Kahlan and Cara ran into the main room and stood in the doorway watching him running across the meadow.
Cara cupped her hands around her mouth. “I love you too, Lord Rahl,” she shouted.
Richard turned as he ran and acknowledged her words with a wave.
Together, they watched Richard’s dark figure flying through the dead brown grass, his fluid gait swiftly carrying him away. Just before he disappeared into the trees, he stopped and turned. Kahlan shared a last look with him, a look that said everything. He turned and vanished into the woods, his clothes making him impossible to distinguish from the trees and undergrowth.
Kahlan collapsed to her knees, sitting back on her heels as she lost control of her emotions. She wept helplessly, her head in her hands, at what seemed the end of the world.
Cara squatted beside her to put an arm around her shoulders. Kahlan hated to have Cara see her cry that way, cry in such weakness. She felt a distant gratitude when Cara held her head to her shoulder and didn’t say anything.
Kahlan didn’t know how long she sat on the dirt floor in her white Confessor’s dress, sobbing, but after a time, she was able to make herself stop. Her heart continued to spiral down into hopeless gloom. Each passing moment seemed unendurable. The bleak future stretched out before her, a wasteland of agony.
She finally looked up and gazed about at the house. Without Richard it was empty. He had given it life. Now it was a dead place.
“What do you wish to do, Mother Confessor?”
It was getting dark. Whether it was the sunset, or the clouds getting thicker, Kahlan didn’t know. She wiped at her eyes.
“Let’s begin to get our things together. We’ll stay here a few days, like Richard asked. After that, anything the horses can’t carry that will spoil, we’d better bury. We should board up the windows. We’ll close up the house good and tight.”
“For when we return to paradise, someday?”
Kahlan nodded as she looked about, trying desperately to focus her mind on a task and not on that which would crush her. The worst part, she knew, was going to be night. When she was alone in bed. When he wasn’t with her.
Now, the valley seemed more like paradise lost. She had trouble believing that Richard was really gone. It seemed as if he were just off to catch some fish, or hunt berries, or scout the hills. It seemed as if, surely, he would be coming back soon.
“Yes, for when we return. Then it will be paradise again. I guess when Richard returns, wherever we are will be paradise.”
Kahlan noticed that Cara didn’t hear her answer. The Mord-Sith was staring out through the doorway.
“Cara, what is it?”
“Lord Rahl is gone.”
Kahlan rested a comforting hand on Cara’s shoulder. “I know it hurts, but we must put our minds to—”
“No.” Cara turned back. Her blue eyes were strangely troubled. “No, that’s not what I mean. I mean that I can’t sense him. I can’t feel the bond to Lord Rahl. I know where he is—he’s going up the trail up to that pass—but I can’t feel it.” She looked panicked. “Dear spirits, it’s like going blind. I don’t know how to find him. I can’t find Lord Rahl.”
Kahlan’s first flash of fear was that he fell and was killed, or that Nicci had executed him. She used reason to force the fear aside.
“Nicci knows about the bond. She probably used her magic to cloak it, or to sever it.”
“Cloaked it, somehow.” Cara rolled her Agiel in her fingers. “That’s what it has to be. I can still feel my Agiel, so I know that Lord Rahl has to be alive. The bond is still there…but I cannot feel it to sense where he is.”
Kahlan sighed with relief. “That has to be it, then. Nicci doesn’t want to be followed, so she cloaked his bond with magic.”
Kahlan realized that to be protected from the dream walker by the bond to Richard, people would now have to believe in him without the reassurance of feeling the bond. Their link would have to remain true in their hearts if they were to survive.
Could they do that? Could they believe in that way?
Cara stared out the doorway, across the meadow to the mountains where Richard had disappeared. The blue-violet sky behind the blue-gray mountains was slashed with blazing orange gashes. The snowcaps were lower than they had been. Winter was racing toward them. If Richard didn’t soon escape and return, Kahlan and Cara would have to be gone before it arrived.
