Faith of the Fallen

Chapter 26

Richard broke up the sausage Nicci gave him from her saddlebag and tossed it in the pot with the simmering rice. The things she had told him kept shouting in his mind as he tried to fit them into their proper order.

He didn’t know how much of what she had said he dared to believe. He feared it was all true. Nicci just didn’t seem to need to lie to him—at least not about what she had told him so far. She didn’t seem as . . . hostile, as he thought she would have to be. If anything, she seemed melancholy, perhaps because of what she had done—although, he had trouble believing that a confessed Sister of the Dark would suffer a guilty conscience. It was probably just some bizarre part of her act, some artifice directed toward her ends.

He stirred the pot of rice with a stick he’d peeled the bark off of.

“You said there were things to discuss.” He rapped the stick clean on the edge of the pot. “I assume that means there are orders you wish to issue.”

Nicci blinked, as if he’d caught her thinking about something else. She looked out of place, sitting prim and straight in a wayward pine, dressed as she was in her fine black dress. Richard would never before have ever thought of Nicci out-of-doors, much less sitting on the ground. The very idea had always seemed ludicrous to him. Her dress constantly made him think of Kahlan, not only because of it being so completely opposite that it evoked the comparison, but also because he so vividly recalled Nicci connected to Kahlan by that awful rope of magic.

That memory twisted him in agony.

“Orders?” Nicci folded her hands in her lap and met his gaze. “Oh, yes, I have a few requests I wish you to honor. First, you may not use your gift. Not at all. Not in any way. Is that clear? Since, as I recall, you have no love of the gift, this should be neither a burden nor a difficult request for you to follow, especially because there is something you do love which would not survive such a betrayal. Do you understand?”

Her cold blue eyes conveyed the threat perhaps even better than her words. Richard gave her a single nod, committing himself to what, exactly, he wasn’t entirely sure at the moment.

He poured her steaming dinner in a shallow wooden bowl and handed it to her along with a spoon. Nicci smiled her thanks. He set the pot on the ground between his legs and took a spoonful of rice, blowing on it until it was cool enough to eat. He watched her from the corner of his eye as she took a dainty taste.

Beyond her physical perfection, Nicci had a singularly expressive face.

She seemed to go cold and blank when she was unhappy, or when she meant to convey anger, threat, or displeasure. She didn’t really scowl the way other people did when they felt those emotions; rather, a look of cool detachment descended on her. That look was, in its own way, far more disturbing. It was her impenetrable armor.

On the other hand, she was expressively animated when she was pleased or thankful. Even more than that, though, such pleasure or gratitude appeared genuine. He remembered her as aloof, and while she still possessed a noble bearing, to some extent her air of reticence had lifted to reveal an innocent delight in any kindness, or even simple courtesy.

Richard still had bread Cara had baked for him. He hated sharing that bread with this evil woman, but it now seemed a childish consideration. He tore off a piece and offered it to Nicci. She took it with the reverence due something greater than mere bread.

“I also expect you to keep no secrets from me,” she said after another bite. “You would not like me to discover you were doing so. Husbands and wives have no need for secrets.”

Richard supposed not, but they were hardly husband and wife. Rather than say so, he said instead, “You seem to know a lot about how husbands and wives behave.”

Rather than rising to his bait, she gestured with her bread at her bowl. “This is very good, Richard. Very good indeed.”

“What is it you want, Nicci? What is the purpose of this absurd pretense?”

The firelight played across her alabaster face, and lent her hair a torrid color it didn’t in reality possess. “I took you because I need an answer which I believe you will provide.”

Richard broke a stout branch in two across his knee. “You said husbands and wives have no need for secrets.” He used half the branch to push the burning wood together before placing the branch atop the fire. “Then aren’t wives, too, supposed to be honest?”

“Of course.” Her hand with the bread lowered. She rested her wrist over her knee. “I will be honest with you, too, Richard.”

