Kahlan added another stick to the fire. Sparks swirled up into the late-evening air as if eager to follow after the departing vestiges of red-orange just visible through the bare branches in the western sky. She warmed her hands toward the building flames and then shivered as she rubbed her arms. It was going to be a cold night.
Short on gear, they each had only one blanket. At least she also had her cloak. Lying on the cold ground made for a miserable, sleepless night. Spruce trees were plentiful, though, so she had cut a number of boughs for bedding. Even as thick as the woods were they wouldn’t have offered good protection from any wind, but since the clear night was dead calm at least they wouldn’t need to build a shelter. Kahlan just wanted to have something to eat and then get some sleep.
Before they had built the fire she had taken the opportunity to set a couple of snares, hoping to catch a rabbit, if not to eat that night then maybe in the morning before they started out again. Samuel had collected a good supply of firewood to last the night, then built the fire. After finishing with that he had gone off to a nearby stream down a rocky bank to collect water.
Kahlan was bone-weary as well as hungry. They were nearly out of the food they’d brought from the Imperial Order’s camp—not that they’d stopped all that often to eat, or rest. Unless they caught a rabbit it would be dried biscuits and dried meat again. At least they had that. It wasn’t going to last much longer, though.
Samuel hadn’t wanted to stop to try to see if they could get more food. He seemed in a frantic urgency to get somewhere. They had a few coins they’d found in the bottom of the saddlebags, but rather than venturing into one of the several small towns they had passed near in order to try to get more supplies, Samuel had insisted that they stay well clear of any people.
He was convinced that Imperial Order soldiers would be hunting them. Considering how much Jagang apparently hated her and how keen he was to extract vengeance, Kahlan couldn’t really offer any argument against Samuel’s theory. For all she knew soldiers might be hot on her heels. The thought added an uneasy edge to her chill.
When Kahlan asked Samuel where they were going he was vague about it, simply pointing west-southwest. He assured her, though, that they were going someplace where they would be safe.
He was proving to be a strange traveling companion. He spoke very little when they rode and even less at camp. Whenever they stopped he rarely ventured far from her. She imagined that he simply wanted to protect her, to keep her safe, but she wondered if it was more that he was watching over his prize. While he had come into the Order’s camp to rescue her, he never wanted to talk about his reasons for doing so. One time when she had pressed him he said it had been because he wanted to help her. On the surface it seemed a nice sentiment, yet he never explained how he knew her, or how he knew that she had been held captive.
By the way that he was always glancing at her when he didn’t think she was watching she thought that maybe he was just bashful. If she pressed him about anything he would typically pull his head down between his shoulders and shrug. She sometimes came to feel that she was torturing the poor man with her questions, and so she would stop and let him be. It was only then that he would seem to relax.
Still, all of the unanswered questions gave her pause. Despite everything he had done, and how he helped her at every turn, she didn’t trust him. She didn’t like that he wouldn’t answer such simple questions—such important questions. Having so much of her own life a mystery to her left her rather sensitive to the relevance of unanswered questions.
She knew, too, that Samuel was fascinated by her. He often seemed eager to do things to please her. He would cut pieces of sausage, giving her one slice at a time until she had to stop him, telling him that she’d had enough, and that he should eat, too. At other times, though, like when he was distracted by his own hunger, he would forget to offer her anything until she asked.
Sometimes she would glance over and see him staring at her with those strange golden eyes. In those moments, she thought that she saw the cunning countenance of a thief. She tried to keep a hand on the handle of her knife when she went to sleep.
At other times, when she would try to ask questions, he seemed too shy even to look her in the eye, much less answer her, and would hunch back toward the fire as if hoping he could be invisible. Most of the time she had trouble getting more than a yes or no out of him. His reticence never seemed to be out of cruelty, arrogance, or indifference, though. In the end, since it was so difficult getting him to talk and the answers she did get were virtually useless, she had stopped trying.
He was either painfully shy, or he was hiding something.
In those long periods of silence, Kahlan’s mind would turn to thoughts about Richard. She wondered if he was alive or dead. She feared that she knew the answer but was reluctant to accept the finality of his death. She was still astonished recalling the sight of him using weapons, the way his blade moved, the way he moved. He had done so much to help her escape. She feared that he had paid the ultimate price for it.
In the still air, thinking about Richard, Kahlan felt a chill that was not from the cold. It was a strange night. Something about it felt out-of-sorts and empty. The world felt like an even more lonely place than usual.
That was the thing that bothered her the most—the constant, gnawing emptiness she felt, the terrible loneliness of being isolated from almost everyone else in the world. A part of her life was missing, too, and she didn’t know what it was. She didn’t even know who she was, other than her name and that she was the Mother Confessor. When she had asked Samuel what a Confessor was he had stared a long moment and then shrugged. She got the clear impression that he knew but didn’t want to say.
Kahlan felt cut off not only from the world, but from herself. She wanted her life back.
In the fading light she made her way over to the exhausted horse as he cropped at the clumps of long grass. There was no currycomb to brush out his coat, so she stroked her hand over the huge animal, cleaning it as best she could, checking for any injuries or burrs. She used her fingers to pry off dried clumps of mud from his legs and then the side of his belly. The horse turned his head back, watching her cleaning off the caked mud.
The horse liked her care and gentle touch. He was an animal kept by men who were little more than animals themselves and wasn’t used to being treated with kindness and respect, so he knew the value of both.
When she finished picking his hooves clean, she gave the horse a good scratch behind the ears. He neighed softly, nuzzling his head against her. Kahlan smiled and scratched some more, which pleased the horse just fine. His big eyes closed as he soaked in the attention. She felt closer to the horse than to Samuel.
