Faith of the Fallen

Chapter 41

At Prince Harold’s instructions, Captain Ryan and his two men went to see to their troops and horses while the rest of them crowded into the small trapper’s lodge. Zedd and Warren sat on a bench made of a board laid atop two log rounds. Verna and Adie sat against the opposite wall on another bench. Cara gazed out the small window. Standing near Cara, General Meiffert watched as the prince ran a finger back and forth along the front edge of the table. Kahlan folded her hands on the table before her.

“So,” she began, fearing the worst, “how is Cyrilla?”

Harold smoothed the front of his coat. “The queen has . . . recovered.”

“Queen . . . ?” Kahlan rose out of her chair. “Cyrilla has recovered? Harold, that’s wonderful news. And she has at last taken her crown back? Even better!”

Kahlan was delighted to be relieved of the role of queen to Galea. As Mother Confessor, it was an awkward duty better served by Cyrilla. More than that, though, she was relieved to learn that her half sister had finally recovered. While the two of them were never close, they shared a mutual respect.

More than her cheer at Cyrilla’s recovery, though, Kahlan felt a sense of deliverance that Harold had at last brought his troops down to join with them. She hoped he had been able to raise the hundred thousand they had previously discussed; it would be a good beginning for the army Kahlan needed to raise.

Harold licked his weather-cracked lips. By the slump in his shoulders, she was sure that the task of collecting his army had been trying, and the journey arduous. She had never seen his face looking so worn. He had a vague, empty look that reminded her of her father.

Kahlan smiled exuberantly, determined to show her appreciation. “How many troops did you bring? We could certainly use the whole hundred thousand. That would just about double what we have down here so far. The spirits know we need them.”

No one was saying anything. As she looked from one person to the next, no one would meet her gaze.

Kahlan’s sense of relief was sloughing away.

“Harold, how many troops did you bring?”

He ran his meaty fingers back through his long, thick, dark hair.

“About a thousand.”

She stared dumbly, sinking back into her chair. “A thousand?”

He nodded, still not meeting her eyes. “Captain Bradley and his men. The ones you led and fought beside, before.”

Kahlan could feel her face heating. “We need all your troops. Harold, what’s going on?”

He at last met her gaze.

“Queen Cyrilla refused my plan to take our troops south. Shortly after you were there and visited her, she came out of her illness. She was herself again—full of ambition and fire. You know what she was like. She was always tireless in her advocacy for Galea.” His fingers idly tapped the table. “But I’m afraid she has been changed by her infirmity. She fears the Imperial Order.”

“So do I,” Kahlan said with quiet bottled rage. She could feel Richard’s sword pressed against the back of her shoulder. She saw Harold’s eyes take it in. “Everyone in the Midlands fears the Order. That is why we need those troops.”

He was nodding as she spoke. “I told her all that. I did. She said that she is Queen of Galea, and as such, she must put our land first.”

“Galea has joined the D’Haran Empire!”

He opened his hands in a helpless gesture. “When she was ill, she was . . . unaware of that event taking place. She said she only gave you the crown for the safekeeping of her people, not to surrender their sovereignty.” His hands dropped to his sides. “She claims you never had any such authority and refuses to abide by the agreement.”

Kahlan glanced at the others in the room, sitting mute, like a panel of grim judges.

“Harold, you and I have discussed all this in the past. The Midlands is under threat.” She swept her arm out. “The entire New World is threatened! We must turn back that threat, not take to defending one land at a time—or have each land try to fend for itself. If we do that, we will all fall, one at a time. We must stand together.”

“I agree with you, in principle, Mother Confessor. Queen Cyrilla does not.”

“Then Cyrilla is not recovered, Harold. She is still sick.”

“That may be, but it is not for me to say.”

Elbow on the table, Kahlan rested her forehead against her fingertips.

Thoughts were screaming around inside her head, demanding that this not be happening.

“What about Jebra?” Zedd asked from the side of the room. Kahlan was relieved to hear his voice, as if reason were returning to the lunacy of what she was hearing, as if the weight of another voice would set things straight. “We left the seer there to help care for Cyrilla and to advise you. Surely, Jebra must have advised Cyrilla against such actions.”

