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“Then you would be the Lord Rahl?”
“That’s right,” Richard said.
“Then there is no doubt. You are the ones we came looking for,” the man said. “The boy, Henrik, told us who you were. We came to find you.”
Richard’s concern eased at hearing that it was Henrik who had told them exactly who he and Kahlan were.
“Enough,” the woman said. She quickly turned back to Richard. “Glad we were in time, Lord Rahl. I’m Ester. Now we have to get you both back to safety.”
“Richard will do.”
“Yes, Lord Rahl,” she said absently, as if no longer listening as she pressed at wounds, checking their depth.
Ester motioned to some of the other men behind her. “You will need to help him. He’s badly hurt. We have to get out of here before those who did this come back.”
Several men, relieved to hear that she was finally ready to leave, rushed in to help Richard to his feet. Once up, Richard insisted on going to Kahlan. The men steadied him when he staggered to the wagon.
Richard saw that Kahlan was still unconscious, but breathing. He laid a hand on her, aching with fear over her condition. Her clothes were soaked in blood from the ordeal with the Hedge Maid. The thought of that vile creature and what she had been doing to Kahlan again awakened Richard’s anger.
The Hedge Maid had been drinking Kahlan’s blood.
He slid his hand through the long slit in her shirt, feeling where Jit’s familiars had slashed open Kahlan’s abdomen to bleed her and collect her blood for the Hedge Maid to drink. He was worried not only about the severity of the terrible wound, but how much blood she had lost. To his astonishment, he found only a few swollen ripples in her skin where the long wound had been nearly healed.
Richard recalled, then, the touch he had felt—the touch of a healing begun, but not finished. Zedd or Nicci must have healed the deep wound on Kahlan, but from the rest of the wounds still evident on her, Richard could see that, as with him, they hadn’t finished what they had started. Because he remembered that it had been Nicci’s healing touch on him, he suspected that it would have been Zedd who had started healing Kahlan.
Richard was thankful that Zedd had managed to heal the terrible gash in Kahlan’s abdomen, but he hadn’t had time to heal everything. She had a number of wounds that still bled. He knew, too, that she must have other serious injuries or she would not be unconscious.
“Do you have someone who can help her?” Richard asked. “A gifted person?”
Ester hesitated. “We have someone gifted who may be able to help,” she finally said.
One of the men behind leaned close, taking hold of Ester’s dress at her shoulder to pull her back a bit as he whispered in her ear. “Do you think that wise?”
The woman turned an angry look on the man. “What choice is there? Should we instead let them die?”
He straightened, his only answer a sigh.
“But we must hurry,” Ester said. “She can’t heal them if they’re dead.”
“Besides that,” another man reminded her, “we need to get all of us in out of the night.”
At his words, others glanced around in the darkness. Richard noted that they all seemed terrified of being out after dark. Having once been a woods guide, he had often visited country folk. It was a relatively common attitude among them to want to shut themselves in when the sun went down. People in more remote places tended to be more superstitious than most, and the one common thing they all feared was darkness.
Although, he had to admit that these people certainly had real things to fear.
Richard watched as several men gently lifted Kahlan and then placed her over the shoulder of the biggest man. Richard wanted to carry her himself, but he knew that he couldn’t even walk by himself. He reluctantly let two of the men put their shoulders under his arms to help him stay upright.
In the faint moonlight and soft golden glow of lanterns that several of the people carried, Richard looked back beyond the wagon. For the first time, he saw countless bodies. They weren’t the men of the First File. Strange, pale, half-naked people lay sprawled across the ground everywhere. Given their gaping wounds, it looked like the First File had fought a fierce battle. Given the numbers of the dead, it was no wonder that the damp air smelled of blood and gore.
Nearby, just beyond the corner of the wagon, one of the dead men lay sprawled on his back, mouth agape. His dead eyes stared up at the dark sky.
The man’s teeth had been filed to points.
