Faith of the Fallen

Chapter 2

“A vision?” Kahlan said in open astonishment.

Richard hated anything to do with prophecy. It had caused him no end of trouble.

Prophecy was always ambiguous and usually cryptic, no matter how clear it seemed on the surface. The untrained were easily misled by its superficially simplistic construction. Unthinking adherence to a literal interpretation of prophecy had in the past caused great turmoil, everything from murder to war. As a result, those involved with prophecy went to great lengths to keep it secret.

Prophecy, at least on the face of it, was predestination; Richard believed that man created his own destiny. He had once told her, “Prophecy can only say that tomorrow the sun will come up. It can’t say what you are going to do with your day. The act of going about your day is not the fulfillment of prophecy, but the fulfillment of your own purpose.”

Shota, the witch woman, had prophesied that Richard and Kahlan would conceive an infamous son. Richard had more than once proven Shota’s view of the future to be, if not fatally flawed, at least vastly more complex than Shota would have it seem. Like Richard, Kahlan didn’t accept Shota’s prediction.

On any number of occasions, Richard’s view of prophecy had been shown to be correct. Richard simply ignored what prophecy said and did as he believed he must. By his doing so, prophecy was in the end often fulfilled, but in ways that could not have been foretold. In this way, prophecy was at once proven and disproved, resolving nothing and only demonstrating what an eternal enigma it truly was.

Richard’s grandfather, Zedd, who had helped raise him not far from where they were, had not only kept his own identity as a wizard secret. In order to protect Richard, he also hid the fact that Richard had been fathered by Darken Rahl and not George Cypher, the man who had loved and raised him. Darken Rahl, a wizard of great power, had been the dangerous, violent ruler of far-off D’Hara. Richard had inherited the gift of magic from two different bloodlines. After killing Darken Rahl, he had also inherited the rule of D’Hara, a land that was in many ways as much a mystery to him as was his power.

Kahlan, being from the Midlands, had grown up around wizards; Richard’s ability was unlike that of any wizard she had ever known. He possessed not one aspect of the gift, but many, and not one side, but both: he was a war wizard. Some of his outfit came from the Wizard’s Keep, and had not been worn in three thousand years—since the last war wizard lived.

With the gift dying out in mankind, wizards were uncommon; Kahlan had known fewer than a dozen. Among wizards, prophets were the most rare; she knew of the existence of only two. One of those was Richard’s ancestor, which made visions all the more within the province of Richard’s gift. Yet Richard had always treated prophecy as a viper in his bed.

Tenderly, as if there were no more precious thing in the whole world, Richard lifted her hand. “You know how I always talk about the beautiful places only I know way back in the mountains to the west of where I grew up? The special places I’ve always wanted to show you? I’m going to take you there, where we’ll be safe.”

“D’Harans are bonded to you, Lord Rahl,” Cara reminded him, “and will be able to find you through that bond.”

“Well, our enemies aren’t bonded to me. They won’t know where we are.”

Cara seemed to find that thought agreeable. “If people don’t go to this place, then there won’t be any roads. How are we going to get the carriage there? The Mother Confessor can’t walk.”

“I’ll make a litter. You and I will carry her in that.”

Cara nodded thoughtfully. “We could do that. If there were no other people, then the two of you would be safe, at least.”

“Safer than here. I had expected the people here to leave us to ourselves. I hadn’t expected the Order to foment unrest this far away—at least not this quickly. Those men usually aren’t a bad lot, but they’re working themselves up into a dangerous mood.”

“The cowards have gone back to their women’s skirts. They won’t be back until morning. We can let the Mother Confessor rest and then leave before dawn.”

Richard cast Cara a telling look. “One of those men, Albert, has a son, Lester. Lester and his pal, Tommy Lancaster, once tried to put arrows into me for spoiling some fun Tommy was about to have hurting someone. Now Tommy and Lester are missing a good many teeth. Albert will tell Lester about us being here, and soon after, Tommy Lancaster will know, too.

“Now that the Imperial Order has filled their heads with talk of a noble war on behalf of good, those men will be fancying what it would be like to be war heroes. They aren’t ordinarily violent, but today they were more unreasonable than I’ve ever seen them.

