“I can’t Richard. You’ve taught me to embrace life.”
Chapter 49
The heavy paneled door opened partway. Rikka stuck her head into the silent room. “Someone is coming.”
Nicci pushed her padded chair away from the polished library table. “Coming?”
“Up toward the Keep.”
“Do you know who?” she asked as she stood.
Rikka shook her head. “Zedd just told me that the shields warned him that someone was on their way up the road. He thought you ought to know. I tell you, all the magic flying around in this place makes my skin crawl.”
“I’ll go find Richard.”
Rikka nodded before vanishing out of the doorway. Nicci quickly returned the book she had been studying to its slot in the vast expanse of mahogany shelves that filled the quiet library. The book was a tedious report on activities in the Keep during the great war. Nicci found it rather strange, reading about all the people who had once lived in the Wizard’s Keep thousands of years ago. It seemed a disconnected history except when she intermittently reminded herself that they were talking about the very place where she was. She considered how, in contrast, the Palace of the Prophets had been so full of life and activity for so long. Nicci couldn’t imagine the Palace of the Prophets empty of all but a few souls, and the Keep was vastly larger. Of course, now the palace was no more while the Keep still stood.
Nicci hadn’t really been interested in the book she’d been reading. It was boring but she didn’t really care. It was merely something to occupy her time. She couldn’t force herself to concentrate on anything that would be absorbing or that would require her to put any great effort into thinking. She was too distracted.
The new moon at the time they had dug up the grave of the Mother Confessor had grown to a full moon and was now approaching its last quarter again, and yet nothing much had changed. A few days after digging up the body, Zedd had told Richard that he loved him and was sorry to have been so hard on him when maybe he should have found out a little more before saying the things he’d said. Zedd promised that they would figure out a way to get Richard’s sword back and everything would be all right.
It might have been sincere, and it might have been true, but for Richard the hurt of such a personal failure was hard to put back into the bottle. He had not just disappointed and angered his grandfather; he had failed to prove his dream was in fact the truth. He had put everything he had into the effort. He had been certain and in the end he had only proved himself wrong.
Richard had only nodded to Zedd’s words. Nicci didn’t think it mattered much to him either way if Zedd had softened his viewpoint. He had reached the end of his ideas, his hopes, and his efforts. Nothing had helped him. After that night, the life had gone out of him.
Zedd had interrogated Cara and Nicci for hours that first night. Nicci had been stunned to hear from Cara what Shota had said about the beast becoming a blood beast because Nicci had inadvertently given it the measure of Richard’s ancestral blood. She was horrified to learn that she had been responsible for intensifying the danger to Richard.
While astonished at how Nicci had accomplished saving Richard’s life, Zedd had quietly assured her that had she not acted, Richard would most certainly have died right then and there. He said that she had given Richard a chance at life, and now they could work to solve the problem of the beast Jagang’s Sisters had created, as well as Richard’s strange delusions and the matter of recovering his sword. From what Shota had revealed about the beast, on top of what Nicci already knew, it didn’t look to Nicci that they had much of a chance of success. She had no idea at all of how to even begin to destroy such a beast spawned of dark powers.
She had also been embarrassed to hear Cara telling about how Shota had revealed to Richard Cara’s plan for Nicci to interest Richard romantically. Zedd, thankfully, had withheld any comments on that part of Cara’s story.
That, among other things, had left Nicci feeling rather hopeless—and helpless. The Imperial Order was rampaging unchecked through the New World, the beast was stalking Richard, and he was not himself, to say the least.
In some ways, it reminded her of her dead attitude toward life, back before Richard. She had been taught that she had been born lucky in every way, and because she had ability it was her duty to devote herself to those in need. No matter how hard she worked, the needs always outpaced her ability to meet them, leaving her perpetually in debt to the ever worsening lives of others while her own life was not her own. Her feeling about what was happening now with the beast and Richard’s delusions were different in almost every way, except they were the same in that they gave her that familiar feeling of hollow hopelessness.
Richard had spent the long days, since opening the grave and discovering the truth, off by himself—with the exception that Cara, after answering all of Zedd’s tedious questions about everything she knew about what had happened with Shota, refused to leave Richard’s side for any reason. Since Richard was in no mood to talk to anyone, Cara had become his silent shadow.
It was strange seeing the two of them together, totally at ease with each other even at such a time. It didn’t seem to Nicci like the two of them even needed to speak, yet they managed, with a look, a slight shrug, or a nothing at all, to all the time understand each other.
Nicci felt like an unwelcome outsider to his misery and so she let him be. She remained as close as she could, so that she would be at hand should the beast attack, but she stayed out of his sight and left him to his solitude.
