the point is, we can’t kill him.”
Berdine scowled. “Do you want to be married to that pig? Sooner or later, he’s going to insist on his rights as your husband.”
“Berdine, listen to me. Even if he does that, I will have to endure it. I can endure rape if it means saving lives. We can’t kill Drefan. He’s the only Lord Rahl we have. Until we can figure out what to do, he is the only thing holding the army together.
“Right now, they’re confused by his aggressive command. D’Harans are used to being told what to do by Lord Rahl. Drefan is acting as if he is the Lord Rahl and, for the moment, the army is scratching their heads, wondering if they’re sure he isn’t.”
“But he isn’t,” Berdine insisted.
“But at the moment, that’s all that is holding the whole thing together. If it falls apart, then the Imperial Order will be able to roll right over the Midlands. Drefan is right about that much of it.”
“But you are the Mother Confessor. General Kerson is loyal to you. Even without the bond, he sticks around because of you. Most of the officers do the same. Because of you, not Drefan. You could hold things together as well as Drefan. Maybe it would work.”
“And maybe not. I may not like Drefan, but he has done nothing to earn assassination. As much as I don’t like his ways, he’s doing his best to keep us all together. With him, and me, we may be able to keep everyone together in this.”
Berdine tilted her head closer. “It won’t last, and you know it.”
Kahlan wiped a hand across her face. “Berdine, Drefan is my husband. I have sworn an oath to him.”
“An oath, is it? Then why haven’t you let him in your bed?”
Kahlan opened her mouth, but couldn’t find the words.
“It’s because of Lord Rahl, isn’t it? You still think he’s coming back, don’t you? You want him to come back.”
Kahlan put her fingertips to her lips. She turned away. “If Richard was going to come back, he’d have done so by now.”
“Maybe it’s the plague, maybe he isn’t finished ridding the magic of the plague. Maybe when he’s finished, he will return.”
Kahlan hugged her arms to herself. She knew that wasn’t it.
“Mother Confessor, you do want him to return, don’t you?”
“I’m married to Drefan. I have a husband.”
“That isn’t what I asked you. You do want him to return. You must want him to come back.”
Kahlan shook her head. “He said he would always love me. He said his heart would always be mine. He promised.” Kahlan swallowed the anguish. “He walked away. I may have—hurt him, but if he really loved me, he wouldn’t do this to me. He’d have given me a chance…”
“But you still want him back.”
“No. I don’t want ever to go through this kind of pain again. I don’t want ever to leave myself open to this much hurt. I was wrong ever to let myself fall in love with him in the first place.” Kahlan shook her head again. “I don’t want him to come back.”
“I don’t believe you. You’re just upset, as I get because Raina died. But if she came back, I’d forgive her for dying and take her back in a heartbeat.”
“Not Richard. I’ll not trust my heart to him again. Regardless of what I did, that doesn’t make it right for him to hurt me as he did. He just walked away from me, and after he’d made promises of always loving me no matter what. He failed me in that test.
“I never thought he would hurt me like that. I thought my heart was safe with him, no matter what, but it wasn’t.”
Berdine turned her around and gripped her shoulders.
“Mother Confessor, you don’t mean that. You don’t. Trust works both ways. If you really loved him, then you must trust in him, no matter what, just as you expected him to always trust in you.”
Tears trickled down Kahlan’s cheeks. “I can’t, Berdine. It hurts too much. I’ll not put myself through it again.
“It doesn’t matter anyway. It’s been weeks. The plague is long over. Richard is never coming back.”
“Look, I don’t know exactly what happened up on the mountain, but you just ask yourself this: If the situation were reversed, if you were in his place, how would you feel?”
“Don’t you think I do that every moment of every day? I know how I’d feel. I’d feel betrayed. I’d never forgive me, if I were him. I’d hate me, just as I know he does.”
“No,” Berdine soothed, “that isn’t true. He doesn’t hate you. Lord Rahl may be confused, or hurt, but he could never hate you.”
