Richard hadn’t slowed for anything since he saw the Dominie Dutch, even her pregnant condition. Since being close to those stone bells and feeling some of what he felt, she had been more cooperative about his hurry.
Richard lifted a hand when he spotted the rider trailing a plume of dust. He could hear orders being relayed back through the ranks in response to his signal, bringing the entire column to a jangling halt. Only when it had stopped, in the sudden silence, did he realize how much noise it made when they were on the move.
“This will be our greeting,” Kahlan said.
“How far to the Minister’s estate?” Richard asked.
“Not far. We’re more than halfway from Fairfield. Maybe a mile.”
Richard and Kahlan dismounted to meet the approaching rider. A soldier took the reins to Kahlan’s horse. Richard handed his back to the man, too, and then stepped away from the others. Kahlan alone walked with him. He had to signal with a hand to keep the soldiers from forming a defensive ring around them.
The young man leaped from his horse before it had skidded to a stop. Holding the reins in one hand, he went to a knee in a bow. Kahlan greeted him in the way of the Mother Confessor and he rose. He wore livery of black boots, dark trousers, white shirt with a fancy collar and cuffs, and tan quilted doublet with black and brown braiding around the edges. The man bowed a head of red hair to Richard. “Lord Rahl?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
He straightened. “I’m Rowley. The Minister of Culture sent me to greet you and extend his joy to have you and the Mother Confessor grace the people of Anderith with your presence.”
“I’m sure,” Richard said.
Kahlan elbowed his ribs. “Thank you, Rowley. We will need a place for our men to set up camp.”
“Yes, Mother Confessor. The Minister wanted me to tell you that you’re welcome to choose any ground in our land. If it would be acceptable, you may have the grounds at the estate for your use.”
Richard didn’t like that idea at all. He didn’t want the men confined in such a way. He wanted them to be close, but able to set up a proper defensive position. Despite what anyone else thought, he had to treat this as being potentially hostile territory.
He gestured to the wheat field. “What about here? We will of course reimburse the landowner for the crops we ruin.”
Rowley bowed. “If it pleases you, Lord Rahl. The Minister wished the choice to be yours. The land is Anderith common ground, and the crops excess, of no real value or concern.
“After you see to your escort, at your convenience, the Minister wishes to invite you to dinner. He asked me to relay his eagerness to meet you, and to see the Mother Confessor again.”
“We don’t—”
Kahlan elbowed him again. “We would be happy to join Minister Chanboor for dinner. Please ask him, though, to understand that we have been riding hard, and are tired. We would appreciate it if he kept the dinner small, no more than three courses.”
Rowley was clearly not prepared for this request, but promised to relay it at once.
Once the man was riding back, Du Chaillu stepped up.
“You need a bath,” she announced to Richard. “Jiaan says there is a pond not far over this hill. Come, we will bathe.”
Kahlan’s brow tightened. Du Chaillu smiled sweetly.
“I usually must suggest it,” she said. “He is shy when we bathe together. His face turns red”—she pointed at Richard’s face—“just like that, when we undress to bathe. His face turns red like that whenever he tells me to take off my clothes.”
Kahlan folded her arms. “Really.”
Du Chaillu nodded. “Do you enjoy bathing with him, too? He seems to enjoy it—bathing with women.”
Now Richard knew how displeased Du Chaillu was with her horseback ride, and how she intended to even the score.
Kahlan’s green eyes turned to him. “What is it with you and women and water?”
Richard shrugged, not about to play the game. “You want to join us? It might be fun.” He winked at her and then turned and seized Du Chaillu’s arm. “Come along, then, wife. We’ll go first, maybe Kahlan will join us later.”
Du Chaillu yanked her arm away. The joke had gone too far for her. “No. I do not wish to go near the water.”
Her eyes betrayed obvious fear. She didn’t wish to give the chimes a chance to drown her again.
Chapter 52
Richard signed impatiently as he surveyed the people enjoying the dinner. An intimate dinner, Bertrand Chanboor had called it. Kahlan had whispered to Richard that, for Anderith, fifty or sixty people was considered an intimate dinner.
When Richard looked out at the people, many of them, especially the men, glanced away. Many of the women did not. It was fortunate, the way they were batting their lashes at him, that Kahlan was not jealous. She hadn’t really been jealous of Du Chaillu; she knew the woman was simply trying to nettle him. He knew, though, he was going to have to explain how innocent his single bath with Du Chaillu had been.
It was hard explaining anything to Kahlan, what with having so many people around all the time. Even when they slept, they had blade masters, and now troops, standing over them every minute. It wasn’t very intimate, much less romantic. He was beginning to forget they were married, for all the time they had alone together.
Their purpose, though, made such considerations pale into insignificance. The awareness of people dying because of the chimes being loose was not conducive to intimacy.
Sitting close to her, sharing food from the trencher, seeing the lamplight reflect in her green eyes, off her hair, seeing the way her thick tresses nestled in the curve of her neck, he was beginning to think about weeks before, in the spirit house—the last time he had made love to her . . . remembering her lush naked body. It was an impossible mental image to forget.
