He wasn’t sure he really did, but he said “Yes,” anyway.
Numb dismay swamped him. He would never have believed this woman would have willingly given up her power for some unspecified knowledge. The very idea of it unleashed cold panic through his veins.
Richard couldn’t make sense of it. With his mind groping blindly in a world gone insane, he spoke without even considering his words.
“I’m already married. I’ll not sleep with you as your husband.”
Nicci blinked in surprise, then let out a dainty titter, covering it with the back of her hand, not in shyness, but at his presumption. Richard felt his ears heating.
“That is not the way in which I want you, Richard.”
Richard cleared his throat. “Good.”
In the quiet of the wayward pine, with the rain outside falling in a gentle patter and the glowing checkered wood hissing softly, Nicci’s focused, intense, resolute expression turned very cold and very still.
“But if I should decide I do, Richard, you will comply with that, too.”
Nicci was a beautiful woman, the kind of woman most any man would eagerly accept. It was hardly that, though, that made him believe her. It was the look in her eyes. Never had the vague possibility of the act of sex seemed so vicious.
Her voice lost the conversational quality. It went on in a lifeless drone, a thing not human, pronouncing a sentence on his life. A sentence he himself would enforce, or Kahlan would die.
“You will act as my husband. You will provide for us as any husband would. You will care for me, and I for you, in the sense of worldly needs. I will mend your shirts and cook your meals and wash your clothes. You will provide us with a living.”
Nicci’s leaden words slammed into him with the deliberate methodical force of a beating delivered with an iron bar.
“You will never see Kahlan again—you must understand that—but as long as you do as I wish, you will know she lives. In that way you will be able to show your love for her. Every day she wakes, she will know you are keeping her alive. You have no other way to show her your love.”
He felt sick to his stomach. He stared off into memories of another place and time.
“And if I choose to end it?” The weight of such madness was so crushing that he earnestly considered it. “Rather than be your slave?”
“Then perhaps that is the form the knowledge I seek will take. Maybe that senseless end will be what I must learn.” She brought her first and second fingers together in a snipping motion, simulating the cutting of the umbilical cord of magic that sustained Kahlan’s life. “One last evil convulsion to finally confirm the senselessness of existence.”
It dawned on Richard that this woman could not be threatened, because she was a creature who, he was beginning to understand, welcomed any terrible outcome.
“Of all there is to me in this world,” he whispered in dim agony, more to himself and to Kahlan than to his implacable captor, “there is only one thing that is irreplaceable: Kahlan. If I must be a slave in order for Kahlan to live, then I shall be a slave.”
Richard realized Nicci was silently studying his face. He met her gaze briefly, then looked away, unable to bear the terrible scrutiny of her beautiful blue eyes while he held the image of Kahlan’s love in his mind.
“Whatever you shared with her, whatever happiness, joy, or pleasure, will always be yours, Richard.” Nicci seemed almost to be peering inside him, reading the pages of his past written in his mind. “Treasure those memories. They will have to sustain you. You will never see her again, nor she you. That chapter of your life is ended. You both have new lives, now. You may as well get used to it because that is the reality of the situation.”
The reality of what was. Not the world as he would wish it. He himself had told Kahlan that they must act according to the reality of what was, and not waste their precious lives wishing for things that could not be.
Richard ran his fingertips across his forehead as he tried to hold his voice steady. “I hope you don’t expect me to learn to be pleased with you.”
“I am the one, Richard, who expects to learn.”
Fists at his side, Richard shot to his feet. “And what is it you wish this knowledge for?” he demanded in unrestrained, violent bitterness. “Why is it so important to you!”
“As punishment.”
Richard stared in stunned disbelief. “What?”
“I wish to hurt, Richard.” She smiled distantly.
Richard sank back to the ground.
“Why?” he whispered.
Nicci folded her hands in her lap. “Pain, Richard, is all that can reach that cold dead thing within me that is my life. Pain is the only thing for which I live.”
He stared numbly at her. He thought about his vision. There was nothing he could do to fight the advance of the Imperial Order. He could think of nothing he could do to fight his fate with this woman.
If not for Kahlan, he would, at that moment, have thrown himself into a battle with Nicci that would have decided it once and for all. He would have willingly gone to his death fighting this cruel insanity. Except his reason denied him that.
He had to live so that Kahlan would live. For that, and that alone, he had to put one foot in front of the other and march into oblivion.
