The First Confessor (Sword of Truth 0)

The crowd again buzzed with anxious chatter. Some people shouted out over the racket, wanting to know what they could do. Magda held up her hands, calling for order so she could answer.

“Let the council do as they will,” she told them. “But if you wish to live, then to save your own life go to your knees, bow forward, place your forehead to the ground, and speak the following devotion to the Lord Rahl:

“Master Rahl guide us. Master Rahl teach us. Master Rahl protect us. In your light we thrive. In your mercy we are sheltered. In your wisdom we are humbled. We live only to serve. Our lives are yours.

“Repeat the devotion three times to ensure that you invoke the link to Lord Rahl’s magic so that your mind will be shielded from the dream walkers.

“Do it in secret if you don’t want to have to explain to these men your reasons or if you fear reprisal. Realize that it does not make you a traitor to the Midlands to swear your allegiance to the Lord Rahl; rather it makes you loyal to your own life.

“Lord Rahl is not an enemy of the Midlands, he is a fighter for all of those in the New World. We are all one. We are all fighting for the right to live, the right to be free from bloody tyranny.

“You cannot help the Midlands if you are dead.” Magda thrust an angry fist high. “Choose to live! Swear your loyalty to Lord Rahl and you will be protected from the dream walkers!”

Magda saw the council frantically signaling for the guards to lead her from the council chambers.

Before they could come to escort her out, she lifted her chin and marched toward the doors. The crowd parted, falling back out of her way as if she were someone of power and authority.

Some whispered their thanks as she passed.

Magda kept her eyes straight ahead and her expression blank, not showing her emotions as she made her way toward the great doors.

Chapter 17

Magda spotted the stony Lord Rahl standing just outside the great doors watching her long march out of the council chambers. His two grim bodyguards waited not far behind him. Glancing back over her shoulder as she passed the massive, mahogany doors, Magda saw the council guard who had been following after her slow to a halt when they were sure that she was indeed leaving and looked to have no intention of returning.

Far off across the rotunda Magda saw Lord Rahl’s small army standing ready to draw weapons and defend him if there was trouble. She realized that they would not be in a good mood after word of all the angry charges and accusations that had been leveled against Lord Rahl reached them. As far as the soldiers were concerned, they must believe that they were in a potentially hostile place. What’s more, three of them had already died mysterious deaths since arriving at the Keep. At a signal from Lord Rahl, though, their hands eased off their weapons.

Back inside the council chambers, despite the calls for order, things were not returning to normal. The crowd didn’t want to go on with the agenda. They wanted answers to pointed questions about the threat from dream walkers.

Magda hoped that the council would think it over and see the wisdom in using Lord Rahl’s solution to shielding people from the threat. In her experience, it was often the case that upon further reflection the council saw that her suggestions made sense. She hoped that was the case this time.

“I must apologize, Lady Searus,” Alric Rahl said with a deep bow. “I was terribly wrong.”

“Wrong about what?” Magda asked, her own temper still burning hot as she started out once again.

As he fell in beside her, he gestured back through the door to the council chambers, where a near riot was taking place. People were shouting at the council, demanding to be heard, demanding to know if it was true that danger was really that close at hand.

“I must beg your forgiveness. I was wrong and you were right.” He leaned down toward her a little and arched an eyebrow. “I can see now that having shorter hair has indeed lowered your status to that of a nobody and that you are now completely defanged.”

Magda’s fury faded in the face of his satire. She couldn’t help but to smile. “Well, the truth is the truth, no matter your status.”

He glanced back briefly toward the council chambers. “Unfortunately, I think that speaking the truth has made you some enemies.”

Magda’s smile faded. “I almost died twice this day. The second time you brought me back as I was passing through the veil into the world of the dead. I was nearly in the embrace of the good spirits. I was dead but for you pulling me back to the world of life.

“Every moment I live now is a gift. All anyone can do is return me to that place where I should rightfully be. If I am to live, then I will live free of pretense.”

“You’re wrong that you should rightfully be dead, Magda. You chose life and you lived. That is the fact of the matter. We can’t live our lives according to what might have been. We have to live by what is. You’re alive and that is what’s important.”

To Magda, though, life without Baraccus seemed dismal and empty. Despite the pain she had been in, she had thought that she was about to be with him again. Despite wanting to live, she was in a way sorry to have been snatched back.

“You lived and you have given other people the gift of also being able to choose to protect themselves so they can also live,” one of Lord Rahl’s big bodyguards said.

Alric Rahl glanced back at the man and nodded. “The choice is now their own, not the council’s.”

He turned his attention back to Magda. “But by helping people make their own choice, you have put yourself in jeopardy. Perhaps you should come with me back to the People’s Palace. You will be safer there.”

With the world at war, Magda wondered if there was such a thing as a safe place. If one place fell, then the next would come under siege until it, too, fell. Eventually, there would be no safe place left to run to. Either the New World survived together, or all of it would fall under the swords of the invaders.

Though he didn’t return the stares, people watched Alric Rahl as he passed. Their eyes betrayed their fear of the imposing figure of Lord Rahl, a man that few in the Keep had ever seen. But they would have heard the stories of him.

As they passed through the great rotunda, she noticed others, back in the shadows, a collection of worried people who glanced her way as they talked quietly among themselves. She saw the silent dread in the eyes tracking her.

In that moment, she realized that while some feared Lord Rahl, most of the others were not watching him, they were watching her as she passed by. They were looking to her for something, for answers, or salvation, or maybe simply a reason to hold out hope

. They weren’t seeing her short hair. They were seeing Magda Searus, a woman covered in blood who had declared that it didn’t have to be.

Magda finally shook her head. “I grew up in Aydindril. Since I married Baraccus I’ve lived in the Keep. This is my home. We are at war and my home is under threat. I have to stay and fight for it. These are my people. I have to stay and fight for them.

“People are accustomed to doing as the council says. I don’t know if any will choose to become bonded to you and your protection, but at least I’m shielded from the dream walkers. That means I will be better able to fight for these people. Maybe I can convince others to join in accepting the same protection.

“Besides, the dream walkers are not the only threat. There are things going on that don’t make sense to me. I know that Baraccus, too, always thought that there was something wrong here at the Keep.”

“Lothain’s conspiracies?”

Magda pursed her lips as she considered. “Knowing my husband I don’t think it’s that simple. There is something terribly wrong here, something much deeper.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, for one thing, the Temple team was supposed to take the most dangerous things of magic away into the Temple for safekeeping. They betrayed us, supposedly to help protect mankind from the tyranny of magic.”

“But they’ve all been caught and put to death.”

Magda was beginning to think that whole story was too simple, too neat and tidy. She was beginning to wonder if they all really were traitors.

“But how could such men turn against us? How is mankind suffering under a tyranny of magic? Dear spirits, they were wizards, creatures of magic. They weren’t tyrants.

“For the Temple team itself—a hundred men—to have been working for the enemy was horrifying. No one, not even Baraccus, had suspected such a thing. So if no one suspected, do you really think that Lothain managed to catch and execute every last one of the traitors?”

“It is hard to imagine such a widespread conspiracy here at the Keep, and especially among such trusted men. But I’m sure that Lothain tortured confessions out of those men before they were executed and would have rounded up any others if there were any.”