The Pillars of Creation (Sword of Truth 7)

“So, if anyone had killed me—Sister Perdita, for example—after I went out in the woods with those Sisters of the Dark, wouldn’t that have opened such a gateway?”

“No. The Keeper needed a protector of the world of life. It took the balance to your lack of the gift. It took a gifted Rahl—the Lord Rahl, to accomplish such a thing,” Richard said. “If I had killed you to save myself, or Kahlan, then the Keeper would have been loosed into this world through the breach created. I had to force you to choose life, not death, if you were to live, and if the Keeper was to be kept in the underworld.”

“I might have…destroyed life,” Jennsen said, shaken at truly understanding how close she’d come to unleashing cataclysmic destruction.

“I’d not have let you,” Tom said, good-naturedly.

Jennsen put her hand on his arm, realizing that she had never had feelings before like she had for him. The man positively made her heart sing. His smile made her life worth living. Betty stuck her nose in, wanting attention, and to see her sleeping babies.

“There is no greater treason to life than delivering the innocent to the Keeper of the Dead,” Cara said.

“But she didn’t,” Richard said. “She used reason to discover the truth, and truth to embrace life.”

“You sure know a lot about magic,” Jennsen said to Richard.

Kahlan and Cara laughed so hard that Jennsen thought they might fall off their horses.

“I don’t see what’s so funny,” Richard grumbled.

The two of them laughed all the harder.