Terry Goodkind - Naked Empire

Verna nodded. For a moment, she had been hoping . . .

“Still, you and Zedd escaped, and that’s what matters for now. Thank the Creator.”

“A surprising number of people showed up all at once to rescue us.” Adie lifted an eyebrow. “I do not recall seeing the Creator among them.”

The warm breeze ruffled Verna’s curly hair. “I suppose not, but you know what I mean.”

The crickets in the woods kept up their steady chirping. Life seemed to be a little sweeter, their situation a little less hopeless.

She let out a sigh. “I hope the Creator will at least help Zedd and Rikka take back the Keep.”

“Zedd will not need the Creator’s help,” Adie said. “Another man showed up to help get us out. Chase be an old friend of Zedd, me, and Richard. Chase will have those holding the Keep praying for the protection of the Creator.”

“Then we can look forward to the day the Keep is back in our hands and Jagang is denied help in breaking through the passes into D’Hara.”

Verna waved her arm, signaling, and the four couples standing at the back of the wagon shuffled forward with their children.

“Welcome to D’Hara,” Verna told them. “You will be safe, here.”

“Thank you for helping get us out,” one of the men said with a bow of his head to Adie. “I feel ashamed, now, of the terrible things I had been thinking of you.”

Adie smiled to herself as she tightened her thin fingers on his shoulder. “True. But I could not blame you.”

The girl who had brought the message the last time tugged on Verna’s dress. “This is my mother and father. I told them how nice you were to me, before.”

Verna squatted down and hugged the girl. “Welcome back, child. Welcome back.”

Whenever a breath of wind sighed among the branches above, silvery streamers of moonlight cascading down through the forest canopy glided about in the darkness like ghosts on the prowl. Kahlan peered around, barely able to make out the somber shapes of the looming trees as she tried to see if there was anything that did not belong. She heard no chirps of bugs, no small animals scurrying among the leaf litter, no mockingbirds singing throughout the night as there had been. Carefully picking her way over the mossy ground, she did her best to see in the gloom so as not to step in holes and cracks in the rocky places or pools of standing water in the low areas.

Ahead of her, Richard slipped through the open forest like a shadow. At times he seemed to disappear, causing her to fear that he might no longer be with them. He had ordered everyone following behind him not to talk and to walk as quietly as possible, but none of them could move through the woods as silently as he did.

For some reason, Richard was as tense as his bowstring. He felt that something was wrong, but he didn’t know what. While it might seem a beautiful moonlit night in the woods, the way Richard was acting, on top of the haunting silence, had draped a pall of foreboding over everyone.

Kahlan was at least pleased that the skies had cleared. The rains of recent days had made travel not just difficult, but miserable. While it hadn’t really been cold, the wet made it feel so. Taking shelter had not been an option. Until they had the final dose of the antidote, they had no choice but to press on.

The antidote from Northwick had improved Richard’s condition a little, in addition to stopping the advance of the symptoms of his poisoning, but now the temporary improvement was dissipating. Kahlan was so worried for him that she had no appetite.

They now had well over double the number of men with them, and many more than that were making their way toward the city of Hawton by different routes. Those other groups of men planned to eliminate the lesser detachments of Imperial Order soldiers stationed in villages along the way.

Richard, Kahlan, and their smaller group were pushing toward Hawton as rapidly as possible, deliberately avoiding contact with the enemy so as to get there before Nicholas and his soldiers knew they were on their way.

Stealth would afford them the best chance of recovering the final dose of the antidote.

Once they had the antidote, then they could gather with the rest of the men for an attack. Kahlan knew that if they could first eliminate Nicholas it would make it much easier, and less risky, to defeat the remaining Imperial Order troops. If she could somehow find a way to get close to Nicholas she could touch him with her power. She knew better than to suggest such an idea to Richard; he would never go along with it.

To a certain extent, Kahlan felt responsible for what these people had suffered under the Imperial Order. After all, if not for her freeing the chimes, the boundary protecting Bandakar would still be in place. Yet, if these people could rid themselves of the Imperial Order, the changes that had come about also meant the true freedom they had never really enjoyed and, with it, the opportunity for better lives.

The change in the people in Northwick had been heartening to witness.

That night, the men Richard and Kahlan had brought had stayed up most of the night talking to the people there, explaining the things Richard and Kahlan had explained to them. The morning after the annihilation of the soldiers who had taken over their city and held them in the grip of fear, the people had celebrated by singing and dancing in the streets. Those people had learned not only just how precious freedom really was, but also that their old ways provided no real tools for improving the quality of their lives.

After Richard had dissolved the ancient illusions of the Wise One’s wisdom and the meaningless tenets the speakers substituted for knowledge, and after the killing of the enemy soldiers, the men of Northwick had not been shy about volunteering to help rid their land of the Imperial Order.

Freed from the enforced blindness of a repressive mindset, many now hungered aloud for a future of their own making.

Kahlan unexpectedly came up against Richard’s outstretched arm. She put a hand to her chest, over her galloping heart, then immediately turned and passed the signal to stop back to those behind. There was still no sound in the dark woods—not so much as the buzz of a mosquito.

Richard slipped his pack off of his back, set it on a low rock, and started quietly searching through it.

Kahlan leaned close to whisper. “What are you doing?”

“Fire. We need light. Pass the word back for some of the men to get out torches.”

While Richard pulled out a steel and flint, Kahlan whispered instructions to Cara, who in turn passed them back. In short order, several men tiptoed forward with torches.

The men gathered in close, squatting down beside a low jumble of rock next to Richard. He picked a stick up off the ground and dipped it in a small container from his pack. He then wiped the stick across the top of a high point on the rock.

“I’m putting some pine resin on this rock,” he told the men. “Hold your torches over it so that when I strike a spark and the resin flames up, it will light the torches.”

Pine resin, painstakingly collected from rotting trees, was valuable for starting fires in the rain. A spark would ignite it even when wet. It burned hot enough to often be able to catch damp wood on fire.

Richard had always seemed at home in the dark. Kahlan had never seen him need to have light like this. She stared intently out into the night, wondering what it was he thought might be out there that they couldn’t see.

“Cara,” Richard whispered, “pass the word back. I want everyone to get out a weapon. Now.”

Without hesitation, Cara turned to pass on the orders. After a seemingly endless span of silence, broken only by the soft whisper of steel sliding past leather, word came back and she leaned down toward Richard.