Confessor: Chainfire Trilogy Part 3

Chapter 64

The balmy breeze lifted Jennsen’s red hair as she stared at the ornate letter “R” engraved on the silver handle of her knife.

“Thinking about your brother?” Tom asked as he walked up to her, bringing her out of her memories.

She smiled up at her husband as she hugged him with one arm. “Yes, but only good thoughts.”

“I miss Lord Rahl, too.”

He pulled out his own knife to gaze at it. It was the twin of Jennsen’s. His had the same ornate letter “R” for the House of Rahl. Tom had spent the better portion of his young adult life as a member of the special forces that served covertly to protect the Lord Rahl. That was how he had earned the right to carry that knife.

Jennsen leaned a shoulder against the doorframe. “It seems you only just got a Lord Rahl worth serving when you gave it all up to come here with me.”

“You know,” he said, smiling as he slipped his knife back in its sheath, “I rather like my new life with my new wife.”

She hugged her arms around the bear of a man. “You do, do you?” she asked in a teasing way.

“I like my new name, too,” he added. “I’m finally used to it. You know, comfortable with it.”

When they married, Tom had taken her name, Rahl, so that they could carry it on in the new world. It seemed only fitting that the man who had given them their new life should be remembered in some fashion.

In every other way he was vanishing from memory.

It was surprising to Jennsen how so many people no longer even remembered the place they came from, their old world. It was just as Richard said: the Chainfire spell was taking their memory and those blank places were being rebuilt with new memories, new beliefs, about who they were. Since the Chainfire spell and the taint within it were both Subtractive magic, it had affected even the pristinely ungifted, so even they were con­tinuing to lose track of who and what they had been.

For the most part, magic had become no more than superstition. Wiz­ards and sorceresses were even less important. They had become no more than tales told around campfires to scare people for a good laugh. Dragons were becoming only folklore. In this world there were no dragons.

Any who possessed magic were fading away. Their ability was dying out, smothered by the taint from the chimes. Day by day they became more powerless. Eventually they would merely be old hags living by themselves in swampy places and considered crazy by most folk.

Any trace of the gift that survived, if not withered away by the taint of the chimes they’d brought with them into their world, would eventually be completely eliminated by descendants of the pristinely ungifted. It would be only a matter of generations before there was no trace of the gift left in mankind—just the way the Order had once said they wanted it.

Everyone was concerned with more important things now. Their lives now revolved around the hard work of survival when there was no one who accomplished anything worthwhile. People had forgotten how to do things, how to create things. Even what had once seemed the most com­mon of things, such as construction methods, was being lost. The people here never knew how to create—they had depended on others to build and create. It would take future generations to discover them all over again.

Those from the old life, those who created, who invented, who made life easier for everyone, and who were the object of such hatred, were not in this world to help make life better. The people left, for the most part, were left to eke out an existence as best they could.

For most, living in such a dark age, sickness and death were their con­stant companion. As they had in the world they had been banished from, they turned to superstition and a grim, fatalistic acceptance of the misery of life and its accompanying devotion to their faith.

It seemed that everywhere Tom and Jennsen traveled to trade for sup­plies, they saw churches going up as the hope for mankind’s salvation from misery. Men of God traveled the countryside to spread the word, and demand devotion to Him.

Jennsen and her people kept mostly to themselves, enjoying the fruits of their own labor and the simple joy of being left alone by tyrants and brutes. Some of them, though, had started keeping the symbols of the religious beliefs pressed on them. It seemed easier for them to go along than to question, to accept prepackaged beliefs than to think for themselves.

Jennsen knew that their world was going to be one that sank into a very dark age, but she also knew that within that dark world, she and those with her could carve out their own small place of happiness, joy, and laughter. The rest of the world was too busy suffering to bother with the remote area of a few quiet people. Some of the pristinely ungifted, though, as their memories of the old world vanished, had left to go out among the cities and far-off places.

Unknowingly, they carried the pristinely ungifted trait. It would continue to spread to the far corners of the world.

“How is the garden coming?” she asked Tom as he knocked mud off his boots.

He scratched his head of blond hair as he grinned. “Things are coming up, Jenn. Can you believe it? I’m growing things—me, Tom Rahl. I’m finding it more than agreeable.

“And I think the sow is going to have her litter any time now. I tell you, Betty is beside herself. The way her tail is wagging, I have the feeling that she thinks the piglets are going to be hers.”

Betty, Jennsen’s brown goat, loved her new home. She got to be near Tom and Jennsen all the time and she could rule the roost. Betty had a couple of horses she was in love with, a mule she tolerated, and chickens that were beneath her. She would soon have her own kids.

Tom leaned his shoulders back against the wall and folded his arms as he gazed out appreciatively at the beautiful spring countryside. “I think we’ll do just fine, Jenn.”

She rose up on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek. “Good, because I’m going to have a baby.”

He looked thunderstruck for a moment; then he leaped in the air with a wild hoot.

“You are! Jennsen, that’s wonderful! We’re bringing a new little Rahl into the new world? Really?”

Jennsen laughed, nodding at his enthusiasm.

She wished that Richard and Kahlan knew, that they could come visit once she eventually had her baby.

But Richard and Kahlan were in another world.

She had come to love the broad sunlit fields, the trees, the beautiful mountains beyond, and the cozy house they had built. It was home. A home filled with love and life. She wished that her mother could see her place in the world. She wished Richard and Kahlan could see her new home, the place Tom and she had built out of nothing. She knew how proud Richard would be.

Jennsen knew that Richard was real, but to the rest of her friends in the new world, Richard and all that he embodied, all that he represented, everything they once had known . . . was passing into the shrouded realm of legend and myth.