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Since digging up the grave—he couldn’t bring himself to call it Kahlan’s grave, even in his own mind, much less out loud—he didn’t think there was anything worth being alive for, anymore. If a person could die by sheer will alone, he would already be dead, but death, when invited, had suddenly grown shy. The days dragged endlessly on.
He had been so stunned by that grave that it seemed his mind had been scrambled on the spot. It felt like he had lost his ability to think. Nothing he knew made sense to him. The things he’d thought were true somehow no longer were. His whole world had been turned upside down. How could he function if he couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t?
He didn’t know what else to do. For the first time in his life, he was baffled and defeated by the way things were. He always seemed to have a variety of options that he knew he could try. Now, he didn’t. He had tried everything he could think of. None of it worked. He was at the end of his rope, and there was none left.
And all the time, in his mind, he kept seeing her body in the coffin.
He saw, he heard, he felt, but he could not think, could not put anything together in a meaningful way. It was a walking, living, imitation of death—a poor one, he believed. What good was living if it felt this way? He longed only for that dark, forever embrace of nothingness to take him.
He was so far beyond hurt, beyond sadness, beyond grief, that there was only an unthinking, empty, blind, confused agony that never for a second would release him enough to get a breath. He wanted desperately to escape the truth, to refuse to allow it to be real, but he couldn’t and it was suffocating him.
The wind coming up the mountain ruffled his hair as he stared out over a precipitous drop of thousands of feet.
What good was he to anyone? He’d let Zedd down. He’d given Shota the Sword of Truth for nothing of value. Nicci thought he was out of his mind, that he was delusional. Not even Cara believed him, really believed him. He was the only one who believed him, and he had proved himself wrong by digging up her grave.
He guessed he must be crazy, that Nicci had to be right. Everyone was right. He could only be imagining things. He could see it in all their eyes the way they looked at him, that he had lost his mind.
Richard gazed down the sheer drop of the dark stones of the massive outer Keep wall. They fell away below him for thousands of feet toward the rock and forest below. Gusts of wind coming up the face of the wall buffeted him. It was a dizzying sight. A dizzying drop.
What good was he to anyone, most of all to himself?
He stole a sidelong glance at Cara. She was close, but not nearly close enough.
Richard didn’t see any reason to continue the agony. He didn’t have his mind, and his mind was life.
He didn’t have Kahlan. She was his life.
From what everyone told him, from what he saw in the coffin that terrible night, he never had her. It was all just a mad delusion. A wish. A whim.
He glanced down again at the forever drop off the towering wall on the side of the keep, at the rocks and trees spread out below. It was a very, very long way down.
He recalled people saying that just before you died you relived your life.
If he were to relive his life, he would relive every precious moment he’d had with Kahlan.
Or thought he’d had.
It was a long way down.
A long time to relive such wonderful, romantic, loving times. A long time to relive every precious moment he’d spent with her.
Chapter 50
Nicci opened an iron-strapped oak door to bright daylight. Puffy white clouds skimmed by just overhead in a sparkling azure sky that on any other day would have lifted her spirits. A fresh breeze carried her hair across her face. She pulled it away as she gazed down the narrow bridge to a rampart in the distance. Richard stood beyond the end of the bridge, at the far wall of the rampart, in the gap of the crenellation, looking down the mountain. Cara, nearby, turned when she heard the door.
Nicci hurried across the bridge above courtyards far below. She could see several stone benches down among the rose garden at the bottom of a tower and juncture of several walls. When she finally reached Richard’s side he glanced over, giving her a brief, small smile. It warmed her to see it even though she knew the smile was little more than a polite formality.
“Rikka came and told me that someone approaches the Keep. I thought I should come and get you.”
Cara, standing only three strides away, stepped a little closer. “Does Rikka know who it is?”
Nicci shook her head. “I’m afraid not, and I’m more than a little worried.”
Without moving or taking his eyes from the distant countryside, Richard said “It’s Ann and Nathan.”
Nicci’s eyebrows lifted in surprise. She looked over the edge. Richard pointed them out far below on the road that wound its way up the mountain toward the Keep.
“There are three riders,” Nicci said.
Richard nodded. “It looks like it might be Tom with them.”
Nicci leaned out a little farther past Richard and peered down the face of the stone wall. It was a frightening drop. The feeling came over her that she didn’t at all like where he was standing.
With a hand on his shoulder to steady herself, Nicci looked out again
at the three horses plodding their way up the sunlit road. They briefly disappeared under trees only to emerge a moment later as they continued steadily up toward the Keep.
A gust of wind suddenly threatened to unbalance her from her footing in the slot in the immense stone wall. Before it could, Richard’s arm around her waist steadied her. She instinctively drew back from the edge. Once she was on safe footing, his protective arm released her.
“You can tell for sure, from here, that it’s Ann and Nathan?” she asked.
“Yes.”
Nicci wasn’t especially enthusiastic about seeing the Prelate again. As a Sister of the Light and having lived at the Palace of the Prophets for most of her life, Nicci had had just about all she wanted of the Sisters and their leader. In many ways the Prelate was a mother figure to her, as she had been to all the Sisters, someone who was there to remind them whenever they were a disappointment and lecture them that they had to redouble their efforts to help others in need.
When she had been young, should self-interest ever rear its ugly head, Nicci’s mother had always been at the ready to bitterly slap it down. Later in Nicci’s life the Prelate served in that same capacity, if with a kindly smile. Slap or smile, it was the same thing: servitude, even if under a nicer name.
Nathan Rahl was another matter. She didn’t really know the prophet. There were Sisters, and novices especially, who trembled at the mere mention of his name. From what everyone always said, though, he was not simply dangerous but possibly deranged, which, if true, had disturbing implications for Richard’s present condition.
The prophet had been held in secure quarters almost his entire life, the Sisters seeing not only to his needs but seeing to it that he never escaped. People in the city of Tanimura, where the palace had been, were both titillated and terrified of the prophet, of what he might tell them of the future. Whispers were, among the people of the city, that he was most surely wicked, since he could tell them things about their future. Ability tended to arouse the ire of a great many people, especially when that ability was not one that could easily be made to serve their wants.
