Jennsen saw the looks that passed between them, the kind of intimate glances between two people who were close. Jennsen could see in the eyes of these two that they could read each other’s slightest expression. She and her mother had been like that, able to see thoughts in the slightest movement of the eyes of the other. It was the kind of communication she thought was facilitated not only through familiarity, but through love and respect.
“I met Friedrich when I returned from the Old World. I had aged only about the same as Friedrich. I had lived a much longer time, of course, but my body had not aged to show it because I had been under the spell of the Palace of the Prophets.
“When I came back, I became involved in a number of things, and one of them was how I might help those such as you.”
Jennsen hung on every word. “That’s when you met my mother?”
“Yes. You see, the spell at the palace, the spell that altered time, sparked an idea of how I might help those like you. I knew that regular means of casting webs—magic—around your kind never seemed to work out. Others had tried but failed; the offspring were killed. I struck on the idea, instead, to cast the web, not on you, but on those who came into contact with you and your mother.”
Jennsen leaned forward expectantly, feeling sure that she was finally getting to the core of what might prove to be the help she sought. “What did you do? What sort of magic?”
“I used magic to alter people’s perception of time itself.”
“I don’t understand. What did that do?”
“Well, the only way Darken Rahl could search for you was as I’ve explained—by using regular means. I tinkered with those regular means. I made it so that those who knew of you perceive time differently.”
“I still don’t understand. How—what—did you make them perceive? Time is time.”
Althea leaned forward with a cunning smile. “I made them think you were just born.”
“When?”
“All the time. Whenever they found out some thread of news about you, as a child fathered by Darken Rahl, they perceived you, and reported you, as newborn. When you were two months, ten months, four years, five years, six years old, they were all still looking for a newborn, despite how long they had known of you. The spell slowed their perception of time, in relation to you alone, so that they were always looking for a newborn baby, rather than a girl growing up.
“In this way, until you were six, I hid you right under their noses. That threw everyone’s calculations off by six years. To this day, anyone who suspected your existence would believe you to be around fourteen or so, when you are actually more than twenty, because they thought you were newborn when the spell ended, when you were six. That’s when they began to mark your age.”
Jennsen rose up onto her knees. “But that could work. You must only do it again. If you were to cast a spell like that for me now, like you did when I was little, it would work the same, wouldn’t it? Then they wouldn’t know I was grown up. They wouldn’t be hunting me. They would be looking for a newborn. Please, Althea, just do that again. Do what you did once before.”
From the corner of her eye, Jennsen saw Friedrich, now sitting at his bench in a back room, turn away. By the look on Althea’s face, Jennsen knew that she had somehow said the wrong thing, and precisely what the sorceress had planned on her saying.
Jennsen realized that this had been a trap of sorts, and she had just talked herself right into it.
“I was young and masterful in my skill with magic,” Althea said. In her dark eyes glimmered the spark of recollection of that grand time in her life. “In thousands of years, few had been through the great barrier and back. I had. I had studied with the Sisters of the Light, had audiences with their Prelate, and with the great prophet. I had accomplished such things as few others had. I was well over a hundred years old and still young, with a handsome and charming new husband who believed I could walk to the moon and back if the fancy struck me.
“I was well over a hundred years of age, yet still youthful, with a full life ahead of me; wise with age, yet still young. I was clever, oh so clever, and powerful in my gift. I was experienced, knowledgeable, and attractive, with many friends and a circle of people who hung on my every worldly pronouncement.”
With long graceful fingers, Althea pulled up the hem of her skirt, uncovering her legs.
Jennsen drew back at the sight.
She saw, then, why Althea had not stood before; her legs were withered, deformed, shriveled bones covered with a dry veneer of pallid flesh, as if they had died years ago, but never been buried because the rest of her was still living. Jennsen didn’t know how the woman could keep from screaming in constant anguish.
“You were six,” the sorceress said in a terribly calm and quiet voice, “when Darken Rahl finally discovered what I had done. He was a very ingenious man. Much more shrewd, as it turned out, than a young sorceress of a hundred-odd years in age.
