Kahlan, her vision turning to a watery blur, looked away.
“Cara,” Richard said, “get the horses hitched to the carriage. I’m going to scout a circle to make sure we don’t have any surprises.”
“I will scout while you hitch the horses. I am your guard.”
“You’re my friend, too. I know this land better than you. Hitch the horses and don’t give me any trouble about it.”
Cara rolled her eyes and huffed, but marched off to do his bidding.
The room rang with silence. Richard’s shadow slipped off the blanket. When Kahlan whispered her love to him, he paused and looked back. His shoulders seemed to betray the weight he carried.
“I wish I could, but I can’t make people understand freedom. I’m sorry.”
From somewhere inside, Kahlan found a smile for him. “Maybe it isn’t so hard.” She gestured toward the bird he had carved in the wall. “Just show them that, and they will understand what freedom really means: to soar on your own wings.”
Richard smiled, she thought gratefully, before he vanished through the doorway.
Chapter 3
All the troubling thoughts tumbling through her mind kept Kahlan from falling back to sleep. She tried not to think about Richard’s vision of the future. As exhausted as she was by pain, his words were too troubling to contemplate, and besides, there was nothing she could do about it right then. But she was determined to help him get over the loss of Anderith and focus on stopping the Imperial Order.
It was more difficult to shake her thoughts about the men who had been outside, men Richard had grown up with. The haunting memory of their angry threats echoed in her mind. She knew that ordinary men who had never before acted violently, could, in the right circumstances, be incited to great brutality. With the way they viewed mankind as sinful, wretched, and evil, it was only a small step more to actually doing evil. After all, any evil they might do, they had already rationalized as being predestined by what they viewed as man’s inescapable nature.
It was unnerving to contemplate an attack by such men when she could do nothing but lie there waiting to be killed. Kahlan envisioned a grinning, toothless Tommy Lancaster leaning over her to cut her throat while all she could do was stare helplessly up at him. She had often been afraid in battle, but at least then she could fight with all her strength to survive. That helped counter the fear. It was different to be helpless and have no means to fight back; it was a different sort of fear.
If she had to, she could always resort to her Confessor’s power, but in her condition that was a dubious proposition. She had never had to call upon her power when in anything like the condition in which she now found herself. She reminded herself that the three of them would be long gone before the men returned, and besides, Richard and Cara would never let them get near her.
Kahlan had a more immediate fear, though, and that one was all too real. But she wouldn’t feel it for long; she would pass out, she knew. She hoped.
She tried not to think of it, and instead put her hand gently over her belly, over their child, as she listened to the nearby splashing and burbling of a stream. The sound of the water reminded her of how much she wished she could take a bath. The bandages over the oozing wound in her side stank and needed to be changed often. The sheets were soaked with sweat. Her scalp itched. The mat of grass that was the bedding under the sheet was hard and chafed her back. Richard had probably made the pallet quickly, planning to improve it later.
As hot as the day was, the stream’s cold water would be welcome. She longed for a bath, to be clean, and to smell fresh. She longed to be better, to be able to do things for herself, to be healed. She could only hope that as time passed, Richard, too, would recover from his invisible, but real, wounds.
Cara finally returned, grumbling about the horses being stubborn today. She looked up to see the room was empty. “I had better go look for him and make sure he’s safe.”
“He’s fine. He knows what he’s doing. Just wait, Cara, or he will then have to go out and look for you.”
Cara sighed and reluctantly agreed. Retrieving a cool, wet cloth, she set to mopping Kahlan’s forehead and temples. Kahlan didn’t like to complain when people were doing their best to care for her, so she didn’t say anything about how much it hurt her torn neck muscles when her head was shifted in that way. Cara never complained about any of it. Cara only complained when she believed her charges were in needless danger—and when Richard wouldn’t let her eliminate those she viewed as a danger.
Outside, a bird let out a high-pitched trill. The tedious repetition was becoming grating. In the distance, Kahlan could hear a squirrel chattering an objection to something, or perhaps arguing over his territory. He’d been doing it for what seemed an hour. The stream babbled on without letup.
This was Richard’s idea of restful.
“I hate this,” she muttered.
“You should be happy—lying about without anything to do.”
“And I bet you would be happy to trade places?”
“I am Mord-Sith. For a Mord-Sith, nothing could be worse than to die in bed.” Her blue eyes turned to Kahlan’s. “Old and toothless,” she added. “I didn’t mean that you—”
“I know what you meant.”
Cara looked relieved. “Anyway, you couldn’t die—that would be too easy. You never do anything easy.”
“I married Richard.”
“See what I mean?”
Kahlan smiled.
Cara dunked the cloth in a pail on the floor and wrung it out as she stood. “It isn’t too bad, is it? Just lying there?”
“How would you like to have to have someone push a wooden bowl under our bottom every time your bladder was full?”
Cara carefully blotted the damp cloth along Kahlan’s neck. “I don’t mind doing it for a sister of the Agiel.”
The Agiel, the weapon a Mord-Sith always carried, looked like nothing more than a short, red leather rod hanging on a fine chain from her right wrist. A Mord-Sith’s Agiel was never more than a flick away from her grip. It somehow functioned by means of the magic of a Mord-Sith’s bond to the Lord Rahl.
Kahlan had once felt the partial touch of an Agiel. In a blinding instant, it could inflict the kind of pain that the entire gang of men had dealt Kahlan. The touch of a Mord-Sith’s Agiel was easily capable of delivering bone-breaking torture, and just as easily, if she desired, death.
Richard had given Kahlan the Agiel that had belonged to Denna, the Mord-Sith who had captured him by order of Darken Rahl. Only Richard had ever come to understand and empathize with the pa
in an Agiel also gave the Mord-Sith who wielded it. Before he was forced to kill Denna in order to escape, she had given him her Agiel, asking to be remembered as simply Denna, the woman beyond the appellation of Mord-Sith, the woman no one but Richard had ever before seen or understood.
That Kahlan understood, and kept the Agiel as a symbol of that same respect for women whose young lives had been stolen and twisted to nightmare purposes and duties, was deeply meaningful to the other Mord-Sith. Because of that compassion—untainted by pity—and more, Cara had named Kahlan a sister of the Agiel. It was an informal but heartfelt accolade.
“Messengers have come to see Lord Rahl,” Cara said. “You were sleeping, and Lord Rahl saw no reason to wake you,” she added in answer to Kahlan’s questioning look. The messengers were D’Haran, and able to find Richard by their bond to him as their Lord Rahl. Kahlan, not able to duplicate the feat, had always found it unsettling.
“What did they have to say?”
Cara shrugged. “Not a lot. Jagang’s army of the Imperial Order remains in Anderith for the time being, with Reibisch’s force staying safely to the north to watch and be ready should the Order decide to threaten the rest of the Midlands. We know little of the situation inside Anderith, under the Order’s occupation. The rivers flow away from our men, toward the sea, so they have not seen bodies to indicate if there has been mass death, but there have been a few people who managed to escape. They report that there was some death due to the poison which was released, but they don’t know how widespread it was. General Reibisch has sent scouts and spies in to learn what they will.”
“What orders did Richard give them to take back?”
“None.”