“Then what’s the question? You said you took me because you need an answer you think I can provide. What’s the question?”

Nicci stared oft again once more looking anything but the grim captor.

She looked as if memories, or perhaps fears, haunted her. It was somehow more unsettling than the sneer of an armed guard outside of the bars of his cage.

The rain outside had increased to a dull roar. They’d made camp just in time. Richard couldn’t help but remember the cozy times he’d had in wayward pines huddled beside Kahlan. At the thought of Kahlan, his heart sank.

“I don’t know,” Nicci finally said. “I honestly don’t, Richard. I seek something, but I will only know it when I find it. After nearly all my one hundred and eighty-one years without knowing it existed, I finally saw the first hint of it not long ago . . .” She seemed to be looking through him again, to some point beyond. Her voice, too, seemed to be addressed to that distant place her vision beheld. “That was when you stood in a collar before all those Sisters, and defied them. Perhaps I will find the answer when I understand what it was I saw that day, in that room. It was not just you, but you were its center . . .”

Her eyes focused once more on his face. She spoke with gentle assurance. “Until then, you will live. I have no intention of harming you. You need fear no torture from me. I’m not like them—that woman, Denna, or like the Sisters of the Light, using you for their games.”

“Don’t patronize me. You are using me for your own game, no less than they used me for theirs.”

She shook her head. “I want you to know, Richard, that I have nothing but respect for you. I probably have more respect for you than any person you have ever met. That’s why I took you. You are a rare person, Richard.”

“I’m a war wizard. You’ve just never seen one of those before.”

She spurned the notion with a dismissive flick of her hand. “Please don’t try to impress me with your power. I’m not in the mood for such silliness.”

Richard knew it was no idle boast on her part. She was a sorceress of remarkable ability. He doubted he had any hope of outsmarting her knowledge of magic.

She was not acting the way he had expected a Sister of the Dark would act, though. Richard put his anger, hurt, and heartache aside for the moment, knowing he had to face what was, rather than putting his hope in wishes, and spoke to Nicci in the same gentle fashion she used with him.

“I don’t understand what it is you want of me, Nicci.”

She shrugged in an involuntary gesture of frustration. “Neither do I. Until I do, you will do as I ask and everything will be fine. I will not harm you.”

“Considering the circumstances, do you really expect me to take your word?”

“I’m telling you the truth, Richard. If you were to twist your ankle, I would, like a good wife, put my shoulder under your arm and help you to walk. From now on, I am devoted to you, and you to me.”

He could only blink at how crazy this was. He almost thought she might be mad. Almost. He knew that would be too easy an answer. As Zedd always said, nothing was ever easy.

“And if I choose not to go along with your wishes?”

Again, she shrugged. “Then Kahlan dies.”

“I understand that, but if she dies, then you lose the collar around my heart.”

She fixed him with cold blue eyes. “Your point?”

“Then you couldn’t get what you wanted from me. You would have no leverage.”

“I don’t have what I want now, so I would be losing nothing. Besides, if you were to do that, then Emperor Jagang would welcome your head as a gift. I would no doubt be showered with gifts and riches.”

Richard didn’t think Nicci wanted gifts or riches showered on her. She was a Sister of the Dark, after all, and he supposed she could manage to be so showered if she really wished it.

Even so, he was sure his head would have a price, and she could salvage that much out of it if he proved ungovernable. She might not care for gifts and riches, but if there was one thing she did want, it had to be power. He was pretty sure she could gain a good measure of that, should she slay the enemy of the Imperial Order.

He bent over the pot between his legs and went back to his dinner, and his dark thoughts. Talking to her was useless. They just went around in circles.

“Richard,” she said in a quiet tone, drawing his eyes to her gaze, “you think I’m doing this to hurt you, or to defeat you because you are the enemy of the Order. I am not. I told you my true reasons.”

“So, when you finally find this answer you seek, in return for my help, then you will let me go?” It was not really meant as a question, but as trenchant incrimination.

