Chainfire (Sword of Truth 9)

Flattery had been a plague that had followed Nicci her whole li

fe. “Nicci, you’re such a bright child, so you must give more of yourself.” “Nicci, you’re so beautiful, the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen. I must hold you.” “Nicci, my dear, I simply must be allowed to sample your exquisite charms or I will surely die an impoverished man.” To Nicci, vacuous flattery was the sound of a prybar, a tool used by a thief as he tried to get at what she had.

“What is it I can do for you,” Nicci asked in a businesslike voice.

Ann, hands still pushed up opposite sleeves, shrugged. “We need to talk to you about Richard’s unfortunate condition. It was quite shocking to discover him suffering from delirium.”

“I can’t say I disagree with that,” Nicci said.

“Do you have any ideas?” the Prelate asked.

Nicci glided her fingers back and forth across the polished top of the magnificent desk. “Ideas? What do you mean, ideas?”

“Don’t play coy,” Ann said, her indulgent humor evaporating from her voice. “You know very well what we mean.”

Zedd finally turned around, apparently not liking Ann’s tack. “Nicci, we’re very worried about him. Yes, we’re worried because of the prophecy and that it says he must be the one to lead our forces and all the rest of it, but…” He lifted a hand and let it drop in frustration. “But we’re worried for Richard himself. There is something very wrong with him. I’ve known him from the day he was born. I’ve spent years with him, alone with him, with him around others. I’ve been so proud of that boy that I can’t begin to tell you. He always has been one to occasionally do puzzling things, things that frustrate and confuse me, but I’ve never seen him act like this. I’ve never seen him believe such crazy stories. You can’t imagine what it does to me to see him like this.”

Nicci scratched an eyebrow, using it as an excuse to look away from the pain in his hazel eyes. His white hair looked in even more disarray than usual. He looked more thin than usual; he looked gaunt. He looked like a man who had not gotten much sleep for weeks.

“I think I can understand your feelings,” she assured him. She took a deep thoughtful breath as she slowly shook her head. “I don’t know, Zedd. I’ve been trying to figure it out since I found him that morning gasping for breath and almost in the Keeper’s clutches.”

“You said he lost a lot of blood,” Nathan said. “And that he was unconscious for days.”

Nicci nodded. “It’s possible that such a condition, such desperate fear of not having enough breath and thinking he was going to die that way, caused him to dream up someone who loved him—a kind of trick to try to calm himself. I used to sometimes do something similar when I was afraid; I would put my mind in another else, a pleasant place, where I was safe. With Richard, with the heavy loss of blood and the abnormally long sleep after being healed, while he was regaining some of his strength—enough strength to try to survive the ordeal—well, I think that the whole time the dream could have grown and grown in his mind.”

“And have taken over his thoughts,” Ann finished.

Nicci met her gaze. “That was my thought.”

“And now?” Zedd asked.

Nicci turned her eyes up to gaze at the heavy oak beams across the ceiling as she searched for words. “I don’t know anymore. I’m no expert in such things. I’ve not exactly spent my life as a healer. I would think that the three of you would know a great deal more about such maladies than I do.”

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact,” Ann said, making a face like she was glad to hear Nicci admit as much, “we would tend to agree with that assessment.”

Nicci eyed all three of them suspiciously. “So, what do all of you think is his problem?”

“Well,” Zedd began, “we’re still not ready to rule out a number of things that—”

“Have you considered a glamour spell?” Ann asked, fixing Nicci in her steady stare the way she used to do to make novices tremble and confess to shirking their chores.

Nicci was no novice and no longer susceptible to such intimidation from on high. After having Jagang, in a blind rage, hold her with one meaty fist around her throat and pound her face with the other, a stare was hardly something to make Nicci tremble. In fact, had the subject not been one so serious, one that sincerely did concern her so, she might have laughed at the very effort of such a stern look to elicit an incautious report.

“It crossed my mind,” she said, seeing no purpose in denying it. “But I had to eliminate the arrow with Subtractive Magic if I was to save his life. I’m afraid that, at the time, I never gave any thought to such an idea. I was frantically tying to keep him from dying. Perhaps I should have thought about the arrow being spelled, but I didn’t. With the arrow now gone there is no way to tell if that really was the case and, without the arrow, there’s no way to do anything about it if true.”

Zedd rubbed his clean-shaven jaw as he looked away. “That certainly makes things more difficult.”