To Samuel, the horse was just a horse. He wanted to hurry, and the horse was his means of covering ground. Kahlan wasn’t sure if it was so much that he had somewhere to go, or if he simply wanted to put as much distance between them and the Imperial Order as possible.
Since he kept to a steady course she supposed that he must have a real destination. If that was the case, then he had some reason to get there in a hurry. If he had a destination, and was eager to get there, then why wouldn’t he at least tell her where they were going?
As she rubbed behind the horse’s ears, he pressed his head a little tighter against her in appreciation. She smiled at the nudge the horse gave her when she paused, urging her to continue. She thought that he was falling in love with her.
Kahlan wondered if she was being less kind to Samuel. She didn’t mean to be deliberately cold toward him, but since he was being less than candid—and likely evasive—she had decided to trust her instincts and remain businesslike with him.
Back at the fire, as Kahlan, sitting on her heels, fed another stick into the flames, she heard Samuel rushing back. She checked the knife at her belt.
“Got one!” he called as he came into the light of the campfire.
He held up a rabbit by its hind legs. She didn’t think that she’d ever seen Samuel so excited. He had to be hungry.
She sat back, smiling. “I guess we get a hot meal tonight.”
Samuel, grasping the hind legs in both hands, hastily ripped the rabbit apart. Kahlan sat up in surprise as he laid a bleeding half of a rabbit before her.
Samuel squatted not far away, hunched down facing the fire, and began devouring the other half of the rabbit.
Kahlan stared in shock as she watched him eating the raw catch. He tore off a bite of fur with his teeth and swallowed it down. He crunched right through bones. As blood ran down his chin he even ate the entrails.
The sight was making her sick. Kahlan looked away to stare into the fire.
“Eat,” Samuel said. “It’s good.”
Kahlan picked up the hind leg and tossed her half to him. “I’m not very hungry.”
Samuel didn’t argue. He tore into her half.
Kahlan lay back, resting her head against the saddle, and watched the stars. To take her mind off Samuel she thought again about Richard, wondering who he really was, and what his connection to her was. She thought about how he fought with a blade. In many ways it reminded her of the way she fought. She didn’t know where she had learned what she knew. As she wandered through an internal landscape of shadowy uncertainties, she watched the moon slowly rise.
She began wondering why she should continue to stay with Samuel. He had saved her life, after a fashion, after Richard told him how. She supposed that she did owe him some gratitude. But why stay with him? He wasn’t providing her any answers or real solutions. She didn’t owe him her dogged allegiance. She wondered if she should strike out on her own.
She realized that even if she left Samuel and struck out on her own, without knowing who she was where would she go? She saw trees and mountains as they rode past, but she didn’t know where she was. She didn’t know where she
grew up, where she lived, where she belonged. She didn’t recognize the land or even remember any towns or cities, other than the places of the dead that she’d gone through after the Sisters had captured her. She was lost in a world that didn’t know her and she didn’t remember.
When she realized that the moon had risen above the trees, she looked over at Samuel. He had long ago finished his meal.
He was polishing his sword as it lay in his lap.
“Samuel,” she called. He looked up as if being yanked out of a trance. “Samuel, I need to know where we’re going.”
“To a place where we will be safe.”
“You’ve told me that before. If I’m going to continue to travel with you—”
“You must! You must come with me! Please!”
Kahlan was taken aback by his outburst of emotion. His eyes wide and round, he looked genuinely panicked.
“Why?”
“Because I will take us to safety.”
“Maybe I can take myself to safety.”
“But I can take you to someone who can help you get your memory back.”
He had her attention. She sat up.
“You know someone who can help me get my memory back?”
Samuel nodded vigorously.
“Who?”
“A friend.”
“How can I believe that you’re telling me the truth?”
Samuel gazed down at the gleaming weapon in his lap. He ran adoring fingers over its curves.
“I am the Seeker of Truth. You have a spell that has taken your memory. I have a friend who can help you recover your past, recover yourself.”
Kahlan’s heart pounded with the abruptly unexpected
prospect of having her memory back. All of her other questions seemed suddenly insignificant.
Samuel had never told her that he was the Seeker of Truth. She didn’t know what the Seeker of Truth was, but she had seen the word
TRUTH
in gold wire woven through the silver wire of the hilt. It seemed an odd title for someone so reluctant to offer any information about anything.
“When will I meet this person?”
“Soon. She is close.”
“How do you know?”
Samuel looked up. His yellow eyes stared at her, looking like twin lanterns in the darkness.
“I can feel her. You must stay if you want to recover your past.”
Kahlan thought about Richard with those strange symbols painted all over him. That was the past she was really interested in. She wanted to know her connection to that man with the gray eyes.
Richard knew that it was his only chance.
Darkness unlike anything he had ever known pressed in all around him. It was suffocating, terrifying, crushing.
Denna tried to protect him, but even she had no power to stop such a thing. No one did.
“You can’t,”
came Denna’s whispering voice in his mind.
“This is a place of nothing. You can’t do that.”
Richard knew that it was his only chance.
“I have to try.”
“If you do that, you will be naked to this place. Your protection will be stripped from you. You will not be able to be here any longer.”
“I’ve done what I must.”
“But you will not be able to find your way back.”
Richard cried out in agony. The protective structure of the spell-forms that he had created was being shredded.
The blackness all around was seeping in and crushing the life from him. This was a place that did not tolerate life. This was a place that existed to draw life itself away into the dark eternity of nothing.
The beast had followed him into that void of the underworld, and now it had him trapped in its own domain.
Finding his way back was no longer what concerned him. That option was already lost to him. His connection to the entry point was gone, broken away by the beast as it tore apart the fabric of the protective spells. There was no way back to the Garden of Life, no way to find something in the middle of nothing.
Now escape was all that mattered.
The beast was a thing created of Subtractive Magic and it was in a Subtractive world. Richard was caught in its lair.