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Richard could not disguise his glare as stood before the silent crowd watching him. “Your people want to know what the Lord Rahl has to say on the subject?”
There were nods all around. Some people dared to inch forward again.
Richard let his arms down and stood taller. “I say that the future is what you make of it, not what someone says it will be. Your lives are not controlled by fate, or set down in some book, or revealed in smoke, or laid out in a twisted pile of pig intestine. You should tell people to stop worrying about prophecy and to put their minds to making their own future.”
Nathan cleared his throat as he took a quick step forward. “What Lord Rahl means to say is that prophecy is meant for prophets, for those with the gift. Only the gifted can understand the complexities tangled up in a genuine prophecy. Rest assured, we will worry about such things so that you don’t need to.”
Some in the crowd reluctantly seemed to think that made some sense. Others were not satisfied. A thin woman, a queen from one of the lands in the Midlands, spoke up.
“But prophecy is meant to help people. It is set down so that those words elicited by the gift will come forward through the dark tunnel of time to be of use to those of us who will be touched by those prophecies. What good is prophecy if the people aren’t informed of what it has to say about their fate? What use is the gift for prophecy if not to help people? What value is prophecy if it is kept secret?”
Nathan smiled. “Since you are not a prophet, Your Majesty, how can you know that there is a prophecy that is relevant, one that you would need to know about?”
She fingered a long jeweled necklace, the unseen end of which was located somewhere down in her cleavage. “Well, I suppose…”
Richard rested the palm of his left hand on his sword. “Prophecy causes more trouble than it ever helps.”
“We have encountered prophecy,” Kahlan said as she stepped up beside Richard, drawing everyone’s attention, “profoundly frightening core prophecy speaking specifically of Richard and of me. Had we followed the grim warnings in those prophecies, done what they said must be done to avert disaster, it would have actually ended up being not only our destruction but the destruction of all life.
“Had we done as you now wish to do, and heeded the words of those terrible prophecies, you would now all be dead at best, or worse, slaves in the hands of savage masters. In the end those prophecies turned out to be true, but not in the way that they sounded. Prophecy is profoundly dangerous in the wrong hands and not intended to be heeded in the way it sounds.”
“So, you are saying that we can’t be trusted with knowing our own future?” There was an edge to the queen’s voice.
Richard saw the flash of anger Kahlan’s green eyes and answered before she could. “We’re saying that the future is not fixed. You make your own future. If you believe you know the future, then that changes the way you behave, changes the decisions you make, changes how you live and how you plan for your future. Such unthinking choices could be ruinous. You need to act in your own rational best interest, not upon what you think prophecy says is in store for you.
“The future, at least for the most part, is not fixed in prophecy. Where prophecy may be valid it is not something that can be comprehended by just anyone.”
While that didn’t entirely satisfy people, it did take some of the wind out of their excitement to hear some juicy omens.
“Prophecy has meaning,” Nathan said, “but the true meaning can only be unraveled by those gifted in such things, and I can tell you that those things are not revealed in a pile of pig guts.”
When she saw the hesitancy in the crowd, Cara, in her white leather outfit, moved in to Richard’s left. “D’Harans have a saying: the Lord Rahl is the magic against magic; we are the steel against steel. He has more than proven himself to all of us. Leave the magic to him.”
Coming from a Mord-Sith, those words had a chilling finality.
The crowd seemed to realize that they were not merely pushing into areas where they didn’t belong, but overstepping bounds. Somewhat shamed, they spoke quietly among themselves, agreeing with one another that it made sense that maybe they should leave such matters to those who were best able to deal with them. Everyone seemed to relax a bit, as if having just pulled back from the brink.
Out of the corner of his eye to the right, Richard saw the blue robes of one of the serving women coming up on the far side of Kahlan.
The woman gently laid her left hand on Kahlan’s forearm as if wanting to speak to her confidentially.
That, more than anything, was what got Richard’s attention. People didn’t just come up and casually lay a hand on the Mother Confessor.
As she came around and turned in toward Kahlan, Richard saw the haunted look in the woman’s eyes and the blood down the front of her robes.
He was already moving when he saw the knife in her other hand sweeping around toward Kahlan’s chest.