“Difficult?” Nicci said. “Such a spell isn’t at all easy to reverse even if you have the object that in this manner infected the victim with a glamour. Without that object, only the sorceress who cast the glamour can eliminate it. You must have the web that carried the infection if you are to heal it.

“And that’s if you know for certain that it was a glamour spell. It could be something else. Whatever it is, spell of some sort, or delirium, you have to know the cause if you’re to heal it.”

“Not necessarily,” Ann said as she again stared at Nicci. “At this point the cause is no longer much of an issue.”

Nicci’s brow twitched. “No longer an issue—what in the world are you talking about?”

“If a person has a broken arm you set it and splint it. You don’t waste your time running around asking questions, trying to figure out exactly how they managed to break their arm. You need to take action to correct the ailment; talk won’t correct it.”

“We think he needs our help,” Zedd offered in a more conciliatory tone. “We all know that the things he is saying are flat impossible. At first, when he said that he gave the Sword of Truth to Shota, I thought he had done something profoundly foolish, but I’ve come to see that his actions weren’t willful nor were the dimensions of them so simply grasped. I reacted with an angry reprimand when I should have seen how ill he really is and dealt with it in that context.

“There are times when you can see how someone might come to believe something odd, but Richard’s behavior is far beyond anything that could remotely be described as odd. It’s become clear that he is delusional and we all now realize as much.” He opened his hands in a beseeching gesture. “Is there anything at all you can say in his behalf that makes any sense and that demonstrates how we may be wrong in our analysis?”

Zedd looked truly under great distress. It was obvious how genuinely concerned he was for his grandson.

Nicci turned her eyes downward, unable to look into the hurt in his eyes. “I’m sorry, Zedd, but I know of nothing that makes any sense. Unfortunately, I don’t think that the body he dug up proves anything conclusively or we might have a chance to force him to accept the reality of the evidence. On the other hand, I think the body he dug up really was the Mother Confessor, Kahlan Amnell, the woman that he dreamed he had a relationship with while in his confused state of pain when he was injured.

“He probably heard the name somewhere when he first traveled to the Midlands and it just stuck in his mind. It was probably a nice fantasy. For someone who grew up to be a woods guide, I think it would be a natural enough daydream, like imagining that he might one day go off to a strange land and marry a queen, but then it turned into a dream while he was hurt, and then into an obsession.”

Nicci had to make herself stop. It hurt to the bone to say such things to other people about Richard, even if those other people also loved and cared about him and wanted to help him. Even Ann, as much as Nicci often thought the woman had ulterior motives, really did care a great deal about Richard. He was a man Ann believed was necessary to fulfil prophe

cy, but she still felt warmly toward him as an individual.

Nicci knew she was doing the right thing in what she said about Richard, but it still made her feel like she was betraying him. She could see his face in her mind, watching, silently hurt that she would be so coldly unbelieving.

“We think that, whatever the cause of his false belief,” Ann said, “Richard needs to be brought back to reality.”

Nicci didn’t say anything. While she thought they were right, she didn’t know that there was anything that could be done, other than letting him, as time went on, arrive at the truth on his own.

Nathan took a step forward and smiled down at Nicci. In the small room he seemed even more imposing. But it was his dark azure eyes that were so riveting. He spread his hands in a gesture of open appeal.

“Sometimes it hurts a person to help them, but later they see how it was the only way, and then, when they are finally well, they’re happy that you did as had to be done.”

“Like setting a broken arm,” Ann offered, nodding to Nathan’s words. “No one wants to go through the pain of having that done, but sometimes such things are necessary if they are to be well and have their life back.”

“So,” Nicci asked with a frown, “you want to heal him?”

“That’s right,” Zedd told her. He smiled, then. “I found a prophecy about Richard that says They will at first contest him before they plot to heal him. I never thought it would come to pass so soon or in quite this manner, but I think we all agree that we love Richard and want him well and back with us as himself.”

Nicci thought that there must be more to this than what any of them were saying. She began to wonder why they had sent Rikka off for tea—why, exactly, they would not want the Lord Rahl’s bodyguard around.

“I told you, I’m not exactly a healer.”

“You did quite a good job of healing him when he was shot with that arrow,” Zedd said. “Even I could not have accomplished such a feat. None of us in this room, other than you, Nicci, could have accomplished such a thing. You may not think you are much of a healer, but you were able to do what would have been impossible for any of us.”