Her icy blue eyes turned up to challenge him. “He tried to kill us. He tried to kill the Mother Confessor.”
She ground her teeth and, while looking Warren in the eye, kicked the whimpering boy again.
Warren licked his lips. “I know…but…”
“But what?”
“He’s so young. It isn’t right.”
“And so it would be better if we just let him kill us? Would that make it right for you?”
Kahlan knew Cara was right. As difficult as it was to witness, Cara was right. If they died, how many men, women, and children would the Imperial Order go on to slaughter? Child though he was, he was a tool of the Order.
Nonetheless, Kahlan gestured Cara that that was enough. When Kahlan signaled, Cara again seized his tangled mat of dirty hair in her fist and hauled him to his feet. With Cara’s thighs at his back, he stood shivering, blood running down his face, pulling short, ragged breaths.
As Kahlan stared down into terrified, tear-filled brown eyes, she put on her Confessor’s face, the face her mother had taught her when she was but a little girl, the face that masked her inner tumult.
“I know you’re, there, Jagang,” she said in a quiet voice devoid of emotion.
The boy’s bloody mouth turned up in a smile that was not his own.
“You made a mistake, Jagang. We’ll have an army soon on its way to stop them.”
The boy smiled a vacant bloody smile, but said nothing.
“Lyle,” Warren said, his voice brittle with anguish, “you can be free of the dream walker. You must only swear loyalty to Richard and you will be free. Believe me, Lyle. Try. I know what it’s like. Try, Lyle, and I swear I’ll help you.”
Kahlan thought that, with Warren there, a man he knew, he might throw himself toward the unexpected light coming from the open dungeon door. The boy behind the smile that was not his own watched Warren with longing that slowly curdled to loathing. This was a child who had seen the struggle for freedom bring horror and death and knew that servile obedience brought rewards and life. He was not old enough to understand what more there was to it.
With a gentle touch of her fingers, Kahlan urged Warren to back away. He reluctantly complied.
“This isn’t the first of Jagang’s wizards we’ve captured,” she said, offhandedly, to Warren. Her words, though, were not meant for Warren.
Kahlan looked up into Cara’s stern blue eyes and then glanced off to the side, hoping the Mord-Sith understood the instruction.
“Marlin Pickard,” Kahlan said, as if recalling the name for Warren, but her words were still meant for Cara. “He was grown, and even with this pompous pretend emperor directing him, Marlin still wasn’t able to give us much trouble.”
Marlin had in fact given them a great deal of trouble. He had nearly killed Cara and Kahlan both. Kahlan hoped Cara remembered how tenuous was her control over someone possessed by the dream walker.
The mood in the quiet woods was still and tense as the boy glared up at Kahlan.
“We discovered your scheme in time, Jagang. You made a mistake thinking you could get by our scouts. I hope you’re with those men, so that when we wipe them out we can cut your throat.”
The bloody grin widened. “A woman like you is wasted on the side of the weak,” the boy said in the menacing voice of a man. “You’d have a much better time serving strength, and the Order.”
“I’m afraid my husband likes me right where I am.”
“And where is your husband, darlin? I was hoping to say hello.”
“He’s around,” Kahlan said in the same dispassionate voice.
She saw Warren, when she had spoken the words, move in a way that was a little too much like surprise.
“Is he, now?” The boy’s eyes turned from Warren, back to Kahlan. “Why is it I don’t believe you?”
She wanted to kick the boy’s teeth in as she watched his cruel grin. Kahlan’s mind raced, trying to figure out what Jagang could possibly know, and what he was trying to discover.
“You’ll see him soon enough, when we get this poor child back to camp. I’m sure Richard Rahl will want to laugh in your cowardly face when I tell him how we discovered the great emperor’s plan to sneak troops north. He’ll want to personally tell you what a fool you are.”
The boy tried to take a step toward her, but Cara’s fist in his hair restrained him. He was a cougar on a leash, still testing its chains. The bloody smile remained, but it was not as self-satisfied as it had been. In the brown eyes, Kahlan thought she saw hesitation.
“Ah, but I don’t believe you,” he said, as if losing interest. “We both know he’s not there at all. Don’t we, darlin?”
Kahlan resolved to take a risk. “You’ll see him for yourself, soon enough.” She made to look as if she were going to turn away, but turned back to him instead.
Kahlan let a sarcastic smile taint her lips. “Oh—you must mean Nicci?”
The smile vanished from the boy’s face. The brow drew down, but he managed to keep any anger out of his voice.
“Nicci? I don’t know what you’re talking about, darlin.”
“Sister of the Dark? Shapely? Blond hair? Blue eyes? Black dress? Surely, you would remember a woman that hauntingly beautiful. Or, besides your other shortcomings, are you also a eunuch?”
The eyes watched, and in them Kahlan could see careful calculations weighing her every word. But it was Nicci’s words about Jagang that Kahlan was remembering.
“I know who Nicci is. I know every private inch of her. One day, I will come to know you as intimately as I know Nicci.”
Such an obscene threat was somehow more chilling, coming as it did from the mouth of a boy. It made her sick to her stomach to hear a child express Jagang’s vile thoughts.
The boy’s arm gestured for his master. “One of my beauties, and quite the lethal lady, besides.” Kahlan thought she detected in Jagang’s gravelly growl a hint of the false bravado of a bluff. Almost in afterthought, he added, “You haven’t really seen her.”
Kahlan heard in the assertion the ghost of a question he dared not ask, and knew by it th
at there was something more to this. She wished she knew what.
She shrugged again. “Lethal? I wouldn’t know.”
He licked the blood from his lips. “That’s what I thought.”
“I wouldn’t know because she didn’t seem all that lethal. She didn’t manage to harm any of us.”
The grin returned. “You lie, darlin. If you really saw Nicci, she would have killed at least some of you, even if she didn’t manage to kill you all. You couldn’t best that one without her scratching someone’s eyes out, first.”
“Really? So sure, are we?”
The boy let out a belly laugh. “Darlin, I know Nicci. I’m sure.”
Kahlan smiled her contempt into the boy’s brown eyes. “You know I’m telling you the truth.”
“Really?” he said, still chuckling. “How’s that?”
“You know it’s the truth because she’s one of your slaves, so you should be able to enter her mind. You can’t, though. I know why you can’t. Even though you aren’t too bright, I don’t suppose you’ll need to think too long to imagine why not.”
Fierce rage fired the boy’s eyes. “I don’t believe you.”
Kahlan shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
“If you saw her, then where is she now?”
As she turned her back on him, Kahlan told him the brutal, bitter truth and let him interpret it his own way. “Last I saw her, she was on her way into oblivion.”
Kahlan heard the bellow behind her. She spun back to see Cara trying to stop him with her Agiel. Kahlan heard the bone in his arm snap. It didn’t even slow him. The boy, in a wild rage, his hands clawed, his teeth bared, lunged for Kahlan.
Half turned back to him, Kahlan lifted her hand against the full weight of the boy crashing toward her as he leaped for her throat. His small chest contacted her hand. His feet were clear of the ground. It felt not as if he were throwing himself at her, but no more than dandelion fluff, floating to her on a breath of air.
Time was hers.
It was not necessary for Kahlan to invoke her birthright, but merely to withdraw her restraint of it. Her feelings could provide her no safe haven; only the truth would serve her now.
This was not a small boy, hurt, alone, afraid.