“He does. He hates me for what I did. That’s the other reason I can never take him back—I hurt him too much. How could I ever look him in the eye again? I couldn’t. I could never ask him to trust me again.”
Berdine circled an arm around Kahlan’s neck and drew her to a shoulder. “Don’t close your heart, Kahlan. Please don’t do that. You are a sister of the Agiel. As your sister, I beg you not to do that.”
“It makes no difference,” Kahlan whispered. “I can’t be with him anyway, no matter what I might think or wish or hope. I must forget him. The spirits have forced me into marrying Drefan. I have given my oath to Drefan and to the spirits in trade to save lives. I must respect the oath I’ve given. Richard, too, must respect my oath.”
62
Wake him! the voice in her head commanded.
Verna cried out. It felt as though she was covered with wasps, and they were all stinging her at once. She frantically swiped at her arms, her shoulders, her legs, her face. She screamed in panic, swatting, swatting.
Wake him! came the voice in her head again.
His Excellency’s voice.
Verna snatched the cloth from the bucket. She turned Warren’s head. He was sprawled forward on the table, unconscious. She dabbed the wet cloth on his cheeks, his forehead. With trembling fingers, she smoothed back his hair. He hadn’t been out long, so she had a better chance to bring him around.
“Warren. Warren, please wake up. Warren!”
He moaned in delirium. She pressed the wet cloth to his lips. She rubbed his back with her other hand as she kissed his cheek. It broke her heart to see him so afflicted with the pain, not only of the dream walker but of the gift out of control. She pressed her fingers to the back of his neck and let a warm flow of Han seep into him, hoping it would give him strength, hoping it would bring him around.
“Warren,” she cried, “please wake up. Please, for me, wake up, or His Excellency will be angry. Please, Warren.”
Tears streamed down her face. She didn’t care. She needed only to wake Warren, or His Excellency would make them both suffer. She had never known that resistance could be so futile. She had never known that she could so easily be made to betray everything in which she believed.
She couldn’t even protect those she loved by killing herself. She had tried. Oh, how she had tried. He wouldn’t allow it; he wanted them alive so that they could serve him. He wished to use their talents.
She now knew that it had to be true: Richard had to be dead. The bond to him was broken, and they were defenseless against the dream walker. He intruded into her mind at will. With frightening ease, Jagang bent her to his wishes. It was as if she were no longer in control of the simplest of actions. If Jagang willed it, her arm lifted, and she could do nothing but watch. He controlled her use of her Han, too. Without the bond, she was powerless.
Warren let out another groggy groan. He moved of his own accord, at last. Only Verna seemed able to wake him when he passed out from the gift. That was the only reason Jagang hadn’t sent her to the tents.
Only his heart’s connection to her was enough to stir Warren. She knew that it was harmful to wake him when the gift wanted him unconscious—it did that as a way to stretch his endurance until he could get proper help—but she had no choice. She was using their love to wake him, and in so doing, was bringing him closer to death; but Jagang didn’t care, as long as Warren did as ordered.
“Sorr
y,” Warren mumbled. “I… I couldn’t…”
“I know,” Verna comforted, “I know. Wake up, now, Warren. His Excellency wants us to keep working. We have to keep working.”
“I… can’t. I can’t, Verna. My head—”
“Please, Warren.” Verna couldn’t control the tears. The pain of a thousand wasps stinging her everywhere at once made it impossible to hold still. She flinched constantly. “Warren, you know what he’ll do to us. Please, Warren, you must go back to the books. I’ll carry them down. Just tell me which ones you need. I’ll get them for you.”
He nodded as he pushed himself up. He was becoming more alert. Verna slid the lamp near him and turned up the wick. She pushed close the volume he had been reading when he had passed out, and tapped the page.
“Here, Warren. Here. This is where you were. His Excellency wants to know what this means.”
Warren pressed his fists to the sides of his head. “I don’t know! Please, Excellency, I don’t know. I can’t make the visions of prophecy come at will. I’m not a prophet yet. I am only beginning.”
