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“Well, I hate boiled peas. Does that make you like me any less, because I dislike something you like? Or make you want to abandon being my protector?”
She made a face. “Lord Rahl, this is different from boiled peas. How can you have faith in someone you do not approve of?”
“It’s not that I don’t approve of you, Berdine. It’s just that to me it doesn’t seem right. But it doesn’t have to. Look, I had a friend when I was younger, another woods guide. Giles and I spent a lot of time together, because we had a lot in common.
“He fell in love with Lucy Fleckner. I hated Lucy Fleckner; she was cruel to Giles. I couldn’t understand how he could care for her. I didn’t like her, and I thought he should feel the same. I lost my friend because he couldn’t be the way I thought he should be. I didn’t lose him because of Lucy, I lost him because of me. I lost all the good things we had because I wasn’t willing to let him be who he was. I’ve always regretted what I lost.
“I guess this is something like that. As you learn to be other than Mord-Sith, like I learned as I grew up, you’ll find that being a friend is to like a person for who they are, even the parts you don’t understand. The reasons you like them makes the things you don’t understand unimportant. You don’t have to understand, or do the same, or live their lives for them. If you truly care for them, then you want them to be who they are; that was why you liked them in the first place.
“I like you, Berdine, and that’s all that matters.”
“True?”
“True.”
She put her arms around his neck and hugged him. “Thank you, Lord Rahl. After you saved me, I feared you would wish you hadn’t. I’m glad I told you, now. Raina will be relieved to know you will not do to us as Darken Rahl did.”
As they stood, a part of the stone wall slid to the side. Richard took her hand and led her from the odd room, through the new doorway, down a stairway and through a dank, wet room with a stone floor that mounded into a huge hump in the center.
“If we are becoming your friends, then I can tell you what you did that I don’t like, what I don’t approve of, and how you did a wrong?” Richard nodded. “I don’t like what you did to Cara. She is angry at what you did to her.”
Richard glanced back in the strange room that seemed to swallow the light. “Cara? Angry with me? What did I do to her?”
“You have treated her badly because of me.” When Richard wrinkled his face in puzzlement, she went on. “When I was under that spell, and I threatened you with my Agiel after you came back from looking for Brogan, you became angry with all of us. You treated them like they had done it too, though it was only I.”
“I didn’t know what was going on. I felt threatened by Mord-Sith because of what you did. She should realize that.”
“She does, but when you found out at last, and made me whole again, you never told Cara and Raina that you were wrong to treat them as if they had threatened you the same as I. They did not.”
Richard felt his face flush in the darkness. “You’re right. Now I feel terrible. Why didn’t she say something?”
Berdine lifted an eyebrow. “You are Lord Rahl. If you decided to beat her because you did not like the way she said good morning, she would not say anything.”
“Then why are you saying something?”
Berdine followed him into a strange corridor with a cobblestone floor only two feet wide and smooth, round, tubelike, walls covered completely in gold. “Because you are a friend.”
As he looked over his shoulder and smiled his thanks, she reached out to touch the gold. Richard snatched her wrist before she could touch it. “Do that and you’re dead.”
She frowned at him. “Why do you tell us that you do not know anything about this place, and then you walk through it like you have lived here you whole life?”
Richard blinked at the question. His eyes suddenly went wide with the realization. “Because of you.”
“Me!”
“Yes,” Richard said in astonishment. “By talking to me, you distracted my conscious mind. You had me so intent on the things you were saying, and on thinking about them, that it let my gift guide me. I never ever realized it as it was happening. Now that I’ve been through this way, I know the dangers and the way back. I can get back, now.” He squeezed her shoulder. “Thank you, Berdine.”
She grinned. “What are friends for?”
“I think we’re through the worst. This way.”
At the end of the gold tunnel was a round tower room at least a hundred feet across, with stairs spiraling up around the inside of the outer wall. At irregular intervals, small landings interrupted the steps at doors. In the gloomy expanse above, shafts of light pierced the darkness. Most of the windows above were small, but one looked huge. Richard couldn’t tell for sure how far the tower rose, but it had to be close to two hundred feet. Below, the circular shaft descended into dank obscurity.
