Wizard's First Rule (4 page)

Richard swallowed hard.

He tried to sound sure of himself. “We will both be passing.” His heart felt as if it were coming up into his throat.

“Not this day,” the leader said with finality. He pulled free a wicked-looking curved knife.

The man to his side pulled a short sword clear of the scabbard strapped across his back. With a depraved grin, he drew it across the inside of his muscled forearm, staining the blade red. From behind, Richard could hear the ring of steel being drawn. He was paralyzed with fear. This was all happening too fast. They had no chance. None.

For a brief moment no one moved. Richard flinched when the four gave the howling battle cries of men prepared to die in mortal combat. They charged in a frightening rush. The one with the short sword swung it high, coming at Richard. He could hear one of the men behind him grab the woman as the man with the sword raced toward him.

And then, just before the man reached him, there was a hard impact to the air, like a clap of thunder with no sound. The violence of it made every joint in his body cry out in sharp pain. Dust lifted around them, spreading outward in a ring.

The man with the sword felt the pain of it, too, and for an instant his attention was diverted past Richard, to the woman. As he came crashing forward, Richard fell back against the wall and with both feet hit the man square in the chest as hard
as he could. It knocked him clear of the path, into midair. The man’s eyes went wide in surprise as he dropped backward to the rocks below, the sword still held over his head in both hands.

To Richard’s shock, he saw one of the other two men from behind him falling through space, too, his chest ripped and bloody. Before Richard could give it a thought, the leader with the curved knife charged past, intent on the woman. He hammered the heel of his free hand into the center of Richard’s chest. The jolt knocked the wind out of him and flung him hard against the wall, smacking his head against the rock. As he fought to remain conscious, his only thought was that he had to stop the man from getting to her.

Summoning strength he didn’t know he had, Richard snatched the leader by his husky wrist and spun him around. The knife came around in an arc toward him. The blade flashed in the sunlight. There was a savage hunger in the man’s blue eyes. Richard had never been so afraid in his life.

In that instant he knew he was about to die.

Seemingly from out of nowhere, the last man, with a short sword covered in gore, smashed into the leader, driving his sword through the other’s gut, slamming the wind out of him. The collision was so fierce it carried both over the side of the cliff. All the way down the last man howled in a cry of rage that ended only when they met the boulders below.

Richard stood stunned, staring over the edge. Reluctantly he turned to the woman, afraid to look, terrified he would see her gashed open and lifeless. Instead, she was sitting on the ground, leaning against the cliff wall, looking drained but unhurt. Her face had a faraway look. It was all over so fast he couldn’t understand what had happened or how. Richard and the woman were alone in the sudden silence.

He slumped down beside her on rock warm from the sun. He had a powerful headache from having his head whacked on the wall. Richard could see she was all right, so he didn’t ask. He felt too overwhelmed to talk and could sense the same in her. She noticed blood on the back of her hand and wiped it off on the wall, adding it to the red splatters already there. Richard thought he might throw up.

He couldn’t believe they were alive. It didn’t seem possible. What was the thunder without sound? And the pain he felt when it had happened? He had never felt anything like it before. He shuddered recalling it. Whatever it was, she had something to do with it, and it had saved his life. Something unearthly had occurred, and he wasn’t at all sure he wanted to know what it was.

She leaned her head back against the rock, rolling it to the side, toward him. “I don’t even know your name. I wanted to ask before, but I was afraid to talk.” She vaguely indicated the drop-off. “I was so frightened of them…. I didn’t want them to find us.”

He thought maybe she was about to cry and looked over at her. She wasn’t, but he felt that he might. He nodded his understanding of what she said about the men.

“My name is Richard Cypher.”

Her green eyes studied his as he looked over at her, the light breeze carrying some wisps of hair across her face.

She smiled. “There are not many who would have stood with me.” He found
her voice as attractive as the rest of her. It matched the spark of intelligence in her eyes. It almost took his breath away. “You are a very rare person, Richard Cypher.”

To his intense displeasure Richard felt his face flush. She looked away, pulling the strands of hair off her face, and pretended not to notice his blushing.

“I am…” She sounded as if she was going to say something she then thought better of. She turned back to him. “I am Kahlan. My family name is Amnell.”

He looked into her eyes a long moment. “You too are a very rare person, Kahlan Amnell. There are not many who would have stood as you did.”

She did not blush, but gave him another smile. It was an odd sort of smile, a special smile, not showing any teeth, but with her lips pressed together, as one would when taking another into one’s confidence. Her eyes sparkled with it. It was a smile of sharing.

Richard reached behind, felt the painful lump on the back of his head, and checked his fingers for blood. There was none, though he thought that by all rights there should have been. He looked back at her, again wondering what had happened, wondering what she had done, and how she had done it. There was that thunder with no sound, and he had knocked one of the men off the cliff; one of the two behind him had killed the other instead of her, and then killed the leader and himself.

“Well, Kahlan, my friend, can you tell me how it is that we are alive and those four men are not?”

She looked at him in surprise. “Do you mean that?”

“Mean what?”

She hesitated. “‘Friend.’”

Richard shrugged. “Sure. You just said I stood with you. That’s the kind of thing a friend does, isn’t it?” He gave her a smile.

Kahlan turned away. “I don’t know.” She fingered the sleeve of her dress as she looked down. “I have never had a friend before. Except maybe my sister….”

He felt the pain in her voice. “Well, you have one now,” he said in his most cheerful tone. “After all, we just went through something pretty frightening together. We helped each other, and we survived.”