“They’ll go drinking to fortify their courage. Tommy and Lester will be with them by then, and their tales of how I wronged them and how I’m a danger to decent folks will get everyone all worked up. Because they greatly outnumber us, they’ll begin to see the merit in killing us—see it as protecting their families and doing the right thing for the community and their Creator. Full of liquor and glory, they won’t want to wait until morning. They’ll be back tonight. We have to leave now.”

Cara seemed unconcerned. “I say we wait for them, and when they come back, we end the threat.”

“Some of them will bring along other friends. There will be a lot of them by the time they get here. We have Kahlan to think about. I don’t want to risk one of us being injured. There’s nothing to be gained by fighting them.”

Richard pulled the ancient, tooled-leather baldric, holding the gold-and-silver-wrought scabbard and sword, off over his head and hung it on the stump of a branch sticking out of a log. Looking unhappy, Cara folded her arms. She would rather not leave a threat alive. Richard picked his folded black shirt off the floor to the side, where Kahlan hadn’t seen it.

He poked an arm through a sleeve and drew it on.

“A vision?” Kahlan finally asked again. As much trouble as the men could be, they were not her biggest concern just then. “You’ve had a vision?”

“The sudden clarity of it felt like a vision, but it was really more of a revelation.”

“Revelation.” She wished she could manage more than a hoarse whisper. “And what form did this vision revelation thing take?”

“Understanding.”

Kahlan stared up at him. “Understanding of what?”

He started buttoning his shirt. “Through this realization I’ve come to understand the larger picture. I’ve come to understand what it is I must do.”

“Yes,” Cara muttered, “and wait until you hear it. Go ahead, tell her.”

Richard glared at Cara and she answered him in kind. His attention finally returned to Kahlan.

“If I lead us into this war, we will lose. A great many people will die for nothing. The result will be a world enslaved by the Imperial Order. If I don’t lead our side in battle, the world will still fall under the shadow of the Order but far fewer people will die. Only in that way will we ever stand a chance.”

“By losing? You want to lose first, and then fight? . . . How can we even consider abandoning the fight for freedom?”

“Anderith helped teach me a lesson,” he said. His voice was restrained, as if he regretted what he was saying. “I can’t press this war. Freedom requires effort if it is to be won and vigilance if it is to be maintained. People just don’t value freedom until it’s taken away.”

“But many do,” Kahlan objected.

“There are always some, but most don’t even understand it, nor do they care to—the same as with magic. People mindlessly shrink from it, too, without seeing the truth. The Order offers them a world without magic and ready-made answers to everything. Servitude is simple. I thought that I could convince people of the value of their own lives, and of liberty. In Anderith they showed me just how foolish I had been.”

“Anderith is just one place—”

“Anderith was not remarkable. Look at all the trouble we’ve had elsewhere. We’re having trouble even here, where I grew up.” Richard began tucking in his shirt. “Forcing people to fight for freedom is the worst kind of contradiction.

“Nothing I can say will inspire people to care—I’ve tried. Those who value liberty will have to run, to hide, to try to survive and endure what is sure to come. I can’t prevent it. I can’t help them. I know that now.”

“But Richard, how can you even think of—”

“I must do what is best for us. I must be selfish; life is far too precious to be casually squandered on useless causes. There can be no greater evil than that. People can only be saved from the coming dark age of subjugation and servitude if they, too, come to understand and care about the value of their own lives, their freedom, and are willing to act in their own interest. We must try to stay alive in the hope that such a day will come.”

“But we can prevail in this war. We must.”

“Do you think that I can just go off and lead men into war, and because I wish it, we will win? We won’t. It takes more than my wishing it. It will take vast numbers of people fully committed to the cause. We don’t have that. If we throw our forces against the Order, we will be destroyed and any chance for winning freedom in the future will be forever lost.” He raked his fingers back through his hair. “We must not lead our forces against the army of the Order.”

He turned to pulling his black, open-sided tunic on over his head.

Kahlan struggled to give force to her voice, to the magnitude of her concern.

