Faith of the Fallen

Chapter 18

Panting in exhaustion, Kahlan had to dance backward through the snarl of hobblebush stitched through with thorny blackberry to dodge the swing of the sword. The tip whistled past, missing her ribs by an inch. In her mad dash to escape, she ignored the snag and tug of thorns on her pants. She could feel her heartbeat galloping at the base of her skull.

As he relentlessly pressed his attack, forcing her back over a low rise of ledge and through the swale beyond, mounds of fallen leaves kicked aloft by his boots boiled up into the late-afternoon air like colorful thunderheads. The bright yellow, lustrous orange, and vivid red leaves rained down over rocky outcrops swaddled in prickly whorls of juniper. It was like doing battle amid a fallen rainbow.

Richard lunged at her again. Kahlan gasped but blocked his sword. He pressed his grim attack with implacable determination. She gave ground, stepping high as she did so in order to avoid tripping over the snare of roots around a huge white spruce. Losing her footing would be fatal; if she fell, Richard would stab her in an instant.

She glanced left. There loomed a tall prominence of sheer rock draped with long trailers of woolly moss. To the other side, the brink of the ridge ran back to eventually meet that rock wall. Once the level ground tapered down to that dead end, the only option was going to be to climb straight up or straight down.

She deflected a quick thrust of his sword, and he warded hers. In a burst of fury, she pressed a fierce assault, forcing him back a dozen steps.

He effortlessly parried her strikes, and then returned her attack in kind.

What she had gained was quickly lost twice over. She was once again desperately defending herself and trading ground for her life.

On a low, dead branch of a balsam fir not ten feet away, a small red squirrel, with his winter ear tufts already grown in, plucked a leathery brown rosette of lichen growing on the bark. With his white belly gloriously displayed, he sat on his haunches at the end of the broken-off deadwood, his bushy tail raised up, holding the crinkled piece of lichen in his tiny paws, eating round and round the edges, like some spectator at a tournament eating a fried bread cake while he watched the combatants clash.

Kahlan gulped air as her eyes darted around, looking for clear footing among the imposing trunks of the highland wood while at the same time watching for an opportunity that might save her. If she could somehow get around Richard, around the menace of his sword, she might be able to gain a clear escape route. He would run her down, but it would buy her time. She dodged a quick thrust of his sword and ducked around a maple sapling into a bed of brown and yellow bracken ferns dappled by glowing sunlight.

Richard, driving forward in a sudden mad rush to end it, lifted his sword to hack her.

It was her opening—her only chance.

In a blink, Kahlan reversed her retreat and sprang ahead a step, ducking under his arm. She drove her sword straight into his soft middle.

Richard covered the wound with both hands. He teetered a moment, and then crumpled into the bed of ferns, sprawling flat on his back. Leaves lying lightly atop taller ferns were lifted by the disturbance. They somersaulted up into the air, finally drifting down to brightly decorate his body. The fierce red of the maple leaves was so vibrant it would have made blood look brown by comparison.

Kahlan stood over Richard, gasping to catch her breath. She was spent.

She dropped to her knees and then threw herself across his supine body. All around them, fern fronds, the color of caramel candy, were curled into little fists as if in defiance of having to die with the season. The sprinkling of lighter, yellowish, hayscented ferns lent a clean, sweet scent to the afternoon air. There were few things that could equal the fragrance of the woods in late autumn. In a spectacular bit of chance, a tall maple nearby, sheltered as it was by a protective corner in the rock wall, was not yet denuded, but displayed a wide spread of leaves so orange they looked tangy against the powder blue sky above.

“Cara!” Putting her left hand to Richard’s chest, Kahlan pushed herself up on one arm to call out. “Cara! I killed Richard!”

Cara, not far off, laying on her belly at the edge of the ridge as she watched out beyond, said nothing.

“I killed him! Did you hear? Cara—did you see?”

“Yes,” she muttered, “I heard. You killed Lord Rahl.”

“No you didn’t,” Richard said, still catching his breath.

She whacked him across the shoulder with her willow-switch sword. “Yes I did. I killed you this time. Killed you dead.”

“You only grazed me.” He pressed the point of his willow switch to her side. “You’ve fallen into my trap. I have you at the point of my sword, now. Surrender, or die, woman.”

“Never,” she said, still gasping for breath as she laughed. “I’d rather die than be captured by the likes of you, you rogue.”

