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Tom swung his pack up over his shoulder. “Take care of them for me, will you, Cara?” he asked with a wink. She smiled her agreement. “I’ll see you all in a few days, then.” He waved his farewell, his gaze lingering on Jennsen, before shepherding Owen around the statue and toward the man’s homeland.
Cara folded her arms and leveled a look at Jennsen. “You’re a fool if you don’t go kiss him a good journey.”
Jennsen hesitated, her eyes turning toward Richard.
“I’ve learned not to argue with Cara,” Richard said.
Jennsen smiled and ran over the ridge to catch Tom before he was gone. Betty, at the end of a long rope, scampered to follow after.
Richard stuffed the small figure of himself into his pack before picking up his bow from where it leaned against the statue. “We’d better get down into the trees and set up a camp.”
Richard, Kahlan, and Cara started down the rise toward the concealing safety of the huge pines. They had been long enough out in the open, as far as Kahlan was concerned. It was only a matter of time before the races came in search of them—before Nicholas came looking for them.
As cold as it was up in the pass, Kahlan knew they didn’t dare build a fire; the races could spot the smoke and then find them. They needed instead to build a snug shelter. Kahlan wished they could find a wayward pine to protect and hide them for the night, but she had not seen any of those down in the Old World and wishing wasn’t going to grow one.
As she stepped carefully on dry patches of rock, avoiding the snow so as not to leave tracks, she checked the dark clouds. It was always possible that it might warm just a little and that the precipitation could turn to rain. Even if it didn’t, it still would be a miserably cold night.
Jennsen, Betty following behind, returned, catching up with them as they zigzagged down through the steep notches of ledge. The wind was getting colder, the snow a little heavier.
When they reached a flatter spot, Jennsen caught Richard’s arm. “Richard, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be angry with you. I know you didn’t banish those people. I know it’s not your fault.” She gathered up the slack on Betty’s rope, looping it into coils. “It just makes me angry that those people were treated like that. I’m like them, and so it makes me angry.”
“The way they were treated should make you angry,” Richard said as he started away, “but not because you share an attribute with them.”
Taken aback by his words, even looking a little hurt, Jennsen didn’t move. “What do you mean?”
Richard paused and turned back to her. “That’s how the Imperial Order thinks. That’s how Owen’s people think. It’s a belief in granting disembodied prestige, or the mantle of guilt, to all those who share some specific trait or attribute.
“The Imperial Order would like you to believe that your virtue, your ultimate value, or even your wickedness, arises entirely from being born a member of a given group, that free will itself is either impotent or nonexistent. They want you to believe that all people are merely interchangeable members of groups that share fixed, preordained characteristics, and they are predestined to live through a collective identity, the group will, unable to rise on individual merit because there can be no such thing as independent, individual merit, only group merit.
“They believe that people can only rise above their station in life when selected to be awarded recognition because their group is due an indulgence, and so a representative, a stand-in for the group, must be selected to be awarded the badge of self-worth. Only the reflected light off this badge, they believe, can bring the radiance of self-worth to others of their group.
“But those granted this badge live with the uneasy knowledge that it’s only an illusion of competence. It never brings any sincere self-respect because you can’t fool yourself. Ultimately, because it is counterfeit, the sham of esteem granted because of a connection with a group can only be propped up by force.
“This belittling of mankind, the Order’s condemnation of everyone and everything human, is their transcendent judgment of man’s inadequacy.
“When you direct your anger at me for having a trait borne by someone else, you pronounce me guilty for their crimes. That’s what happens when people say I’m a monster because our father was a monster. If you admire someone simply because you believe their group is deserving, then you embrace the same corrupt ethics.
“The Imperial Order says that no individual should have the right to achieve something on his own, to accomplish what someone else cannot, and so magic must be stripped from mankind. They say that accomplishment is corrupt because it is rooted in the evil of self-interest, therefore the fruits of that accomplishment are tainted by its evil. This is why they preach that any gain must be sacrificed to those who have not earned it. They hold that only through such sacrifice can those fruits be purified and made good.