Harold hung his head again. “I’m afraid that Queen Cyrilla ordered Jebra thrown into a dungeon. Moreover, the queen gave orders that if Jebra speaks one word of her blasphemy—as Queen Cyrilla calls it—she is to have her tongue cut out.”

Kahlan had to tell herself to blink. It was no longer Cyrilla’s behavior that so stunned her. Her words came sparse and brittle, the naked bones of dead respect.

“Harold, why would you follow the orders of a madwoman?”

His jaw took a set, as if injured by her tone. “Mother Confessor, she is not only my sister, but my queen. I am sworn to obey my queen in order to protect the Galean people. All those men of ours out there who have been fighting with your army are also sworn to protect the people of Galea above all else. I’ve already given them our queen’s orders. We must all return to Galea at once. I’m sorry, but that is the way it must be.”

Kahlan pounded her fist on the table and shot to her feet.

“Galea stands at the head of the Callisidrin Valley! It’s a gateway right up the center of the Midlands! Don’t you see what a tempting route it might be for the Imperial Order? Don’t you see how they might want to split the Midlands?”

“Of course I do, Mother Confessor.”

She aimed a stiff arm, pointing at the camp beyond the lodge.

“So you just expect all those men out there to put their lives between you and the Order? You and Queen Cyrilla callously expect all those men out there to die protecting you?—while you sit back in Galea?—hoping they prevent the Order from ever reaching you?”

“Of course not, Mother Confessor.”

“What’s the matter with you! Don’t you see that if you fight with us to halt the Order, you are protecting the people of your homeland?”

Harold licked his lip. “Mother Confessor, all you say is probably true. It is also irrelevant. I am commander of the Galean army. My entire life has been devoted to serving the people of Galea and my sovereign—first my mother and father, and then my sister. From the time I was a boy at my father’s knee, I was taught to protect Galea above all else.”

Kahlan did her best to control her voice. “Harold, Cyrilla is obviously still sick. If you are honestly interested in protecting your people, you must see that what you’re doing is not the way to accomplish it.”

“Mother Confessor, I have been charged by my queen with protecting the people of Galea. I know my duty.”

“Duty?” Kahlan wiped a hand across her face. “Harold, you can’t blindly follow that woman’s whim. The route to life and liberty exists only through reason. She may be queen, but reason can be your only true sovereign. To fail to use reason in this, to fail to think, is intellectual anarchy.”

He looked at her as if she were some poor child who didn’t understand the world of adult responsibility.

“She is my queen. The queen is devoted to the people.”

Kahlan drummed her fingers on the table. “What Cyrilla is, is deluded by ghosts that still haunt her. She is going to bring harm to your people. You are going to aid her in delivering your people into ruin because you wish something to be true, even though it is not. You are seeing her as she once was, not as she is now.”

He shrugged. “Mother Confessor, I can understand why you think what you think, but it can change nothing. I must do as my queen commands.”

Elbows on the table, Kahlan held her face in her hands for a time, trembling with anger at the insanity of what she was hearing. She finally looked up, meeting her half brother’s gaze.

“Harold, Galea is part of the D’Haran Empire. Galea has a queen only at the indulgence of the Empire. Queen though she may be, even if she does not recognize the rule of the D’Haran Empire, she is still, as she always has been, subordinate to the Mother Confessor of the Midlands. As Mother Confessor, as well as the leader of the D’Haran Empire in Lord Rahl’s absence, I formally terminate that indulgence. Cyrilla is now without authority and is removed from office. She is no longer the queen of anything, much less Galea.

“You are ordered to return to Ebinissia, to put Cyrilla under arrest for her own protection, to release Jebra, and to return to this army with the seer and all Galean forces except a home guard for the crown city.”

“Mother Confessor, I’m sorry, but my queen has ordered—”

Kahlan slammed the flat of her hand down on the table. “Enough!”

He fell silent as Kahlan rose. With her fingertips pressed to the table, she leaned closer to him.