“Go?” She stared down into her bowl of rice and sausage, stirring it around as if it might reveal a secret. She looked up. “No, Richard, then I will kill you.”

“I see.” He hardly thought that was a way to encourage his cooperation in her search, but he didn’t say so. “And Kahlan? After you kill me, I mean.”

“You have my word that if I decide I must kill you, as long as I live, she will, too. I have no ill will toward her.”

He tried to find solace in that much of it. For some reason, he believed Nicci. Knowing that Kahlan would be all right gave him courage. He could endure what was to happen to him, if only she would be all right. It was a price he was willing to pay.

“So, ‘wife,’ where are we going? Where is it you’re taking me?”

Nicci didn’t look at him but instead used her bread to sop up some of her dinner. She considered his question as she nibbled.

“Who are you fighting, Richard? Who is your enemy?” She took another small bite of her bread.

“Jagang. Jagang and his Imperial Order.”

Like an instructor correcting him, Nicci slowly shook her head. “No. You are wrong. I think perhaps you are in need of answers, too.”

Games. She was playing foolish games with him. Richard ground his teeth, but held his temper in check.

“Then who, Nicci? Who, or what, am I fighting if it is not Jagang.”

“That is what I hope to show you.” She watched his eyes in a way he found unsettling. “I am going to take you to the Old World, to the heart of the Order, to show you what you are fighting—the taste nature of what you believe to be your enemy.”

Richard frowned. “Why?”

Nicci smiled. “Let’s just say it amuses me.”

“You mean we’re going back to Tanimura? Back to where you lived all that time as a Sister?”

“No. We are going to the heart and soul of the Old World: Altur’Rang. Jagang’s homeland. The name means, roughly, ‘the Creator’s chosen.’ ”

Richard felt a chill run up his spine. “You expect to take me, Richard Rahl, there, into the heart of enemy territory? I hardly doubt we will be living as ‘husband and wife’ for long.”

“Besides not using your magic, you will not use the name associated with that magic—Rahl—but instead the name you grew up with: Richard Cypher. Without your magic, or your name, no one will know you are anyone but a humble man with his wife. That is exactly what you shall be—what we both shall be.”

Richard sighed. “Well, if the enemy should find I’m more, I guess a Sister of the Dark can . . . exert her influence.”

“No, I can’t.”

Richard’s eyes turned up. “What do you mean?”

“I can’t use my power.”

Gooseflesh prickled his arms. “What?”

“It’s devoted to the link with Kahlan, to keeping her alive. That is how a maternity spell works. It requires a prodigious amount of power to even establish such a complex spell, much less maintain it. My power must be invested into the labor of preserving the living link. A maternity spell leaves nothing to spare; l doubt I could make a spark.

“If we have any trouble, you will have to handle it. Of course, I can at any time call upon my ability as a sorceress, but to do so I would have to draw the power from our link. If I do that without her near . . . Kahlan dies.”

Alarm raced through him. “But what if you accidentally—”

“I won’t. As long as you take good care of me, Kahlan will be safe enough. If, however, I should fall off my horse and break my neck, her neck snaps, too. As long as you take good care of me, you are taking good care of her. This is why it’s important that we live as husband and wife—so that you can be close at hand, and so that I can guide and help you, too. It will be a difficult life with both of us living without our power, just as any other married couple, but I believe this to be necessary if I am to find what I seek from you. Do you understand?”

He wasn’t sure he really did, but he said “Yes,” anyway.

Numb dismay swamped him. He would never have believed this woman would have willingly given up her power for some unspecified knowledge. The very idea of it unleashed cold panic through his veins.

Richard couldn’t make sense of it. With his mind groping blindly in a world gone insane, he spoke without even considering his words.

“I’m already married. I’ll not sleep with you as your husband.”

Nicci blinked in surprise, then let out a dainty titter, covering it with the back of her hand, not in shyness, but at his presumption. Richard felt his ears heating.