Chapter 27
Kahlan yawned as she rubbed her eyes. Squinting, she arched her back and stretched her sore muscles. The terrible desperate memories swooped in from the sleep-darkened corners of her mind, leaving little chance for any other thoughts to long survive.
She was beyond the realm of merciless anguish and crying; she had entered the sovereign dominion of unbridled anger.
Her fingers found the cold steel scabbard of his sword lying at her side. It felt alive with icy rage. That, the carving of Spirit, and her memories were about all she had of him.
There wasn’t a lot of firewood, but since they wouldn’t be needing much more anyway, Kahlan put another stick of what was left into the fire. She squatted, holding her hands close over the top of the feeble flames, hoping to bring feeling to her numb fingers. The wind shifted a little. Pungent smoke billowed up into her face, making her cough. The smoke rolled past her face and followed the rock overhang up and out from their shelter.
Cara was gone, so Kahlan pushed the little pot of water back onto the fire to warm it for tea for when the Mord-Sith returned. Cara was probably visiting their makeshift privy. Or maybe she was checking the traps they’d set the night before for rabbits. Kahlan didn’t hold out any real hope that they would catch a rabbit for their breakfast. Not in this weather. They had brought enough provisions, in any event.
Through slits in the clouds, the crimson light of a cold crisp dawn penetrated gaps in the snow-crusted limbs of trees to slant in under the rock overhang, casting everything in their little campsite in a blush glow. The two of them had tried without avail to find a wayward pine. The screen of trees, along with a short wall of boughs she and Cara had cut and placed the night before to protect them from the wind, as Richard had taught them to do, shielded the secluded spot. With their improvements it had proven a fit shelter. They had been lucky to find it in the driving snow. Outside, the snow was fairly deep, but in the shelter they had had a relatively dry, if cold, night. Kahlan and Cara had huddled together under blankets and their thick wolf fur mantles to keep each other warm.
Kahlan wondered where Richard was, and if he was cold, too. She hoped not. Probably, since he had started out a few days sooner, he had been lucky and had made it down to the lowlands already, avoiding the snow.
Cara and Kahlan had stayed in their home, as he had asked, for three days. Snow had arrived the morning after he’d left. Kahlan had been tempted to wait for a break in the weather before they started out, but she had learned a bitter lesson from Sister Nicci: don’t wait, act. When Richard didn’t return, Kahlan and Cara had immediately struck out.
It was hard going at first. They struggled through the drifts, leading the h
orses at times, riding them occasionally. They couldn’t see very far, and most of the time had to keep the wind from the west at their right shoulder as their only clue as to which direction they faced. It was dangerous traveling over the passes in such conditions. For a time, they feared that they had made a terrible mistake leaving the safety of their house.
Through a break in the clouds just before dark the night before, as they were gathering boughs for their shelter, they’d caught a glimpse of the lower hills; they were green and brown, not white. They would be below the snow line before long. Kahlan was confident that they were through the worst of it.
As she stuffed an arm into a sleeve, pulling another shirt on over the top of the two she was wearing, Kahlan heard the crunch of snow underfoot. When she realized it was more than one pair of footsteps, she stood up in a rush.
Cara pushed her way through the boughs of the sheltering trees. “We have company,” she announced in a grim voice. Kahlan saw that Cara’s fist held her Agiel.
A bundled up squat woman came through the trees, following in Cara’s footsteps. Under layers of cloaks, scarves, and other dangling corners of thick cloth, Kahlan was surprised to recognize Ann, the old Prelate of the Sisters of the Light.
Behind Ann came a taller woman, her scarves pushed back to reveal graying brown hair loose to her shoulders. She had an intense, steady, calculating gaze that had earned her an enduring network of fine wrinkles radiating out from the corners of her deep-set eyes. Her brow was less steady, twitching down several times toward her prominent nose. She looked like a woman who used a switch to teach children.
“Kahlan!” Ann rushed forward, seizing Kahlan’s arms. “Oh, my dear, it’s so good to see you!” She looked back when Kahlan glanced up behind her. “This is one of my Sisters, Alessandra. Alessandra, may I introduce the Mother Confessor—and Richard’s wife.”
The woman stepped forward and smiled. The pleasant grin completely altered her face, instantly erasing the severity of it with open good nature. It was a somewhat disorienting transformation, making her seem like two different people sharing one face. Or, Kahlan thought, perhaps one person with two faces.