Confessor: Chainfire Trilogy Part 3

Chapter 19

Nicci’s hand slipped from the newel post and dropped to her side as they started away. The floors, walls, and ceiling of the quiet hallway stretching into the distance were made entirely of polished slabs of white marble. Soft tendrils of gray and gold veining meandered through the marble, giving the entire stone corridor a faintly wispy look.

Torches in iron brackets spaced evenly along the walls cast the solemn corridor in a flickering light. The dead air carried the heavy smell of pitch and a pale haze of acrid smoke. At varying places along the passageway were other halls leading off to tombs.

“It’s a dangerous time we are in,” Ann said, the sounds of their footsteps echoing off the stone. “We approach the most dangerous place in prophecy that I know of. We approach what holds the potential to be our end.”

Nicci glanced over at the old prelate. “That’s why I have to help Zedd and then find Richard. At the same time Six has to be stopped before she can unite all three boxes. She has already shown me how dangerous she is, but if we can find her Zedd might be able to help with handling the witch woman.

“I think it might be more important for me to get my hands on Sisters Ulicia and Armina. They have the other two boxes. If they unite all three boxes of Orden, I don’t think that the Sisters of the Dark intend to let Richard have until the first day of winter next year to try to open one of the boxes of Orden. They will certainly try to open them as soon as they have all three. I have this uneasy feeling that we may be running out of time.”

“I agree, “ Ann said as they passed a hissing torch. “That is why it’s so important for you to be there for Richard—so important for you to help him.”

“I intend to help him.”

Ann glanced up at Nicci. “A man needs a woman to temper his choices, especially when those choices can change the course of life itself.”

Nicci watched their shadows rotate around them as they passed another torch. “I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about.”

“Only a woman who loves him, who stands at his side, who is trusted implicitly, can be the kind of woman who can be a positive influence.”

“I do love him and I will stand at his side.”

“You need to do more than stand at his side, Nicci, to be the woman who can have the influence needed.”

Nicci glanced over out of the corner of her eye. “And what influence is it, exactly, that you think is needed?”

“A child needs the strength of a father as well as the nurturing of a mother.” She held up her first two fingers pressed tightly together. “Male and female working together shape us, define us, guide us. In this it is no different. A man needs the feminine element in his life if he is to be a proper ruler to guide the growth of mankind.

“A powerful general without a woman can fight battles and win wars. Jagang can crush those in his way, but he can do nothing more than that—nothing worthwhile, anyway.

“Our side, our cause, is different. It takes more not only to win such a war as we face, but the future that we hope to be the result. Richard doesn’t simply need someone who loves him, but someone he can love. Living by the sword alone is not enough. He needs that investment of his own emotion. He needs to give love as well as receive it.”

Nicci didn’t want to go down this line of argument again. “I am not that woman.”

“You can be,” Ann pressed in a soft voice.

“I’m sure that Kahlan is a woman who deserves Richard’s love. I am not. I have done terrible things, things which I can never undo. I’ve walked a very dark path. All that I can do is to fight to stop the evil ideas for which I once fought. If I can do that, then I can earn redemption in my own heart. But I could never deserve Richard’s love. Kahlan is that kind of woman. I am not.”

“Nicci, Kahlan is not an option for us. It is pointless to frame it as a choice between you and Kahlan being there for him; she can no longer fill that role. Chainfire took that woman. Only you can fill the role, now. You must marry Richard and be that woman for him.”

“Marry him!” Nicci let out a brief, bitter laugh as she shook her head. “Richard doesn’t love me. He would have no reason to want to marry me.”

“Did you learn nothing at the Palace of the Prophets?” Ann clicked her tongue impatiently. “How did you ever get to be a Sister?”

Nicci threw up her hands. “Now what are you talking about?”

“Men have needs.” Ann shook a finger at Nicci. “Attend to them with all your talent as a woman—as the beautiful woman the Creator made you—and he will want more. He will marry you to get it.”

Nicci wanted to slap the woman. Instead, she said, “Richard isn’t like that. He understands that love is what makes passion between a man and a woman meaningful.”

“In the end that is what he will have. You would merely be helping that meaningful passion come to be. A man’s heart will follow his needs. Are you so backward as to think that all couples marry for love? The wisdom of elders often creates a better match. In the absence of Kahlan, that is what we must do.

“It is your job to urge him into your bed and show him what you can do for him, what he is missing, what he needs. If you tend to his passions, his heart will be yours and he will, in the end, have that meaningful passion.”

Nicci could feel her face going scarlet. She couldn’t believe they were having this conversation. She had to change the subject but she couldn’t seem to find her voice.

