Chainfire: Chainfire Trilogy Part 1

Chapter 2

The distant howl of a wolf woke Richard from a dead sleep. The forlorn cry echoed through the mountains, but went unanswered. Richard lay on his side, in the surreal light of false dawn, idly listening, waiting, for a return cry that never came.

Try as he might, he couldn’t seem to open his eyes for longer than the span of a single, slow heartbeat, much less gather the energy to lift his head. Shadowy tree limbs appeared to move about in the murky darkness. It was odd that such an ordinary sound as the distant howl of a wolf should wake him.

He remembered that Cara had third watch. She would no doubt come to wake them soon enough. With great effort, he summoned the strength to roll over. He needed to touch Kahlan, to embrace her, to go back to sleep with her in his protective arms for a few more delicious minutes. His hand found only an expanse of empty ground.

Kahlan wasn’t there.

Where was she? Where had she gone off to? Perhaps she’d awakened early and gone to talk to Cara.

Richard sat up. He instinctively checked to make sure that his sword was at hand. The reassuring feel of the polished scabbard and wire-wound hilt greeted his fingers. The sword lay on the ground beside him.

Richard heard the soft whisper of a slow, steady rain. He remembered that for some reason he needed it not to rain.

But if it was raining, then why didn’t he feel it? Why was his face dry? Why was the ground dry?

He sat up rubbing his eyes, trying to get his bearings, trying to clear his foggy mind as he fought to herd together scattered thoughts. He peered into the darkness and realized that he wasn’t outside. In the faint gray light of dawn coming in through a single small window he saw that he was in a derelict room. The place smelled of wet wood and damp decay. Dying embers glowed deep within the ash in a hearth set into a plastered wall rising up before him. A blackened wooden spoon hung to one side of the hearth, a mostly bald broom leaned against the other side, but other than that he saw no personal items to distinguish the people who lived there.

Daybreak looked to be still some time off. The incessant patter of the rain against the roof promised that there would be no sun this chilly and damp day. Besides dripping through several holes in the tattered roof, rain leaked in around the chimney, adding yet another layer of stain to the dingy plaster.

Seeing the plastered wall, the hearth, and the heavy plank table brought back spectral fragments of memories.

Driven by his need to know where Kahlan was, Richard staggered to his feet, clutching at the lingering pain in the left side of his chest with one hand and the edge of the table with his other.

At hearing him stand in the dimly lit room, Cara, leaning back in a chair not far away, shot to her feet. “Lord Rahl!”

He saw his sword lying on the table. But he had thought—

“Lord Rahl, you’re awake!” In the somber light Richard could see that Cara looked exuberant. He also saw that she was wearing her red leather.

“A wolf howled and woke me.”

Cara shook her head. “I’ve been sitting right there, awake, watching over you. No wolf howled. You must have dreamed it.” Her smile returned. “You look better!”

He recalled not being able to breathe, not being able to get enough air. He took an experimental deep breath and found that it came easily. While the ghost of terrible pain still haunted him, the reality of it had nearly faded away.

“Yes, I think I’m all right.”

Short, disjointed memories flashed in fits before his mind’s eye. He remembered standing alone and still in the eerie early light as the dark tide of Imperial Order soldiers flooded through the trees. He remembered bits of their wild charge, their raised weapons. He remembered releasing himself into the fluid dance with death. He remembered, too, the hail of arrows and bolts from crossbows, and, finally, other men joining the battle.

Richard lifted the front of his shirt out away from himself, looking down at it, not understanding why it was whole.

“Your shirt was ruined,” Cara offered, noticing his puzzlement. “We washed and shaved you, then we put a clean shirt on you.”

We. That one word rose up above all others in his mind. We. Cara and Kahlan. That had to be what Cara meant.

“Where is she?”

“Who?”

“Kahlan,” he said as he took a stride away from the support of the table. “Where is she?”

“Kahlan?” Cara’s features meandered into a provocative smile. “Who’s Kahlan?”

Richard sighed with relief. Cara would not be needling him in such a way if Kahlan were hurt or in any kind of trouble—that much he knew for certain. An overwhelming sense of relief purged his dread and with it some of his weariness. Kahlan was safe.

He couldn’t help being cheered, too, by Cara’s impish expression. He loved to see her with a lighthearted smile, in part because it was such a rare sight. Usually when a Mord-Sith smiled it was a menacing prelude to something wholly unpleasant. The same was true when they wore their red leather.