She stabbed him repeatedly in his ribs with her willow practice sword as he giggled and rolled from side to side.

“Cara! Did you see? I killed him this time. I finally got him!”

“Yes, all right,” Cara grouched as she intently watched out beyond the ridge. “You killed Lord Rahl. Good for you.” She glanced back over her shoulder. “This one is mine, right, Lord Rahl? You promised this one was mine.”

“Yes,” Richard said, still catching his breath, “this one goes for yours, Cara.”

“Good.” Cara smiled in satisfaction. “It’s a big one.”

Richard smirked up at Kahlan. “I let you kill me, you know.”

“No you didn’t! I won. I got you this time.” She whacked him again with her willow sword. She paused and frowned. “I thought you said you weren’t dead. You said it was only a scratch. Ha! You admitted I got you this time.”

Richard chuckled. “I let you—”

Kahlan kissed him to shut him up. Cara saw and rolled her eyes.

When Cara looked back over the ridge, she suddenly sprang up. “They just left! Come on, before something gets it!”

“Cara, nothing is going to get it,” Richard said, “not this quickly.

“Come on! You promised this one was mine. I don’t want to have gone through all this for nothing. Come on.”

“All right, all right.” Richard said as Kahlan climbed off him. “We’re coming.”

He held his hand out for Kahlan to help him up. She stabbed him in the ribs instead. “Got you again, Lord Rahl. You’re getting sloppy.”

Richard only smiled as Kahlan finally offered her hand. When he was up he hugged her in a quick gesture, and before turning to follow after Cara, said, “Good job, Mother Confessor, good job. You killed me dead. I’m proud of you.”

Kahlan endeavored to show him a sedate smile, but she feared it came out as a giddy grin. Richard scooped up his pack and hefted it onto his back. Without delay, he started the descent down the steep, broken face of the mountain. Kahlan threw her long wolf’s-fur mantle around her shoulders and followed him through the deep shade of sheltering spruce at the edge of the ridge, stepping on the exposed ledge rather than the low places.

“Be careful,” Richard called out to Cara, already a good distance ahead of them, “With all the leaves covering the ground, you can’t see holes or gaps in the rock.”

“I know, I know,” she grumbled. “How many times do you think I need to hear it?”

Richard constantly watched out for them both. He had taught them how to walk in such terrain and what to be careful of. From the beginning, marching through the forests and mountains, Kahlan noted that Richard moved with quiet fluidity, while Cara traipsed along, bounding up onto and off of rocks and ledges, almost like an exuberant youngster. Since Cara had spent most of her life indoors, she didn’t know that it made a difference how you walked in such terrain.

Richard had patiently explained to her, “Pick where to put your feet in order to make your steps comparatively level. Don’t step down to a lower spot if you don’t need to, only to have to step up again as you continue your climb up the trail. Don’t step up needlessly, only to have to step down again. If you must step up on something, you don’t always need to lift your whole body—just flex your legs.”

Cara complained that it was too hard to think about where to put her foot each time. He told her that by walking the way she did, she was actually climbing the mountain twice for each time he climbed it. He admonished her to think as she walked, and soon it would become instinctive and would require no conscious thought. When Cara found that her shin and thigh muscles didn’t get as tired and sore when she followed his suggestions, she became a keen student. Now she asked questions instead of arguing. Most of the time.

Kahlan saw that as Cara descended the steep trail, she did as Richard had taught her and used a stick as an improvised staff to probe any suspicious low area where leaves collected before stepping there. This was no place to break an ankle. Richard said nothing, but sometimes he smiled when she found a hole with her stick rather than her foot, as she used to.

Forging a new trail on a steep slope like the one they were descending was dangerous work. Potential trails often withered into dead ends, requiring that you retrace your steps. On less severe slopes, hillsides, and flatter ground especially, animals often made good trails. In a valley, a suitable trail that shrank to nothing wasn’t a big problem because there you could beat through the brush to more open ground. Making your own trail on a rocky precipice, a thousand feet up, was always arduous and often frustrating. In such conditions, particularly if the hour grew late, the desire not to have to backtrack a difficult climb tempted people into taking chances.

Richard said that it was hard work that demanded you put reason before your wish to get down, get home, or get to a place to camp. “Wishing gets people killed,” he often said. “Using your head gets you home.”

