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Shota smoothed a loose wisp of her dress. “Think, Mother Confessor, and you will see that you are wrong, just as I showed you that you were wrong that I could no longer harm you.”
“How? How could I do such a thing, when I know it isn’t in me—for any reason—to betray him?”
Shota took a patient breath. “It is not nearly so difficult as you wish to think. What if you knew, for example, that you had only one way to save his life, and that way was to betray him, but in so doing, you would lose his love. Would you make the sacrifice of his love to preserve his life? The truth, now.”
Kahlan swallowed past the lump in her throat. “Yes. I would betray him if it was to save his life.”
“So, you see, it is not as impossible an event as you imagined.”
“I guess not,” Kahlan said in a small voice. She pushed at a few crumbs on the table. “Shota, what is the purpose of all this? Why would the future hold that Richard will marry Nadine, and that I will marry another man? There must be a reason. It goes against everything we both want, so there must be some force pushing events down that path.”
Shota said after a moment’s deliberation, “The Temple of the Winds hunts Richard. The spirits have a hand in this.”
Kahlan’s face sank wearily into her hands.
“You said to Nadine, ‘May the spirits have mercy on him.’ What did you mean by that?”
“The underworld contains more than just the good spirits. The spirits—good, and the evil—are all involved in this.”
Kahlan didn’t want to talk anymore. It was too painful, talking about the ruination of her dreams and hopes as if they were pieces on a game board.
“To what purpose?” she mumbled.
“The plague.”
Kahlan looked up. “What?”
“It has something to do with the plague, and the thing of magic the dream walker stole from the Temple of the Winds.”
“You mean that it could be that this could somehow be part of our attempt to find the magic to stop the plague?”
“I believe it is so,” the witch woman said at last. “You and Richard are desperately seeking a way to stop the plague and save the lives of countless people. I see in the future that you each wed other people.
“For what other reason would both of you make such a sacrifice?”
“But why would it be necessary—”
“You seek something I cannot answer. I cannot alter what will be, nor do I know the reason for it. We are forced to consider the possibilities. Think.
“If the only way to save all those people from dying in a firestorm of plague were for Richard and you to sacrifice your life together, perhaps, say, to prove your true devotion to protecting innocent lives, would you both do such a thing?”
Kahlan put her trembling hands in her lap, under the table. She had seen the pain in Richard’s eyes when he had watched that boy die. She knew her own pain. They had both seen innocent, sick children, who were going to die. How many more would die?
She would never be able to live with herself if the only way to save those children was to sacrifice her love, and she refused.
“How could we not? Even if it would kill us, how could we not? But how could the good spirits demand such a price?”
Kahlan suddenly remembered Denna’s spirit taking the Keeper’s mark from Richard, and freely choosing to go in Richard’s place to eternal torment at the Keeper’s hands. That it turned out that Denna didn’t have to face that fate didn’t matter; she thought that she would, and had sacrificed her soul in the place of one she loved.
The branches of a nearby maple tree clacked together in the gentle breeze. Kahlan could hear the flags atop Shota’s palace snapping in the wind. The air tasted of spring. The grasses were a bright, new green. Life was beginning to bud all around.
Kahlan’s heart felt like dead ashes.
“Then I will tell you one other thing,” Shota said, as if from a great distance. Kahlan listened from the bottom of a well of despair. “You have not heard the last message from the winds. You will receive one more, involving the moon. This will be the consequential communion.
“Do not ignore it, nor dismiss it. Your future, Richard’s future, and the future of all those innocent people will hinge on this event. Both of you must use all you have learned in order to comprehend the chance you will be offered.”
“Chance? Chance for what?”
Shota’s gaze riveted Kahlan. “The chance to carry out your most solemn duty. The chance to save all the innocent lives of those who depend upon you to do what they cannot.”
“How soon?”
“I only know it will not be long.”
Kahlan nodded. She wondered why she wasn’t crying. It seemed as if this was the most devastating personal tragedy she could imagine—losing Richard—and yet, she wasn’t crying.
She guessed she would, but not now, not here.