“As Mother Confessor, I am commanding you to carry out my orders at once. That is final. I will hear no more.”

The room seemed gripped by the grave consequence of what was happening.

Each forbidding face watched, waiting to see how it was going to go.

Harold spoke in a voice that reminded Kahlan of her father’s.

“I realize that it may make no sense to you, Mother Confessor, but I must choose my duty to my people above my duty to you. Cyrilla is my sister. King Wyborn always told me to run a good army. An officer must obey his queen. My men down here are ordered by their queen to return at once to protect Galea. I am a man bound by my honor to protect my people, as ordered by my queen.”

“You pompous fool. How dare you speak to me of your honor? You are sacrificing the lives of innocent people to your delusions of honor. Honor is honesty to what is, not blind duty to what you wish to be. You have no honor, Harold.”

Kahlan sank into her chair. She looked past him, to the side, staring into the hearth, into the flames.

“I have given you my orders. Do you refuse to obey them?”

“I must refuse, Mother Confessor. Let me say only that it is not out of malice.”

“Harold,” she said in a flat tone without looking at him, “you are committing treason.”

“I realize that you may see it that way, Mother Confessor.”

“Oh, I do. I do indeed. Treason to your people, treason to the Midlands, treason to our D’Haran union against the Imperial Order, and treason against the Mother Confessor. What do you suppose I ought to do about it?”

“I would expect that if you feel so strongly, you would have me put to death, Mother Confessor.”

She looked up at him. “If you have enough sense to realize that, then what good will it do for you to stick to the orders of a madwoman? It will only bring your death, and then you will not be able to carry out your queen’s orders. Staying to your course can only leave your people without your aid, which is what you claim to put above all else. Why not simply do the right thing and help us to help your people? Since you refuse, you have shown yourself, in truth, to be without common sense, much less honor.”

His eyes turned to her, filled with smoldering anger. The knuckles of his fists went white.

“I will be heard, now, Mother Confessor. If I stand by my honor, even if it costs me my life, it will be honoring my family, my sister, my queen, and my homeland. A homeland forged by my father, King Wyborn, and my mother, Queen Bernadine. When I was young, my father, my sovereign king, was taken from my mother, my family, and my homeland of Galea, by the Confessors, taken by a Confessor’s power for their selfish desire of a husband for your mother, for her selfish desire for a strong man to father her a child—you. Now, you, Mother Confessor—the daughter of that theft of that beloved man from us when I was but a boy—you would take me from my sister? Take her, too, from our land? Take me from my duty to serve my queen, my land, and above all my people? The last duty my father charged me with before your mother took him from us and destroyed him for no reason but that he was good and she wanted him, was that I should always honor my duty to my sister and my land. I will carry out my father’s last charge to me, even if you think it madness.”

Kahlan stared at him in cold shock.

“I’m sorry you feel that way, Harold.”

His face had aged and hardened. “I know that you are not responsible for all that happened before you came to be, and I will always love that part of you that is my father, but I am still the one who must live with it all. Now I must be true to myself, to my own feelings.”

“Your feelings,” she repeated.

“Yes, Mother Confessor. Those are my feelings, and I must put my faith in them.”

Kahlan swallowed past the painful constriction in her throat. Her fingers, lying limply on the table before her, tingled.

“Faith and feelings. Harold, you are as mad as your sister.”

She drew herself up straight and folded her hands. She shared a last look with her half brother, a man she had never known, except in name, as she pronounced sentence on him.

“Beginning at sunrise tomorrow, the D’Haran Empire and Galea are at war. After sunrise tomorrow, if you are seen by me or any of our men, you will be put to death for the crime of treason.

“I will not allow those brave men out there to die for traitors. The Imperial Order will, in all likelihood, turn north up the Callisidrin Valley. You will be alone. They will butcher every man in your army, just as they butchered the people of Ebinissia. Jagang will give your sister to his men, as a whore.

“It will be by your doing, Harold, for refusing to use your ability to think, and instead following your feelings and faith in what does not exist.”