Cara poked her stick into a pile of leaves between bare granite rocks.

“Don’t step in the leaves here,” she said over her shoulder as she hopped onto the far rock. “There’s a hole.”

“Why, thank you, Cara,” Richard said in mock gratitude, as if he would have stepped there had she not warned him.

The cliff face they were on had a number of sizable ledges with rugged little trees and shrubs that provided good footing and the safety of a handhold. Below, the mountainside dropped away before them into a lush ravine. Beyond the defile, it rose up again in a steep slope covered with evergreens and the dull gray and brown skeletons of oaks, maples, and birches.

The raucous coats of autumn leaves had been resplendent while they lasted, but now they were but confetti on the ground, and there they faded fast. Usually, the oaks held on to their leaves until at least early winter, and some of them until spring, but up in the mountains icy winds and early storms had already stripped even the oaks bare of their tenacious brown leaves.

Cara stepped out onto a shelf of ledge jutting out over the chasm below. “There,” she said as she pointed across the way. “Up there. Do you see?”

Richard shielded his eyes against the warm sunlight as he squinted higher up on the opposite slope. He made a sound deep in his throat to confirm that he saw it. “Nasty place to die.”

Kahlan snugged the warm wolf fur up against her ears to protect them from the cold wind. “There’s a good place?”

Richard let his hand drop from his brow. “I guess not.”

Farther up the slope from where Cara had pointed, the forest ended in a place called the crooked wood. Above that, where no trees could grow, the mountain was naked rock ridges and scree. A little farther up, snow, white as sugar, sparkled in the slanting sunlight. Below the snow and bare rock, the crooked wood was exposed to harsh winds and bitter weather, causing the trees to grow in tortured shapes. The crooked wood was a line of demarcation between the desolation where little more than lichen could survive the forbidding weather, and the forest of trees huddled below.

Richard gestured off to their right. “Let’s not waste any time, though. I don’t want to be caught up here come dark.”

Kahlan looked out to where the mountain opened onto a grand vista of snowcapped peaks, valleys, and the undulating green of seemingly endless, trackless forests. A roiling blanket of thick clouds had invaded those valleys, stealing in around the mountains, sneaking ever closer. In the distance, some of the snowcapped peaks stood isolated in a cottony gray sea.

Lower down the mountains, below those dense, dark clouds, the weather would be miserable.

Both Richard and Cara awaited Kahlan’s word. She didn’t like the thought of being exposed in the crooked wood when the icy cold fog and drizzle arrived. “I’m fine, let’s go and get it done. Then we can get down lower where we’ll be able to find a wayward pine to stay dry tonight. I wouldn’t mind sitting beside a hearty little fire sipping hot tea.”

Cara blew warm breath into her cupped hands. “That sounds good to me.”

It was on the first day Kahlan met Richard, more than a year before, that he had taken her to a wayward pine. Kahlan had never known about such trees in the deep woods of Westland. Wayward pines still held the same mystic quality for her as they did the first time she saw one silhouetted against a darkening sky, taller than all the trees around it. Such mature trees were a friend to travelers far from any conventional shelter.

A big wayward pine’s boughs hung down to the ground all around. The needles grew mostly at the outer fringe, leaving the inner branches bare.

Inside, under their dense green skirts, wayward pines provided excellent shelter from harsh weather. Something about the tree’s sap made them resistant to fire, so if you were careful, you could have a cozy campfire inside while outside it rained and stormed.

Richard, Kahlan, and Cara often stayed in wayward pines when they were out in the mountains. Those nights getting warm around a small fire within the tree’s confines brought them all closer, and gave them time to reflect, to talk, and to tell stories. Some of the stories made them laugh. Some brought a lump to their throats.

After Kahlan’s assurance that she was up to it, Richard and Cara nodded and started down the cliff. She had recovered from her terrible wounds, but they still left it up to her to decide if she was prepared for the effort of such a descent and climb and then descent again before they found a sheltered campsite—hopefully in a wayward pine.

Kahlan had been a long time in healing. She had known, of course, that injuries such as she had suffered would take time to heal. Bedridden for so long, her muscles had become withered, weak, and nearly useless. For a long time, it had been hard for her to eat much. She became a skeleton. With the realization of just how weak and helpless she had become, even as she healed, she had inexorably spiraled down into a state of abject depression.