Nicci knew that she had Richard’s friendship and trust. To do as Ann suggested would violate that friendship and void that trust. Richard was safe in her friendship. The sincerity and shelter of Nicci’s friendship in some ways qualified her for his love, but to do as Ann suggested would breach the trust of his friendship and in so doing disqualify her from ever really being worthy of it.

“You must not allow this chance to pass you by, child—to pass us by.”

Nicci seized Ann’s arm and pulled her to a halt. “Pass us by?”

Ann nodded. “You are our link to Richard.”

Nicci narrowed her eyes. “What link?”

Ann’s face tightened, looking more and more like the prelate Nicci remembered. “The link those of us who teach young wizards need to have with such men.”

“Richard is our leader—not by birth, but by his own ability and force of will to see this through. He may not have set out to become the Lord Rahl, to become the one to lead us in this war, but along the way he grew into that role. He decided that life meant enough to him that he had to fight for his right to live it as he saw fit. He has inspired others who feel the same. It is only because of that that we have made it this far.

“He is not a boy at the Palace of the Prophets with a Rada’Han around his neck. He is his own man.”

“Is he? Step back, child, and look at the larger picture. Yes, Richard is our leader—and I am sincere in saying that—but he is also a man who has the gift and knows nothing about it. More than that, he is a wizard with both sides of the gift. Lightning is bottled up in that man. What is the purpose of a Sister of the Light if not to teach such men how to control their ability and to—”

“I am not a Sister of the Light.”

Ann flicked a hand dismissively. “Semantics. Wordplay. Denying it will not change it.”

“I am not—”

“You are.” Ann jabbed an insistent finger against the center of Nicci’s chest. “In there, you are. You are a person who, by whatever course, has embraced life. That is the Creator’s calling. Call yourself what you will, Sister of the Light, or simply Nicci. It matters not; it changes nothing. You fight for our cause—the Creator’s cause of life itself. You are a Sister, a sorceress, who can guide a man in what he needs to do.”

“I am not a whore, not for you, not for anyone.”

Ann rolled her eyes. “Did I ask you to bed a man you don’t love? No. Did I ask you to trick him out of anything? No. I asked you to go to a man you love, give him love, and be the woman he so desperately needs, be the woman who can receive his love. That is what he needs—a woman to be the link for his need to love. That is the completing link to his humanity.”

Nicci glared. “A minder from the Palace of the Prophets, that’s what you really want me to be.”

Ann muttered a prayer for strength toward the ceiling. “Child,” she said, her gaze finally coming down to fix on Nicci, “I am only asking you not to waste any more of your life. You don’t fully grasp what it is you are not seeing. You may think that this is about love, but you don’t really know love, now do you? You know only its beginning: longing.

“The circumstances may not be what you would ask for in a perfect world, but this is the chance the Creator has given you, your chance to have the greatest joy possible to us in this life—love. Complete love. Your love right now is one sided, incomplete, deficient. It is merely sweet longing and imagined bliss. You can’t know what love really is unless those feelings within your heart are returned in kind and set free. Only then is it real love, complete love. Only then can the heart truly soar. You don’t yet know the joy of that most human of emotions.”

Nicci had been kissed by rutting brutes. There was no joy in such things. Ann was right: Nicci didn’t think that she could truly understand what it would be like to be kissed by a man she loved, truly loved, a man who loved her in return and held her above all else in his heart. She could only imagine such bliss. What a pity for those who didn’t know the difference.

Ann opened a hand in a gesture of appeal. “If in that joy of complete love—for both of you—you can help guide the man you love to make choices that are nothing more than the right choices, what is wrong with that?”

She let the hand drop. “I’m not asking you to cause him to do wrong, but to do right, to do what he himself would want. I’m only asking you to save him from the kind of pain that risks him making a mistake, a mistake that will take us all down with him.”

Nicci again felt the fine hair on the back of her neck stiffen.

“What are you talking about?”

“Nicci, when you were with the Order—when you were known as Death’s Mistress—what did you feel like?”

“Feel like?” Nicci cast about in her mind for an answer to the unexpected question. “I don’t know. I don’t know what you mean. I guess I hated myself, hated life.”

“And in your hatred of yourself did you care if Jagang killed you?”

“Not really.”

“Would you act the same today? Act out of disinterest for yourself, for the future?”

“Of course not. Back then I didn’t care what happened to me. What future could there be? I didn’t think that I deserved any happiness—I didn’t think that I could ever have any happiness—so nothing really mattered to me, not even my own life. I just didn’t think that anything mattered.”

