Blood of the Fold (Sword of Truth 3)

Waving a hand, the general laughed with glee. “For all time, Lord Rahl. Now, if you will excuse me, I must return at once to let our people know of this great day.”

“Of course,” Richard managed to get out.

General Baldwin clasped hands with Cara and Raina before rushing from the room. Richard stood stunned.

Cara frowned. “Lord Rahl, is something wrong? Your face is as pale as ashes.”

Richard finally took his gaze from the door the general had gone through, and looked to her. “He knew that Kahlan is the Mother Confessor.”

Cara’s brow twitched as if she were mystified. “Everyone knows that your bride-to-be, Kahlan Amnell, is the Mother Confessor.”

“What?” he whispered. “You know, too?”

She and Raina nodded, Raina speaking. “Naturally. Lord Rahl, you do not look well. Are you ill? Perhaps you should sit down.”

Richard looked from Raina’s questioning face back to Cara. “She had a spell on her to protect her. No one knew she was the Mother Confessor. No one. A great wizard used magic to hide her identity. You never knew before.”

Cara frowned, truly puzzled, now. “We didn’t? That’s most odd, Lord Rahl. It seems to me that I’ve always known she was the Mother Confessor.” Raina nodded her agreement.

“Impossible,” Richard said. He turned to the door. “Ulic! Egan!”

They burst through the door almost instantly, poised and ready for combat. “What is it, Lord Rahl?”

“Who am I to marry?”

Both men straightened in surprise. “The Queen of Galea, Lord Rahl,” Ulic said.

“Who is she!”

The two men shared a confused glimpse at one another. “Well,” Egan said, “she is the queen of Galea—Kahlan Amnell, the Mother Confessor.”

“The Mother Confessor is supposed to be dead! Don’t any of you remember the speech I gave to all the representatives, down in the council chambers? Don’t you remember how I talked about how they should honor the memory of the dead Mother Confessor by joining with D’Hara?”

Ulic scratched his head. Egan stared at the floor while he sucked the tip of a finger in concentration. Raina looked to the others, hoping they would have an answer. Cara’s face finally brightened.

“I think I remember, Lord Rahl,” she said. “But I think you were speaking of past Mother Confessors in general, not your bride-to-be.”

Richard looked from one face to another as each nodded. Something was wrong.

“Look, I know you don’t understand, but this involves magic.”

“You’re right, then, Lord Rahl,” Raina said, turning more serious. “If there’s a magic spell involved, then the spell would deceive us. You have magic, so you would be able to discern the difficulty. We must trust in what you tell us about magic.”

Richard rubbed his hands together as he looked off, his eyes unable to find a place to settle. Something was wrong. Something was terribly wrong. But what? Maybe Zedd lifted the spell. Maybe he had a reason. It could be that there was nothing wrong. Zedd was with her. Zedd would protect her. Richard spun around.

“The letter. I sent them a letter. Maybe Zedd removed the spell because he knows that I’ve taken Aydindril from the Imperial Order, so he didn’t think there was any need to keep her spelled.”

“That sounds reasonable,” Cara offered.

Richard felt a wave of worry rise into his throat. What if Kahlan was furious that he had ended the alliance of the Midlands and had demanded the surrender of the lands to D’Hara, and so she had insisted that Zedd take off the spell to let people know the Midlands still had a Mother Confessor? If so, that would mean she wasn’t in trouble, but that she was angry with him. Anger he could accept. Trouble, he could not. If she was in trouble, he had to help her.

“Ulic, please go find General Reibisch and bring him to me at once.” Ulic tapped a fist to his chest and rushed from the room. “Egan, you go visit some of the officers and men. Don’t act as if it’s anything out of the ordinary. Just engage them in conversation about me, maybe my marriage or something like that. See if others also know that Kahlan is the Mother Confessor.”