Warren cried out, squirming in his chair.
“I’ll try! I’ll try! Please, let me try!”
Warren panted as his agony subsided. He bent over the book, licking his lips. Fingers shook as he set them to the book, following along the line of words, the line of prophecy.
“‘Patronizing past,’” he muttered as he read to himself. “‘Patronizing past carries forward the same disfavor twisted to new use, for a new master.…’ Dear Creator, I don’t know what it means. Please, let the vision come.”
Clarissa peered out into the darkness as the coach rocked to a stop. Dust hung in the air, their ghostlike escort. A stone fortress rose up just outside the coach’s window. It was dark, and she couldn’t see the whole thing, but what she could see made her heart pound out of control.
She waited, twisting her fingers together, until the soldier opened the door.
“Clarissa,” he whispered. “This is the place.”
Clarissa took his hand as she stepped out into the inky night. “Thank you, Walsh.”
The other one of Nathan’s soldier friends, a man named Bollesdun waited up in the driver’s seat, keeping tight the reins.
“Hurry, now,” Walsh told her. “Nathan said he doesn’t want you in there for more than a few minutes. If anything happens, the two of us aren’t going to be able to fight much of a battle to get you out.”
She knew the truth of that. They had ridden past so many tents that it left her stunned by their numbers. The hoard who had overrun Renwold had been nothing compared to the numbers of men here.
Clarissa pulled up the hood on her cloak. “Don’t you worry, I know better than to dally. Nathan told me what to do.”
She clutched her cloak together in her fist. She had promised Nathan. He had done so much for her. He had saved her life. She would do this for him. She would do this so others wouldn’t die.
As terrified as she was, she would do anything for Nathan. There was no better man in the whole world. No kinder man, no more compassionate, no braver.
Walsh walked beside her as they passed under an iron portcullis, and then into an entryway under a barreled roof. Two brutish guards, wearing hide mantles and hung with grisly-looking weapons, stood beside a hissing torch.
Clarissa kept her cloak tightly drawn and her hood pulled forward. She hung her head so that the guards couldn’t see her face in the shadow. She let Walsh do the talking, as she had been instructed.
Walsh flicked his hand toward her. “The representative of His Excellency’s plenipotentiary, Lord Rahl,” he said in a gruff voice, as if unhappy that this assignment had fallen to him.
The bearded guard grunted. “So I’ve been told.” He lifted a thumb toward the door. “Go on in. Someone is supposed to be waiting for you.”
Walsh adjusted his weapons belt. “Good. I have to drive this one back tonight. Can you believe it? Won’t even let us wait until morning. That Lord Rahl is as demanding as they come.”
The guard grunted, as if he well understood the annoyance of night duty.
“Oh,” Walsh added, as if in afterthought, “Lord Rahl also wanted to know if his representative could pay the Lord Rahl’s respects to His Excellency.”
The guard shrugged. “Sorry. Jagang took out of here this morning. He took most everyone with him. Just left a few behind to mind things.”
Clarissa’s heart sank with disappointment. Nathan had been hoping that Jagang would be here, but he had said that even though he hoped it, Jagang would likely be smarter than that. Jagang wasn’t one to trust his life to the unknown abilities of a wizard as powerful as Nathan.
Walsh took Clarissa’s arm and pushed her on ahead as he gave the guard a good-natured slap on the shoulder. “Thanks.”
“Yea, just go on in down the hall. There’s one of the women waiting there for you. Last I saw her, she was pacing by the second set of torches.”
Walsh and Bollesdun were Imperial Order soldiers, and they had had no trouble with any of the other soldiers, either. Clarissa dreaded to think what would have happened to her without those two the times their coach had been stopped by troops to query its mission. Walsh and Bollesdun also had little trouble ushering her through checkpoints.
Clarissa remembered all too well what happened to the women in Renwold. She still had nightmares about what she had seen happening to Manda Perlin when the Order’s troops captured Renwold. And right there, on the floor beside her murdered husband, Rupert.