Kahlan cleared her throat. “He asked you a question, Richard,” she whispered.
Richard blinked. “What?”
“Minister Chanboor asked you a question.”
Richard turned to the other side. “I’m sorry, my mind was elsewhere. On an important action.”
“Yes, of course,” Minister Chanboor said, smiling. “I was just curious as to where you grew up.”
A long-forgotten memory of youth surfaced in Richard’s mind, a memory of wrestling with his older brother—his stepbrother, Michael. He had so enjoyed the playful tumbles they had. It had been a time of laughter. “Oh, you know—wherever there was a good fight.”
The Minister stumbled around for words. “I, I suppose you had a good teacher.”
His stepbrother had later, when they were grown, betrayed him to Darken Rahl. Michael had betrayed many people. Because of Michael’s betrayal, many innocent people had died.
“Yes,” Richard said, the memory standing in stark relief between him and the Minister’s expectant face. “I did have a good teacher. Last winter I had him beheaded.”
The Minister paled.
Richard turned back to Kahlan. She hid her smile. “Good answer,” she whispered to him from behind a napkin so she couldn’t be heard over the music coming from the harp set before and below their table.
The Lady Chanboor, on Kahlan’s other side, if she was appalled, didn’t show it. Dalton Campbell, on the far side of the Minister, raised an eyebrow. Beyond him, his wife, Teresa, a nice woman, Richard thought, hadn’t heard his words. When Dalton turned and whispered them to her, her eyes went wide, more in titillation than horror.
Kahlan had warned him these people responded to power, and suggested he show them more intimation of force than offers of accommodation if they were to gain the Anders’ cooperation.
The Minister, a piece of rolled beef dripping a red sauce in his fingers, gestured and sought to change the subject to something less bloody.
“Lord Rahl, don’t you wish any meat?”
The meat course seemed to Richard to have gone on for an hour. He decided to tell the man the flat truth.
The harpist missed a note. Everyone else held their breath.
Richard filled the dragging silence. “I’m certain that by now you have heard the proposal I’ve made for the lands of the Midlands to join with us. The terms are fair and equitable to all. Your representatives would have brought our terms to you. If you join willingly, your people will be welcomed. If you oppose us . . . well, if you oppose us, then we will have to conquer you and the terms will be harsh.”
“So I’ve been told,” the Minister said.
Kahlan leaned in. “And you have been informed my word backs Lord Rahl’s? You know my advice is for all lands to join us?”
The Minister tipped his head in a slight bow. “Yes, Mother Confessor, and please be assured we value greatly your sound advice.”
“Then is it your intention to join with us, Minister, in our struggle for freedom?”
“Well . . . you see, Mother Confessor, it is not quite that simple.”
“Fine,” Richard said, beginning to rise. “I will see the Sovereign, then.”
“You can’t,” Dalton Campbell said.
Richard, a scowl growing, sank back down. “And why would that be?”
The Minister licked his lips. “The Sovereign, the Creator watch over his blessed soul, is very ill. He is bedridden. Not even I have been able to see him. He is in no condition to talk, from what the healers and his wife tell me. Speaking with him would be hopeless, since he is rarely conscious.”
“I’m so sorry,” Kahlan said. “We had no idea.”
“We would take you to see him, Mother Confessor, Lord Rahl,” Dalton Campbell said in a sincere-sounding voice, “but the man is so ill he would be unable to offer his advice.”
The harpist went into a louder, more complex and dramatic piece, using every string, it seemed.
“Then you will have to decide without his advice,” Richard said. “The Imperial Order is already invading the New World. We need everyone we can get to resist their tyranny, lest their dark shadow cover us all.”
“Well,” the Minister said as he intently picked at invisible things on the tablecloth, “I want the land of Anderith to join with you and your noble cause. I really do. As do most of the people of Anderith, I’m sure—”
“Good. Then that’s settled.”
“Well, no, it’s not.” Minister Chanboor looked up. “Though I might wish it, as would my wife, and as Dalton has so forcefully advised we do, we cannot decide something this important on our own.”
“The Directors?” Kahlan asked. “We will speak with them straightaway.”
“They are part of it,” the Minister said, “but not all. There are others who must be part of such a momentous decision.”
Richard sat puzzled. “Who else is there?”
The Minister leaned back in his chair and gazed out at the room for a time before his dark eyes turned back to Richard.
“The people of Anderith.”
“You are the Minister of Culture,” Kahlan said heatedly as she leaned in. “You speak for them. You have but to say it will be so and it will.”
The man spread his hands. “Mother Confessor, Lord Rahl, you are asking us to surrender our sovereignty. I can’t callously do that on my own.”
“That is why it is called ‘surrender,’ ” Richard growled.
“But you are asking our people to cease to be who they are, and become one with you and your people. I don’t think you realize what that means. You are asking us to surrender not only our sovereignty, but our very culture.
“Don’t you see? We would cease to be who we are. We have a culture stretching back thousands of years. Now you come in, one man, and ask the people to throw away all that history? How can you think it so simple a matter to forget our heritage, our forebears, our culture?”