Harold, hands clasped behind his back, chin held up, said nothing as Kahlan continued.

“Tell Cyrilla that she had better hope for the fate I have just described, because if the Order does not come through Galea, I will. I have promised no mercy to the Order. Galea’s treason condemns her to the same fate as the Order. If the Order does not get Cyrilla, then I swear I will, and when I get her, I am going to take her back to Aydindril and I’m going to personally throw her back down into that pit from which you rescued her, and I am going to leave her down there with every criminal brute I can find for as long as she lives.”

Harold’s jaw dropped. “Mother Confessor . . . you wouldn’t.”

Kahlan’s eyes told him otherwise. “You be sure to tell Cyrilla what’s in store for her. Jebra probably tried to tell her, and was thrown in a dungeon for it. Cyrilla is refusing to see the open pit before her, and you are walking into it with her. Worse, you are taking your innocent people with you.”

Kahlan drew her royal Galean sword. She grasped either end in a hand.

Gritting her teeth, she pulled the flat of the blade against her knee. The steel bent, then finally snapped with a loud report. She tossed the broken blade on the floor at his feet.

“Now get out of my sight.”

He turned to leave, but before he took a step, Zedd stood, holding out a hand as if to ask him to remain where he was.

“Mother Confessor,” Zedd said, choosing his words carefully. “I believe you are letting your emotions get in the way.”

Harold gestured to Kahlan, relieved to hear Zedd’s intercession. “Tell her, Wizard Zorander. Tell her.”

Kahlan couldn’t believe her ears. She remained where she was, staring into Zedd’s hazel eyes. “Then would you mind explaining my error of emotion, First Wizard?”

Zedd glanced at Harold and then back to Kahlan. “Mother Confessor, Queen Cyrilla is obviously deranged. Prince Harold is not only doing her a disservice, but enabling her to bring only the specter of death to her people. If he chose the side of reason, he would be protecting his people, and honoring his sister’s past admirable service when she was of sound mind.

“Instead, he has betrayed his duty to his people by embracing what he wishes to be true about her instead of facing what is true. In this way, he is embracing death, and in this case, embracing death for his people, too.

“Prince Harold has been justly found guilty of treason. Your emotions for him are interfering with your judgment. Obviously, he is now a danger to our cause, to the lives of our people, and to the lives of his own people. He cannot be allowed to leave.”

Harold looked thunderstruck. “But Zedd . . .”

Zedd’s hazel eyes, too, were a terrible pronouncement of guilt. He waited, as if challenging the man to further prove his treason. Harold’s mouth moved, but he could offer no words.

“Does anyone disagree with me?” Zedd asked.

He looked at Adie. She shook her head. Verna likewise shook her head.

Warren stared at Harold for a moment, then shook his head.

Harold’s expression turned indignant. “I’m not going to stand for this. The Mother Confessor has given me until dawn to withdraw. You must honor her sentence.”

He took two strides toward the door, but then paused, clutching his chest. Twisting slowly as he started to sink, his eyes rolling up in his head. His legs folded and he crashed to the floor.

Kahlan sat stunned. No one moved or said anything. General Meiffert went down on one knee beside the body, checking Prince Harold for breath or pulse. The general looked up at Kahlan and shook his head.

She passed her gaze from Zedd, to Adie, to Verna, to Warren. None revealed anything in their expression.

Kahlan stood and spoke softly. “I don’t ever want to know which one of you did this. I’m not saying you were wrong . . . I just don’t want to know.”

The four gifted people nodded.

At the door, Kahlan stood in the bright sunlight a moment, feeling the cold air on her face, searching, until she saw Captain Ryan leaning against a stout young maple tree. He stood at attention as she strode out to him through the snow.

“Bradley, did Prince Harold tell you why he was coming here?”

Calling him by his given name, rather than his rank, changed the nature of the question. His rigid posture slackened.

“Yes, Mother Confessor. He said he had to tell you that he had been ordered back by his queen to defend Galea, and that he was further ordered to bring his men serving with you back to Galea with him.”

