“But on the other hand, being around for you and Kahlan makes it all worthwhile.”
Richard felt a little better. “That’s good to hear.”
Zedd put a hand on Richard’s shoulder as he leaned closer in the moonlight. “You make life worthwhile for me, Richard. You always have. In a way, I no longer live for myself, but instead for you and Kahlan. I think that maybe that’s a wonderful way to live—to have something meaningful to live for.” He cocked his head. “Isn’t it Kahlan who makes you fight for life? Think of life without her, and you will see what I mean, and see what you are really living for.”
Richard nodded. “That’s certainly true.” He looked down at Kahlan not far away as she pulled the blanket up, ready for him to crawl in beside her and keep her warm. “I can’t imagine life without her. I wouldn’t want to live without her.”
Zedd gave a firm nod. “That’s what I mean, Richard. That, and I’m perfectly happy to stick around to help you keep from falling on your face. Someone has to.”
Richard let out a deep breath as he nodded. “Good. I love you, you know.”
“I know. I love you too, my boy.” He gestured to Kahlan. “Now go get some sleep. I’ll be right here nearby if either of you needs anything—and I’ll be with you for a good long time to come. I’m not too old to be of use, you know.
“Soon we will free you of that sickness and then you can decide what you want to do. Either way—quit and go off to live your own lives, or continue to fight—I will still love you and support you in whatever you do. I know you will make the right choice, your own choice. As Magda Searus said, you make your own destiny.”
“Thanks, Zedd. I guess we’ve had quite the adventure since we left Hartland.”
“Quite the adventure, indeed. And it hasn’t been all bad. There have been a lot of good times along the way.”
“I’m all for the adventure being over, though,” Richard told his grandfather.
Zedd smiled. “That’s my wish, too. Now, get some rest. I don’t want to have you going unconscious on me again before I can heal you. The last time was a bother.”
“You can really heal us, though, right?”
Zedd stood up straight and looked Richard in the eye. “In a containment field, yes, of course. You have no need to doubt that, Richard. Now let me go so I can get some rest.”
“Sure. Rest well, then.”
The wizard looked around at the woods. “This really is a beautiful place. It’s important to take in beauty whenever you can, my boy. This is a good place for a rest. And then tomorrow we need to be on our way to get to where we can heal you.”
Richard smiled and gave his grandfather a nod before he went back and crawled into the blanket beside Kahlan. As he turned on his side, she spooned up against him.
“Everything all right?” she asked. “With Zedd, I mean.”
“He wants us to get some sleep.”
Kahlan squeezed her arm around his middle. “I’m all for that.”
As she snuggled close for warmth and simply to be close, Richard watched out over the camp. Nicci, Irena, and Samantha were already wrapped in their blankets, breathing evenly and slowly, as were most of the men.
Richard watched them all, worrying about them all, afraid to go to sleep lest he never wake.
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Richard woke sometime in the night when Zedd rose up. He had been sleeping fitfully because he was worried about a whole variety of things. There were a lot of problems but not very many solutions, other than getting to the citadel. He had also been sleeping lightly because he was on alert, so Zedd standing up was enough to wake him.
In the moonlight he could see his grandfather take the blanket off from around his shoulders, lay it down, and then stretch to one side. He yawned and after stretching to the other side he carefully tiptoed among a sleeping Nicci, Irena, Samantha, and some of the soldiers. Richard knew that while Zedd usually slept well, he sometimes said that his bones ached, and it was not uncommon for him to get up in the night for a while to “walk the kinks out,” as he put it.
Something about the night felt strange to Richard. Even the perfectly still woods they were camped in felt somehow peculiar, somehow unnatural. He saw that the moon had moved across the sky, so he knew that it was not long until dawn. As soon as there was enough light, they could all be on their way.
Once Zedd had disappeared beyond a screen of young spruce and Richard couldn’t see him anymore, he rolled over onto his back and gazed down at Kahlan. In her sleep, she rearranged herself and snuggled up under his arm. It made him smile to watch her sleep. It was a picture of perfect innocence. Richard gently ran a hand down the side of her face, thinking about how much he loved her, how he would do anything for her. It made him angry to think of anyone harming her.
Once he started to worry about her safety, he couldn’t go back to sleep. Something was wrong and he could not for the life of him put his finger on it.
As long as he was awake and couldn’t sleep, he pushed himself back to sit up a little so he could scan the woods, looking for anything out of place. Not a leaf stirred in the dead air. He didn’t hear any night birds, or even any bugs. It was perfectly quiet in the woods all around them. He watched everyone sleeping, his gaze going from one soldier to another, checking. No one stirred as they slept. He was at least glad that the rest of them were able to get some sleep. Zedd was the only one out of his bedroll besides men on watch somewhere out among the trees.
At one point, as he dozed off into a light sleep, Richard heard an odd, muted thump, but the woods otherwise remained still. Waking instantly, he cocked his head, listening, waiting for it to happen again so he could better tell what it was, but the woods remained silent. He thought that it might have been a big pinecone dropping to the soft mat of the forest floor. Those sometimes made a thump that jarred him awake on really quiet nights.
