Before he could answer, Kahlan spoke up. Richard had forgotten she was still standing next to him.
“Please forgive your brother, it was not his fault. He came to guide me into Hartland and I was late in coming. I pray he is not dishonored in your eyes because of me.”
Michael’s eyes glided down the length of her before returning to her face. “And you are?”
Her back stiffened as she stood tall. “I am Kahlan Amnell.”
Michael gave a slight smile and a small bow of his head. “So, you are not my brother’s escort, as I thought. And where have you traveled from?”
“It is a small place, far away. I am sure you would not know of it.”
Michael didn’t challenge the answer, but turned to his brother instead. “You will stay the night?”
“No. I have to go see Zedd. He’s been looking for me.”
Michael’s smile melted. “You should find better friends. No good can come of spending your time with that contrary old man.” He turned back to Kahlan. “You, my dear, will be my guest tonight.”
“I have other arrangements,” she said warily.
Michael reached around her with both arms, cupped both hands to her bottom and pulled the lower half of her body hard against him. His leg pressed between her thighs.
“Change them.” His smile was as cold as a winter night.
“Remove. Your. Hands.” Her voice was hard and dangerous. Each stared into the other’s eyes.
Richard was dumbfounded. He couldn’t believe what his brother was doing. “Michael! Stop it!”
They both ignored him and continued to confront one another, faces close, eyes locked together. Richard stood next to them, feeling helpless. He could sense that both wanted him to stay out of it. His body tensed, muscles hard, ready to disregard the feeling.
“You feel good,” Michael whispered. “I think I could fall in love with you.”
Kahlan’s breathing was slow and restrained. “You do not know the half of it.” Her voice was even and controlled. “Now, remove your hands.”
When he did not, she slowly placed the fingernail of her first finger on his chest, just below the hollow at the base of his neck. As they glared at each other, she slowly, ever so slowly, began to drag her nail downward, ripping his flesh open. Blood ran down skin in rivulets. For a brief moment, Michael didn’t move, but then his eyes could not disguise the pain. He flung open his arms and staggered back a step.
Without looking back, Kahlan stormed out of the house.
Richard gave his brother an angry glare he could not suppress, and followed her out.
Chapter 4
Richard ran down the walkway to catch up with her. Kahlan’s dress and long hair flowed behind as she marched along in the late-afternoon sunlight. When she reached a tree, she stopped and waited. For the second time that day, she wiped blood off her hand.
As he touched her shoulder, she turned, her calm face showing no emotion.
“Kahlan, I’m sorry . . .”
She cut him off. “Do not apologize. What your brother did, he was not doing to me, he was doing to you.”
“To me? What do you mean?”
“Your brother is jealous of you.” Her face softened. “He is not stupid, Richard. He knew I was with you and he was jealous.”
Richard took her arm and started walking down the road, away from Michael’s house. He was furious with Michael, and at the same time he was ashamed of his anger. He felt as if he were letting his father down.
“That’s no excuse. He’s First Councilor—he has all anyone could want. I’m sorry I didn’t put a stop to it.”
“I did not want you to. It was for me to do. What he wants is whatever you have. If you had stopped him, having me would be a contest he would have to win. This way he has no more interest in me. Besides, what he did to you, about your mother, was worse. Would you have wanted me to have stepped in on your behalf?”
Richard put his eyes back to the road. He choked off his anger. “No, that was not for you to do.”
As they walked, the houses became smaller, closer together, but remained clean and well kept. Some of their owners were out taking advantage of the good weather to make repairs before winter. The air was clean and crisp, and Richard knew by the dryness of it that it would be a cold night—the right kind of night for a fire of birch logs, fragrant but not too hot. The white-fenced yards gave way to larger garden plots in front of small cottages set farther back from the road. As he walked, Richard plucked an oak leaf from a branch hanging close to the road.
“You seem to know a lot about people. You’re very perceptive, I mean about why they do what they do.”
She shrugged. “I guess.”
He tore little pieces off the leaf. “Is that why they hunt you?”
She looked over as they walked, and when his eyes came to her, she answered. “They hunt me because they fear truth. One reason I trust you is because you do not.”
He smiled at the compliment. He liked the answer, even though he wasn’t sure what it meant. “You aren’t about to kick me, are you?”
A grin came to her face. “You are getting close.” She thought a moment, the smile fading, and went on. “I am sorry, Richard, but for now you must trust me. The more I tell you, the greater the danger, to both of us. Still friends?”
“Still friends.” He threw the skeleton of the leaf away. “But someday you will tell me all of it?”
She nodded. “If I can, I promise I will.”
“Good,” he said cheerfully. “After all, I am a ‘seeker of truth.’ ”
Kahlan jerked to a halt, grabbed his shirtsleeve, and spun him to face her wide eyes.
“Why did you say that?” she demanded.
“What? You mean ‘seeker of truth’? That’s what Zedd calls me. Ever since I was little. He says I always insist on knowing the truth of things, so he calls me ‘seeker of truth.’ ” He was surprised by her agitation. His eyes narrowed. “Why?”