“Then what are you doing here? Why did you and your men come along, if he was to take everyone back?”

He lifted his square jaw and looked at her with clear blue eyes.

“Because we deserted, Mother Confessor.”

“You what?”

“Prince Harold gave me his orders, as I just reported them. I told him that it was wrong, and could only harm our people. He said it was not for me to decide such things. He said it was not for me to think, but to follow orders.

“I’ve fought with you, Mother Confessor. I believe I know you better than Prince Harold does—I know you are devoted to protecting the lives of the people of the Midlands. I told him that what Cyrilla was doing was wrong. He was angry, and said it was my duty to follow my orders.

“I told him that, in that case, I was deserting the Galean army and was going to stand with you, instead. I thought he was going to have me put to death for disobeying him, but he would have had to put all thousand of us to death because all the men felt the same way. A good many came forward to tell him so. The fire seemed to go out of him, then, and he let us ride down here with him.

“I hope you aren’t angry with us, Mother Confessor.”

Kahlan couldn’t force herself to be the Mother Confessor at that moment. She put her arms around him.

“Thank you, Bradley.”

She gripped his shoulders and smiled at him through her watery vision.

“You used your head. I couldn’t be angry with that.”

“You told us once we were a badger trying to swallow an ox whole. Looks to me you’ve taken to trying to do the same thing. If there ever was a badger who could swallow an ox whole, it would be you, Mother Confessor, but I guess we wouldn’t want you to try it without us to help you do it.”

They turned then and saw General Meiffert directing some of his men.

They were carrying Prince Harold’s limp body out of the lodge, holding him by the shoulders and feet. His hands dragged through the snow.

“I figured this wasn’t going to come to any good end,” the young captain said. “Ever since Cyrilla was hurt, Prince Harold just never seemed himself. I always loved the man. It hurt me to have to desert him. But he just wasn’t making sense anymore.”

Kahlan put a comforting hand on his shoulder as they watched the body being carried away.

“I’m sorry, Bradley. Like you, I always thought highly of him. I guess seeing his sister and his queen so long held in the grip of that kind of sickness just brought him to his wits’ end. Try to keep your good memories of him.”

“I will, Mother Confessor.”

Kahlan changed the subject. “I’ll need one of your men to take a message to Cyrilla. I was going to have Harold take it, but now we’ll need a messenger.”

“I will see to it, Mother Confessor.”

She only then realized how cold it was outside, and that she didn’t have a cloak. As the captain went to get his men quartered and to pick out a man to act as a messenger, Kahlan went back inside the lodge.

Cara was putting more wood on the hearth. Verna and Adie had gone.

Warren was selecting a rolled map from the basket of maps and diagrams in the corner.

As he was leaving, Kahlan caught Warren’s arm. She looked into the wizard’s blue eyes, knowing they were much older than they appeared. Richard had always said that Warren was one of the smartest people he had ever met.

Besides that, Warren’s true talent was said to lie in the area of prophecy.

“Warren, are we all going to die in this mad war?”

His face softened with a shy but impish grin. “I thought you didn’t believe in prophecy, Kahlan.”

She released his arm. “I guess I don’t. Never mind.”

Cara, leaving to find some more firewood, followed Warren out. Kahlan warmed herself before the hearth as she stared at Spirit standing on the mantel. Zedd rested a comforting hand on her shoulder.

“What you had to say to Harold about using your mind, about reason, was very wise, Kahlan. You were right.”

Her fingers touched the buttery smooth walnut robes of Spirit. “It was what Richard said, when he was telling me what he had finally come to understand about what he had to do. He said the only sovereign he could allow to rule him was reason.”

“Richard said that? Those were his very words?”

Kahlan nodded as she gazed at Spirit. “He said the first law of reason is that what exists, exists; what is, is, and that from this irreducible, bedrock principle, all knowledge is built. He said that was the foundation from which life is embraced.

“He said thinking is a choice, and that wishes and whims are not facts, nor are they a means to discover them. I guess Harold proved the point. Richard said reason is our only way of grasping reality—that 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.”