Their footsteps echoed as they hurried down the stone corridor. It was a dark, dank, and depressing place. It looked to Clarissa to have no comforts other than a few wooden benches. This was a place for soldiers, not a place for families to live.
As the guard had said, the woman was waiting near the second set of torches.
“Yes,” the woman asked, “what is it?”
As Clarissa came to a stop before the woman, she could see in the torchlight that her face was badly battered. She had horrid-looking cuts and bruises. One side of her lower lip was swollen to twice normal size. Even Walsh moved back a little when he got a good look at her.
“I am to meet Sister Amelia. His Excellency’s plenipotentiary sent me.”
The woman slumped with relief. “Good. I am Sister Amelia. I have the book. I hope never to see it again.”
“His Excellency’s plenipotentiary also told me that I am to pay his respects to an acquaintance of his, Sister Verna. Is she here?”
“Well, I don’t know if I should—”
“If I’m not allowed to see her, His Excellency will be most unhappy when his plenipotentiary reports how his request was so rudely treated by a slave. As a slave myself, serving His Excellency, I can tell you that I will not be the one to take the blame.”
Clarissa felt foolish saying such words, but as Nathan had told her, they seemed to work magic.
Sister Amelia’s eyes fixed on the gold ring through Clarissa’s lip. Her hesitation vanished. “Of course. Please follow me. That is where the book is kept, anyway.”
With Walsh close at her side, and his hand near the hilt of his short sword, Clarissa followed Sister Amelia deeper into the gloomy fortress. They went down a long hall, and then took a turn. Clarissa was paying careful attention as they went, so that if they had to get out fast, she wouldn’t take a wrong route and be caught in here.
Sister Amelia stopped before a door, glancing to Clarissa for just an instant before she lifted the lever and led them in. A woman and a man were in the room, he sitting at a simple plank table, reading a book laid open on the table, and she looking over his shoulder.
The woman glanced up. She was a little older than Clarissa, and attractive, with curly brown hair. She looked to Clarissa to be a woman of authority crushed by humiliation. She looked in agony. Whether it was physical, or emotional, Clarissa didn’t know.
Sister Amelia held out a hand. “This is Verna.”
Verna s
traightened. She had a gold ring in her lip, the same as Sister Amelia, the same as Clarissa. The man, his curly blond hair in disarray, didn’t look up. He seemed frantically absorbed in his book.
“Pleased to meet you,” Clarissa said.
Verna turned back to the man and the book he was studying.
Clarissa pushed back her hood as she turned to Sister Amelia. “The book?”
Sister Amelia bowed. “Of course. It’s right here.”
She scurried to a shelf. The room wasn’t large. One of the stone block walls had a crudely built shelf holding books. There were perhaps no more than a hundred. Nathan had been hoping there would be a great many more. As Nathan had expected, though, Jagang wouldn’t keep many of his prizes together in one place.
Sister Amelia pulled a volume from a shelf and placed it on the table. She looked to be uncomfortable even touching it.
“This is it.”
The cover was as Nathan had described it to her, a strange black that seemed to absorb the light from the room. Clarissa flipped open the cover.
“What are you doing?” Sister Amelia cried out as she stepped closer.
Clarissa looked up. “I was instructed how to make sure it is the right book. Please leave it to me?”
Sister Amelia stepped back, wringing her hands together. “Of course. But I can tell you only too well that it’s the right book. It’s the one His Excellency agreed to.”
Clarissa carefully turned over the first page as Sister Amelia nervously licked her lips. Verna watched from the corner of her eye.
Clarissa reached inside her cloak and pulled out the little leather pouch of powder Nathan had given her. She sprinkled it over the open page. Words began to appear.
Assigned to the Winds by Wizard Ricker.
It was the book she had come for. Nathan hadn’t known the name of the wizard, but he had told her it would say “Assigned to the Winds” and then a name. She flipped the cover closed.
“Sister Amelia, would you leave us for a moment, please?”
The woman bowed and quickly scurried out of the room.
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