“But what about all those who are prepared to fight—all the armies already in the field? There are good men, able men, ready to go against Jagang and stop his Imperial Order and drive them back to the Old World. Who will lead our men?”

“Lead them to what? Death? They can’t win.”

Kahlan was horrified. She reached up and snatched his shirtsleeve before he could lean down to retrieve his broad over-belt. “Richard, you’re only saying this, walking away from the struggle, because of what happened to me.”

“No. I had already decided it that same night, before you were attacked. When I went out alone for a walk, after the vote, I did a lot of thinking. I came to this realization and made up my mind. What happened to you made no difference except to prove the point that I’m right and should have figured it out sooner. If I had, you would never have been hurt.”

“But if the Mother Confessor had not been hurt, you would have felt better by morning and changed your mind.”

Light coming through the doorway behind him lit in a blaze of gold the ancient symbols coiled along the squared edges of his tunic. “Cara, what would happen if I’d been attacked with her, and we had both been killed? What would you all do then?”

“I don’t know.”

“That is why I withdraw. You are all following me, not participating in a struggle for your own future. Your answer should have been that you would all fight on for yourselves, for your freedom. I have come to understand the mistake I’ve made in this, and to see that we cannot win in this way. The Order is too large an opponent.”

Kahlan’s father, King Wyborn, had taught her about fighting against such odds, and she had practical experience at it. “Their army may outnumber ours, but that doesn’t make it impossible. We just have to outthink them. I will be there to help you, Richard. We have seasoned officers. We can do it. We must.”

“Look how the Order’s cause spreads on words that sound good”—Richard swept out an arm—“even to distant places like this. We know beyond doubt the evil of the Order, yet people everywhere passionately side with them despite the ghastly truth of everything the Imperial Order stands for.”

“Richard,” Kahlan whispered, trying not to lose what was left of her voice, “I led those young Galean recruits against an army of experienced Order soldiers who greatly outnumbered us, and we prevailed.”

“Exactly. They had just seen their home city after the Order had been there. Everyone they loved had been murdered, everything they knew had been destroyed. Those men fought with an understanding of what they were doing and why. They were going to throw themselves at the enemy with or without you commanding them. But they were the only ones, and even though they succeeded, most of them were killed in the struggle.”

Kahlan was incredulous. “So you are going to let the Order do the same elsewhere so as to give people a reason to fight? You are going to stand aside and let the Order slaughter hundreds of thousands of innocent people?

“You want to quit because I was hurt. Dear spirits, I love you Richard, but don’t do this to me. I’m the Mother Confessor; I’m responsible for the lives of the people of the Midlands. Don’t do this because of what happened to me.”

Richard snapped on his leather-padded silver wristbands. “I’m not doing this because of what happened to you. I’m helping save those lives in the only way that has a chance. I’m doing the only thing I can do.”

“You are doing the easy thing,” Cara said.

Richard met her challenge with quiet sincerity. “Cara, I’m doing the hardest thing I have ever had to do.”

Kahlan was sure now that their rejection by the Anderith people had hit him harder than she had realized. She caught two of his fingers and squeezed sympathetically. He had put his heart into sparing those people from enslavement by the Order. He had tried to show them the value of freedom by allowing them the freedom to choose their own destiny. He had put his faith in their hands.

In a crushing defeat, an enormous majority had spurned all he had offered, and in so doing devastated that faith.

Kahlan thought that perhaps with some time to heal, the same as with her, the pain would fade for him, too. “You can’t hold yourself to blame for the fall of Anderith, Richard. You did your best. It wasn’t your fault.”

He picked up his big leather over-belt with its gold-worked pouches and cinched it over the magnificent tunic.

“When you’re the leader, everything is your fault.”

Kahlan knew the truth of that. She thought to dissuade him by taking a different tack.

“What form did this vision assume?”

Richard’s piercing gray eyes locked on her, almost in warning.

“Vision, revelation, realization, postulation, prophecy . . . understanding—call it what you will, for in this they are all in one the same, and unequivocal. I can’t describe it but to say it seems as if I must have always known it. Maybe I have. It wasn’t so much words as it was a complete concept, a conclusion, a truth that became absolutely clear to me.”