Richard slid back down to lie beside Kahlan for a time. He knew he should get some sleep, but he seemed too on edge to sleep. Every time he closed his eyes, they kept coming open. He took every opportunity, when they did, to watch out over the camp, visually checking on Nicci, Irena, Samantha, and the men. None of them had stirred, and no one in camp besides him appeared to have been awakened by the soft thump.
In the moonlight, Richard spotted a dark form in the distance moving through the encampment. He soon realized that it was Commander Fister making his way among the sleeping men. By the way the man was walking, Richard recognized that he had an urgent purpose.
Richard sat up, frowning, as the commander came close and dropped to a knee beside him. Even in the moonlight, Richard could see that the man’s face was white.
Richard checked and noticed that Zedd was not back, yet.
He looked back at Commander Fister. “What is it?”
Kahlan woke up and sat up in a rush beside Richard. “What’s wrong?” she asked in a whisper.
The commander couldn’t seem to find his voice.
“What’s wrong?” Richard asked again, more forcefully.
“It’s … it’s Zedd.”
Richard frowned as he looked over at his grandfather’s empty bedroll. “What about Zedd?” He looked around, checking the camp. “Where is he?”
Commander Fister swallowed. He stood and gestured weakly off in the direction Richard had last seen his grandfather.
Richard shot to his feet. In a heartbeat, Kahlan was up beside him.
Richard could see that the man still couldn’t find words. “Show me.”
Men were already starting to stir, to sit up, as the commander nodded. He turned to the camp and shouted.
“Everyone up! Weapons!”
Men rushed to scramble out of bedrolls as they snatched up swords, axes, and bows.
Commander Fister stared urgently across the camp as men with their weapons to hand went into defensive positions. The commander, Kahlan, and Richard stepped between Nicci, Irena, and Samantha as they rolled over, rubbi
ng sleep from their eyes while rushing to get to their feet.
Samantha looked up at the men all around standing with weapons drawn. “What is it?” she asked.
No one answered as they all hurried to follow the commander.
Predawn mist drifted close to the ground. Richard and Kahlan followed the hulking form of the commander as he rushed across the small camp and then through the screen of young spruce. He continued on a short distance through the woods beyond to a small, moonlit spot that was open, with trees standing like sentinels all around.
Lit by a small patch of moonlight, under a fine shroud of mist, Zedd lay on his back in the bed of moss.
Richard blinked. Kahlan, right beside him, gasped.
His grandfather’s head rested a half dozen feet away among the ferns.
The whole scene looked so peaceful, so restful, so calm.
Richard blinked again, at first not really understanding what he was seeing—or not wanting to.
The reality of what he was seeing filled his mind in a hot rush.
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The next instant, Richard pulled his sword free from its scabbard, its fury already fully alive the instant his hand had reached the hilt.
It only took a couple of heartbeats after the sound of steel filled the quiet night before the entire force of the First File had rushed in through the woods around them.
Richard stood panting, trying to find a direction for his rage. He scanned the moonlit scene, hunting for a cause, a threat, an explanation. He saw nothing out of the ordinary other than his grandfather lying beheaded in the middle of a soft, moonlit bed of moss surrounded by small, wispy ferns.
In the next heartbeat, Samantha cried out in horror. Her mother stared in disbelief, both hands covering her open mouth.
Nicci, standing beside him, briefly looked at Richard’s face before rushing to kneel beside Zedd’s body.
“How could this happen?” Richard asked no one in particular. “Who could have done this? We had watches posted!”
His own booming voice echoed back to him out of the silent woods. He could see nothing out of the ordinary. The only blood he could see was on Zedd.
Men were already racing off in every direction, searching for the killer, shamed that someone had gotten through their defenses. The men of the First File did not make these kinds of mistakes.
One by one, the men returned, each giving the commander a shake of his head, none of them wanting to look at Richard.
“Tracks?” the commander asked his men, looking from one to another.
One of them gestured off toward the woods. “Some of us came through here earlier to check the area and we saw those tracks, but no one other than us has been through here. There aren’t any tracks out beyond, either. We can’t find any evidence of anyone coming into this area from outside. They had to have snuck in through the camp. That’s the only way.”
“Unless they were hiding here the whole time we set up camp,” Commander Fister said, “waiting for someone important to pass by. Maybe they slipped away after they did this.”
Richard didn’t know that such an explanation made any sense—unless they were being followed. Other than the animal Kahlan had named Hunter, he hadn’t seen anyone or anything watching them. He supposed they could have used occult powers to mask themselves as they shadowed the group. Other than that, he was having trouble understanding how it could have happened. With a thousand thoughts tumbling through his mind all at once, he couldn’t think clearly.
No matter how they did it, there was no doubt that the camp had been penetrated by a killer.
The way Richard’s heart pounded with rage also made it difficult to think. He needed a direction for that bottled fury, but couldn’t find one.
He watched, tears running down his face, as Nicci gently lifted Zedd’s head and brought it back, placing it by his body so that the old wizard almost looked right again.
Richard dropped to his knees beside Nicci, staring down at his grandfather. Zedd’s dead hazel eyes stared up at the dark sky. Kahlan knelt beside him, one hand on Richard’s shoulder as she cried, holding her other trembling hand over her mouth, holding back the scream.
