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“You, too, misunderstand what I meant about duty. To the right person, the person who is truly born to it, duty is a form of love, through which all is possible. Duty is not always a denial of things, but an expansion of them to others. Duty is not always a chore, but is best carried out with love.
“Will you not return to her, Richard? She needs you.”
“Kahlan has a husband, now. I have no place in her life.”
“You have a place in her heart.”
“Kahlan said she would never forgive me.”
“Richard, have you never said something you didn’t mean, in desperation? Have you never wished you could take back the words?”
“I can’t return to her. She is married to another. She has given an oath, and she has… I won’t go back.”
“Even if she is married to another, even if you cannot be with her, even if it breaks your heart to know you can’t have her, don’t you love her enough to mend her heart? To put her heart at peace? Is it all you, and none of it her, in this love you have?”
Richard glared at the spirit. “She has found happiness in my absence. She doesn’t need anything from me.”
“Do you find enjoyment in the rose, Richard?”
Richard walked on. “Yes, it’s very nice, thank you.”
“Will you consider going back, then?”
Richard wheeled to the spirit of Kahlan’s mother. “Thank you for the rose. Here are a thousand in repayment, so you may not say I owe you anything in return!”
Richard cast out his hand and the air filled with roses. Rose petals flew and swirled in a red blizzard.
“I’m sorry I could not make you understand, Richard. I can see that I only bring you pain. I will leave you.”
When she vanished, the floor was bespattered with red petals, looking like nothing so much as a pool of blood.
Richard sank to the floor, feeling too sick to stand. Soon, he would be one of them, a spirit, and he would not have to endure this limbo where he twisted between worlds. He had food, when he wanted it, he had sleep, when he wanted it, but he couldn’t maintain life here indefinitely. This was not the world of life.
Soon enough, he would be one of them, and finished with this emptiness that was his life.
Kahlan had once filled that emptiness. She had once been everything to him. He had trusted her. He had thought his heart had been safe in her care. He had imagined more than was true. How could he have been such a fool? Was it all such illusion?
Richard’s head came up. He peered across the hall. He went through a mental inventory of the items stored here. The gazing font. It was there, across the hall. He knew how to use it.
He rose and crossed the hall, going between two of the columns, to find the stone gazing font. It had two basins, in two tiers, the lower one waist-high, and the upper just above his head. Each basin was a long rectangle. Carved into the glittering charcoal-gray stone were ornate symbols of instruction and power. The lower basin was brimful of a silver liquid, appearing similar to the sliph, but very different, he knew.
Richard lifted the silver ewer from the shelf below and dipped it in the lower basin. He emptied the ewer into the upper basin. He continued, until the upper basin was loaded with its charge of the gazing liquid.
Richard leaned across the lower basin to place his hands on the proper symbols, spread wide to each side. He read the ancient words before him as he leaned in, hands pressed to the gazing keyways. When the words were said, he focused his mind on the person he wished to gaze upon. As he did this, he let slip a small cord of power to release the liquid in the upper font.
Across the entire knife-edge front of the upper basin, the silver liquid spilled out in a thin, silvery sheet before his face. In that waterfall of gazing liquid, Richard saw the person he called in his mind: Kahlan.
His chest tightened at seeing her. He almost gasped, almost called out her name in anguish.
She was in her white Confessor’s dress. The familiar contours of her face made him ache with longing. She was near her rooms, her bedroom, in the Confessors’ Palace. It was night, there. Richard could feel his heart hammering against his ribs as he watched her glide to a halt at the door.
Drefan slipped up behind her. He put his hands on her shoulders, giving them a squeeze as he leaned close, putting his mouth by her ear.
“Kahlan, my wife, my love. Are you ready to go into bed? I’ve had a hard day. I so look forward to a night of your lustful passion.”