She simply nodded. Richard looked out over the Ven, the forests where he was so at home. Sunlight made the green of the trees vibrant, lush. His eyes were drawn to the left, to spots of brown, the dead and dying trees that stood out among their healthy neighbors. Until that morning, when he found the vine and it bit him, he had had no idea that the vine was up by the boundary, spreading through the woods. He rarely went up into the Ven, that close to the boundary. Older people wouldn’t go within miles of it. Others went closer, if they traveled on Hawkers Trail, or to hunt, but none went too close. The boundary was death. It was said that to go into the boundary was not only to die but to forfeit your soul. The boundary wardens made sure people stayed away.

He gave her a sideways glance. “So what about the other part? The part about us being alive. How did that happen?”

Kahlan didn’t meet his gaze. “I think the good spirits protected us.”

Richard didn’t believe a word of it. But as much as he wanted to know the answers, it was against his nature to force someone to tell something she didn’t want to. His father had raised him to respect another person’s right to keep his own
secrets. In her own time she would tell him her secrets, if she wanted to, but he would not try to force her.

Everyone had secrets; he certainly had his own. In fact, with his father’s murder and with today’s events he felt those secrets stirring unpleasantly in the back of his mind.

“Kahlan,” he said, trying to make his voice sound reassuring, “being a friend means you don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to, and I’ll still be your friend.”

She didn’t look at him, but nodded her agreement.

Richard got to his feet. His head hurt, his hand hurt, and now he realized his chest hurt where the man had hit him. To top it off he remembered he was hungry. Michael! He had forgotten about his brother’s party. He looked at the sun and knew he was going to be late. He hoped he wouldn’t miss Michael’s speech. He would take Kahlan, tell Michael about the men, and get some protection for her.

He held out his hand to help her up. She stared at it in surprise. He continued to hold it out for her. She gazed up into his eyes, and took the hand.

Richard smiled. “Never had a friend give you a hand up before?”

She averted her eyes. “No.”

Richard could tell she felt uncomfortable, so he changed the subject.

“When’s the last time you had something to eat?”

“Two days ago,” she said without emotion.

His eyebrows went up. “Then you must be even more hungry than I am. I’ll take you to my brother.” He peered over the edge of the cliff. “We’ll have to tell him about the bodies. He’ll know what to do.” He turned again to her. “Kahlan, do you know who those men were?”

Her green eyes turned hard. “They are called a quad. They are, well, they are like assassins. They are sent to kill…” She caught herself again. “They kill people.” Her face regained the calm countenance it had when he first saw her. “I think that maybe the fewer people who know about me, the safer I will be.”

Richard was startled; he had never heard of anything like this. He ran his fingers through his hair, trying to think. Dark, shadowy thoughts started to swirl again. For some reason, he was terrified of what she might say, but had to ask.

He looked hard into her eyes, expecting the truth this time. “Kahlan, where did the quad come from?”

She studied his face a moment. “They must have tracked me out of the Midlands, and through the boundary.”

Richard’s skin went cold, and prickles bumped up along his arms in a wave that rolled up to the back of his neck, making the fine hairs there stand stiffly out. An anger deep within him awakened and his secrets stirred.

She had to be lying. No one could cross the boundary.

No one.

No one could go into or come out of the Midlands. The boundary had sealed it away since before he was born.

The Midlands was a land of magic.

Michael’s house was a massive structure of white stone, set back quite a distance from the road. Slate roofs in a variety of angles and rakes came together in complicated junctures topped with a leaded-glass peak that let light into the central hall. The walkway to the house was shaded from the bright afternoon sun by towering white oaks as it passed through sweeping stretches of lawn before coming to formal gardens laid in symmetrical patterns to each side. The gardens were in full bloom. Since it was so late in the year, Richard knew the flowers had to have been raised in greenhouses just for the occasion.

People in fine clothes strolled the lawns and gardens, making Richard feel suddenly out of place. He knew he must look a mess in his dirty, sweat-stained forest garb, but he hadn’t wanted to waste the time going out of his way to his house to get cleaned up. Besides, he was in a dark mood and didn’t much care how he looked. He had more important things on his mind.

Kahlan, on the other hand, didn’t look so out of place. The unusual but striking dress she wore belied the fact that she, too, had just walked out of the woods. Considering how much blood there had been up on Blunt Cliff, he was surprised that she didn’t have any on her. She had somehow managed to stay clear while the men killed each other.

When she had seen how upset he had become when she had told him she had come through the boundary from the Midlands, she had fallen silent on the subject. Richard needed time to think about it, and hadn’t pressed. Instead she asked him about Westland, what the people were like and where he lived. He told her about his house in the woods, how he liked living away from town, and that he was a guide for travelers through the Hartland Woods on their way to or from the town itself.

“Does your house have a fireplace?” she had asked.

“It does.”

“Do you use it?”

“Yes, I cook on it all the time,” he had told her. “Why?”

She had merely shrugged as she looked off to the countryside. “I just miss sitting in front of a fire, that’s all.”

As unsettling as the day’s events had been, on top of his grief, it felt good to have someone to talk to, even if she did dance around her secrets.

“Invitation, sir?” someone called in a deep voice from the shade beside the entry.

Invitation? Richard spun around to see who had addressed him and was met by a mischievous grin. Richard broke into a grin of his own. It was his friend Chase. He clasped hands with the boundary warden in a warm greeting.

Chase was a big man, clean-shaven, with a head of light brown hair that showed no sign of receding but instead gave way to age by going gray at the sides. Heavy brows shaded intense brown eyes that stole slowly about, even as he talked, and saw everything. This habit often gave people the impression—a seriously mistaken impression—that he wasn’t paying attention. Despite his size Richard knew him to be frighteningly quick when there was need. Chase wore a brace of knives to one side of his belt, and a six-bladed battle mace to the other. The hilt of a short sword stood above his right shoulder, and a crossbow with a full complement of barbed, steel-tipped bolts hung from a leather strap on his left.