Jennsen snuffled back her tears as Richard stood. “It was magic, then—the thing you saw?”
Richard stared off toward where the form had appeared in the blowing sand. “Something evil.”
Off behind them, Rusty tossed her head and whinnied in sympathy with inconsolable Betty. When Tom laid a sorrowful hand on Jennsen’s shoulder, she seized it as if for strength and held it to her cheek.
Jennsen finally stood, shielding her eyes against the blowing dust as she looked to the horizon. “At least we’re rid of the filthy races.”
“Not for long,” Richard said.
His headache came slamming back with such force that it nearly took him from his feet. He had learned a great deal about controlling pain, about how to disregard it. He did that now.
There were bigger worries.
Chapter 7
Around midafternoon, as they were walking across the scorching desert, Kahlan noticed Richard carefully watching his shadow stretched out before him.
“What is it?” she asked. “What’s the matter?”
He gestured at the shadow before him. “Races. Ten or twelve. They just glided up behind us. They’re hiding in the sun.”
“Hiding in the sun?”
“They’re flying high and in the spot where their shadow falls on us. If we were to look up in the sky we wouldn’t be able to see them because we’d have to look right into the sun.”
Kahlan turned and, with her hand shielding her eyes, tried to see for herself, but it was too painful to try to look up anywhere near the merciless sun. When she looked back, Richard, who hadn’t turned to look with her, again flicked his hand toward the shadows.
“If you look carefully at the ground around your shadow, you can just make out the distortion in the light. It’s them.”
Kahlan might have thought that Richard was having a little fun with her were it not about a matter as serious as the races. She searched the ground around their shadows until she finally saw what he was talking about. At such a distance, the races’ shadows were little more than shifting irregularities in the light.
Kahlan glanced back at the wagon. Tom was driving, with Friedrich sitting up on the seat beside him. Richard and Kahlan were giving the horses a rest from being ridden, so they were tethered to the wagon.
Jennsen sat on blankets in the back of the wagon, comforting Betty as she bleated in misery. Kahlan didn’t think the goat had been silent for more than a minute or two all day. The gash wasn’t bad; Betty’s suffering was from other pain. At least the poor goat had Jennsen for solace.
From what Kahlan had learned, Jennsen had had Betty for half her life. Moving around as she and her mother had, running from Darken Rahl, hiding, staying away from people so as not to reveal themselves and risk word drifting back to Darken Rahl’s ears, Jennsen had never had a chance to have childhood friends. Her mother had gotten her the goat as a companion. In her constant effort to keep Jennsen out of the hands of a monster, it was the best she could offer.
Kahlan wiped the stinging sweat from her eyes. She took in the four black feathers Richard had bundled together and strung on his upper right arm. He had taken the feathers when he’d retrieved the arrows that were still good. Richard had given the last feather to Tom for killing the fifth race with his knife. Tom wore his single feather like Richard, on his arm. Tom thought of it as a trophy, of sorts, awarded by the Lord Rahl.
Kahlan knew that Richard wore his four feathers for a different reason: it was a warning for all to see.
Kahlan pulled her hair back over her shoulder. “Do you think that was a man below the races? A man watching us?”
Richard shrugged. “You know more about magic than me. You tell me.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it.” She frowned over at him. “If it was a man…or something like that, why do you think he finally decided to reveal himself?”
“I don’t think he did decide to reveal himself.” Richard’s intent gray eyes turned toward her. “I think it was an accident.”
“How could it be an accident?”
“If it’s someone using the races to track us, and he can somehow see us—”
“See us how?”
“I don’t know. See us through the eyes of the races.”
“You can’t do that with magic.”
Richard fixed her with a trenchant look. “Fine. Then what was it?”
Kahlan looked back at the shadows stretching out before them on the buckskin-colored rock, back at the small bleary shapes moving around the shadow of her head, like flies around a corpse. “I don’t know. You were saying?…About someone using the races to track us, to see us?”
“I think,” Richard said, “that someone is watching us, through the races or with their aid—or something like that—and they can’t really see everything. They can’t see clearly.”
“So?”
“So, since he can’t see with clarity, I think maybe he didn’t realize that there was a sandstorm. He didn’t anticipate what the blowing sand would reveal. I don’t think he intended to give himself away.” Richard looked over at her again. “I think he made a mistake. I think he showed himself accidentally.”
Kahlan let out a measured, exasperated breath. She had no argument for such a preposterous notion. It was no wonder he hadn’t told her the full extent of his theory. She had been thinking, when he said the races were tracking them, that probably a web had been cast and then some event had triggered it—most likely Cara’s innocent touch—and that spell had then attached to them, causing the races to follow that marker of magic. Then, as Jennsen had suggested, someone was simply watching where the races were in order to get a pretty good idea of where Richard and Kahlan were. Kahlan had thought of it in terms of the way Darken Rahl had once hooked a tracer cloud to Richard in order to know where they were. Richard wasn’t thinking in terms of what had happened before; he was looking at it through the prism of a Seeker
.
There were still a number of things about Richard’s notion that didn’t make sense to her, but she knew better than to discount what he thought simply because she had never heard of such a thing before.
“Maybe it’s not a ‘he,’” she finally said. “Maybe it’s a she. Maybe a Sister of the Dark.”
Richard gave her another look, but this one was more worry than anything else. “Whoever it is—whatever it is—I don’t think it can be anything good.”
Kahlan couldn’t argue that much of it, but still, she couldn’t reconcile such a notion. “Well, let’s say it’s like you think it is—that we spotted him spying on us, by accident. Why did the races then attack us?”
Dust rose from Richard’s boot as he casually kicked a small stone. “I don’t know. Maybe he was just angry that he’d given himself away.”
“He was angry, so he had the races kill Betty’s kids? And attack you?”
Richard shrugged. “I’m just guessing because you asked; I’m not saying I think it’s so.” The long feathers, bloodred at their base, turning to a dark gray and then to inky black at the tip, ruffled in the gusts of wind.
As he thought it over, his tone turned more speculative. “It could even be that whoever it was using the races to watch us had nothing at all to do with the attack. Maybe the races decided to attack on their own.”
“They simply took the reins from whoever it was that was taking them for the ride?”
“Maybe. Maybe he can send them to us so he can have a peek at where we are, where we’re going, but can’t control them much more than that.”
In frustration, Kahlan let out a sigh. “Richard,” she said, unable to hold back her doubts, “I know a good deal about all sorts of magic and I’ve never heard of anything like this being possible.”
Richard leaned close, again taking her in with those arresting gray eyes of his. “You know about all sorts of things magic from the Midlands. Maybe down here they have something you never encountered before. After all, had you ever heard of a dream walker before we encountered Jagang? Or even thought such a thing was possible?”