Kahlan had not comprehended completely the punishing effort that would be required if she was to he herself again. Richard and Cara tried to cheer her up, but their efforts seemed distant; they just didn’t understand what it was like. Her legs wasted away until they were bony sticks with knobby knees. She felt not just helpless, but ugly. Richard carved animals for her: hawks, foxes, otters, ducks, and even chipmunks. They seemed only a curiosity to her. At the lowest point, Kahlan almost wished she had died along with their child.

Her life became a tasteless gruel. All she saw, day after day, week after week, were the four walls of her sickroom. The pain was exhausting and the monotony numbing. She came to hate the bitter yarrow tea they made her drink, and the smell of the poultice made of tall cinquefoil and yarrow.

When after a time she resisted drinking yarrow, they would sometimes switch to linden, which wasn’t so bitter but didn’t work as well, yet it did help her sleep. Skullcap often helped when her head hurt, though it was so astringent it make her mouth pucker for a long time after. Sometimes, they switched to a tincture of feverfew to help ease her pain. Kahlan came to hate taking herbs and would often say she didn’t hurt, when she did, just to avoid some horrid concoction.

Richard hadn’t made the window in the bedroom very big; in the summer heat the room was often sweltering. Kahlan could see only a bit of the sky outside her window, the tops of some trees, and the jagged blue-gray shape of a mountain in the distance.

Richard wanted to take her outside, but Kahlan begged him not to try because she didn’t think it would be worth the pain. It didn’t take much convincing for him to be talked out of hurting her. Every kind of day, from sunny and bright to gray and gloomy, came and went. Lying in her little room as time slipped away while she slowly healed, Kahlan thought of it as her “lost summer.”

One day, she was parched, and Richard had forgotten to fill the cup and place it where she could reach it on the simple table beside the bed. When she asked for water, Richard came back with the cup and a full waterskin and set them both on the windowsill as he called to Cara, outside. He rushed out, telling Kahlan as he went that he and Cara had to go check the fishing lines and they would be back as soon as they could. Before Kahlan could ask him to put the water closer, he was gone.

Kahlan lay fuming in the silence, hardly able to believe that Richard had been so inconsiderate as to leave the water out of her reach. It was unusually warm for late summer. Her tongue felt swollen. She stared helplessly at the wooden cup setting in the windowsill.

On the verge of tears, she let out a moan of self-pity and smacked her fist against the bed. She rolled her head to the right, away from the window, and closed her eyes. She decided to take a nap in order not to think about her thirst. Richard and Cara would be back by the time she awoke, and they would get the water for her. And Richard would get a scolding.

Sweat trickled down her neck. Outside, a bird kept calling. Its repetitious song sounded like a little girl with a high pitched voice saying “who, me?” Once a “who, me?” bird started in, it was a long performance.

Kahlan could think of little else besides how much she wanted a drink.

She couldn’t make herself fall asleep. The annoying bird kept asking its question over and over again. More than once, she found herself whispering “yes, you,” in answer. She growled a curse at Richard. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to forget her thirst, the heat, and the bird and go to sleep. Her eyes kept popping open.

Kahlan lifted her sleeping gown away from her chest, ruffling it up and down to cool herself. She realized she was staring at the water in the window. It was out of her reach—clear over on the other side of the room.

The room wasn’t very big, but still, she couldn’t walk. Richard knew better.

She thought that maybe, if she could sit up and move to the bottom of the bed, she might be able to reach the cup.

With an ill-tempered huff, she threw the light cover off her bony legs.

She hated seeing them. Why was Richard being so inconsiderate? What was the matter with him? She intended to give him a piece of her mind when he got back. She eased her legs over the side of the bed.

The mattress was a pliable woven mat stuffed with grasses and feathers and tow padding. It was quite comfortable, and Kahlan was pleased with her snug bed. With a great effort, she pushed herself up. For a long time, she sat on the edge of the bed holding her head in her hands as she caught her breath. Her whole body throbbed in pain.

It was the first time she had sat up all by herself.

She understood very well what Richard was doing. Still, she didn’t appreciate his way of forcing her to get up. It was cruel. She wasn’t ready.

She was still badly hurt. She needed to rest in bed in order to recover. Her oozing wounds had finally closed up and healed over, but she was sure she was still too injured to be getting up. She feared to test broken bones.

Accompanied by a lot of groaning and grunting, she worked herself to the bottom of the bed. Sitting there, one hand holding the footboard to steady herself, she was still too far from the window to reach the water. She was going to have to stand.