She knew he expected her to leave it at that. “If it became so clear and is unambiguous,” she pressed, “you must be able to express it in words.”

Richard slipped the baldric over his head, laying it over his right shoulder. As he adjusted the sword against his left hip, light sparkled off the raised gold wire woven through the silver wire of the hilt to spell out the word TRUTH.

His brow was smooth and his face calm. She knew she had at last brought him to the heart of the matter. His certainty would afford him no reason to keep it from her if she chose to hear it, and she did. His words rolled forth with quiet power, like prophecy come to life.

“I have been a leader too soon. It is not I who must prove myself to the people, but the people who must now prove themselves to me. Until then, I must not lead them, or all hope is lost.”

Standing there, erect, masculine, masterful in his black war wizard outfit, he looked as if he could be posing for a statue of who he was: the Seeker of Truth, rightfully named by Zeddicus Zu’l Zorander, the First Wizard himself—and Richard’s grandfather. It had nearly broken Zedd’s heart to do so, because Seekers so often died young and violently.

While he lived, a Seeker was a law unto himself. Backed by the awesome power of his sword, a Seeker could bring down kingdoms. That was one reason it was so important to name the right person—a moral person—to the post.

Zedd claimed that the Seeker, in a way, named himself by the nature of his own mind and by his actions, and that the First Wizard’s function was simply to act on his observations by officially naming him and giving him the weapon that was to be his lifelong companion.

So many different qualities and responsibilities had converged in this man she loved that she sometimes wondered how he could reconcile them all.

“Richard, are you so sure?”

Because of the importance of the post, Kahlan and then Zedd had sworn their lives in defense of Richard as the newly named Seeker of Truth. That had been shortly after Kahlan had met him. It was as Seeker that Richard had first come to accept all that had been thrust upon him, and to live up to the extraordinary trust put in him.

His gray eyes fairly blazed with clarity of purpose as he answered her.

“The only sovereign I can allow to rule me is reason. The first law of reason is this: what exists, exists; what is, is. From this irreducible, bedrock principle, all knowledge is built. This is the foundation from which life is embraced.

“Reason is a choice. Wishes and whims are not facts, nor are they a means to discovering them. Reason is our only way of grasping reality—it’s our basic tool of survival. We are free to evade the effort of thinking, to reject reason, but we are not free to avoid the penalty of the abyss we refuse to see.

“If I fail to use reason in this struggle, if I close my eyes to the reality of what is, in favor of what I would wish, then we will both die in this, and for nothing. We will be but two more among uncounted millions of nameless corpses beneath the gray, gloomy decay of mankind. In the darkness that will follow, our bones will be meaningless dust.

“Eventually, perhaps a thousand years from now, perhaps more, the light of liberty will again be raised up to shine over a free people, but between now and then, millions upon millions of people will be born into hopeless misery and have no choice but to bear the weight of the Order’s yoke. We, by ignoring reason, will have purchased those mountains of broken bodies, the wreckage of lives endured but never lived.”

Kahlan found herself unable to summon the courage to speak, much less argue; to do so right then would be to ask him to disregard his judgment at a cost he believed would be a sea of blood. But doing as he saw they must would cast her people helpless into the jaws of death.

Kahlan, her vision turning to a watery blur, looked away.

“Cara,” Richard said, “get the horses hitched to the carnage. I’m going to scout a circle to make sure we don’t have any surprises.”

“I will scout while you hitch the horses. I am your guard.”

“You’re my friend, too. I know this land better than you. Hitch the horses and don’t give me any trouble about it.”

Cara rolled her eyes and huffed, but marched off to do his bidding.

The room rang with silence. Richard’s shadow slipped off the blanket.

When Kahlan whispered her love to him, he paused and looked back. His shoulders seemed to betray the weight he carried.

“I wish I could, but I can’t make people understand freedom. I’m sorry.”

From somewhere inside, Kahlan found a smile for him. “Maybe it isn’t so hard.” She gestured toward the bird he had carved in the wall. “Just show them that, and they will understand what freedom really means: to soar on your own wings.”

Richard smiled, she thought gratefully, before he vanished through the doorway.