She started walking again. “Never mind.”
Somehow, he seemed to have broached a sensitive subject. His need to know the answers started to shoulder its way around in his mind. They hunted her because they feared truth, he thought, and she became upset when he said he was a “seeker of truth.” Maybe she had become upset, he decided, because it made her fear for him, too.
“Can you at least tell me who ‘they’ are? Those who hunt you?”
She continued to watch the road as she walked next to him. He didn’t know if she was going to answer him, but at last she did.
“They are the followers of a very wicked man. His name is Darken Rahl. Please do not ask me any more for now—I do not wish to think of him.”
Darken Rahl. So, now he knew the name.
The late-afternoon sun was behind the hills of the Hartland Woods, allowing the air to cool as they passed through gently rolling hills of hardwood forest. They didn’t talk. He didn’t care to talk anyway, as his hand was hurting and he was feeling a little dizzy. A bath and a warm bed were what he wanted. Better to give her the bed, he thought—he would sleep in his favorite chair, the one with the squeak. That sounded good, too—it had been a long day and he ached.
By a stand of birch he turned her up the small trail that would lead past his house. He watched her walking in front of him on the narrow path, picking spiderwebs off her face and arms as she broke the strands strung across their way.
Richard was eager to get home. Along with his knife and the other things he had forgotten to take along, there was something else he had to have, a very important thing his father had given him.
His father had made him the guardian of a secret, made him the keeper of a secret book, and had given Richard something to keep always, as proof to the true owner of the book, that it was not stolen, but rescued for safekeeping. It was a triangular shaped tooth, three fingers wide. Richard had strung a leather thong to it so he could wear it around his neck, but like his knife and backpack he had stupidly lef
t the house without it. He was impatient to have it back around his neck—without it, he couldn’t prove his father wasn’t a thief.
Higher up, after an open area of bare rock, the maples, oaks, and birches began to give way to spruce. The forest floor lost its green for a quiet, brown mat of needles. As they walked along, an uneasy feeling began to itch at him. He gently took Kahlan’s sleeve between his thumb and forefinger, pulling her back.
“Let me go first,” he said quietly. She looked at him and obeyed without question. For the next half hour he slowed the pace, studying the ground and inspecting every branch close to the trail. Richard stopped at the base of the last ridge before his house and squatted them down beside a patch of ferns.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Maybe nothing,” he whispered, “but someone has been up the trail this afternoon.” He picked up a flattened pinecone, looking at it for a short time before tossing it away.
“How do you know?”
“Spiderwebs.” He looked up the hill. “There aren’t any spiderwebs across the trail. Someone has been up the trail and broken them. The spiders haven’t had time to string more, so there aren’t any.”
“Does anyone else live up this trail?”
“No. It could be just a traveler, passing through. But this trail isn’t used much.”
Kahlan frowned, perplexed. “When I was walking in front, there were spiderwebs all over. I was picking them off my face every ten steps.”
“That’s what I’m talking about,” he whispered. “No one had been up that part of the trail all day, but since the open place we came through, there haven’t been any more.”
“How could that be?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. Either someone came out of the woods back by the clearing, and then went up the trail, a very hard way to travel”—he looked her in the eyes—“or they dropped in out of the sky. My house is over this hill. Let’s keep our eyes sharp.”
Richard carefully led the two of them up the rise, both scanning the woods as they went. He wanted to run in the other direction, take them away from there, but he couldn’t. He wasn’t running away without the tooth his father had given him for safekeeping.
At the top of the rise they crouched behind a big pine and looked down on his house. Windows were broken, and the door, which he always locked, stood open. His possessions were scattered about on the ground.
Richard stood. “It’s been ransacked, just like my father’s house.”
She grabbed a fistful of his shirt and hauled him back down.
“Richard!” she whispered angrily. “Your father may have come home just like this. Maybe he went in just like you are about to do, and they were waiting for him.”
She was right, of course. He ran his fingers through his hair, thinking. He looked back toward the house. Its back sat hard up against the woods with its door facing the clearing. Since it was the only door, anyone inside would expect him to come running in that way. That’s where they would wait, if they were inside.
“All right,” he whispered back, “but there’s something inside I have to get. I’m not leaving without it. We can sneak around the back, I’ll get it, and then we will be away from here.”
Richard would have preferred not to take her, but he didn’t want to leave her waiting on the trail, alone. They made their way through the woods, through the tangle of brush, skirting the house, giving it a wide berth. When he reached the place where he would have to approach the back of the house, he motioned her to wait. She didn’t like the idea, but he would take no argument. If there was anyone in there, he didn’t want them getting her as well.
Leaving Kahlan under a spruce tree, Richard started cautiously toward the house, following a serpentine route to stay on the areas of soft needles instead of treading on dry leaves. When he finally saw the back bedroom window, he stood frozen, listening. He heard no sound. Carefully, his heart pounding, he took slow crouched steps. There was movement at his feet. A snake wriggled past his foot. He waited for it to pass.
