“Mmm. Commander Fister, you make a great stew.”
He smiled, happy that the Lord Rahl liked it.
“That’s what I told him,” Irena said. “I told him you would like it.”
Now that the soldiers had brought over more, she and Samantha each had a bowl as well. Their likeness was uncanny. Sitting there beside each other on a small blanket, both skinny, both with the same thick thatch of frizzy black hair, dark eyes, and narrow faces, they looked like an older and younger version of the same person.
The immature femininity of Samantha’s smooth features gave her a sweet look. Those same features had hardened on Irena’s face into a calculating countenance. Richard could see that behind Irena’s smile and dark eyes was a woman who had led a hard life. Where Samantha still possessed the treasure of youthful optimism, Irena had traded that optimism for pragmatism, and it looked like it had been an eager trade.
After swallowing another bite, Richard gestured with his spoon toward Irena. “Tell me about Stroyza. I’d like to hear what you know about the third kingdom and the evil hidden behind that barrier. Tell me what you know of it.”
Irena shrugged. “We were given an ancient duty, passed down from one generation to the next, to watch over that barrier. Samantha told me that she showed you the viewing port, where we watched the north wall, as we called it. Our duty was to check that the gates still held.”
When she fell silent and went back to eating stew, Richard asked something more specific. “Have there always been gifted living at Stroyza?”
“Yes,” she said after swallowing a mouthful. “My husband had an older sister, Clarice. She was the sorceress who led the rest of us gifted in Stroyza, and the rest of the village, for that matter. She had been the matriarch for, my, I can’t even remember how many years. Since well before Samantha was born. She was a hard woman, with an iron will, but fair.”
“And I take it she passed away?” Zedd asked.
“Yes, a little over a year and a half ago. The men who found her dead in the woods said that she was just sitting there, leaned up against a tree, looking like she had taken a nap and in the middle of it never woke back up.”
“Then my mother took her place,” Samantha said with obvious pride.
“So, there were no other gifted in Stroyza?” Zedd asked.
“Yes, I have—had—two sisters, both gifted, as were their husbands, although to a lesser extent. I never actually took Clarice’s place, though. Stroyza is a small village. It wasn’t like it needed a queen to rule over it.”
“So this Clarice thought of herself as the queen of the people of Stroyza?” Zedd asked.
Irena shrugged one shoulder. “At times. After her death, the six of us discussed matters when there was need. We didn’t include Samantha in those discussions because she is still too young.” She thought better of it and smiled over at her daughter. “Well, she was too young. No longer, it seems. She is growing into a fine sorceress.”
Zedd reached out, patted Samantha’s knee, and gave her a wink. “Yes she is.” Samantha beamed.
“So the six of you discussed things, like when you started hearing rumors about the Hedge Maid?” Richard asked, having heard all this before, when Samantha had originally told him. He wanted to hear Irena’s version, though.
“That’s right. Millicent’s husband felt he had a gift of prophecy, and he had long warned of wicked forces loose in the Dark Lands. He considered the rumors to be proof of his ability, but I thought otherwise.”
“What do you mean, you thought otherwise?” Zedd asked, looking up from shoveling stew into his mouth.
Irena again shrugged the one shoulder. “The Dark Lands are a vast and dangerous place. In such a place there are always dark forces at work, always evil about. To state the obvious, that they will cause trouble, hardly seems prophecy to me.”
“And you believe that’s because the evil behind the barrier has long been leaking out,” Richard said.
She blinked at him. “That’s right. How did you know that?”
“It has been my experience,” he said, glancing at his grandfather out of the corner of his eye, “that barriers holding back evil do not fail all at once. Over time, they begin to degrade so that small bits of what is beyond can begin to slip through that barrier. It tends to go unnoticed because the barrier still stands and people have long since forgotten what to look for. They get complacent. As time passes, what slips through grows stronger, until there are precursor events.”
Samantha waggled a finger at him. “I bet you’re right. I never thought of that, but I bet that’s the reason for some in the Dark Lands to have strange powers.”
“Like the cunning folk?” Richard asked before taking a spoonful of stew.
“That’s right,” Irena said, giving him a funny look, as if wondering what else he might already know. “The occult powers locked away behind the barrier thousands of years ago were incredibly powerful. After all, some of those half people have occult powers that can bring the dead back to life again.”
“Well, make them move about, anyway,” Richard said. “Those powers can animate them and so they can be sent to attack people, but I don’t think they are actually alive.”
“We read that in the writing on the walls in the tunnels back in Stroyza,” Samantha told her mother. “The tunnel outside the viewing port.”
Irena frowned at her daughter. “What in the world are you talking about? What writing? What do you mean you read about it in the writing on the walls?”
“All those designs carved into the walls are writing.”
“Writing?” She stared in surprise. “Are you sure?”
Samantha nodded that it was so. “The language of Creation.”
Irena gave her daughter an admonishing look. “You mean that Richard read the writing.”
“Well, yes, it was Lord Rahl who told me it was writing, and what it said.”
Zedd was frowning at Richard again. “What was this writing? Who put it there?”
Richard gestured with a spoonful of stew. “It was in the language of Creation, like we found at the People’s Palace.”
He didn’t want to mention out loud about the ancient omen machine associated with the writing they had found back at the People’s Palace. He wanted to know things, not reveal them.
Zedd caught his drift and nodded with an “ah.”
“So, do you know who put it there? Or when?” Irena asked.
“It was put there by a sorceress named Naja Moon,” Richard said. “She intended it to explain to the people of Stroyza, and all the rest of us, the evil that Emperor Sulachan had created in the great war. Her people had not been able to extinguish that evil, but they were able to bui
ld a barrier with magic to seal it off and contain it. They warned that it wouldn’t hold forever, so the people of Stroyza were to keep watch. It said that was all they could do until the right person came along to put an end to the threat of what was behind those walls.”
Zedd was frowning again. Richard realized he had already said too much.
“Did this sorceress from back so long ago say if they knew who would be able to put an end to this evil?” Zedd asked.
When Richard hesitated in answering, Samantha spoke up, eager to tell the story. She drifted her spoon before them, as if pulling back the curtain of time, and then leaned in with the secret sent across time itself.
“Naja Moon said that only the bringer of death could do it, and even then, only by ending prophecy.”
Zedd almost dropped his bowl of stew. “The bringer of—”
“So you were saying…” Richard interrupted, rolling his spoon toward Irena to get her to go on, “about the evil behind the barrier leaking out?”
Richard ignored his grandfather, turning the conversation back to what he really wanted to know, not what he already knew.
Irena’s attention was again riveted on Richard. “Yes, that’s right. My sisters and I always suspected that a little bit of that occult power has been seeping out through the barrier for, for, well, the Creator only knows how long. But I think it explains a lot of things about the Dark Lands.”
“That certainly makes a lot of sense,” Zedd said as he thought it over. He seemed to have gotten the message that this was not the time or place to discuss the bringer of death. Zedd knew all too well that the bringer of death referred to Richard.
“Power like that is not easy to contain,” he explained. “While that barrier may have held for thousands of years, it would have begun to deteriorate long before it finally suffered a total catastrophic failure. That’s the way such things work.”
“My suspicion as well,” Irena said. “When we started hearing rumors about this Hedge Maid, Jit, as the country people called her, and the strange healing powers she was said to have, my sisters and I began to suspect that power leaking out through the barrier had something to do with it. We thought that it might even foretell that the barrier was getting close to failing.