CHAPTER 10
Time itself seemed to stop.
Richard recognized all too well the eternal emptiness between the heartbeats of time, that expectant void before the lightning ignition of power.
He was a step too far away to stop the woman in time, yet he also knew that he was too close for what was about to happen.
It was already out of his hands and there was nothing he could do about it.
Life and death hung in that instant of time. Kahlan could not afford to hesitate. His instinct to turn away tensed his muscles even though he was well aware that nothing he could do would be fast enough.
The sea of people stood wide-eyed, frozen in shock. Several Mord-Sith in red leather had already begun to leap a distance that Richard knew they could never make in time. He saw Cara’s red Agiel beginning to spin up into her hand, soldiers’ hands going for swords, and Zedd’s hand lifting to cast magic. Richard knew that not one of them had a chance to make it in time.
At the center of it all, Richard saw the woman holding Kahlan’s forearm down out of the way as the bloody knife in her other hand arced around toward Kahlan’s chest.
In that instant everyone had only begun to move.
Into that silent void in time, thunder without sound suddenly ignited.
Time crashed back in a headlong rush as the force of the concussion exploded through the confined space of the banquet hall.
The impact to the air raced outward in a circle.
People near the front cried out in pain as they tumbled backward to the ground. Those farther away in the rear were knocked back a few steps. In shock and fear they too late protectively covered their faces with an arm.
Food flew off tables and carts; glasses and plates shattered against the walls; wine bottles, cutlery, containers, small serving bowls, napkins, and fragments of glass were blown back by the shock wave sweeping across the room at lightning speed. When it hit the far end of the room the glass in all the windows blew out. The bottoms of curtains flapped out through the shattered windows. Knives, forks, food, drink, plates, and pieces of broken glass clattered across the floor.
Richard was by far the one closest to Kahlan as she had unleashed her Confessor power. Too close. Proximity to such power being loosed was dangerous. The pain of it seared through every joint in his body, dropping him to a knee. Zedd fell back, knocked from his feet. Nathan, a little farther away, staggered back, catching Cara’s arm to steady her.
When pieces of shattered glass finally stopped skipping across the floor, the tablecloths and curtains finally settled and stilled, and people sat up in stunned silence, the woman in bloody blue robes was kneeling at the Mother Confessor’s feet.
Kahlan stood tall at the center of the settling chaos.
People stared in shock. None of them had ever seen a Confessor unleash her power before. It was not something done before spectators. Richard doubted that any of them would ever forget it as long as they lived.
“Bags, that hurts,” Zedd muttered as he sat up rubbing his elbows and rol
ling his shoulders.
As Richard’s vision and mind cleared from the needle-sharp stab of pain that had instantly stitched its way through every joint in his body, he saw that the woman had left a bloody handprint on the sleeve of Kahlan’s white dress.
Kneeling there before the Mother Confessor, the woman didn’t look at all like an assassin. She was of average build with small features. Limp ringlets of dark hair just touched her shoulders. Richard knew that a person touched by a Confessor’s power didn’t feel the same pain as those nearby, but, more than that, things such as pain would be merely distant considerations to her. Once touched by a Confessor, the Confessor was all.
Whoever the woman had been, she was no more.
“Mistress,” the woman whispered, “command me.”
Kahlan’s voice came as cold as ice. “Tell me again what you have done, what you said to me before.”
“I’ve killed my children,” the woman said in a dispassionate voice. “I thought you should know.”
The words cut through the somber silence, running a shiver up many a spine, Richard was sure. Some people gasped.
“That’s why you came to me?”
The woman nodded. “Partly. I had to tell you what I had done.” A tear ran down her cheek. “And what I had to do.”
With her mind and who she had been now gone, Richard knew that her tears were not for killing her children, but for having intended to kill Kahlan. The Confessor who had touched her was now the only thing that mattered to her. The guilt of her intent now crushed her soul.
Richard bent and carefully took hold of the woman’s right wrist as he pulled the bloody knife from her grip. Disarming her was no longer necessary, but it still made him feel better. She didn’t seem to notice.
“Why would you do such a thing?” Kahlan asked in a commanding tone that stilled everyone’s breath for a moment.
