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"No," she said. "I must see with my own eyes."
She turned the knob. The door was locked, the key still in place. She touched the icy metal plate. "This is a lock, the thing I told you of before," she lectured as she pulled the key out and held it up. "This is a key." Replacing the key, she twisted it with shaking fingers. "If you have a key, you can open the lock, and then the door."
Someone had obviously locked the door, out of respect for the Queen.
The windows were intact, as was the furniture. The room was as freezing cold as the rest of the palace, but the smell made them suddenly gag and hold their breath.
Human excrement covered everything in the outer sitting room. The two of them stared in shock. Dark piles dotted the carpets and sat on the desk and table. The blue velvet chairs and couches were soaked with yellow, frozen urine. Someone had even squatted neatly in the fireplace.
Holding their mantles across their noses, they stepped carefully across the room to the next closed door. The Queen's bedchamber was worse. There was hardly a place to put a foot without stepping in it. But as covered as the floor was, the worst was the bed; it was heaped with feces. Delicately painted floral scenes on the walls were smeared with it. If everything hadn't been frozen solid, they would have been driven from the room by the stench. As it was, it was barely tolerable.
Thankfully, there were no bodies. The Queen was not here.
The names on Kahlan's mental roster of who could have done all this fell away, and only one nation was left. The ones who had been at the top, before.
"Keltans," she hissed to herself.
Chandalen was dumbfounded. "Why would these men do this? Are they children who do not know better?"
After a last look around, Kahlan led them back out into the hall, locking the door once more, at last taking a full breath. "It is a message. It is meant to show their disrespect for the people who lived here. It says that they have nothing but scorn for these people, and anything that is theirs. They have soiled their foe's honor in every way they could think of."
"At least your half sister is not here."
Kahlan snugged the thongs of her mantle tight at her neck. "At least there is that."
She descended the steps, pausing to look once more at the closed doors on the second floor. Chandalen watched her after he, too, glanced to the row of doors.
She sought to fill the silence. "We must go and find Prindin and Tossidin."
His face was lined with ire. "Does this not make you angry?"
She realized only then that she was wearing her Confessor's face. "It would do no good for me to show my anger right now. When the time is right, you will know just how angry I am."
30
In a cramped daub-and-wattle house next to the hole in the city's wall, Kahlan watched as Chandalen built a small fire for her in the central pit. The two brothers were nowhere to be seen.
"Warm yourself," he said. "I will see if Prindin and Tossidin are close, and tell them where we wait."
After he had left, she drew off her mantle, even though she knew it wasn't a good idea to get too used to the warmth because it would only make the cold seem worse later. Drawn by the lure of the fire, she squatted close, rubbing her hands together over the flames, shivering as the warmth seeped into her bones.
The small room was one of only two that had been a large part of some family's world. The table was broken but the crude bench sitting against the wall was not. A few pieces of clothing were scattered about, along with bent tin plates and a broken spinning wheel. Three bobbins were crushed into the dirt floor.
Kahlan retrieved a dented pot from among the rubble, deciding it was easier to use it than to unpack one of their own. She heaped it full of snow from outside the door, placed the pot on three stones in the fire, then warmed her icy fingers again, finally pressing them against the cold flesh of her face. There was tea in a crushed canister in the corner, but she instead pulled her own from her pack while she waited for the snow to melt, and the men to return.
Try as she might, she couldn't get the faces of the dead young women out of her mind.
Several times, she added snow as that in the pot melted down. As the water was just starting to bubble, Prindin came through the door. He leaned his bow against the wall and with a sigh slumped down heavily on the bench.
Kahlan stood and glanced to the empty doorway. "Where's your brother?"
"He should be here soon. We took different ways back, to be able to look at more tracks." He craned his neck, looking through the doorway into the second room. "Where is Chandalen?"
"He went to find you and Tossidin."
"Then he will be back soon. My brother is not far."
"What did you find?"
"More dead people."
He didn't seem to want to talk about it at the moment, so she decided to wait until Chandalen returned with Tossidin before questioning him.
"I was just warming water. We will have some hot tea."
He nodded, flashing her his handsome smile. "It would be good to have hot tea."
Kahlan bent over the pot, shaking tea from a leather pouch with one hand, and holding her long hair back from her face with the other.
"You have a fine looking bottom," came his voice from behind.
She straightened and turned to him. "What did you say?"
Prindin pointed toward her middle. "I said you have a fine looking bottom. It is a good shape."
Kahlan had learned not to be startled or insulted by the strange customs of different peoples of the Midlands. Among the Mud People, for example, a man complimenting a woman on her breasts was the same as saying she looked to be capable of being a fit and healthy mother, able to nurse her future children. It was a compliment that brought smiles of pride from the flattered woman's family, and was a sure way for a suitor to make friends with her father. At the same time, asking to see a woman with the sticky mud washed from her hair was likely as not to raise drawn bows—it was tantamount to asking the girl for improper favors.
The Mud People treated matters of sex in an especially casual manner. Kahlan had more than once been brought to blushing by Weselan's unexpected and cavalier descriptions of coupling with her husband. Worse, she was as likely as not to do it in his presence.
As she stared at Prindin, the visions of the young women's faces, too, floated before her eyes.
Though Prindin had not complimented her on her breasts, it seemed to her that a woman's hips could be construed to carry the same maternal compliment. She knew he meant no disrespect, but still, his beaming smile made the hairs on her arms stand on end. Maybe it was just the inappropriate timing, with the dead all about, that unnerved her. But he hadn't seen the dead young women.
Prindin's smile faded only a little as a frown came to his brow. "You look surprised. Doesn't Richard With The Temper ever tell you how fine your bottom is?"
Kahlan fumbled for words, not sure how to bring this to an honorable halt. "He has never mentioned it, specifically."
"Other men must have told you this before. It is too fine for them not to notice. The shape of your body is very good to look at. It fills me with desire to..." He frowned in puzzlement. "I don't know your word for..."
Blood went to her face in a red rush as she took a step toward him. "Prindin!" She relaxed her fists and brought her voice back in check. "Prindin. I am the Mother Confessor."
He nodded, his grin returning, but not quite as confident. "Yes, but you are a woman, too, and your shape..."
"Prindin!" He blinked at her as she ground her teeth. "In your land it may be proper to speak to a woman in this fashion, but in other places in the Midlands, it is not. In other places, speaking in this manner is offensive. Very offensive. More than that, I am the Mother Confessor, and it is not proper to speak to me in this way."
His smile vanished. "But you are now one of the Mud People."
"That may be true, but I am still the Mother Confessor."
His face blanched. "I hav
e offended you." He leapt up from the bench and fell to his knees before her. "Forgive me, please. I meant no disrespect. I meant only to show my favor for you."
Her red face glowed in embarrassment. She had done it now; she had humiliated him.
"I understand, Prindin. I know your words are harmless, but you must not speak this way outside your land. Others would not understand your ways and would be greatly offended."
He was nearly in tears. "I did not know. Please say you forgive Prindin." He clutched at her pants, and gripped her upper thighs with his powerful fingers.
"Yes... of course... I know you meant no harm." She took hold of his wrists, pulling them gently from her legs. "I forgive you..."
Chandalen came through the door, his face set in a grim cast. He took a quick glance at Prindin before looking up into her eyes.