“Didn’t think that anything mattered,” Ann repeated. She tsked concern to herself before continuing her theatrical dismay at what Nicci had said. “You didn’t think you could have any happiness, and so you didn’t think anything mattered.” She held up a finger for a point of clarity. “You didn’t make the same kinds of decisions back then that you would make today because you didn’t care about yourself. Am I right?”

Nicci suspected that she was nearing the unseen jaws of a trap. “That’s right.”

“And how do you suppose a man like Richard is going to feel when he finally realizes that Kahlan is lost to him—when the finality of it really and truly sinks in? Will he think that life is worth living? Do you think he will feel the same connection to us—feel the same sense of the importance of life—if he is lost, alone, despairing, despondent . . . hopeless? If he thinks he can never have any happiness, do you think he will care as much what happens to him? You know what that feels like, child. You tell me.”

Goose bumps tingled up Nicci’s arms. She feared to answer the question.

Ann waggled a finger. “If he has no one, no love, do you think he will care so much if he lives or dies?”

Nicci swallowed, forcing herself to face the truth. “I suppose it’s possible that he might not.”

“And if he has no hope for himself, will he make the right choices for us? Or will he simply give up?”

“I don’t think Richard would give up.”

“You don’t think he would.” Ann leaned closer. “Are you eager to put that to the test? Put our lives, our world, existence itself, to such a test?”

The intensity of Ann’s expression seemed to have frozen Nicci in place. “Child, if we lose Richard, then we are all lost.”

She went on in a soft voice, making Nicci feel as if the trap were finally closing around her. “You yourself know his central importance—that is why you put the boxes of Orden in play in his name. You know that he is the only one who can lead us in this battle. You know that without him the Sisters of the Dark will unleash the Keeper of the underworld. Without Richard to stop them they will unleash death upon life itself. They will end the world of life. They will take us into the Great Void.

“Without Richard we are all lost,” she said again, as if hammering the final nail into a coffin.

Nicci swallowed back the lump in her throat. “Richard wouldn’t ever abandon us.”

“Maybe not intentionally. But if he goes into this battle alone, having lost love and hope, he may make the kind of decisions that he wouldn’t make if he held in his care the heart of a woman he loved. That love could be the stitch that holds the whole thing together, holds him together.

“That kind of love can be the single thing, the only thing, that keeps a man from giving up when he has no strength to go on.”

“That all may be true, but it still does not give you the right to decide his heart.”

“Nicci, I don’t think—”

“What are we fighting for, if not the sanctity of life?”

“I am fighting for the sanctity of life.”

“Are you? Are you really? Your whole life has been devoted to molding others to what you wanted, not to what they wanted. While it might not be out of a hatred for the good, it certainly has been out of your notion of how others ought to live, and what they should live for. You molded novices into Sisters so that they could serve in the duty you assigned them. You used Sisters to shape young men into wizards who would likewise follow what you believe the Creator wants.

“Everyone you’ve had control over has been forced to your vision of how they ought to live their lives and what beliefs they must follow. You rarely let people make reasoned choices for themselves. You often didn’t allow them to learn about life; you instead told them what aspects of it mattered and how they would live it. The only partial exception that I know of is Verna, when you sent her away for twenty years.

“You have been planning Richard’s life for hundreds of years before he was even born. You laid out plans for how he must live out his existence—his only life. You, Annalina Aldurren, based on your own interpretation of what you read into prophecy, decided how Richard would spend his existence in the world of life. Now you are planning his emotions for him. You’ve probably even planned his place in the spirit world.

“You imprisoned Nathan nearly his whole life, even though he spent centuries helping you to your ends. Even though you came to love him, you condemned him to a life of imprisonment for the crime of what you feared he might possibly do.

“Ann, what are we fighting for, if it is not the ability to live our own lives? You simply can’t decide what others will do or not do. You can’t set yourself up as the good version of Jagang, the flip side of the same coin.”

Ann blinked in sincere surprise. “Is that what you think I’m doing?”

“Aren’t you? You’re deciding Richard’s life for him now the same as you did before he was even born. It’s his life. He loves Kahlan. What good is his life to him if he can’t have sovereignty over his own heart, if he must do as you say? Who are you to decide that he must abandon what he wants most and instead love me?

“How could I be the kind of woman he really could love if I were to manipulate him in the way you want? If I did what you ask I would automatically invalidate any emotions I created in him, make a sham of any such feelings.”

Ann looked disheartened. “But I don’t want you to love him against your will. I only want what is best for you as well.”

“I would give anything to be able to use your urging as an excuse to do this, but I would never again respect myself. Richard loves Kahlan. It is not for me to replace that love with anything. It is because I love him that I could never betray his heart.”

“But I don’t think—”

“Would you be happy to have Nathan’s love as a prize for a calculated trick? Would that be satisfactory to you? Would that bring you happiness?”