Kahlan stared at the table. “Shota, you would try to stop us from having a child, wouldn’t you? A boy child?”
“Yes.”
“You would try to kill our son, if we had one, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Then how do I know that this isn’t just some plot on your part to prevent us from having a child?”
“You will have to judge the truth of my words with your own mind and heart.”
Kahlan remembered the dying boy’s words, and the prophecy. Somehow, she had known all along that she would never marry Richard. It was all just an impossible dream.
When she was young, Kahlan had asked her mother about growing up and having a love, a husband, a home. Her mother had stood before her, beautiful, radiant, statuesque, but wearing her Confessor’s face.
Confessors don’t have love, Kahlan. They have duty.
Richard was born a war wizard. He had been born for a purpose. Duty.
She watched the breeze roll a few of the crumbs from the table. “I believe you,” Kahlan whispered. “I wish I didn’t, but I do. You’re telling me the truth.”
There was nothing else to say. Kahlan stood. She had to lock her knees to stay upright on her trembling legs. She tried to remember where the sliph’s well was, but she couldn’t seem to make her mind work.
“Thank you for the tea,” she heard herself say. “It was lovely.”
If Shota answered, Kahlan didn’t hear it.
“Shota?” Kahlan grasped the back of the chair to steady herself. “Could you point me in the right direction? I can’t seem to remember…”
Shota was there, taking her arm. “I will walk partway with you, child,” Shota said in a soft, compassionate voice, “so you may find your way.”
They walked the road in silence. Kahlan tried to find cheer in the warm spring morning. It was still so cold in Aydindril. It had been snowing when she left. Still, she couldn’t find any cheer in the fine day.
As they climbed the stone steps cut into the cliff, Kahlan fought to regain a sense of purpose. If she and Richard could somehow save all those people from the plague, it would be a wonderful thing. Most wouldn’t care about the sacrifice they made, but that wouldn’t lessen the relief she would fe
el in the sound of a child’s laughter, or the sight of a mother’s joy in her child’s safety.
There would still be things to live for. She could fill the void with the happiness to be seen in the eyes of her people. She would have done something no other could do. She and Richard would have stopped Jagang from harming all those people.
Near the top of the cliff, Kahlan paused at a turn in the steps and looked out at Agaden Reach. It truly was a beautiful place, this valley nestled among the peaks of jagged mountains.
She remembered that the Keeper had sent a wizard and a screeling to kill Shota. Shota had barely escaped with her life. She had vowed to regain her home.
“I’m glad you got your home back. I’m glad for you, Shota. I really am. Agaden Reach belongs to you.”
“Thank you, Mother Confessor.”
Kahlan looked to the witch woman’s almond eyes. “What did you do to the wizard who chased you out?”
“What I said I would do. I tied him up by his thumbs, and I skinned him alive. I sat back and watched as his magic bled from his skinless carcass.” She turned and gestured back down into the green valley. “I covered the seat of my throne with his hide.”
Kahlan remembered that that was precisely what Shota had promised to do. It was small wonder that even wizards rarely dared to enter Agaden Reach; Shota was more than a match for a wizard. One wizard, at least, had learned that lesson too late.
“I can’t say I blame you—the Keeper sending him to kill you and all. If the Keeper had gotten you, well, I know how much you feared that.”
“I owe you and Richard a debt. Richard prevented the Keeper from having us all.”
“I’m glad the wizard didn’t send you to the Keeper, Shota.”
Kahlan really meant it. She still knew Shota was dangerous, but the witch woman seemed also to have a compassion that Kahlan hadn’t expected.
“Do you know what he said to me, this wizard?” Shota asked. “He said he forgave me. Can you believe it? He granted me forgiveness. And then he begged mine.”
The wind carried some of Kahlan’s hair across her face. She pulled it back. “Seems a strange thing for him to say, considering.”
“The Wizard’s Fourth Rule, he called it. He said that there was magic in forgiveness, in the Fourth Rule. Magic to heal. In the forgiveness you grant, and more so in the forgiveness you receive.”
