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Cara looked surprised by the notion. She glanced at Nicci. Nicci wet her lips and sighed heavily.
“That has to be it,” Richard pressed. “That has to be the answer.”
“Richard,” Nicci said in a quiet voice, “that’s not what is going on here. It doesn’t even remotely make sense.”
Richard couldn’t understand how Nicci, being a sorceress, couldn’t see it. “Yes it does. Magic made everyone forget Zedd. After Kahlan met me in the woods that day, she told me how she was looking for the great wizard, but that no one could recall the old one’s name because he had cast a web of magic to make them forget it. Magic must have been used to make everyone forget Kahlan in the same way.”
“Except you?” Nicci said as she arched an eyebrow. “This magic seems to have failed where you’re concerned, since you have no trouble remembering her.”
Richard had been expecting just such an argument. “It’s possible that since I alone have a different form of the gift, the spell didn’t work on me.”
Nicci again drew a deep, patient breath. “You say that this woman, Kahlan, came looking for the missing wizard, the ‘old one,’ right?”
“Right.”
“Don’t you see the problem, Richard? She knew that she was looking for this old one, the missing wizard.”
Richard was nodding. “That’s right.”
Nicci leaned toward him. “That kind of spell is quite troublesome to create, and it has a number of complications that must be taken into account, but other than that it’s not altogether remarkable. Difficult, yes, remarkable, no.”
“Then that must be what was done with Kahlan. Someone—maybe one of the Order’s wizards traveling with the supply convoy—took her and cast a spell to try to make us all forget her so that we wouldn’t come after them.”
“Why would someone go to the trouble to do such a thing?” Cara asked. “Why not simply kill her? What’s the purpose in capturing her and then making everyone forget her?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe they simply wanted to have a way to escape without being followed. Maybe they intend to spirit her away and then, at a time of their choosing, parade their prisoner before their subjects to show their power, to show that they can capture anyone who opposes them. The fact remains that she’s gone and no one but me remembers her. It makes sense to me that a spell must have been used, like the spell Zedd used to make people forget him.”
Nicci pinched the bridge of her nose in a way that somehow made Richard feel just a little stupid, as if his idea was so foolish it was giving her a headache. “Everyone was looking for this old one, this great wizard. They remembered that he was the great wizard, that he was an important, accomplished man, even that he was from the Midlands. They merely couldn’t remember his name and probably what he looked like. So, without his name or a description of him they were having a great deal of difficulty finding him.”
Richard nodded. “That’s right.”
“Don’t you see, Richard? They knew that he existed, knew that he was the old wizard, and probably had a great many memories of things he had done, but they simply couldn’t recall his name—because of the spell. That’s all—his name. They couldn’t remember his name even though they remembered that the man existed.
“But this wife of yours is remembered by no one except you. We don’t know her name or anything else about her. We have no memory of her or of anything she supposedly did with us. We have no knowledge of anything at all about her. Not one thing. She exists in no one’s mind but yours.”
Richard saw the distinction but wasn’t ready to concede the point. “But maybe this was just a stronger spell, or something. It must have been much the same, but just more powerful so that everyone not only forgets her name, but forgets her altogether.”
Nicci gently gripped his shoulders in an almost painfully sympathetic manner.
“Richard, I admit that to someone like you, who grew up without understanding magic, that might seem like it makes sense—and it’s very inventive, it really is—but it simply doesn’t work that way in the real world. To someone without an understanding of how such power works it must seem entirely logical, at least on the surface. But when you look deeper the difference between a spell to make everyone forget a person’s name and a spell making everyone forget that the person ever existed, it’s the difference between lighting a fire at camp and igniting a second sun in the sky.”
Richard threw up his hands in frustration. “But why?”
“Because the first alters only one thing, the memory of a person’s name—and I must add that such a thing, as simple as it might seem on the face of it, is profoundly difficult and beyond the ability of all but a handful of the most gifted individuals and even then they must have extensive knowledge. Still, everyone knows that they have forgotten the great wizard’s name so even as it does the work of making people forget that name, the spell only has to accomplish this one clearly defined and limited task. The difficulty with spells of this nature is in how broadly the task is applied, but for the purpose of this example that is beside the point.
