Terry Goodkind - Confessor - Chainfire Trilogy Part 3

She held the sword out. “Every weapon needs a master.”

Richard’s warm smile broke through like sunshine on a cold, cloudy day. It warmed her heart. He gazed at her a moment, still unable to look away, then gently lifted the weapon from her hands.

He ducked his head under the baldric, laying it over his right shoulder so that the sword rested against his left hip. The sword looked completely natural with him, unlike the way it had looked with Samuel.

“Samuel is dead.”

“When I felt you use your power I thought as much.” He rested his left palm on the hilt of the sword. “Thank goodness he didn’t hurt you.”

“He tried. That’s why he’s dead.”

Richard nodded. “Kahlan, I can’t explain it all right now, but there is a great deal happening that—”

“You missed all the excitement.”

“Excitement?”

“Yes. Samuel confessed. He told me that we’re married.”

Richard went stiff as stone. A look akin to terror passed across his face.

She thought that maybe he should take her in his arms and tell her how happy he was to have her back, but he just stood there, looking like he was afraid to breathe.

“We were in love, then?” she asked, trying to prompt him.

His face lost some of its color. “Kahlan, now is not the time to talk about this. We’re in more trouble than you can imagine. I don’t have time to explain it but—”

“So, you’re saying that we weren’t in love?”

She hadn’t expected this. She hadn’t even considered it. She suddenly had difficulty making her voice work.

She couldn’t understand why he just stood there, why he wouldn’t say anything. She supposed that there was nothing for him to say.

“It was just some kind of arranged thing, then?” She swallowed back the lump rising in her throat. “The Mother Confessor marrying the Lord Rahl for the good of their respective people? An alliance of convenience. Something like that?”

Richard looked more terrified than Samuel had when she had been questioning him. He drew his lower lip through his teeth as if trying to think how to answer.

“It’s all right,” Kahlan said. “You won’t hurt my feelings. I don’t remember any of it. So, that’s what it was, then? Just a marriage of convenience?”

“Kahlan . . .”

“We’re not in love, then? Please, answer me, Richard.”

“Look, Kahlan, it’s more complicated than that. I have responsibilities.”

That was what Nicci had said when Kahlan had asked if she loved Richard. It was more complicated than that. She had responsibilities.

Kahlan wondered how she could she have been so blind. It was Nicci he loved.

“You have to trust me,” he said when she could only stare at him. “There are important things at stake.”

She nodded, holding back the tears, putting on a blank face, hiding behind the mask of it. She didn’t try to test her voice just then.

She didn’t know why she had let her heart get ahead of her head. She didn’t know if her legs were going to hold.

Richard squeezed his temples between a finger and a thumb, his gaze going to the ground for a moment. “Kahlan . . . listen to me. I’ll explain everything to you—everything—I promise, but I can’t right now. Please, just trust me.”

She wanted to ask why she should trust a man who married her without loving her, but right then she was not sure that she would be able to summon her voice.

“Please,” he repeated. “I promise I’ll explain everything when I can, but right now we have to get to Tamarang.”

She cleared her throat, finally gathering the ability to speak. “We can’t go there. Samuel said that Six was there.”

He was nodding as she spoke. “I know. But I have to go there.”

“I don’t.”

He paused, gazing at her.

“I don’t want anything else to happen to you,” he finally said. “Please, you need to come with me. I’ll explain later. I promise.”

“Why is later better than now?”

“Because we’ll be dead if we don’t hurry. Jagang is going to open the boxes of Orden. I have to try to stop him.”

She didn’t buy the excuse. Had he wanted to, he could have already answered her.

“I’ll go with you if you answer one question. Did you love me when you married me?”

His gray eyes studied her face a moment before he finally answered in a quiet voice.

“You were the right person for me to marry.”

Kahlan swallowed back the pain, the cry wanting to escape. She turned away, not wanting him to see her tears, and started toward where Samuel had been taking her.

It was well after nightfall when they were finally forced to stop. Richard would have kept going but the terrain, thickly wooded, rocky, and becoming uneven as ridgelines rose up around them, was simply too treacherous to negotiate in the dark. The nearly new moon would have come up at sunset but the narrow crescent didn’t provide enough illumination to brighten the inky cloud cover in the least. Even the light that would have been provided by meager starlight was hidden by the thick clouds. The darkness was so complete that it was simply impossible to go on.

Kahlan was tired, but as Richard started a fire in the fluff of cattails he’d broken open for tinder, she could see that he was in far worse condition. She wondered if he’d slept in recent days. After he had a fire going, he set fishing lines and then started to collect enough firewood to last them through the cold night. Up against a rocky rise they at least had some protection from the biting wind.

Kahlan did her best to care for the horses, fetching them water in a canvas bucket among the supplies Richard had with him. When he’d finished collecting firewood he found that they had some brook trout on his lines. As she watched him cleaning the fish, throwing the innards on the fire so they wouldn’t attract animals, she decided not to ask any more questions about the two of them. She couldn’t endure the pain of the answers. Besides, he had already told her what she had asked: she was simply the right person for him to marry.

She wondered if he’d even met her before he agreed to marry her. She realized that it must have been heartbreaking for Nicci to see the man she loved marry someone else for unromantic, practical reasons.

Kahlan forced her mind away from that whole line of thought.

“Why are we going to Tamarang?” she asked.

Richard glanced up from his work at cleaning the fish. “Well, a long time ago, back in the great war three thousand years ago, the people back then were fighting this same war we’re fighting now, a war to defend ourselves against those who want to eliminate magic and all other forms of freedom.

“The people defending against such aggression took a number of extremely valuable things of magic—things they had created over many centuries—and put those things in a place called the Temple of the Winds. Then, to protect it all from falling into the hands of the enemy, they sent the temple into the underworld.”

“They sent it into the world of the dead?”

Richard nodded as he laid out some big leaves. “During the war, wizards on both sides had conjured terrible weapons—constructed spells and such. But some of those weapons were made out of people. That’s how the dreamwalkers came to be. They were created out of people captured in Caska—Jillian’s ancestors.”

“And that was when they created the Chainfire event?” she asked. “During that great war.”

“That’s right,” he said as he spread a layer of mud on the leaves. “Other wizards were constantly working to counter the things that had been created from magic. The boxes of Orden, for example, were created during that great war in order to counter the Chainfire spell.”