“Kahlan,” Richard said, playing along, “you know, my wife. Where is she?”

Cara’s nose wrinkled with seldom-seen feminine mirth. Such an extraordinary look was so uncommon on Cara that it not only surprised him, but spurred him into a grin.

“A wife,” she drawled, turning coy. “Now, there’s a novel concept—the Lord Rahl taking a wife.”

That he found himself to be the Lord Rahl, the leader of D’Hara, at times still seemed unreal to him. It was not the kind of thing a woods guide growing up in far-off Westland would ever have dreamed up in his wildest imaginings.

“Yes, well, one of us had to be the first.” He wiped a hand across his face, still trying to clear the web of sleep from his mind. “Where is she?”

Cara’s smile widened. “Kahlan.” She tilted her head toward him, arching one brow. “Your wife.”

“Yes, Kahlan, my wife,” Richard said offhandedly. He had long ago learned that it was best not to give Cara the satisfaction of seeing her mischievous antics get to him. “You remember her—intelligent, green eyes, tall, long hair, and of course the most beautiful woman I’ve ever laid eyes on.”

The leather of Cara’s outfit creaked as she straightened her back and folded her arms. “You mean the most beautiful besides me, of course.” Her eyes were luminous when she smiled. He didn’t rise to the bait.

“Well,” Cara finally said with a sigh, “the Lord Rahl certainly seems to have had an interesting dream during his long sleep.”

“Long sleep?”

“You’ve been asleep for two days—after Nicci healed you.”

Richard raked his fingers back through his dirty, matted hair. “Two days . . .” he said as he tried to reconcile his fragmented memories. He was becoming annoyed with Cara’s game. “So where is she?”

“Your wife?”

“Yes, my wife.” Richard planted his fists on his hips as he leaned toward the irksome woman. “You know, the Mother Confessor.”

“Mother Confessor! My, my, Lord Rahl, but when you dream you certainly do dream big. Smart, beautiful, and the Mother Confessor as well.” Cara leaned in with a taunting look. “And no doubt she’s also madly in love with you?”

“Cara . . .”

“Oh, wait.” She held up a hand to stop him as she abruptly turned serious. “Nicci said that she wanted me to go get her if you woke. She was really insistent about it—said that if you woke she needed to have a look at you.” Cara started toward the single closed door at the back of the room. “She’s only been asleep for a couple of hours, but she’ll want to know that you’re awake.”

Cara was in the back room for no more than a moment when Nicci burst out of the darkness, pausing briefly to grasp the doorframe. “Richard!”

Before Richard could say anything, Nicci, her eyes wide with relief at seeing him alive, dashed to him and seized his shoulders as if she thought he were a good spirit come to the world of the living and only her firm grip would keep him there.

“I was so worried. How are you feeling?”

She looked as drained as he felt. Her mane of blond hair hadn’t been brushed out and it looked like she’d been sleeping in her black dress. Even so, the contrast of her disheveled appearance only served to highlight her exquisite beauty.

“Well, all right for the most part, except that I feel exhausted and lightheaded despite having had what Cara tells me was quite a long sleep.”

Nicci dismissively waved a slender hand. “That’s to be expected. With rest you will have your full strength back soon enough. You lost a lot of blood. It will take time for your body to recover.”

“Nicci, I need . . .”

“Hush,” she said as she put one hand behind his back and pressed the flat of her other to his chest. Her smooth brow drew together in concentration.

Though she appeared to be about his age, or at most only a year or two older, she had lived a very long time as a Sister of the Light at the Palace of the Prophets, where those within the walls aged differently. Nicci’s graceful manner, the keen appraisal of her blue eyes, and her singular subdued smile—always delivered with her knowing gaze locked on his—had been at first distracting and then unsettling, but was now merely familiar.

Richard winced as he felt Nicci’s power tingling deep into his chest, between her hands. It was a disconcerting penetration. It made his heart flutter. A mild wave of nausea coursed through him.

“It’s holding,” Nicci murmured to herself. She looked up into his eyes then. “The vessels are whole and strong.” The look of wonder in her eyes betrayed how uncertain she had been of success. Some of her reassuring smile returned. “You still need to rest, but you’re doing well, Richard, you really are.”

He nodded, relieved to hear that he was healthy, even if she sounded a little surprised by it. But his other concerns needed to be put to rest, as well.

“Nicci, where’s Kahlan? Cara’s in one of her moods this morning and won’t say.”