“That is not the way in which I want you, Richard.”

Richard cleared his throat. “Good.”

In the quiet of the wayward pine, with the rain outside falling in a gentle patter and the glowing checkered wood hissing softly, Nicci’s focused, intense, resolute expression turned very cold and very still.

“But if I should decide I do, Richard, you will comply with that, too.”

Nicci was a beautiful woman, the kind of woman most any man would eagerly accept. It was hardly that, though, that made him believe her. It was the look in her eyes. Never had the vague possibility of the act of sex seemed so vicious.

Her voice lost the conversational quality. It went on in a lifeless drone, a thing not human, pronouncing a sentence on his life. A sentence he himself would enforce, or Kahlan would die.

“You will act as my husband. You will provide for us as any husband would. You will care for me, and I for you, in the sense of worldly needs. I will mend your shirts and cook your meals and wash your clothes. You will provide us with a living.”

Nicci’s leaden words slammed into him with the deliberate methodical force of a beating delivered with an iron bar.

“You will never see Kahlan again—you must understand that—but as long as you do as I wish, you will know she lives. In that way you will be able to show your love for her. Every day she wakes, she will know you are keeping her alive. You have no other way to show her your love.”

He felt sick to his stomach. He stared off into memories of another place and time.

“And if I choose to end it?” The weight of such madness was so crushing that he earnestly considered it. “Rather than be your slave?”

“Then perhaps that is the form the knowledge I seek will take. Maybe that senseless end will be what I must learn.” She brought her first and second fingers together in a snipping motion, simulating the cutting of the umbilical cord of magic that sustained Kahlan’s life. “One last evil convulsion to finally confirm the senselessness of existence.”

It dawned on Richard that this woman could not be threatened, because she was a creature who, he was beginning to understand, welcomed any terrible outcome.

“Of all there is to me in this world,” he whispered in dim agony, more to himself and to Kahlan than to his implacable captor, “there is only one thing that is irreplaceable: Kahlan. If I must be a slave in order for Kahlan to live, then I shall be a slave.”

Richard realized Nicci was silently studying his face. He met her gaze briefly, then looked away, unable to bear the terrible scrutiny of her beautiful blue eyes while he held the image of Kahlan’s love in his mind.

“Whatever you shared with her, whatever happiness, joy, or pleasure, will always be yours, Richard.” Nicci seemed almost to be peering inside him, reading the pages of his past written in his mind. “Treasure those memories. They will have to sustain you. You will never see her again, nor she you. That chapter of your life is ended. You both have new lives, now. You may as well get used to it because that is the reality of the situation.”

The reality of what was. Not the world as he would wish it. He himself had told Kahlan that they must act according to the reality of what was, and not waste their precious lives wishing for things that could not be.

Richard ran his fingertips across his forehead as he tried to hold his voice steady. “I hope you don’t expect me to learn to be pleased with you.”

“I am the one, Richard, who expects to learn.”

Fists at his side, Richard shot to his feet. “And what is it you wish this knowledge for?” he demanded in unrestrained, violent bitterness. “Why is it so important to you!”

“As punishment.”

Richard stared in stunned disbelief. “What?”

“I wish to hurt, Richard.” She smiled distantly.

Richard sank back to the ground.

“Why?” he whispered.

Nicci folded her hands in her lap. “Pain, Richard, is all that can reach that cold dead thing within me that is my life. Pain is the only thing for which I live.”

He stared numbly at her. He thought about his vision. There was nothing he could do to fight the advance of the Imperial Order. He could think of nothing he could do to fight his fate with this woman.

If not for Kahlan, he would, at that moment, have thrown himself into a battle with Nicci that would have decided it once and for all. He would have willingly gone to his death fighting this cruel insanity. Except his reason denied him that.

He had to live so that Kahlan would live. For that, and that alone, he had to put one foot in front of the other and march into oblivion.