Richard released the font. He lifted his fists as he staggered back. The gazing font exploded apart, heavy pieces of rock driven ahead of huge gouts of flame and smoke. Shards of stone whistled through the hall, disappearing into the distance. Massive chunks of stone wailed as they rose up into the air, lifted on a raging inferno, until they lost their upward momentum and dropped back down, to shatter into fragments and dust. The gazing liquid flooded the floor.
In each droplet and pool, Richard could see Kahlan’s face.
He turned his back and stalked away. A furnace of flame blasted the floor, evaporating each droplet, yet he could still perceive her face in the tiniest mist of it filling the air. He cast up his fists. Every droplet, every infinitesimal bit of mist, winked into nothingness behind him.
In the center of the hall, in a daze, Richard slumped to the floor, staring out at nothing.
A malicious chuckle drifted through the winds. Richard knew who it was. His father was back to torment him again.
“What’s the matter, my son?” Darken Rahl said in his derisive hiss. “Aren’t you happy with my choice of a husband for your true love? My own son, my own flesh and blood, Drefan, wed to the Mother Confessor. I think it a good choice myself. He’s a good boy. She seemed pleased. But then, you already know that, don’t you? You should be pleased that she is pleased. So very pleased.”
Darken Rahl’s laughter cavorted through the hall.
Richard didn’t bother to banish the luminous form standing over him. What did it matter.
“So, what do you say, my wife? Shall we have a night of wild passion? Like you showed my brother when you thought it me?”
Kahlan used all her strength to ram her elbow into Drefan’s sternum. She had caught him off guard. He hadn’t expected that. He doubled over in pain, unable to get his breath.
“I told you, Drefan, if you touch me, I’ll cut your throat.”
Before he could recover to laugh at her anger, or to taunt her with his threats of force, she slipped into her room, slammed the door, and threw the bolt.
She stood trembling in the near darkness. She had felt something. For a moment, it had felt as if Richard was there with her. She had almost called out his name—screamed she loved him.
She clutched her abdomen in agony. When would she ever stop thinking about him?
Richard was never coming back.
Kahlan crossed the thick carpets in her sitting room and went back into the bedroom. She dropp
ed into a defensive crouch when someone stepped out in front of her.
“Sorry,” Berdine whispered. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
Kahlan sighed as she unclenched her fists and rose to her feet. “Berdine.” She threw her arms around the woman. “Oh, Berdine, I’m glad to see you. How are you doing?”
Berdine hugged Kahlan with a desperate need for comfort.
“It’s been a few weeks, but it seems as if Raina died only yesterday. I’m so angry with her for leaving me. And then when I get angry at her, I cry because I miss her so. If she would only have held on for a few more days, she would be alive now. Just a couple of days.”
“I know, I know,” Kahlan whispered. She parted from Berdine, keeping her voice low. “What are you doing here? I thought you went up to the Keep to relieve Cara.”
“I did, but I had to come down to talk to you.”
“You mean the sliph is unguarded?” Berdine nodded. “Berdine, we can’t leave her alone. We would never know if someone slipped into Aydindril—someone with dangerous magic. That was what—”
Berdine shushed her. “I know. This is important, too. Besides, what difference does it really make? Cara and I have lost our power. We couldn’t stop someone with magic, now, if they did come through the sliph.
“I have to talk to you, Mother Confessor, and I can never do it in the day because Drefan is always showing up.”
“Don’t let him catch you calling him anything other than Lord Rahl, or he—”
“He isn’t Lord Rahl. He isn’t, Mother Confessor.”
“I know. But he’s all the Lord Rahl we have.”
Berdine looked Kahlan in the eye. “Cara and I have been talking. We decided we should kill him. We need you to help us.”
“We can’t do that.” Kahlan gripped Berdine’s shoulder. “We can’t.”
“Sure we can. We’ll hide out on the balcony, you get him out of his clothes so that he’s away from those knives of his, and while you… distract his attention, we’ll burst in and end it.”
“Berdine, we can’t.”
“Well, all right, if you’re skittish about that plan, we can easily think of another. The point is, we have to kill him.”
