The soldiers reluctantly slowed to a halt, remaining near the cobblestone square piled with the rubble of the tower. Nicci, Kahlan, and the three Mord-Sith ignored his instructions and followed him without pause. At the moment he needed to catch the person responsible and didn’t want to stop to argue with them, but he knew he couldn’t let them go all the way.
Rather than go down the road, he instead headed in the other direction, around the citadel. She wouldn’t likely be down in the city. She would have come out of the cover of the uninhabited woods.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Kahlan asked as she walked faster to catch up with his big strides.
Richard nodded. “It has to be her.”
“Who?” Cassia asked from behind. “What are you talking about?”
“Samantha,” Nicci said.
The Mord-Sith frowned suspiciously. “Samantha. You mean the young sorceress who stabbed the Mother Confessor?”
“That would be the one,” Richard said without looking back.
“How could she do such a thing?” Cassia asked.
“It’s drizzling and wet,” Nicci said to keep the Mord-Sith from distracting Richard as he scanned all the places she could be hiding. “Samantha can use her ability to heat the moisture in solid objects to make it expand and blow them apart–objects like trees and even rock.”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Cassia said.
“Your Lord Rahl generously taught her how to do it,” Nicci said with obvious displeasure.
“I learned it from you,” Richard reminded her.
Nicci’s mouth twisted with displeasure but she didn’t answer. Richard slowed as he approached the opening in the wall at the edge of the more formal citadel grounds. The gardens were nowhere near as ornate as some of the places Richard had seen, but the maze of hedges, stone walks, and orderly patches of wildflowers were lavish for the small city of Saavedra. Hannis Arc would have had the grounds kept up as a demonstration of his importance, not because he cared about going for a stroll to gaze at wildflowers.
Richard held his arm out as he slowed, stopping all the women. “I want you all to wait here. I mean it. She’s dangerous.”
“Yes, she is,” Nicci said, “and she wants revenge against you.”
“And to get that revenge she would love to kill all of you to get back at me, the same way she stabbed Kahlan to hurt me.”
Kahlan put an imploring hand on his shoulder. “Richard, she has already done that. She stabbed me. Now she will want to kill you.”
“Kahlan is right,” Nicci said. “You shouldn’t be going out there to face her at all, much less alone. That’s what she wants. We can distract her and keep her from–”
“I said stay here.” His harsh tone caused them to fall silent.
They knew he was in no mood to argue with them, and they knew, too, that they couldn’t afford to waste time and let her get away. Once he was sure they weren’t going to argue, he started for the opening in the wall that led to the marshy fields around the citadel grounds that kept the forest back and insured that it would be harder for anyone to sneak up unseen. There was no gate. Hannis Arc was more feared than what was out beyond.
Richard lifted his sword a few inches, checking that it was clear in the scabbard. He let it drop back in place before he moved into the opening, leaning out to check both ways on the far side. Standing under the arch, he gazed out across the field of soggy grasses, looking for anything that didn’t belong.
Richard spotted her in the distance among the rushes.
Samantha stood like a statue among grasses taller than her. She was about halfway across the marshland to the dark forest behind her. Richard turned back and held up a hand to Kahlan, Nicci, and the three Mord-Sith, letting them know that he meant for them to stay put and he would brook no argument.
“If she makes it past me,” he told Nicci, “you make sure you stop her before she can get to Kahlan again. Understand?”
Nicci stared into his eyes a moment before answering. “I didn’t go to the underworld to get you back only to have a girl with a bad temper kill you.”
“I asked if you understood.”
Nicci pressed her lips tight for a moment. Finally she folded her arms. “I understand.”
“Good. Thank you.”
“You came back to the world of life to take care of important matters,” Kahlan warned him. “Samantha isn’t one of them.”
“I can’t do anything about Sulachan if Samantha kills us all first, now can I?”
Kahlan didn’t look at all happy, but she didn’t say anything. She knew he was right. The young woman was the one forcing the issue. It wasn’t like they had a choice.
When he was confident that they would wait where they were, he started out the opening.
CHAPTER
23
As he made his way among the thick clumps of grasses and reeds, out across the sodden field toward the young sorceress, Richard reminded himself to keep control of his anger. Samantha had stabbed Kahlan through the heart, and there was nothing else that would ignite his anger the way harming Kahlan would. But he knew that he couldn’t focus on that to the exclusion of everything else.
Righteous anger could be a valuable tool, but it needed to be rational anger. Anger against evil. Anger against wrongs. It had to be wielded the same way any weapon was wielded. It needed to be wielded with reasoned wisdom tempered with maturity. It had to be respected for the damage it could do not only to evil, but also to the innocent. He knew that sometimes ability grew faster than the sense to know when not to use it, like a young man who grew muscles before growing wise enough not to be easily provoked into using them.
Although Samantha had been his friend and had helped him a number of times, and had even used her anger to save his life and the lives of a lot of good people, her temper wasn’t always governed by reason. It obviously sometimes got the best of her. When it got out of control in that way, she was capable of anything, capable of hurting anyone, even someone as innocent as Kahlan.
It was certainly understandable that she would be enraged by the sight of Richard killing her mother, but she didn’t know all the facts. She knew him and she should know that he wouldn’t harm someone, especially not her mother, without a very good reason. He hoped that by coming out and talking to her, he could convince her to let her better judgment take over.
As he made his way through the tall rushes and among patches of blue vervain and swamp milkweed, he could see Samantha up ahead waiting for him. Her frizzy mass of black hair was stuffed into the hood of her cloak to protect it from the steady drizzle. Under the cloak her skinny arms were bare. He thought she had to be cold standing out in the wet weather. But he knew, too, that anger could heat a person and make them forget the cold. She stood stone-still, waiting for him, her dark-eyed glare locked on him as he made his way among the clumps of the grasses bowed over under the wet weight of accumulated mist.
The spongy ground was covered with a tangled web of matted, dead grass. In places it sank down when he put weight on it, so that clear water rose up over the toes of his boots. He reminded himself to be careful and not lose his footing. He wouldn’t want to fall and find himself down on the ground with Samantha standing over him. She had already proven that there were no bounds on what she could or would do.
“Samantha,” he called through the veil of rushes when he was still a good distance away from her. He tried to keep a familiar tone she would remember. “I need to talk to you.”
When he stepped out from a screen of grasses, she spoke in a low voice that was little more than a growl. “My name is Sammie. You gave me the name Samantha. My mother called me Sammie. The people of Stroyza all called me Sammie. That is my name–Sammie. I don’t want a name from you.”
“Fine. Sammie, then,” he said as he kept weaving his way among the tall thickets of rushes and shorter knots of grasses, steadily making his way closer to her. “We still need to talk.”
/> “There is nothing to talk about. You killed my mother.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“It is that simple. She’s dead. You are the one who killed her. I saw you do it.”
He thought that there was something odd-looking about the young woman, some kind of shimmering aspect to her, something in her big, dark eyes, but in the dreary light he couldn’t tell for sure what it was, or if it was his imagination. He had often seen the aura of power around sorceresses, seen it crackling with menace. He could do that, though, only when his own gift worked. Because he still had the poisonous touch of death in him, his gift didn’t work. Still, he was sure that he saw something, even though he couldn’t tell what.
He came to a halt when he was close enough to talk to her without having to yell. He didn’t want to get any closer if he didn’t have to. He knew what a temper she had, and it was true, after all, that he had killed her mother.