The first four or five days after arriving at the Keep Richard had spent in the Confessors’ Palace—wandering the magnificent rooms and vast network of halls. Nicci stayed in a guest room in the palace, out of sight, while Richard roamed aimlessly about the empty place. After that, he’d gone out and wandered the city of Aydindril for a half-dozen days, walking the streets and alleys as if reliving the life that had once been there. It was a lot more difficult for Nicci to stay close to him when he walked all day long through the city. After that he had spent yet more days wandering the forests of the mountains around Aydindril, sometimes not even returning at night. Richard was at home in the woods, so Nicci had decided not to follow him, knowing how difficult it would have been for her to keep Richard from knowing she was there. She was comforted somewhat by her connection of magic with him that allowed her always to be aware of what direction he was and roughly how far way. When he didn’t come back at night, though, Nicci paced, unable to sleep.
Zedd finally asked Richard to please remain at the Keep so that in case the beast were to attack, Zedd and Nicci could help stop it. Richard had done as he’d been asked without comment or objection. He’d spent recent days, instead of wandering the palace, or the city, or the woods, wandering the outer ramparts of the Keep, staring off into the distance.
Nicci desperately wanted to do something to help him, but Zedd had insisted that there was nothing to do but wait and see if time would begin to bring him around to the reality that he had only dreamed up his relationship with Kahlan during the time he had been unconscious. In this, Nicci didn’t really think time would solve anything. She’d been with Richard long enough to realize that this was something bigger. She believed that he needed some kind of help, but she didn’t know what that help could possibly be.
Nicci hurried down the wood-paneled hall outside the library, her feet swishing across thick carpets. She rushed up through the maze of stairwells and passageways, using her sense of her gifted connection with Richard to guide her, letting that thread of magic take her where it may, rather than trying to deliberately remember and find her way through the Keep.
As she made her way ever closer to him, she reminisced about the kiss she had given him to link them so that she could find him. She felt rather guilty about that kiss, even if it had been achingly wonderful to do it. It had been far more than she needed to do. She could have simply touched a finger to the back of his hand, or a shoulder, and es
tablished a link without him feeling a thing.
But Cara had just been telling her how maybe she needed to make him more aware of her and filled her mind with heady thoughts of the possibilities. That kiss would certainly have planted her firmly in his thoughts. In a way, though, she felt it was too forward, considering his mental state; he was in love with someone else, even if it was a dream, and Nicci hadn’t respected that. She regretted, in a way, giving him that kiss. In another way, she wished she had planted it on his lips instead of his cheek.
As Shota had done.
It burned her to hear Cara telling them how Shota had kissed him and tried to get him to stay with her. Nicci knew how the witch woman felt—but that didn’t make her any happier about it.
Nicci would give anything to be able to hold him, now, to comfort him, to tell him that it would be all right for no other reason than simply to try to make him feel just a little better, to reassure him that there were others around who cared about him.
But she knew that this was not the time or circumstances for such things.
At the same time, she knew that this could not continue. He simply could not go on like this. His life could not stay in this static state, drifting without his conscious direction. He had to come to his senses.
Nicci hurried onward, quickening her pace, down the endless maze of halls and through empty but grand rooms, suddenly feeling, for some reason, the urgent need to be with him.
Richard stood at the brink of the wall, an arm resting on a massive merlon to each side, as he stared out through the crenellation. It felt like standing at the edge of the world. Gray patches of shade drifted slowly over the hills and fields far below as their mothering clouds shepherded them along.
He seemed to have lost all track of time. Every day had become the same monotonous, pointless, empty existence. He didn’t even know how long he had been standing at the gap in the wall, staring out at nothing in particular.
With Kahlan dead and gone, nothing mattered anymore. He had trouble imagining why it ever had. He couldn’t even imagine for sure, now, that she had ever been real.
But whether or not she had been, it was over.
Cara was close. She was always close. In a way it was comforting, knowing that he could depend on her for anything. In some ways, though, it was wearing to have her always there, so that he was never able to have a moment’s privacy.
He wondered if she believed she was close enough to snatch him if he jumped.
He knew that she wasn’t.
He gazed at the tiny little roofs crowded together in the city of Aydindril far below. In a way, he felt an affinity for the city. It was empty. He was empty. Life was gone from both of them.
Since digging up the grave—he couldn’t bring himself to call it Kahlan’s grave, even in his own mind, much less out loud—he didn’t think there was anything worth being alive for, anymore. If a person could die by sheer will alone, he would already be dead, but death, when invited, had suddenly grown shy. The days dragged endlessly on.
He had been so stunned by that grave that it seemed his mind had been scrambled on the spot. It felt like he had lost his ability to think. Nothing he knew made sense to him. The things he’d thought were true somehow no longer were. His whole world had been turned upside down. How could he function if he couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t?
He didn’t know what else to do. For the first time in his life, he was baffled and defeated by the way things were. He always seemed to have a variety of options that he knew he could try. Now, he didn’t. He had tried everything he could think of. None of it worked. He was at the end of his rope, and there was none left.
And all the time, in his mind, he kept seeing her body in the coffin.
He saw, he heard, he felt, but he could not think, could not put anything together in a meaningful way. It was a walking, living, imitation of death—a poor one, he believed. What good was living if it felt this way? He longed only for that dark, forever embrace of nothingness to take him.