Bouts of dizzying grief threatened to drown her in a flood of tears. Needing to do something, she went to her room to take off her Confessor’s dress. She would set to work with the task of closing up the house and preparing to leave.
As Kahlan pulled her dress off, Cara appeared in the doorway.
“Where are we going to go, Mother Confessor? You said we were going to leave, but you never said where we were going to go.”
Kahlan saw Spirit standing in the window, fists at her sides as she looked out at the world. She lifted the carving off the sill and trailed her fingers over the flowing form.
Seeing the statue, touching it, feeling the power of it, made Kahlan want to reach deep inside for resolve. Once before, she had been hopeless, and Richard carved this for her. Her other hand fell to her side, and her fingers found Richard’s sword lying across their bed. Kahlan focused her mind, ordering the turbulent swirl of despair thickening into wrath.
“To destroy the Order.”
“Destroy the Order?”
“Those beasts took my unborn child, and now they’ve taken Richard. I will make them regret it a thousand times over and then another thousand. I once swore an oath of death without mercy to the Order. The time has come. If killing every last one of them is the only way to get Richard back, then that’s what I will do.”
“You swore an oath to Lord Rahl.”
“Richard said nothing about not killing them, just about how. My oath was not to try to drive a sword through their heart. He said nothing about bleeding them to death with a thousand cuts. I won’t break my oath, but I intend to kill every last one of them.”
“Mother Confessor, you must not do that.”
“Why?”
Cara’s blue eyes gleamed with menace. “You must leave half for me.”
Chapter 24
Richard had stopped to turn back and look at her only once as he ran, just before he went into the trees. She was standing in the doorway in her white Confessor’s dress, her long thick hair tumbling down, her form the embodiment of feminine grace, looking as beautiful as the first time he saw her. They held each other’s gaze for a brief moment. He was too far away to see the green of her eyes, a color he’d never beheld on anyone else, a color of such heart-piercing perfection that it sometimes would stop his breathing, and at other times quicken it.
But it was the mind of the woman behind those eyes that in reality captivated him. Richard had never met her equal.
He knew he was cutting the time close. As much as
he hated the idea of turning his gaze away from Kahlan, her life hung in the balance. His purpose was clear. Richard had plunged into the woods.
He had traveled the trail often enough; he knew where he could run, and where he had to be careful. Now, with little time left, he couldn’t afford to be too careful. He didn’t try for a glimpse of the house.
He was alone in the woods as he ran, his thoughts but salt in a raw wound. For once he felt out of place in the woods—powerless, insignificant, hopeless. Bare branches clattered together in the wind, while others creaked and moaned, as if in mock sorrow to see him leaving. He tried not to think as he ran.
Fir and spruce trees took over as the ground rose out of the valley. His breath came in rapid pulls. In the cold shadows of the forest floor, the wind was a distant pursuer far overhead, chasing after him, shooing him along, hounding him away from the happiest place he had ever been. Spongy mounds of verdant moss lay dotting the forest floor in the low places where mostly cedars grew, looking like wedding cakes done up in an intense green, sprinkled over with tiny, chocolate brown, scale-like cedar needles.
Richard tiptoed on rocks sticking up above the water as he crossed a small stream. As the little brook tumbled down the slope, it went under rocks and boulders in places, making an echoing drumming sound, announcing him to the stalwart oaks along his march into imprisonment. In the flat gray light, he failed to see a reddish loop of cedar root. It caught his foot and sent him sprawling facedown in the trail, a final humiliation on his judgment and sentence of banishment.
As Richard lay in the cold, damp, discarded leaves, dead branches, and other refuse of the forest, he considered not getting up ever again. He could just lie there and let it all end, let the indifferent wind freeze his limbs stiff, let the sneaky spiders and snakes and wolves come to bite him and bleed him to death, and then finally the uncaring trees would cover him over, never to be missed except by a few, his vanishing a good riddance to most.
A messenger with a message no one wanted to heed.