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Nicci threw up her hands. “Now what are you talking about?”
“Men have needs.” Ann shook a finger at Nicci. “Attend to them with all your talent as a woman—as the beautiful woman the Creator made you—and he will want more. He will marry you to get it.”
Nicci wanted to slap the woman. Instead, she said, “Richard isn’t like that. He understands that love is what makes passion between a man and a woman meaningful.”
“In the end that is what he will have. You would merely be helping that meaningful passion come to be. A man’s heart will follow his needs. Are you so backward as to think that all couples marry for love? The wisdom of elders often creates a better match. In the absence of Kahlan, that is what we must do.
“It is your job to urge him into your bed and show him what you can do for him, what he is missing, what he needs. If you tend to his passions, his heart will be yours and he will, in the end, have that meaningful passion.”
Nicci could feel her face going scarlet. She couldn’t believe they were having this conversation. She had to change the subject but she couldn’t seem to find her voice.
Nicci knew that she had Richard’s friendship and trust. To do as Ann suggested would violate that friendship and void that trust. Richard was safe in her friendship. The sincerity and shelter of Nicci’s friendship in some ways qualified her for his love, but to do as Ann suggested would breach the trust of his friendship and in so doing disqualify her from ever really being worthy of it.
“You must not allow this chance to pass you by, child, to pass us by.”
Nicci seized Ann’s arm and pulled her to a halt. “Pass us by?”
Ann nodded. “You are our link to Richard.”
Nicci narrowed her eyes. “What link?”
Ann’s face tightened, looking more and more like the prelate Nicci remembered. “The link those of us who teach young wizards need to have with such men.”
“Richard is our leader—not by birth, but by his own ability and force of will to see this through. He may not have set out to become the Lord Rahl, to become the one to lead us in this war, but along the way he grew into that role. He decided that life meant enough to him that he had to fight for his right to live it as he saw fit. He has inspired others who feel the same. It is only because of that that we have made it this far.
“He is not a boy at the Palace of the Prophets with a Rada’Han around his neck. He is his own man.”
“Is he? Step back, child, and look at the larger picture. Yes, Richard is our leader—and I am sincere in saying that—but he is also a man who has the gift and knows nothing about it. More than that, he is a wizard with both sides of the gift. Lightning is bottled up in that man. What is the purpose of a Sister of the Light if not to teach such men how to control their ability and to—”
“I am not a Sister of the Light.”
Ann flicked a hand dismissively. “Semantics. Wordplay. Denying it will not change it.”
“I am not—”
“You are.” Ann jabbed an insistent finger against the center of Nicci’s chest. “In there, you are. You are a person who, by what ever course, has embraced life. That is the Creator’s calling. Call yourself what you will, Sister of the Light, or simply Nicci. It matters not; it changes nothing. You fight for our cause—the Creator’s cause of life itself. You are a Sister, a sorceress, who can guide a man in what he needs to do.”
“I am not a whore, not for you, not for anyone.”
Ann rolled her eyes. “Did I ask you to bed a man you don’t love? No. Did I ask you to trick him out of anything? No. I asked you to go to a man you love, give him love, and be the woman he so desperately needs, be the woman who can receive his love. That is what he needs—a woman to be the link for his need to love. That is the completing link to his humanity.”
Nicci glared. “A minder from the Palace of the Prophets, that’s what you really want me to be.”
Ann muttered a prayer for strength toward the ceiling. “Child,” she said, her gaze finally coming down to fix on Nicci, “I am only asking you not to waste any more of your life. You don’t fully grasp what it is you are not seeing. You may think that this is about love, but you don’t really know love, now do you? You know only its beginning: longing.
“The circumstances may not be what you would ask for in a perfect world, but this is the chance the Creator has given you, your chance to have the greatest joy possible to us in this life—love. Complete love. Your love right now is one sided, incomplete, deficient. It is merely sweet longing and imagined bliss. You can’t know what love really is unless those feelings within your heart are returned in kind and set free. Only then is it real love, complete love. Only then can the heart truly soar. You don’t yet know the joy of that most human of emotions.”
Nicci had been kissed by rutting brutes. There was no joy in such things. Ann was right: Nicci didn’t think that she could truly understand what it would be like to be kissed by a man she loved, truly loved, a man who loved her in return and held her above all else in his heart. She could only imagine such bliss. What a pity for those who didn’t know the difference.
Ann opened a hand in a gesture of appeal. “If in that joy of complete love—for both of you—you can help guide the man you love to make choices that are nothing more than the right choices, what is wrong with that?”
She let the hand drop. “I’m not asking you to cause him to do wrong, but to do right, to do what he himself would want. I’m only asking you to save him from the kind of pain that risks him making a mistake, a mistake that will take us all down with him.”
Nicci again felt the fine hair on the back of her neck stiffen.
“What are you talking about?”
“Nicci, when you were with the Order—when you were known as Death’s Mistress—what did you feel like?”
“Feel like?” Nicci cast about in her mind for an answer to the unexpected question. “I don’t know. I don’t know what you mean. I guess I hated myself, hated life.”
“And in your hatred of yourself did you care if Jagang killed you?”
“Not really.”
“Would you act the same today? Act out of disinterest for yourself, for the future?”
“Of course not. Back then I didn’t care what happened to me. What future could there be? I didn’t think that I deserved any happiness—I didn’t think that I could ever have any happiness—so nothing really mattered to me, not even my own life. I just didn’t think that anything mattered.”
“Didn’t think that anything mattered,” Ann repeated. She tsked concern to herself before continuing her theatrical dismay at what Nicci had said. “You didn’t think you could have
any happiness, and so you didn’t think anything mattered.” She held up a finger for a point of clarity. “You didn’t make the same kinds of decisions back then that you would make today because you didn’t care about yourself. Am I right?”
Nicci suspected that she was nearing the unseen jaws of a trap. “That’s right.”
“And how do you suppose a man like Richard is going to feel when he finally realizes that Kahlan is lost to him—when the finality of it really and truly sinks in? Will he think that life is worth living? Do you think he will feel the same connection to us—feel the same sense of the importance of life—if he is lost, alone, despairing, despondent…hopeless? If he thinks he can never have any happiness, do you think he will care as much what happens to him? You know what that feels like, child. You tell me.”
Goose bumps tingled up Nicci’s arms. She feared to answer the question.
Ann waggled a finger. “If he has no one, no love, do you think he will care so much if he lives or dies?”
Nicci swallowed, forcing herself to face the truth. “I suppose it’s possible that he might not.”
“And if he has no hope for himself, will he make the right choices for us? Or will he simply give up?”
“I don’t think Richard would give up.”
“You don’t think he would.” Ann leaned closer. “Are you eager to put that to the test? Put our lives, our world, existence itself, to such a test?”
The intensity of Ann’s expression seemed to have frozen Nicci in place. “Child, if we lose Richard, then we are all lost.”
She went on in a soft voice, making Nicci feel as if the trap were finally closing around her. “You yourself know his central importance—that is why you put the boxes of Orden in play in his name. You know that he is the only one who can lead us in this battle. You know that without him the Sisters of the Dark will unleash the Keeper of the underworld. Without Richard to stop them they will unleash death upon life itself. They will end the world of life. They will take us into the Great Void.