Ann’s gaze drifted away, tears starting to fill her eyes. “No, it wouldn’t.”

“Then how can you think that I would be satisfied to seduce Richard at the expense of my self-respect? Love, real love, is something you earn for who you are; it’s not a prize for your performance in bed.”

Ann’s gaze searched without settling. “But I only . . .”

“When I took Richard down to the Old World, when I took him captive, I wanted to force him to accept the Order’s beliefs. But I also wanted to make him love me. To that end I thought to do something very similar to what you are asking me to do now. Richard refused.

“That’s one of the reasons I so respect him. He was unlike any of the men I’d known who simply wanted me in their bed. I thought I could have him by the same means. He proved that his mind was what ruled him. He wasn’t an animal like others who allowed their passion to rule them. He is a man ruled by reason. That is why he is our leader, not, as you seem to think, because you have pulled the proper strings.

“Had he given in to me I would never have respected him in the same way I do now. How could I truly love him if he would have proven such weakness of character? Even if I were to agree to your plan, Richard would not. He would remain the same Richard now as he was then. All that would happen is that he would lose his respect for me. In the end the plan would fail. It would fail because, ultimately, you failed to respect him as well.

“But would you really want it to work? Would you really want a man who is ruled by passion rather than reason to be our leader? Do you want merely to install a puppet of your wishes?”

“No, I suppose not.”

“Me neither.”

Ann smiled then, and took Nicci’s arm, starting her down the white marble corridor.

“I hate to admit it, but I see your point. I guess that I have been guilty of allowing my passion for doing the Creator’s work to get carried away into believing that I alone could decide how that should be accomplished, and how others should live.”

They walked in silence for a moment, accompanied by flickering light and the soft hiss of the torches.

“I am sorry, Nicci. In spite of me, you have turned out to be a woman of true character.”

Nicci stared into the distance. “It seems destined to be a lonely path.”

“Richard would be wise were he to love you for who you are, just the way you are.”

Nicci swallowed, unable to bring forth words.

“I guess that, in all the urgency of everything, I started to forget much the same lesson I’d already learned from Nathan.”

“Perhaps all this really isn’t your fault,” Nicci allowed. “Perhaps it has more to do with Chainfire, and how much of what we knew is being lost to us.”

Ann sighed. “I’m not sure I can blame my actions of a lifetime on a spell that has only recently happened.”

Nicci glanced over at the former prelate. “What lesson from Nathan are you talking about?”

“He one day convinced me of very much the same things you have just brought back to my attention. In fact, he used much the same reasoning as you have just used. I misjudged Nathan, just as I have misjudged you, Nicci. You have my apology, child, not just for this, but for so much more I have robbed you of.”

Nicci shook her head. “No, don’t apologize for my life. I made the choices I made. Everyone, to one extent or another, must face life’s trials. There will always be those who try to influence or even dominate us. We cannot allow such things to be an excuse for making the wrong choices. Ultimately, each of us lives our own life and we are responsible for it.”

Ann nodded. “The mistakes that we spoke of before.” She laid a hand tenderly against Nicci’s back. “But you have made amends for yours, child. You have come to be responsible for yourself. You have done good.”

“While I’ve come to see the grievous errors in my thinking, and I’ve tried to correct my mistakes, I don’t think that counts as amends, but I promise you, Ann, if Richard needs anything, he will have it from me. That is what a true friend would do.”

Ann smiled. “I guess you really are his friend, Sister.”

“Nicci.”

Ann chuckled. “Nicci, then.”

They walked in silence past a dozen torches. Nicci was relieved that Ann had finally understood. She supposed that one could never be too old to come to new understandings. She hoped that Ann truly did understand, and that this was not just another strategy, another way to wield her influence over events. Maybe Nathan had actually changed her, as Ann had suggested.

To Nicci, it felt sincere. It also felt like this had been a conversation with Ann that she had been waiting her whole life to have.

“Which reminds me,” Ann said, “in regard to Nathan and the terrible thing I had intended for him just before he helped me come to my senses. There is something important I left down in the dungeons.”

Nicci glanced over at her squat companion. “And what would that be?”

“I was intending—”

“Well, well, well,” a voice said.

Nicci froze in place, looking up just in time to see three women step out of a hallway ahead and to the left.

Ann stared in confusion. “Sister Armina?”

Sister Armina wore a haughty smirk. “If it isn’t the dead prelate—once again alive, it would seem.” She lifted an eyebrow. “I believe we can remedy that problem.”

Ann used her weight to pull Nicci behind her. “Run, child. It’s upon you now to protect him.”

There was no doubt in Nicci’s mind who Ann meant.