She listened to the fire crackling at her feet as she let her gaze wander over the lines of the figure he had carved for her. When she heard nothing from Zedd, she looked over her shoulder. He was staring into the flames, a tear running down his cheek.

“Zedd, what’s wrong?”

“The boy figured it out himself.” The old wizard’s voice was the uneasy sum of loneliness and quiet pride. “He understands it—he interpreted it perfectly. He even came to it on his own, by applying it.”

“Came to what?”

“The most important rule there is, the Wizard’s Sixth Rule: the only sovereign you can allow to rule you is reason.”

Reflections of the firelight danced in his hazel eyes. “The Sixth Rule is the hub upon which all rules turn. It is not only the most important rule, but the simplest. Nonetheless, it is the one most often ignored and violated, and by far the most despised. It must be wielded in spite of the ceaseless, howling protests of the wicked.

“Misery, iniquity, and utter destruction lurk in the shadows outside its full light, where half-truths snare the faithful disciples, the deeply feeling believers, the selfless followers.

“Faith and feelings are the warm marrow of evil. Unlike reason, faith and feelings provide no boundary to limit any delusion, any whim. They are a virulent poison, giving the numbing illusion of moral sanction to every depravity ever hatched.

“Faith and feelings are the darkness to reason’s light.

“Reason is the very substance of truth itself. The glory that is life is wholly embraced through reason, through this rule. In rejecting it, in rejecting reason, one embraces death.”

By the next morning, about half of the Galean force had vanished, returning to their homeland and queen as ordered by Prince Harold before his death. The rest, like Captain Ryan and his young soldiers, remained loyal to the D’Haran Empire.

Lieutenant Leiden, the former general, and his entire force of Keltish troops had also departed by morning. He left Kahlan a letter, in it saying that with Galea choosing to break with the D’Haran Empire, he had to return to help protect Kelton, as surely the selfish actions of the Galeans meant the Order would be more likely to come up the Kern River Valley and threaten Kelton. He wrote that he hoped the Mother Confessor would realize how grave was the danger to Kelton, and understand that it was not his intention to desert her or the D’Haran Empire, but simply to help protect his people.

Kahlan knew of the men leaving; General Meiffert and Warren had come to tell her. She had expected it, and had been watching. She told General Meiffert to allow them to leave if they wished. War in their camp could come to no good end. The morale of the remaining men was boosted by a sense of being on the right side, and of doing the right thing.

That afternoon, as she was drafting an urgent letter to General Baldwin, commander of all Keltish forces, General Meiffert and Captain Ryan came to see her. After listening to their plan, she granted Captain Ryan permission to go with a like number of General Meiffert’s handpicked D’Haran special forces to conduct raids on the Imperial Order force. Warren and six Sisters were sent to accompany them.

With the Imperial Order having moved so far back to the south, Kahlan needed information on what they were doing and what shape their force was in. More than that, though, with the foul weather in their favor, she wanted to keep pressure on the enemy. Captain Bradley Ryan and his band of nearly a thousand were experienced mountain fighters and had grown up in just such harsh conditions. Kahlan had fought beside the captain and his young Galean soldiers, and had helped train them in the ways of fighting a vastly superior force. If only the enemy force did not number over a million . . .

General Meiffert’s special forces, which, until Kahlan had promoted him, he had ably commanded, were now led by Captain Zimmer, a young, square jawed, bullnecked D’Haran with an infectious smile. They were everything Captain Ryan’s young men were, tripled: experienced, businesslike under stress, tireless, fearless, and coolly efficient at killing. What made most soldiers blanch made them grin.

They preferred fighting just such as this, where they were free of massive battlefield tactics and could instead use their special skills. They treasured being let off the leash to do what they did best. Rather than check them, Kahlan gave them a free hand.

Each of those D’Harans collected enemy ears.

They felt a great fidelity to Kahlan, in part because she didn’t try to rein them in and integrate them into the larger army, and, perhaps more so, because when they returned from missions, she always asked to see their strings of ears. They relished being appreciated.

Kahlan intended to later send them to collect Galean ears.