Richard’s grandfather Zedd and the sorceress Nicci had brought elite soldiers with them to see Richard and Kahlan safely back to the People’s Palace. None of them would have abandoned the two of them. Richard scanned the scattered bones among pieces of uniforms, insignias, and the weapons of the First File lying scattered across the ground. It was a horrifying sight. But he didn’t see anything that looked like it belonged to Zedd or Nicci or Cara.
Cara, his and Kahlan’s personal bodyguard, was Mord-Sith. She would not have left him for any reason short of death, and he’d always suspected that even then Cara would come back from the world of the dead to protect him.
He feared that out there in the darkness where he couldn’t see them, the bones of all those he cared so much about were among the dead. Panic at the thought of losing those so close to him tightened his chest.
“Hurry now,” Ester said, pushing at the men helping to hold Richard up. “He’s bleeding badly. We have to get back.”
The others were more than happy to start away from the sight of so much death and head back to safety.
Richard let the men half carry him onto a narrow path through the wall of trees and into the night.
CHAPTER
4
On their swift journey through a forest so dense that the floor of the trail remained nearly untouched by moonlight, all of the people around him kept a wary watch of the surrounding darkness. Richard, too, scanned the woods, but he could see little beyond the weak lantern light. There was no way of telling what might be back in the black depths of the woods, no way of telling if the mysterious, half-naked people who had slaughtered his friends might be following him.
Every sound caught his attention and drew his eye. Every branch that brushed against him or snagged on his pant leg elevated his heart rate.
From what he could see, the people he was with carried nothing more than utilitarian knives. They had used a rock to dispatch the man attacking Richard. He would hate to encounter the hordes of killers on the dark trail and have to fight them off with little more than rocks.
He was glad to have the tooled leather baldric back over his right shoulder and his sword again at his left hip. From time to time he absently touched the familiar hilt of his sword for reassurance. He knew, though, that he was in little condition to fight.
Still, just touching the ancient weapon stirred its latent power and the silent storm of rage it held within it, stirring its twin within him and enticing him to call it forth. It was reassuring to have that faithful weapon and its attendant power at his beck and call.
Because some of the people had lanterns, Richard scanned the blackness for eye shine that would reveal the presence and position of animals beyond the limited range of the lantern light. While he did see some small creatures like frogs, a raccoon, and some night birds, he didn’t see any eyes of larger animals watching them.
Of course, it was always possible that something larger could have been hidden among the dense clusters of ferns and shrubs or back among the tree trunks so that Richard wouldn’t have seen them.
And, of course, there would have been no eye shine if the eyes watching them were human.
Since he couldn?
?t really see anything in the black depths of the woods, he depended instead on sounds and smells that might tip him off to a threat. The only thing he smelled, though, was the familiar scent of balsam, ferns, and the mat of pine needles, dried leaves, and forest litter covering the ground. The only sounds he heard were the buzz of insects and sometimes the sharp call of night birds. Distant, faint cries of coyotes occasionally echoed through the mountains.
All of the people taking Richard and Kahlan to the safety of their village refrained from talking on the journey. The wary group walked swiftly but nearly silently, the way only those who had spent a lifetime in the woods were able to do. Even the man ahead who was carrying Kahlan made little noise as he moved along the trail. Richard, unable to walk very well and sometimes dragging his feet as the men on either side helped him, was making more noise than any of the rest of them, but there was little he could do about it.
With all the bodies of strange people he had seen back near the wagon, to say nothing of the two men who had attacked him and the things he had overheard, as well as all the warnings he’d previously gotten about venturing into the Dark Lands, Richard could easily see why these people were nervous and being so careful. The two men who had attacked him had looked nothing like the bodies he had seen. If those two men had been right, then the dead were the mysterious people they had mentioned, the Shun-tuk.
It seemed that unlike other country folk Richard knew back home, the people with him had more reason for their fears than simple superstition.
He appreciated it when people took real dangers seriously. The people who most often invited trouble were the willfully ignorant who didn’t want to believe trouble was possible, so they dismissed the potential for it. You couldn’t be ready for what you never considered or were unwilling to consider. Worry was sometimes a valuable survival tool, so Richard thought it foolish to ignore it. But still, since they were so lightly armed, he didn’t think these people took the threats seriously enough.