Nicci looked to be at a loss. “Who?”

Richard took hold of her wrist and removed her hand from his chest. “What’s wrong? Is she hurt? Where is she?”

Cara tilted her head toward Nicci. “While he slept, Lord Rahl dreamed himself up a wife.”

Nicci turned an astonished frown on Cara. “A wife!”

“Remember the name he called out when he was delirious?” Cara flashed a conspiratorial smile. “That’s the one he married in his dream. She’s beautiful—and smart, of course.”

“Beautiful.” Nicci blinked at the woman. “And smart.”

Cara cocked an eyebrow. “And she’s the Mother Confessor.”

Nicci looked incredulous. “The Mother Confessor.”

“Enough,” Richard said as he released Nicci’s wrist. “I mean it, now. Where is she?”

It was immediately apparent to both women that his indulgent sense of humor had evaporated. The intensity in his voice, to say nothing of his glare, gave them pause.

“Richard,” Nicci said in a cautious tone, “you were hurt pretty bad. For a time I didn’t think . . .” She hooked a stray strand of hair behind her ear and started over. “Look, when a person is hurt as seriously as you were, it can play tricks with their mind. It’s only natural. I’ve seen it before. When you were shot with that arrow you couldn’t breathe. Not getting air, like when you’re drowning, causes . . .”

“What’s the matter with you two? What’s going on?” Richard couldn’t understand why they were stalling. His heart felt as if it were galloping out of control. “Is she hurt? Tell me!”

“Richard,” Nicci said in a calm voice obviously meant to settle him down, “the bolt from that crossbow came perilously close to going right through your heart. If it had, there wouldn’t have been anything I could have done. I can’t raise the dead.

“Even though it missed your heart, the arrow still did serious damage. People just don’t survive a wound as grave as you had. I wouldn’t have been able to heal you in the conventional manner because it couldn’t be done. There was no time to even try to get the arrow out in any other way. You were bleeding inside. I had to . . .”

She faltered as she stared up into his eyes. Richard bent down a little toward her. “You had to what?”

Nicci shrugged one shoulder self-consciously. “I had to use Subtractive Magic.”

Nicci was a powerful sorceress in her own right, but she was infinitely more exceptional in that she was able to wield underworld forces as well. She had once been committed to those forces. She had once been known as Death’s Mistress. Healing was not exactly her specialty.

Richard’s caution flared. “Why?”

“To get the arrow out of you.”

“You eliminated the arrow with Subtractive Magic?”

“There was no time and no other way.” She again clasped his shoulders, although more compassionately this time. “If I hadn’t done something you would have been dead in mere moments. I had to.”

Richard glanced to Cara’s grim expression and then back to Nicci. “Well, I guess that makes sense.”

At least, it sounded like it made sense. He didn’t really know if it did or not. Having been raised in the vast woods of Westland, Richard didn’t know a great deal about magic.

“And some of your blood,” Nicci added in a low voice.

He didn’t like the sound of that. “What?”

“You were bleeding into your chest. One lung had already failed. I was able to perceive that your heart was being forced out of place. The major arteries were in danger of being ripped apart from the pressure. I needed the blood out of the way in order to heal you—so that your lungs and heart could work properly. They were failing. You were in a state of shock and delirium. You were near death.”

Nicci’s blue eyes brimmed with tears. “I was so afraid, Richard. There was no one but me to help you and I was so afraid that I would fail. Even after I did everything I could to heal you, I still wasn’t sure you would ever wake again.”

Richard could see the toll of that fear in her expression and feel it in the way her fingers trembled on his arms. It spoke to how far she had come since she had given up her belief in the cause of the Sisters of the Dark and then the Imperial Order.

The haunted look on Cara’s face confirmed for him the truth of how desperate the situation had been. For all the sleep he’d apparently gotten, neither of them appeared to have had much more than brief naps. It must have been a frightening vigil.

The rain drummed without letup against the roof. Other than that, the dank husk of a house was dead quiet. Life seemed all the more fleeting in the abandoned home. The forsaken place gave Richard the chills.

“You saved my life, Nicci. I remember being afraid I was going to die. But you saved my life.” He touched his fingertips to her cheek. “Thank you. I wish there was a better way to say it, a better way to tell you how much I appreciate what you did, but I can’t think of any.”

Nicci’s small smile and simple nod told him that she grasped the depth of his sincerity.

Another thought struck him. “Do you mean to say that using Subtractive Magic caused some kind of—problem?”

