As soon as she saw Kahlan and Cara vanish like vengeful spirits into the whiteness, Ann fell to her knees and thrust her hands into the fire to snatch the burning journey book from its funeral pyre in the white-hot coals.
“Prelate!” Alessandra cried. “You’ll burn yourself!”
Flinching back from the ferocity of the pain, Ann ignored the gagging stench of burning flesh and thrust her hands again into the wavering heat of the fire. She saw, rather than felt, that she had the priceless journey book in her fingers.
The entire rescue of the burning book took only a second, but, through the prism of pain, it seemed an eternity.
Biting down on her lower lip against the suffering, Ann rolled to the side. Alessandra came running back with her hands full of snow. She threw it on Ann’s bloody blackened fingers and the journey book clenched in them.
She let out a low wail of agony when the wet snow contacted the burns. Alessandra fell to Ann’s side, taking her hands by the wrists, gasping in tears of fright.
“Prelate! Oh, Prelate, you shouldn’t have!”
Ann was in a state of shock from the pain. Alessandra’s shrill voice seemed a distant drone.
“Oh, Ann! Why didn’t you use magic, or even a stick!”
Ann was surprised by the question. In her panic over the priceless journey book burning there in the fire, her mind was filled only with the single thought to get it out before it was too late. Her reckless action, she knew, was precipitated by her bitter anguish over Kahlan’s accusations.
“Hold still,” Alessandra admonished through her own tears. “Hold still and let me see what I can do about healing you. It will be all right. Just hold still.”
Ann sat on the snowy ground, dazed by the hurt, and by the words still hammering her from inside her head, as she let Alessandra work at healing her hands.
The Sister could not heal her heart.
“She was wrong,” Alessandra said, as if reading Ann’s thoughts. “She was wrong, Prelate.”
“Was she?” Ann asked in a numb voice after the searing pain in her fingers finally began to ease, replaced by the achingly uncomfortable tingling of magic coursing into her flesh, doing its work. “Was she, Alessandra?”
“Yes. She doesn’t know so much as she thinks. She’s a child—she couldn’t be a paltry three decades yet. People can’t learn to wipe their own noses in that much time.” Alessandra was prattling, Ann knew, prattling with her worry over the journey book, and with her worry over the anguish caused by Kahlan’s words. “She’s just a foolish child who doesn’t know the first thing about anything. There’s much more to it. Much more. It isn’t so simple as she thinks. Not so simple at all.”
Ann wasn’t so sure anymore. Everything seemed dead to her. Five hundred years of work—had it all been a mad task, driven on by selfish desires and a fool’s faith? Wouldn’t she, in Kahlan’s place, have seen it the same way?
Endless rows of corpses lay before her in the trial going on in her mind. What was there to say in her defense? She had a thousand answers for the Mother Confessor’s charges, but at that moment, they all seemed empty. How could Ann possibly excuse herself to the dead?
“You’re the Prelate of the Sisters of the Light,” Alessandra rambled on during a pause in her work. “She should have been more considerate of who she was talking to. More respectful. She doesn’t know everything involved. There’s a great deal more to it. A great deal. After all, the Sisters of the Light don’t casually choose their Prelate.”
Nor did Confessors casually choose their Mother Confessor.
An hour passed, and then another, before Alessandra finally finished the difficult and tedious work of healing Ann’s burns. Burns were difficult injuries to heal. It was a tiring experience, being helpless and cold while magic sizzled through her, while Kahlan’s words sliced her very soul.
Ann flexed the aching fingers when Alessandra had finished. A shadow of the burning pain lingered, as she knew it would for a good long time. But they were healed, and she had her hands back.
When the matter was weighed, though, she feared she had lost a great deal more of herself than she had recovered.
Exhausted and cold, Ann, to Alessandra’s worry, lay down beside the hissing remnants of the fire that had so hurt her. At that moment, she had no desire to ever rise again. Her years, nearly a thousand of them, seemed to have all caught up with her at once.
She missed Nathan terribly right then. The prophet doubtless would have had something wise, or foolish, to say. Either would have comforted her. Nathan always had something to say. She missed his boastful voice, his kind, childlike, knowing eyes. She missed the touch of his hand.
Weeping silently, Ann cried herself to sleep. Her dreams kept the sleep from being either restful, or deep. She awoke in late morning to the feel of Alessandra’s comforting hand on her shoulder. The Sister had added more wood to the fire, so it offered warmth.
“Are you feeling better, Prelate?”
Ann nodded her lie. Her first thought was for the journey book. She gazed at it lying in the protection of Alessandra’s lap. Ann sat up and carefully lifted the blackened book from the sling of Alessandra’s dress.
“Prelate, I’m so worried for you.”
With a sour wave of her hand, Ann dismissed the concern.
“While you slept, I’ve looked at the book.”
Ann grunted. “Looks bad.”
Alessandra nodded. “That’s what I thought. I don’t think it can be salvaged.”
Ann used an easy, gentle flow of her Han to hold the pages—little more than ash—together as she carefully turned them.
“It has endured three thousand years. Were it ordinary paper, it would be beyond help—ended—but this is a thing of magic, Alessandra, forged in the fires of magic, by wizards of power not seen in all those three thousand years…until Richard.”
“What can we do? Do you know a way to restore it?”
Ann shook her head as she inspected the curled, charred journey book. “I don’t know if it can be restored. I’m just saying that it’s a thing of magic. Where there is magic, there is hope.”
Ann pulled a handkerchief from a pocket deep under the layers of her clothes. Laying the blackened book in the center of the handkerchief, she carefully folded the handkerchief up to hold it together. She wove a spell around it all to protect and preserve it for the time being.
“I will have to try to find a way to restore it—if I can. If it can even be restored.”
Alessandra dry-washed her hands. “Until then, our eyes with the army are lost.”
Ann nodded. “W
e won’t know if the Imperial Order decides to finally leave their place in the south and move up into the Midlands. I can give no guidance to Verna.”
“Prelate, what do you think will happen if the Order finally decides to attack—and Richard isn’t there with them? What will they do? Without the Lord Rahl to lead them…”
Ann did her best to move the terrible weight of Kahlan’s words to the side as she considered the immediate situation.
“Verna is the Prelate now—at least as far as the Sisters with the army are concerned. She will guide them wisely. And Zedd is with them, helping the Sisters prepare for battle, should it come. They could have no better counsel than to have a wizard of Zedd’s experience with them. As First Wizard, he has been through great wars before.
“We will have to place our faith in the Creator that He will watch over them. I can’t advise them unless I can restore the journey book. Unless I can do that, I won’t even know their situation.”
“You could go there, Prelate.”
Ann brushed snow from the side of her shoulder, where she had been lying on the ground, as she considered that possibility.
“The Sisters of the Light think I’m dead. They’ve put their faith in Verna, now, as their Prelate. It would be a terrible thing to do to Verna—and to the rest of the Sisters—to come back to life in the middle of such trying circumstances. Certainly many would be relieved to have me back, but it also sows the seeds of confusion and doubt. Battle is a very bad time for such seeds to sprout.”
“But they would all be encouraged by your—”
Ann shook her head. “Verna is their leader. Such a thing could forever undermine their trust in her authority. They must not lose their faith in her leadership. I must put the welfare of the Sisters of the Light above all else. I must keep their best interests at heart, now.”
“But, Ann, you are the Prelate.”
Ann stared off. “What good has that done anyone?”
Alessandra’s eyes turned down. The wind moaned sorrowfully through the trees. Gusts kicked up blue-gray trailers of snow and whipped them along through the campsite. The sunlight had vanished behind somber clouds. Ann wiped her nose on the edge of her icy cloak.