Richard, noting men return and whisper reports to Commander Fister, finally looked up at the man. “Anything? Did the men find anything at all?” His own voice sounded distant and wooden to him, as if it belonged to someone else.
“I’m sorry, Lord Rahl. Other than this,” he said with a nod toward Zedd’s corpse, “nothing looks wrong or out of the ordinary.”
“How could this happen right here, right under our noses? How could we not know, not see anything, not hear anything?”
Richard remembered, then, the soft thump he’d heard. He realized then what he had heard hitting the mossy ground.
“I wish I had an answer for you, Lord Rahl,” Commander Fister said in little more than a sorrowful whisper.
“I told you,” Irena said in a quiet voice, “things like this are common in the Dark Lands. There are dangers here that no one knows about.”
Richard wasn’t in the mood to talk about the dangers of the Dark Lands. He stood up, then, his mind racing, his heart hammering, his fist clenched around the hilt of his sword. He forced himself to cap off his emotion. He couldn’t let those emotions free. None of them could afford for him to lose control right then.
He could hear his own voice inside his head, telling himself to think. It felt like he was somewhere above, watching himself standing there in the little clearing lit by moonlight, looking down on Zedd’s body.
No one knew what to do, what Richard would do. They were afraid to move, afraid to do anything. They all waited for him to give everyone direction.
Richard swallowed and cleared his throat, making sure his voice would not fail him. “We can’t carry his remains with us to Saavedra,” he said, his own voice sounding surprisingly calm. “There would be no point to it. Zedd didn’t know the place. It would have meant nothing to him.”
Kahlan still knelt, bent over Zedd’s chest, her face buried in her hands as she wept. Zedd had been the wizard she had come through the boundary to find. He had been “the one.” Everyone had needed him. She had come to pull him away from his peaceful life in Westland and back into a world ablaze with war. They had all needed the First Wizard so he could name a Seeker. They needed the First Wizard to set things right.
Richard knew what else was going through her mind at that moment—the same memory that was going through his thoughts—Zedd marrying the two of them.
Nicci, standing close to his left shoulder, looked up at him. “What do you want us to do, Richard?” she asked in a broken voice.
He knew that hesitation, failure to make a decision, was deadly. They were already in enough trouble, and there was obviously yet more they hadn’t been aware of lurking in the night. It was most likely something to do with occult sorcery, otherwise Zedd and Nicci would have detected it.
He needed to make a decision, he needed to make it quickly, and he needed it to be the right decision.
He tried to think of what Zedd would want him to do, what he would advise. Richard looked around. No one knew Zedd’s wishes better than Richard. He knew that Zedd would tell him that he must push on, that he had to get to the citadel or everything, all their efforts and hopes, would be in vain.
His grandfather would tell him that the living couldn’t sacrifice their chance at life to mourn the dead.
“Zedd told me that he thought this was a beautiful place. His soul is in the hands of the good spirits, now. He is safe, there, with them, and finally at peace. He no longer has need of this vessel in which he has for so long sailed the world of life. He would want us to purify his remains in a funeral pyre. We need to build up a platform of wood and place him on it.
“We need to be quick about it. We don’t know what danger is here among us. We can’t stay here. We need to take care of Zedd, and then we must be gone.”
“I w
ill see to it at once, Lord Rahl,” the commander said.
Richard turned to Nicci. “If we get to a containment field can you cure Kahlan and me by yourself—without Zedd?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
Nicci did not hesitate. “Absolutely.”
“Could you tell how he was beheaded? By what method?”
Nicci swallowed. “No. It looks like a blade, but it could have been something else.”
“You mean like the gift?”
“Yes. I’ve seen it done often enough. It looks much the same. But I can detect no gifted people anywhere near—other than myself, Irena, and Samantha right here with us.”
“They could have been lying in wait, and then when they saw an opportunity killed the first person of rank that they could, and then run off,” Commander Fister said.
Richard nodded. “Possibly. Send your best trackers out and have them search while we take care of Zedd. But if they do find any evidence of an intruder, they could be gifted so I don’t want them following or trying to take them on. Just come get me instead.”
He turned back to Nicci. “Could it have been someone using occult sorcery?”
Nicci’s eyes brimmed with tears. “Yes, I suppose, but I have no way of knowing, and if it was, I can’t sense such people. They could be standing right next to me and I wouldn’t be able to detect such powers. Occult powers are like the dark side of the moon. They remain out of sight and a mystery.”
Richard turned to a stricken-looking Irena. “Can you?”
She wiped her nose on her sleeve as she shook her head.
Richard gritted his teeth for a moment, fighting to keep control of the rage thundering through him. He was on the razor edge of losing control, but there was no target for his fury. He told himself yet again to think of what his grandfather would advise him to do.
“All right then, we need to see to taking care of Zedd’s remains as swiftly as possible. He is with the good spirits now. We can weep for his soul but we have to move while we weep. Though his body is only an empty vessel, now, I don’t want animals getting at it. With our gifted, we can have a fire hot enough to purify his remains in short order.
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