Richard paced and thought as he waited for General Reibisch to arrive. What should he do? Kahlan and Zedd should be here at any time, but what if something was wrong? Even if Kahlan was angry about what he had done, that wouldn’t stop her from coming to Aydindril, it would only make her want to talk him out of it, or lecture him on the history of the Midlands and what he was destroying.

Maybe she would want to tell him that their marriage was off, and she never wanted see him again. No. He could not believe that. Kahlan loved him, and even if she was angry, he refused to believe that she would willingly put anything before her love for him. He had to believe in her love, just as she had to believe in his.

The door opened and Berdine struggled into the room with her arms full of books and papers. She had a pen between her teeth. She smiled as best she could with the pen in her mouth, and dumped the things on the table.

“We need to talk,” she whispered, “if you’re not busy.”

“Ulic went out to look for General Reibisch. It’s urgent that I talk to him.”

Berdine glanced to Cara, Raina, and the door. “Do you want me to leave, Lord Rahl? Is something wrong?”

Already, Richard had learned enough to know he was right about the journal they had found being important. He could do nothing until Reibisch returned.

“Who am I to marry?”

Berdine opened a book on the table as she sat in his chair and shuffled through the papers she had brought. “Queen Kahlan Amnell, the Mother Confessor.” She looked up hopefully. “Do you have a bit of time? I could use your help.”

Richard sighed and went around the desk to stand beside her. “Until General Reibisch gets here I’ve got time. What do you need?”

With the back end of her pen, she tapped the open journal. “I’ve almost got this bit here translated, and it seems he was emphatic about it when he wrote it, but I’m missing two words that I think are important.” She pulled the High D’Haran version of The Adventures of Bonnie Day around before them. “I’ve found a place with the same two words in this. If you can remember what it says, I’ll have it.”

Richard had read The Adventures of Bonnie Day countless times, it was his favorite book, and he thought he could recite it by heart. He had discovered that he could not. He knew the book well, but remembering the exact words proved harder than he had thought it would be. He could remember the story, but not the exact story, word for word. Unless he could tell her the exact words of a sentence, the gist of the story wasn’t often of much help.

He had gone to the Keep several times and searched for a version of the book he could read so they could cross-reference the D’Haran version, but he hadn’t been able to find one. It was frustrating that he couldn’t be of more help.

Berdine pointed to a place in The Adventures of Bonnie Day. “I need these two words. Can you tell me what this sentence says?”

Richard’s hopes rose. It was the beginning of a chapter. He had had the most success with the beginnings of chapters because the starting places were memorable.

“Yes! This is the chapter where they leave. I remember. It starts, ‘For the third time that week, Bonnie violated her father’s rule about not going into the woods alone.’”

Berdine leaned over, looking at the line. “Yes, this is ‘violated,’ I’ve already got that one. This word here is ‘rule,’ and this one ‘third’?”

Richard nodded when she glanced up. Grinning with the thrill of discovery, she dipped her pen in the bottle of ink and started writing on one of the sheets of paper she had brought, filling in a few of the blank places. When she finished, she proudly slid the paper over in front of him.

“This is what it says in this bit of the journal.”

Richard picked up the paper and held it up in the light coming over his shoulder from the window.

The arguments rage on among us. Wizard’s Third Rule: Passion rules reason. I fear this most insidious of rules may be our ruin. Though we know better, I fear some of us are violating it anyway. Each faction presses that their course of action is reason, but in the desperation, I fear all are passion. Even Alric Rahl sends frantic word of a solution. Meanwhile, the dream walkers scythe through our men. I pray the towers can be completed, or we are all lost. Today I said good-bye to friends leaving for the towers. I wept to know I will never see those good men again in this world. How many will die in the towers for the cause of reason? But alas, I know the worse cost should we violate the Third Rule.

When Richard finished the translation, he turned away, toward the window. He had been in those towers. He knew that wizards had given their life force into them to ignite the tower’s spells, but they had never seemed real people to him before. It was chilling to read the anguish in the words of the man whose bones had lain in that room in the Keep for thousands of years. Through the words in the journal, his bones seemed to be coming to life.