“I don’t like the looks of it,” Berdine said as she peered over the edge of the iron rail at the landing. “This looks like the worst of it to me.”
Richard thought he saw something move in the murk below. “Stay close and keep your eyes open.” He fixed his gaze on the spot where he thought he had seen movement, trying to see it again. “If anything happens, you have to try to get out.”
Berdine glanced with disapproval over the railing. “Lord Rahl, it has taken us hours to get down here. We have been through more shields than I can remember. If anything happens to you, I am dead, too.”
Richard considered his options. It might be better if he were cloaked in his mriswith cape. “You wait here. I’ll go have a look.”
Berdine snatched his shirt at his shoulder and yanked him around to face her fiery blue eyes. “No, you will not go alone.”
“Berdine—”
“I am your protector. You will not go alone. Is that understood?”
She had that penetrating, iron look in her eyes that made his tongue fear a mistake. He finally let out a breath.
“All right. But you stay close and do as I say.”
She cocked her head. “I always do as you say.”
37
As his horse swayed under him, Tobias Brogan idly watched the Creator’s five messengers walking not far ahead and off to one side. It was unusual to see them. Since they had unexpectedly appeared four days earlier, they were always around, but rarely seen, and even when they were visible they were still hard to see, being all white like the snow, or when it was dark, all black like the night. He marveled at the way they were able to simply vanish before his eyes. The Creator’s power was indeed miraculous.
His choice of messengers, though, left Tobias uneasy. The Creator had told Tobias, in his dreams, not to question His plans and, thankfully, had finally accepted Tobias’s supplications of forgiveness for the effrontery of an inquiry. All right-minded children feared the Creator, and Tobias Brogan was nothing if not right-minded. Still, the scaled creatures hardly seemed the appropriate choice to carry divine guidance.
He suddenly straightened in his saddle. Of course. The Creator wouldn’t want to reveal His intentions to the profane by letting them see disciples who looked the part. Evil would expect the beauty and glory of the Creator to hound them, but would not
be spooked to go to ground at the sight of disciples in this guise.
Tobias let out a relieved sigh as he watched the mriswith leaning in, conferring with one another, and with the sorceress, in whispers. She called herself a Sister of the Light, but she was still a sorceress, a streganicha, a witch. He could understand the Creator using the mriswith as messengers, but he couldn’t understand why He would give streganicha such authority.
Tobias wished he knew what they had to talk about all the time. Ever since the streganicha had joined them the day before, she had kept company almost exclusively with the five scaled creatures, having precious few words for the lord general of the Blood of the Fold. The six of them kept to themselves, as if they only happened to be traveling the same direction as Tobias and his company of a thousand.
Tobias had seen but a handful of the mriswith dispatch hundreds of D’Haran soldiers, and so felt less uneasy about only having two fists of his men with him. The rest of his force of over a hundred thousand of the Fold waited a little more than a week out of Aydindril. Tobias had been told by the Creator, when He had come in a dream that first night with his army, that they were to remain behind, to participate in the conquest of Aydindril.
“Lunetta,” he said in a quiet tone as he watched the Sister gesticulating in her conversation with the mriswith.
She stepped her horse closer to his right side. She took his cue and kept her voice low. “Yes, my lord general?”
“Lunetta, have you seen the Sister use her power?”
“Yes, Lord General, when she moved the windfall from our way.”
“Could you tell her power from that?” Lunetta gave him a slight nod. “Does she have the power you do, my sister?”
“No, Tobias.”
He smiled over at her. “That be good to know.” He glanced around to make sure no one was near, and the six were still visible. “I am becoming puzzled by some of the things the Creator has been telling me in the last few nights.”
“Do you wish to tell Lunetta?”
“Yes, but not now. We’ll talk about it later.”
She idly stroked her pretties. “Perhaps when we can be alone. It be time to stop soon.”