Richard drummed his fingers on the table. He gazed out at the people enjoying the dinner, who had no idea how important were the words being spoken at the head table.
“You misstate it, Minister Chanboor. We have no desire to destroy your culture”—Richard leaned toward the man—“although from what I’ve heard of it, there are unfair aspects of it that will not be allowed. Under our law, everyone is treated equally.
“As long as you follow the common laws, you may retain your culture.”
“Yes, but—”
“In the first place, it is a matter of necessity to the very freedom of hundreds of thousands of people of the New World. We will not tolerate a risk to so many. If you don’t join us, we will conquer you. When that happens, you will lose your say in the common laws we set down, and, you will pay penalties that will cripple your land for a generation.”
The heat in Richard’s eyes moved the Minister back a few inches. “Worse, though, would be if the Imperial Order gets to you first. They will not impose financial penalties, they will crush you. They will murder and enslave you.”
“The Imperial Order demanded the surrender of Ebinissia—” Kahlan said in a distant voice. “I was there. I saw what the Order did to those people when they refused to surrender and become slaves. The men of Imperial Order tortured and butchered every man, woman, and child in the city. Every last one. Not one person was left alive.”
“Well, any men who would—”
“Over fifty thousand men of the Order participated in slaughtering the innocent people of Ebinissia,” Kahlan said in a coldly powerful voice. “I led the troops who hunted them down. We killed every last man who had been in on the butchery in Ebinissia.”
Kahlan leaned toward the Minister. “Many wept for mercy. I have declared, as Mother Confessor, no mercy for the Order. That includes any who side with them. We killed every last one of those men, Minister Chanboor. Every last one.”
The frightful chill of her words stunned everyone at the table into silence. Dalton, Campbell’s wife, Teresa looked as though she might run from the table.
“Your only salvation,” Richard finally said, “is to join with us. Together, we are forming a formidable force capable of turning back the Imperial Order and preserving peace and freedom in the New World.”
Minister Chanboor finally spoke. “As I said, if it were my choice, I would agree to join you, as would my wife, as would Dalton. The problem is, Emperor Jagang has made generous offers to people here, offers of peace and—”
Kahlan shot to her feet. “What! You have been talking to those murderers!”
Some of the people around the room paused in their conversations to glance up at the head table. Some, Richard had noticed, had never taken their eyes off the Minister and his guests.
The Minister, for the first time, seemed undaunted. “When your land is threatened with extinction by opposing forces, neither of which were invited to demand our surrender, it is our duty as leaders and advisors to listen to what each side has to say. We wish no war, but war is being thrust upon us. It is incumbent on us to hear what our choices might be. You cannot fault us for listening to our options.”
“Freedom or slavery,” Richard said, standing beside his wife.
The Minister stood up, too. “Listening to what people have to say is not considered an offense, here in Anderith. We don’t attack people before they make threats. The Imperial Order implored us not to listen to what you have to say, but here you are. We offer people the opportunity to speak.”
Richard’s hand tightened on the hilt of his sword. He expected to feel the raised letters made of gold wire, the letters spelling out the word “Truth.” He was momentarily surprised to find them missing.
“And what lies did the Order tell you, Minister?”
Minister Chanboor shrugged. “As I said, we like your offer better.”
He held his hand out in invitation. Reluctantl
y, Richard and Kahlan returned to their seats.
“I must tell you right up front, Minister,” Richard said, “whatever it is you want, we’ll not give it to you. Don’t even bother listing to us your conditions. As we’ve explained to your representatives back in Aydindril, we have made the same offer to all the lands. In order to be fair to all, there can be no exceptions, and no special accommodations for some.”
“We ask for none,” Minister Chanboor said.
When Kahlan touched Richard’s back, he recognized it as a signal to take a breath and keep hold of his temper. He took the deep breath and reminded himself of their purpose. Kahlan was right. He had to think, and not just react.
“All right, Minister, what is the problem keeping you from accepting our terms of surrender?”
“Well, as I said, if it were up to me and—”
“What is the problem?” Richard’s tone was deadly, deep breath or not.
He was already considering his troops, less than a mile away. The guards at the estate would present little opposition for such elite D’Haran soldiers. It was not an option he wished to fall back on, but he might be forced to it. They couldn’t let the Minister—inadvertently or otherwise—interfere with stopping Jagang.
The Minister cleared his throat. Everyone else at the table was rigid, almost afraid to move, as if they could read Richard’s thoughts in his eyes.
“This affects everyone in our land. You are asking us to forsake our culture, as is the Imperial Order—although with you it would be less of a change and we would be able to retain some of our ways.
“This is not something I can impose on our people. It must be up to them.”
Richard’s brow twitched. “What? What do you mean?”
“I can’t dictate such a thing to our people. They will have to decide for themselves what to do.”
Richard lifted a hand. He let it fall back to the table. “But, how can they do that?”
The Minister wet his lips. “They will all decide what shall be the fate of all by their vote.”
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