“I only had time to tell my sister to warn your mother, before he caught me.”
Jennsen remembered running. When she was little, she and her mother had fled the palace. It had been night. It had been shortly after a visitor had come to their door. In the dark hall, there had been whispering. And then they had fled.
“But, he…he didn’t kill you?” Jennsen swallowed. “He showed you mercy—he spared your life.”
Althea chuckled without humor. It was an empty laugh at encountering a profoundly naive notion.
“Darken Rahl did not always believe in simply killing those who displeased him. He preferred, instead, that they should live a good long time; death would have been a release, you see. If they were dead, how could they regret, how could they suffer, how could they serve as an example to others?
“You cannot imagine, and I could not begin to tell you, the terror of such a capture, of the long walk to be taken before him, of what it was like being in the grip of that man, of what it was like to look up into his calm face, his cold blue eyes, and know you were at the mercy of a man who had none. You cannot imagine what it was like to know in that single terrible instant, that everything you were, everything you had, everything you had hoped for in life, was about to forever change.
“The pain was what you might expect, I suppose. Perhaps my legs can partly attest to it.”
“I’m so sorry,” Jennsen whispered through her tears, hands pressed over her heartache.
“But the pain was not the worst of it. Not the worst by far. He stripped me of everything I had, but took for granted. He did to my power, to my gift, worse than he did to my legs. You just cannot see it—you are blind to it. Every day, I see it. That hurt, I assure you, you cannot begin to imagine.
“Even all that, though, was not enough for Darken Rahl. His displeasure at what I had done to hide you had only begun. He banished me here, to this sunken, foul place of hot springs and sickening vapors. He imprisoned me here, filling in about me a swamp with monstrosities created by the very power he had stripped from me. He wanted me close, you see. Several times he visited, just to behold me in my prison.
“I’m at the mercy of those things out there that are given life by my own gift, a gift to which I no longer have access. I cou
ld never drag myself out by my arms alone, but even if I were to try, or if I had the help of another, those beasts, created from my own power, would rip me apart. I can’t call them back even to save myself.
“He left a path, in the front, so that provisions and supplies could be brought in, so I would be sure to have the things I needed. Friedrich had to build a home for us, here, because I cannot ever leave. Darken Rahl wished me a long life—a life I could spend suffering for displeasing him.”
Jennsen trembled as she listened, unable to say anything. Althea lifted a hand to point with one long graceful finger toward the back room.
“That man, who loves me, had to witness it all. Friedrich was thus condemned to a life of tending to a crippled wife he loved, who could no longer be a wife to him in ways of the flesh.”
She ran a hand over her bony limbs, tenderly, as if seeing them as they they once were. “I have never again had the joy of being with my husband as a woman is with a man. My husband never again was able to share and enjoy the intimate charms of the woman he loves.”
She paused to regain her composure before going on. “As part of my punishment, Darken Rahl left me with the power to use my gift in the one way which would haunt me every day: prophecy.”
Jennsen could not help herself from asking, thinking that this must be one thread of possible comfort left to the woman. “It’s part of your gift—can’t it bring you some joy?”
Dark eyes fixed on her again. “Did you enjoy the last day with your mother—the day before she died?”
“Yes,” Jennsen finally said.
“Did you laugh and talk with her?”
“Yes.”
“What if you had known that the next day she was to be murdered? What if you saw it all, long before it happened? Days, weeks, or even years before? Knew what was to happen, when, every ghastly detail? Saw, by the power of your magic, the horrifying sight of it, the blood, the agony, the dying. Would that please you? Would you still have experienced that joy, that laughter?”
Jennsen answered in a small voice. “No.”
“So you see, Jennsen Rahl, I cannot help you, not because I am selfish, as you put it, but because even if I were willing, I have no power left to cast you a spell. You must find within yourself the ability to help yourself, the free will to accomplish what you must. Only in that way can you truly succeed in life.