“No, no, Richard.” Nicci squeezed his arms as if to allay his fears. “No, I don’t think that it caused any harm.”

“What do you mean, you don’t think it did?”

She hesitated a moment before explaining. “I’ve never done anything like that before. I’ve never even heard of it being done. Dear spirits, I didn’t even know that it could be done. As I’m sure you can imagine, using Subtractive Magic in such a way is risky, to put it mildly. Anything living touched by it would also be destroyed. I had to use the core of the arrow itself as a pathway into you. I was as careful as I could possibly be that I only eliminated the arrow—and the spent blood.”

Richard wondered what happened to things when Subtractive Magic was used—what would have happened to his blood—but his head was already spinning with the story and he most wanted her to get to the point.

“But between all that,” Nicci added, “between the massive loss of blood, the injury, the dire condition of not being able to get enough air, the stress you underwent while I used regular Additive Magic to heal you—to say nothing of the unknown element that Subtractive Magic added into the mix—you were going through an experience that can only be described as unpredictable. Such a terrible crisis can cause unexpected things to happen.”

Richard didn’t know what she was getting at. “What unexpected things?”

“There’s no telling. I had no choice but to use extreme methods. You were beyond what I thought were all limits. You have to try to understand that you were not yourself there for a while.”

Cara hooked a thumb behind her red leather belt. “Nicci is right, Lord Rahl. You weren’t yourself. You were fighting us. I had to hold you down just so she could help you.

“I’ve stood over men at the cusp of death. Strange things happen when they’re in that place. Believe me, you were there a long time into that first night.”

Richard knew very well what she meant when she said that she had stood over men on the cusp of death. The profession of Mord-Sith had been torture—at least it had been until he changed all that. He carried the Agiel of Denna, the Mord-Sith who had once stood over him in that capacity. She had given him her Agiel as a solemn gift in gratitude for freeing her from the madness of her terrible duty—even though she had known that the price of that freedom was to be his sword through her heart.

Right then Richard felt a very long way from the peaceful woods where he’d grown up.

Nicci spread her hands as if imploring him to try harder to understand. “You were unconscious and then asleep for quite a time. I had to revive you enough to get you to drink water and a broth, but I needed you to stay in a deep sleep so that you could begin to recover your strength. I had to use a spell to keep you in that state. You’d lost a lot of blood; had I allowed you to awake too soon it would have sapped your tenuous strength and you still could have slipped away from us.”

Died, that was what she meant. He could have died. Richard took a deep breath. He’d had no idea of everything that had gone on over the last three days. He basically recalled the battle and then waking when he heard the wolf howl.

“Nicci,” he said, trying to show her that he could be calm and understanding even though he felt neither, “what does this have to do with Kahlan?”

Her features were set in an uneasy mix of empathy and disquiet. “Richard, this woman, Kahlan, is just a product of your mind when you were in that confused state of shock and delirium before I could heal you.”

“Nicci, I wasn’t imagining . . .”

“You were at the brink of death,” she said as she held up a hand, commanding silence and for him to listen. “In your mind you were grasping for someone to help you—someone like this person, Kahlan. Please believe me when I say that it’s understandable. But you’re awake now and must face the truth. She was figment born of your dire condition.”

Richard was dumbfounded to hear her even suggesting such a thing. He turned to Cara, imploring her to come to her senses, if not his rescue. “How could you possibly think such a thing? How could you believe it?”

“Haven’t you ever had a dream where you were terrified and then your long-dead mother was there, alive, and she was going to help you?” Cara’s unblinking blue eyes seemed focused elsewhere. “Don’t you remember waking after such dreams and feeling sure that it had been real, that your mother was alive again, really alive, and that she was going to help you? Don’t you remember how much you wanted to cling to that feeling? Don’t you remember how desperately you wanted it to be real?”

Nicci lightly touched the place where the arrow had been, where his flesh was now whole. “After I’d healed you to the point that you were past the worst of the crisis, you went into a long dreaming state of sleep. You carried these desperate illusions forward with you. You dreamed about them, added to them, lived with them longer than any ordinary sleep. This prolonged dream, this comforting illusion, this divine longing, had time to seep into every corner of your thoughts, saturate every part of your mind, and became real to you, just as Cara says, but, because of the length of time you were asleep, it gained even more power. Now that you’ve only just come awake from that protracted sleep you are merely having a little trouble filtering out what part of your ordeal was a dream and what was real.”