“Where the first example alters one thing, the name of the vanished wizard, the second alters nearly everything. That is what makes it beyond difficult; it makes it impossible.”
“I still don’t understand.” Richard paced from the statue partway out across the platform and back, gesturing as he spoke. “It seems to me like it does roughly the same thing.”
“Think of all the ways a person, especially an important person such as the Mother Confessor, touches the lives of nearly everyone. Dear spirits, Richard, she oversaw the Central Council of the Midlands. She made decisions that affected every land.”
Richard closed the distance to the sorceress. “What difference does that make? Zedd was First Wizard. He was important, too, and he touched a lot of lives.”
“And people only forgot his name; they did not forget the man himself. Try, for a moment, to imagine what would be the result if a spell could make everyone forget a simple man.” Nicci walked off a few paces and then abruptly turned back. “Say, Faval, the charcoal maker. Not just forget his name, but forget the man entirely. Forget that he exists or ever did, just like you suggest happened to this woman, Kahlan.
“What would happen? What would Faval’s family do? Who would his children think fathered them? Who would his wife think made her pregnant and gave her children, if she couldn’t remember Faval? Where was this mystery man who sired a family? Would her mind invent another man to soothe her panic and fill the void? What would her friends believe and how would all of their thoughts mesh with hers? What would everyone believe without the truth to support their thinking? What would happen when people’s mind’s fabricated patches filling the gaps in their memories, and those patches didn’t match? With the charcoal ovens all around his home, how would his wife and children think they got there and how had all the charcoal been made? What would happen at the foundry where Faval sold his charcoal? What would Priska think—that somehow baskets of charcoal had magically appeared in the bins in the storage room of his foundry?
“I’m not even beginning to scratch the surface of the ever expanding complications such a fanciful forget-me spell cast on Faval would cause—the accounting of money, the allocation of work, the agreements with lumbermen and other workers, the documents, the promises he’d made and all the rest. Think of all the confusion and disarray such a thing would cause, and that’s with one little-known man living in a tiny house down a lonely lane.”
Nicci lifted an arm as if in grand introduction, “But with a woman like the Mother Confessor herself?” She let the arm drop. “I can’t even begin to imagine the tangle of consequences left snarled in the wake of such an incomprehensible event.”
Nicci’s mane of blond hair stood out against the dark background of trees on the hills beyond the broad, level grassy expanse. Her hair’s length and its sweeping curves looked casual, even comfortably intimate, and complemented her shapely form
in her black dress, but the power of her presence was not to be taken lightly. At that moment, as she stood illuminated by a ray of light from the setting sun, she was a breathtaking figure of astute perception and knowledgeable authority, a force that seemed beyond reproach. Richard stood mute and motionless as she went on in an instructional tone.
“It’s the cascade of connections to all those specific incidents that would make such a spell impossible. Every little thing that the Mother Confessor had ever done would snowball together with connected circumstances in which she may not even have been personally involved, compounding the number of events that would become tainted by such a spell. The power, the complexity, the sheer magnitude of it is beyond comprehension.
“Those complications must draw power from the spell in order to counteract the disruptive potential of such complications. Those exigencies feed off the power of the spell that seeks to command the nature of the event. At some point, a spell without the power to compensate for a growing vortex of such dissipative events would simply sputter and die like a candle in a downpour.”
Nicci stepped close and jabbed a finger at his chest. “And that’s not even taking into account the most glaring inconsistency of your dream. In your delirium you dreamed up an even more complex predicament. You dreamed up not only this woman, this wife, who is remembered by no one else, but in your irrational dreaming state you went further, much further, without realizing the fateful consequences. You see, it wasn’t merely some country girl, who no one knew, that you dreamed up for yourself. No, you made her a known person. In the context of a dream that might seem a simple thing, but in the real world a known person creates a congruency dilemma.
“And yet, you went further still! Even a known person would not be as complicated as what you did.