She paused for a while to have dark thoughts about her husband.

After a day many weeks before, when she had called for a long time and Richard hadn’t heard her weak voice, he had left a light pole beside her so she would be able to use it to reach out and knock on the wall or door if she was in urgent need of their help. Now, Kahlan worked her fingers around the pole lying alongside her bed and lifted it upright. She planted the thicker end on the ground and leaned on the pole for support as she carefully slid off the bed. Her feet touched the cool dirt floor. Putting weight on her legs made her gasp in pain.

She half stood, half leaned on the bed, prepared to cry out, but realized she was gasping more at the brutal pain she expected than from the actual pain. It did hurt, but she realized it wasn’t too much to endure. She was a bit disgruntled to learn it wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been; she had been planning on reducing Richard to tears with the torturous suffering he had so cavalierly forced upon her.

She put more weight on her feet and pulled herself up with the aid of the pole. Finally, she stood in wobbling triumph. She was actually on her feet, and she had done it by herself.

Kahlan couldn’t seem to make her legs walk the way she wanted them to.

In order to get to the water, she was going to have to make them do her bidding—at least until she reached the window. Then, she could collapse to the floor, where Richard would find her. She luxuriated in her mental picture of it. He wouldn’t think his plan to get her out of bed so clever, then.

With the aid of the stout pole for support and her tongue poked out the corner of her mouth for balance, she slowly shuffled to the window. Kahlan told herself that if she fell, she was going to lie there in a heap on the floor, without any water, until Richard came back and found her moaning through cracked lips, dying of thirst. He would be sorry he had ever tried such a pitiless trick. He would feel guilty for the rest of his life for what he had done to her—she would see to it.

Almost wishing every difficult step of the way that she would fall, she finally made it to the window. Kahlan threw an arm over the sill for support and closed her eyes as she panted in little breaths so as not to hurt her ribs. When she had her wind back, she drew herself up to the window. She snatched the cup and gulped down the water.

Kahlan plunked the empty cup down on the sill and peered out as she caught her breath again.

Richard was sitting on the ground just outside, his arms hooked around his knees, his hands clasped.

“Hi there,” he said with a smile.

Cara, sitting right beside him, gazed up without emotion. “I see you’re up.”

Kahlan wanted to yell at him, but instead she found herself trying with all her might not to laugh. She felt suddenly and overwhelmingly foolish for not trying sooner to get up on her own.

Tears stung her eyes as she looked out at the expanse of trees, the vibrant colors, the majestic mountains, and the huge sweep of blue sky dotted with fluffy white clouds marching off into the distance. The size of the mountains, their imposing slopes, their luscious color, was beyond anything she had ever encountered before. How could she possibly not have wanted more than anything to get up and see the world around her?

“You know, of course, that you’ve made a big mistake,” Richard said.

“What do you mean?” Kahlan asked.

“Well, had you not gotten up, we’d have kept waiting on you—at least for a time. Now that you’ve shown us that you can get up and move on your own, we’re only going to keep doing this—putting things out of your reach to make you start moving about and helping yourself.”

While she silently thanked him, she was unwilling, just yet, to tell him out loud how right he had been. But inside, she loved him all the more for braving her anger to help her.

Cara turned to Richard. “Should we show her where she can find the table?”

Richard shrugged. “If she gets hungry, she’ll come out of the bedroom and find it.”

Kahlan threw the cup at him, hoping to wipe the smirk off his face. He caught the cup.

“Well, glad to see your arm works,” he said. “You can cut your own bread.” When she started to protest, he said, “It’s only fair. Cara baked it. The least you can do is to cut it.”

Kahlan’s mouth fell open. “Cara baked bread?”

“Lord Rahl taught me,” Cara said. “I wanted bread with my stew, real bread, and he told me that if I wanted bread, I would have to learn to make it. It was easy, really. A little like walking to the window. But I was much more good-natured about it, and didn’t throw anything at him.”

Kahlan could not help smiling, knowing it must have been harder for Cara to knead dough than for Kahlan to get up and walk. She somehow doubted that Cara had been “good-natured” about it. Kahlan would like to have seen that battle of wills.

“Give me back my cup. And then go catch some fish for dinner. I’m hungry. I want a trout. A big trout. Along with bread.”