“Nicci is right, Lord Rahl.” Richard couldn’t remember Cara ever looking so dead serious. “You just dreamed it—like you dreamed that you heard a wolf howl. It sounds like a nice dream—this woman you dreamed you married—but that’s all it is: a dream.”

Richard’s mind reeled. The concept of Kahlan being nothing more than a dream, a figment of his imagination born in his delirium, was, at its core, terrifying. That terror stormed unchecked through him. If what they were saying was true, then he didn’t want to be awake. If it was true, then he wished that Nicci had never healed him. He didn’t want to live in a world where Kahlan wasn’t real.

He groped for solid ground in a sea of dark disorder, too stunned to think of a way to fight such a shapeless threat. He felt confused by his ordeal and that he didn’t remember much of it. His certainty in what he regarded as truth began to crumble.

He caught himself. He knew better than to believe a fear and thus give it life. While he could not fathom how they’d latched on to such a monstrous idea, he knew that Kahlan wasn’t a dream.

“After all that you’ve both shared with her, how can you two possibly say that Kahlan is just a dream?”

“How indeed,” Nicci asked, “if what you’re saying were true?”

“Lord Rahl, we would never be so cruel as to try to deceive you about something so important to you.”

Richard blinked at them. Could it be? He frantically tried to imagine if there was any possibility that what they were saying could be true.

His fists tightened. “Stop it—both of you!”

It was a plea for a return of sanity. He hadn’t meant for it to come out as threatening, but it did. Nicci took half a step back. Cara’s face lost a little of its color.

Richard couldn’t slow his breathing, his racing heart.

“I don’t remember my dreams.” He looked at each of them in turn. “Not since I was little. I don’t remember any dreams while I was hurt, or while I slept. None. Dreams are meaningless. Kahlan is not. Don’t do this to me—please. This isn’t helping anything, it’s only making it worse. Please, if something has happened to Kahlan, I need to know.”

That had to be it. Something had happened to her and they just didn’t think he was strong enough yet to handle the news.

A worse fear by far welled up when he recalled Nicci saying that she couldn’t raise the dead. Could they be trying to shield him from that?

He gritted his teeth with the effort not to scream at them, to keep his voice level and in control. “Where is Kahlan?”

Nicci cautiously dipped her head, as if beseeching his forgiveness. “Richard, she is just in your mind. I know that such things can seem very real, but it’s not. You dreamed her up while you were hurt—nothing more.”

“I did not dream up Kahlan.” He again turned his plea to the Mord-Sith. “Cara, you’ve been with us for more than two years. You’ve fought with us, fought for us. Back when Nicci was a Sister of the Dark and she brought me down here to the Old World, you stood in for me and protected Kahlan. She has protected you. You’ve shared and endured things that most people could never even imagine. You’ve become friends.”

He gestured to her Agiel, the weapon that looked like nothing more than a short, thin red leather rod hanging by a thin gold chain from her right wrist.

“You even named Kahlan a sister of the Agiel.”

Cara stood stiff and mute.

Cara’s conferring on Kahlan the title of sister of the Agiel had been an informal but deeply solemn accolade from a former mortal enemy to a woman she had come to respect and trust.

“Cara, you may have started out as a protector to the Lord Rahl, but you’ve become more than that to Kahlan and me. You’ve become like family.”

Cara would willingly and without hesitation sacrifice her life to protect Richard. She was not only ruthless but fearless in her defense of him.

The one thing Cara did fear was disappointing him.

That fear was clearly evident in her eyes.

“Thank you, Lord Rahl,” she finally said in a meek voice, “for including me in your wonderful dream.”

Richard’s flesh prickled as a wave of cold dread washed up through him. Overwhelmed, he pressed his hand to his forehead, pushing back his hair. These two women were not inventing some story for fear of telling him bad news. They were telling him the truth.

The truth as they saw it, anyway. The truth somehow twisted into a nightmare.

He couldn’t make any of it work in his mind, couldn’t make any sense of it. After all they had shared with Kahlan, all they had been through with her, all their time together, it was impossible for him to understand how these two women could be saying this to him.

And yet, they were.

Although he couldn’t conceive of the cause, something was obviously and dreadfully wrong. A suffocating sense of foreboding settled over him. It felt as if the whole world had been turned upside down and now he couldn’t make the pieces fit back together.

He had to do something—what he had been about to do just before the soldiers had attacked them. Maybe it wasn’t too late.