He was so far beyond hurt, beyond sadness, beyond grief, that there was only an unthinking, empty, blind, confused agony that never for a second would release him enough to get a breath. He wanted desperately to escape the truth, to refuse to allow it to be real, but he couldn’t and it was suffocating him.
The wind coming up the mountain ruffled his hair as he stared out over a precipitous drop of thousands of feet.
What good was he to anyone? He’d let Zedd down. He’d given Shota the Sword of Truth for nothing of value. Nicci thought he was out of his mind, that he was delusional. Not even Cara believed him, really believed him. He was the only one who believed him, and he had proved himself wrong by digging up her grave.
He guessed he must be crazy, that Nicci had to be right. Everyone was right. He could only be imagining things. He could see it in all their eyes the way they looked at him, that he had lost his mind.
Richard gazed down the sheer drop of the dark stones of the massive outer Keep wall. They fell away below him for thousands of feet toward the rock and forest below. Gusts of wind coming up the face of the wall buffeted him. It was a dizzying sight. A dizzying drop.
What good was he to anyone, most of all to himself?
He stole a sidelong glance at Cara. She was close, but not nearly close enough.
Richard didn’t see any reason to continue the agony. He didn’t have his mind, and his mind was life.
He didn’t have Kahlan. She was his life.
From what everyone told him, from what he saw in the coffin that terrible night, he never had her. It was all just a mad delusion. A wish. A whim.
He glanced down again at the forever drop off the towering wall on the side of the keep, at the rocks and trees spread out below. It was a very, very long way down.
He recalled people saying that just before you died you relived your life.
If he were to relive his life, he would relive every precious moment he’d had with Kahlan.
Or thought he’d had.
It was a long way down.
A long time to relive such wonderful, romantic, loving times. A long time to relive every precious moment he’d spent with her.
Chapter 50
Nicci opened an iron-strapped oak door to bright daylight. Puffy white clouds skimmed by just overhead in a sparkling azure sky that on any other day would have lifted her spirits. A fresh breeze carried her hair across her face. She pulled it away as she gazed down the narrow bridge to a rampart in the distance. Richard stood beyond the end of the bridge, at the far wall of the rampart, in the gap of the crenellation, looking down the mountain. Cara, nearby, turned when she heard the door.
Nicci hurried across the bridge above courtyards far below. She could see several stone benches down among the rose garden at the bottom of a tower and juncture of several walls. When she finally reached Richard’s side he glanced over, giving her a brief, small smile. It warmed her to see it even though she knew the smile was little more than a polite formality.
“Rikka came and told me that someone approaches the Keep. I thought I should come and get you.”
Cara, standing only three strides away, stepped a little closer. “Does Rikka know who it is?”
Nicci shook her head. “I’m afraid not, and I’m more than a little worried.”
Without moving or taking his eyes from the distant countryside, Richard said “It’s Ann and Nathan.”
Nicci’s eyebrows lifted in surprise. She looked over the edge. Richard pointed them out far below on the road that wound its way up the mountain toward the Keep.
“There are three riders,” Nicci said.
Richard nodded. “It looks like it might be Tom with them.”
Nicci leaned out a little farther past Richard and peered down the face of the stone wall. It was a frightening drop. The feeling came over her that she didn’t at all like where he was standing.
With a hand on his shoulder to steady herself, Nicci looked out again
at the three horses plodding their way up the sunlit road. They briefly disappeared under trees only to emerge a moment later as they continued steadily up toward the Keep.
A gust of wind suddenly threatened to unbalance her from her footing in the slot in the immense stone wall. Before it could, Richard’s arm around her waist steadied her. She instinctively drew back from the edge. Once she was on safe footing, his protective arm released her.
“You can tell for sure, from here, that it’s Ann and Nathan?” she asked.
“Yes.”
Nicci wasn’t especially enthusiastic about seeing the Prelate again. As a Sister of the Light and having lived at the Palace of the Prophets for most of her life, Nicci had had just about all she wanted of the Sisters and their leader. In many ways the Prelate was a mother figure to her, as she had been to all the Sisters, someone who was there to remind them whenever they were a disappointment and lecture them that they had to redouble their efforts to help others in need.
When she had been young, should self-interest ever rear its ugly head, Nicci’s mother had always been at the ready to bitterly slap it down. Later in Nicci’s life the Prelate served in that same capacity, if with a kindly smile. Slap or smile, it was the same thing: servitude, even if under a nicer name.
Nathan Rahl was another matter. She didn’t really know the prophet. There were Sisters, and novices especially, who trembled at the mere mention of his name. From what everyone always said, though, he was not simply dangerous but possibly deranged, which, if true, had disturbing implications for Richard’s present condition.
The prophet had been held in secure quarters almost his entire life, the Sisters seeing not only to his needs but seeing to it that he never escaped. People in the city of Tanimura, where the palace had been, were both titillated and terrified of the prophet, of what he might tell them of the future. Whispers were, among the people of the city, that he was most surely wicked, since he could tell them things about their future. Ability tended to arouse the ire of a great many people, especially when that ability was not one that could easily be made to serve their wants.
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