Confessor (Sword of Truth 11)

Zedd glanced her way before resuming his pacing. “I understand.” He halted and turned to Nicci. “But I’m still not sure I buy the whole theory about emotional foreknowledge being able to taint…”

In midsentence, Zedd’s mouth snapped closed with a startled expression.

“What?” Nicci asked. “Did you think of something?”

Zedd sank down to sit on the edge of the bed. “Yes, I most certainly did.”

The power, the fire, had gone out of him.

“Dear spirits,” he whispered, sounding as if the weight of his years had just settled on his slumped shoulders.

Nicci leaned down and touched his arm. “Zedd, what’s wrong?”

He looked up at her with haunted eyes. “Foreknowledge can affect how magic works. It’s not a theory. It’s true.”

“Are you sure? How do you know?”

“I don’t remember Kahlan, or anything about her. When Richard was here, though, he told me about her. He filled me in on my missing memories of how he came to love her, and she him.

“Kahlan is a Confessor. A Confessor’s gift destroys the mind of the person she touches with her power. Confessors release their restraint on their power to unleash it. The rest of the time they must keep it under their tight control.”

“I know, I’ve heard about their ability,” Nicci said. “But what does that have to do with their love?”

“A Confessor always chooses her mate from among those they don’t really care about because if she were to be intimate with a man she loved she would unintentionally lose control of that power. So released, her power would take the man. He would stand no chance. He would no longer be who he was. He would be lost, his mind destroyed. He would be a hollow shell, left with a blind, mindless devotion to the Confessor. She would have him, have his love and devotion, but it would be meaningless, empty love.

“For this reason Confessors always choose a man they don’t care about, and then take him with their power. They choose a mate for what kind of father he would be, for the daughter he could produce, but they never choose a man they love. Men fear an unmarried Confessor in search of a mate, fear being chosen, fear losing who they are to her power.”

“But there obviously must be a way for it to work,” Nicci said. “How did Richard accomplish it?”

Zedd looked up. “There is only one way. I can’t tell you what it was. I couldn’t tell Richard, either. I couldn’t even tell him that a way existed.”

“Why not?” she asked.

“Because the foreknowledge would have tainted him and her magic, when first she unleashed it on him without intending to, would have taken him. He had to be totally unaware of the solution to it, or that a solution even existed, or that solution would not have worked.”

Zedd stared at the floor. “It is no theory. Foreknowledge can taint a sterile field, as you put it. Richard himself proved the central question of Ordenic theory: foreknowledge can affect the function of magic.”

Nicci padded barefoot across the carpet to stand before him. She frowned down at the old wizard. “You knew of this beforehand, before Richard and Kahlan were married? You knew that the foreknowledge of the solution would cause it to fail in Richard?”

“I did. But I dared not tell him that a solution existed that would enable him to be with his love. Even that much foreknowledge, even the knowledge that there might be a solution, would ruin his chance of it working.”

“How did you know about this?”

Zedd lifted a hand and then let it fall back to his lap. “The very same thing happened to the first Confessor, Magda Searus, and the man who loved her, Merritt. They, too, ended up in love and married. Since that time, Richard was the first to ever again solve the problem. Since Magda Searus was the first Confessor, no one knew that there was a solution; therefore, there was not yet any foreknowledge to taint him. Without such foreknowledge he was able to solve the paradox of loving a Confessor without her power destroying him.”

Nicci pulled at a strand of blond hair as she considered. “Then the reality of foreknowledge alone being able to taint magic is true.” She frowned down at Zedd. “But the wizards who created Orden knew of no example of foreknowledge tainting a spell. It was only a theory for them.”

Zedd shrugged. “That probably means that Confessors were created after Orden. First Wizard Merritt proved the concept, so maybe it happened after Orden had already been created.”

Nicci sighed at it all. “I suppose that might be the answer.”

She gestured vaguely as she went on to other business. “Cara said something, before, about there being a problem. A problem with the Keep.”

Zedd finally looked up from his private thoughts and stood. The creases in his face drew into a grave expression.

“Yes, there is trouble.”

“What sort of trouble?” Nicci asked.

He started for the door. “Come with me, and I’ll show you.”

CHAPTER 14

Zedd led Nicci and Cara toward an area of the Keep that Nicci knew to be a labyrinth of halls and passageways heavily guarded by layers of shields. Glass spheres in iron brackets brightened in turn as they approached each one, then faded back into darkness as they passed. The Keep felt like a great, silent, gloomy place to Nicci. It was not only immense, but immensely complex, and she couldn’t imagine what could be the trouble with it that s

o concerned Zedd.

Before they had gone far, Rikka; Tom, the big blond-headed D’Haran from Lord Rahl’s elite guard; and Friedrich the old gilder emerged from a reading room to join in the quiet procession. Nicci guessed that they had all been waiting there for her to awake from her encounter with Six. That Zedd had probably asked them to stand by and wait for Nicci to wake only heightened her growing sense of concern.

“You look a lot better than you did last night,” Rikka said as they started through a cozy room hung with hundreds of paintings of every size. The paintings, each in a rich gold-leaf frame, covered every bit of the walls.

“Thanks. I’m fine now.”

Nicci noticed that the paintings hung throughout the room were all portraits, though the styles varied greatly. The subjects in some, dressed in ceremonial robes, sat in formal poses while in others the people stood casually in beautiful gardens, met in conversation among grand columns, or relaxed on benches in courtyards.

She saw that in many of the portraits the Keep, or parts of it, were visible in the background. It was a somewhat startling and sad thought to realize that all of these people had probably once lived in the Keep, a place that had been alive with life. It made the place now seem all the more deserted and empty.

Rikka cast a sidelong glance down the length of Nicci. “That nightdress was pink, before.”

“I hate pink,” Nicci said.

Rikka looked disappointed. “Really? When Cara and I put you in it I thought that it made you look even prettier.”

At first startled by such a statement coming from a Mord-Sith, Nicci suddenly grasped the whole pink nightgown thing. This was a woman trying to find her way out of the dark wasteland of madness. She was trying to throw off the shackles of emotions that had been drilled into her since she had been a girl. Everything in her life, her world, had been ugly and violent. The pink nightdress represented something innocent and lovely—the kind of thing forbidden to the likes of a Mord-Sith. By appreciating such a simple thing on Nicci, she was testing the possibility of enjoying something attractive and harmless—testing dreams. It was much the same as a young girl making a pretty dress for a doll. It was a considered examination of aesthetics and, more than that, it was practice at aspirations.