At the weathered back of his house, he gently put his hand on the bare wooden frame of the window and raised his head high enough to look inside. Most of the glass was broken out, and he could see that his bedroom was a mess. The bedding was slashed open. Prized books were torn apart and their pages strewn about the floor. To the far side of the room the door to the front room was opened partway, but not enough to see beyond. Without a wedge under it, that was the spot the door always swung to on its own.
Slowly, he put his head in the window and looked down at his bed. Below the window was the bottom bedpost, and hanging from it were his pack and the leather thong with the tooth, right where he had left them. He brought his arm up and started to reach through the window.
There was a squeak from the front room, a squeak he knew well. He went cold with fright. It was the squeak his chair made. He had never fixed the squeak because it seemed a part of the chair’s personality, and he couldn’t bring himself to alter it. Soundlessly, he dropped back down. There could be no doubt: someone was in the front room, sitting in his chair, waiting for him.
Something caught his eye, making him look to the right. A squirrel sat on a rotting stump watching him. Please, he thought desperately to himself, please don’t start chattering at me to leave your territory. The squirrel watched him for a long moment, then jumped off the stump to a tree, scurried up, and was gone.
Richard let out his breath, and raised himself back up to look in the window again. The door still stood as it had before. Quickly he reached inside and carefully lifted the pack and leather thong with the tooth off the bedpost, listening wide-eyed all the time for the slightest sound from beyond the door. His knife was on a small table on the other side of the bed. There was no chance of retrieving it. He lifted the pack through the window, being careful not to let it bump against any of the remaining shards of broken glass.
With his booty in hand, Richard moved quickly but silently back the way he had come, resisting a strong urge to break into a run. He looked over his shoulder as he went to be sure no one followed. He put his head through the loop of leather and tucked the tooth into his shirt. He never let anyone see the tooth—it was only for the keeper of the secret book to see.
Kahlan waited where he had left her. When she saw him, she sprang to her feet. He crossed his lips with his finger to let her know to keep silent. Slinging the pack over his left shoulder, he put his other hand gently on her back to move her along. Not wanting to go back the way they had come, he guided her through the woods to where the trail continued above his house. Spiderwebs strung across the trail glistened in the last rays of the setting sun and they both breathed out in relief. This trail was longer and much more arduous, but it led where he was going. To Zedd.
The old man’s house was too far to reach before dark and the trail was too treacherous to travel at night, but he wanted to put as much distance as he could between them and whomever waited back at his house. While there was light, they would keep moving.
Coldly, he wondered if whoever was in his house could be the same person who had murdered his father. His house was torn up just like his father’s had been. Could they have been waiting for him as they had waited for his father? Could it be the same person? Richard wished he could have confronted him, or at least seen who it was, but something inside him had strongly warned him to get away.
He gave himself a mental shake. He was letting his imagination have too free a rein. Of course something inside had warned him of danger, warned him to get away. He had already gotten away with his life when he shouldn’t have once this day. It was foolish to trust in luck once—twice was arrogance of the worst kind. It was best to walk away.
Still, he wished he could have seen who it was, been sure there was no connection. Why would someone tear his house apart, as his father’s had been torn apart? What if it was the same person? He wanted to know who had killed his father. He burned to kno
w.
Even though he had not been allowed to see his father’s body at his house, he had wanted to know how he was killed. Chase had told him, very gently, but he had told him. His father’s belly had been cut open and his guts had been spread out all over the floor. How could anyone do that? Why would anyone do that? It made him sick and light-headed to think of it again. Richard swallowed back the lump in his throat.
“Well?” Her voice jolted him out of his thoughts.
“What? Well, what?”
“Well, did you get whatever it was you went to get?”
“Yes.”
“So what was it?”
“What was it? It was my backpack. I had to get my backpack.”
She turned to face him with both hands on her hips and a scowl on her face. “Richard Cypher, you expect me to believe you risked your life to get your backpack?”
“Kahlan, you are coming close to getting kicked.” He couldn’t manage a smile.
Her head was cocked to the side, and she continued to give him a sideways look, but his remark had taken the fire out of her. “Fair enough, my friend,” she said gently, “fair enough.”
He could tell Kahlan was a person who was used to getting answers when she asked a question.
As the light faded and colors muted into grayness, Richard started thinking of places to spend the night. He knew of several wayward pines along the way that he had used on many occasions. There was one at the edge of a clearing, just off the trail ahead. He could see the tall tree standing out against the fading pinks of the sky, standing above all the other trees. He led Kahlan off the trail toward it.
The tooth hanging around his neck nagged at him. His secrets nagged at him. He wished his father had never made him the keeper of the secret book. A thought that had occurred to him back at his house, but he had ignored, forced itself to the front of his mind. The books at his house looked like they had been torn apart in a rage. Maybe because none was the right book. What if it was the secret book they were looking for? But that was impossible—no one but the true owner even knew of the book.
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