“We believe, on the other hand, that your own individual life is the value and its own end, and what you achieve is yours.
“Only you can achieve self-worth for yourself. Any group offering it to you, or demanding it of you, comes bearing chains of slavery.”
Jennsen stared at him for a long moment. A smile finally overcame her. “That’s why, then, I always wanted to be accepted for who I was, for myself, and always thought it unfair to be persecuted because of how I was born?”
“That’s why,” Richard said. “If you want to be proud of yourself because of what you accomplish, then don’t allow yourself to be chained to some group, and don’t in turn chain other individuals to one. Let your judgment of individuals be earned.
“This means I should not be hated because my father was evil, nor should I be admired because my grandfather is good. I have the right to live my own life, for my own benefit. You are Jennsen Rahl, and your life is what you, alone, make of it.”
They made the rest of the way down the hill in silence. Jennsen still had a faraway look as she thought about what Richard had said.
When they reached the trees, Kahlan was relieved to get in under the sheltering limbs of the ancient pines and even more so when they entered the secluded protection of the lower, thicker balsam trees. They made their way through dense thickets into the quiet solitude of the towering trees, and farther down the slope, to a place where an outcropping of rock offered protection from the elements. It would be easier to construct a shelter in such a place by leaning boughs against it in order to make a relatively warm shelter.
Richard used Tom’s hatchet to cut some stout poles from young pines in the understory which he placed against the rock wall. While he lashed the poles together with wiry lengths of pine roots he pulled up from the mossy ground, Kahlan, Jennsen, and Cara started collecting boughs to make dry bedding and to cover over the shelter.
“Richard,” Jennsen asked as she dragged a bundle of balsam close to the shelter, “how do you think you are going to rid Bandakar of the Imperial Order?”
Richard laid a heavy bough up high on the poles and tied it in place with a length of the wiry pine root. “I don’t know that I can. My primary concern is to get to the antidote.”
Jennsen looked a bit surprised. “But aren’t you going to help those people?”
He glanced back over his shoulder at her. “They poisoned me. No matter how you dress it up, they’re willing to murder me if I don’t do as they wish—if I don’t do their dirty work for them. They think we’re savages, and they’re above us. They don’t think our lives are worth as much—because we are not members of their group. My first responsibility is to my own life, to getting that antidote.”
“I see what you mean.” Jennsen handed him another balsam bough. “But I still think that if we eliminate the Order there, and this Nicholas, we’ll be helping ourselves.”
Richard smiled. “I can agree with that, and we’re going to do what we can. But to truly help them, I need to convince Owen and his men that they must help themselves.”
Cara snorted a derisive laugh. “That will be
a good trick, teaching the lambs to become the wolves.”
Kahlan agreed. She thought that convincing Owen and his men to defend themselves would be more difficult than the five of them ridding Bandakar of the Imperial Order by themselves. She wondered what Richard had in mind.
“Well,” Jennsen said, “since we’re all in this, all going to face the Order up in Bandakar, don’t you think that I have a right to know everything? To know what you two are always making eyes at each other about and whispering about?”
Richard stared at Jennsen a moment before he looked back at Kahlan.
Kahlan laid her bundle of branches down near the shelter. “I think she’s right.”
Richard looked unhappy about it, but finally nodded and set down the balsam bough he was holding. “Almost two years ago, Jagang managed to find a way to use magic to start a plague. The plague itself was not magic; it was just the plague. It swept through cities killing people by the tens of thousands. Since the firestorm had been started with a spark of magic, I found a way to stop the plague, using magic.”
Kahlan did not believe that such a nightmare could be reduced to such a simple statement and even begin to adequately convey the horror they had gone through. But by the look on Jennsen’s face, she at least grasped a little bit of the terror that had gripped the land.
“In order for Richard to return from the place where he had to go to stop the plague,” Kahlan said, leaving out terrible portions of the story, “he had to take the infection of plague. Had he not, he would have lived, but lived alone for the rest of his life and died alone without ever seeing me or anyone else again. He took the plague into himself so that he could come back and tell me he loved me.”