Richard smiled. “I can do that. If you can find the table.”

Kahlan did find the table. She never ate in bed again.

At first, the pain of walking was sometimes more than she could tolerate, and she took refuge in her bed. Cara would come in and brush her hair, just so Kahlan wouldn’t be alone. She had no power in her muscles, and could hardly move by herself. Brushing her own hair was a colossal task.

Just getting to the table was exhausting, and all she could accomplish at first. Richard and Cara were sympathetic, and continually encouraged her, but they pushed her, too.

Kahlan was joyous to be out of the bed and that helped her to ignore the pain. The world was again a wondrous place. She was more than joyous to be able at last to go out to the privy. While she never said so, Kahlan was sure Cara was happy about that, too.

As much as she liked the snug home, going outside felt like finally being freed from a dungeon. Before, Richard had frequently offered to take her outside for the day, but she had never wanted to leave her bed, fearing the pain. She realized that because she was so sick, her thinking had slowly become dull and foggy. Along with her summer, she had for a time lost herself. Now, at long last, she felt clearheaded.

She discovered that the view outside her window was the least impressive of the surrounding sights. Snowcapped peaks towered around the small house Richard and Cara had built in the lap of breathtaking mountains.

The simple house, with a bedroom at either end, one for Richard and Kahlan, and one for Cara, with a common room in the middle, sat at the edge of a meadow of velvety green grasses sprinkled with wildflowers. Even though it was late in the season when they had arrived, Richard managed to start a small garden in a sunny place outside Cara’s window, growing fresh greens for the table and some herbs to add flavor to their cooking. Right behind the house, huge old white pines towered over them, sheltering them from the full force of the wind.

Richard had continued his carving, to pass the time as he sat by Kahlan’s bed, talking and telling stories, but after she had at last gotten out of bed, his carvings changed. Instead of animals, Richard began sculpting people.

And then one day he surprised her with his most magnificent carving yet in celebration, he said, of her getting well enough to finally come out into the world.

Astonished by the utter realism and power of the small statue, she whispered that it could only be the gift that had guided his hand in carving it. Richard regarded such talk as nonsense.

“People without the gift carve beautiful statues all the time,” he said. “There’s no magic involved.”

She knew, though, that some artists were gifted, and able to invoke magic through their art.

Richard occasionally spoke wistfully about the works of art he’d seen at the People’s Palace, in D’Hara, where he had been held captive. Growing up in Hartland, he had never before seen statues carved in marble, and certainly none carved on such a grand scale, or by such talented hands.

Those works had in some ways opened his eyes to the greater world around him and had made a lasting impression on him. Who else but Richard would remember fondly the beauty he saw while held captive and being tortured?

It was true that art could exist independent of magic, but Richard had been taken captive in the first place only with the aid of a spell brought to life through art. Art was a universal language, and thus an invaluable tool for implementing magic.

Kahlan finally stopped arguing with him about whether the gift helped him to carve. He simply didn’t believe it. She felt, though, that, having no other outlet, his gift must be expressing itself in this way. Magic always seemed to find a way to seep out, and his carvings of people certainly did seem magical to her.

But the figure of the woman that he carved for her as a gift stirred profound emotion within her. He called it, an image nearly two feet tall carved from buttery smooth, rich, aromatic walnut, Spirit. The feminity of her body, its exquisite shape and curves, bones and muscle, were clearly evident beneath her flowing robes. She looked alive.

How Richard had accomplished such a feat, Kahlan couldn’t even imagine.

He had conveyed through the woman, her robes flowing in a wind as she stood with her head thrown back, her chest out, her hands fisted at her sides, her back arched and strong as if in opposition to an invisible power trying unsuccessfully to subdue her, a sense of . . . spirit.

The statue was obviously not intended to look like Kahlan, yet it evoked in her some visceral response, a tension that was startlingly familiar. Something about the woman in the carving, some quality it conveyed, made Kahlan hunger to be well, to be fully alive, to be strong and independent again.

If this wasn’t magic, she didn’t know what was.

Kahlan had been around grand palaces her whole life, exposed to any number of pieces of great art by renowned artists, but none had ever taken her breath with its thrust of inner vision, its sense of individual nobility, as did this proud, vibrant woman in flowing robes. The strength and vitality of it brought a lump to Kahlan’s throat, and she could only throw her arms around Richard’s neck in speechless emotion.