Faith of the Fallen

Chapter 54

The uprising lasted a day. Richard stayed home. He asked Nicci to stay home, too. He told her that he’d heard rumors of possible trouble and said he didn’t want her to get hurt.

The purge of the insurrectionists by the Order, on the other hand, lasted a week. Men who had participated in the marching had been slaughtered in the streets, or captured by the city guard. Those who were captured were questioned until they eventually confessed the names of others. People questioned by the Order always confessed.

The ripples of arrest, confession, and further arrest spread through the city and went on for days. Hundreds of men were buried in the sky.

Eventually, the fires of unrest were snuffed out. The ash of regret covered every tongue as people wanted to forget the whole thing. The marches were rarely even mentioned, as if it had never happened.

Richard finally went back to work at the transport company, rather than risk having his wagon out at night. Jori had nothing to say as they rolled through the city, past the poles holding up rotting corpses buried in the sky.

Jori and Richard made trips out to the mines to pick up ore for the foundries. They made one trip to a sandstone quarry a little ways to the east of the city. That took the whole day there and back. The next day they delivered the stone to the west side of Retreat, where it was needed for a buttress. There were a number of poles, maybe fifty or sixty, on the other side of the walls, over near the carving area. Apparently, some of the workers had been purged, too.

On the way out, they went up the road past the blacksmith’s shop.

Richard jumped down off the wagon and told Jori that he would go up the hill and join him after the wagon made its way around the twists in the road. He said he had to report to the blacksmith about their next delivery.

Inside the dark workshop, Victor was hammering a long piece of steel, bending the red-hot metal over the horn of an anvil. He looked up and, when he saw it was Richard, thrust the hot metal in the liquid beside this anvil, where it bubbled and hissed.

“Richard! I’m glad to see you.”

Richard noticed several of Victor’s men were missing. “Sick?”

Victor grimly shook his head.

Richard acknowledged the news with a single nod. “I’m glad to see you well, Victor. I just wanted to stop and make sure you were all right.”

“Richard, I’m fine.” He hung his head. “Thanks to your advice. I could be buried in the sky, now.” He gestured toward the Retreat. “Did you see? Many of the carvers . . . all hanging from the poles down there.”

Richard had seen the bodies, but hadn’t realized it was many of the stone carvers. He knew how some had felt about the things they carved—how they hated to create scenes of death.

“Priska?”

Victor gave a desolate shake of his head, too choked up to say it.

“Faval?”

“Saw him yesterday.” Victor took a purging breath. “He said you told him to stay home and make charcoal. I think he is going to rename one of his children after you.”

“If Priska . . . What about your special steel?”

Victor gestured with the bar he held in tongs. “His head man is going to carry on. Can you make a run for iron? I haven’t had a supply since before the trouble. Brother Narev is in a foul mood; he wants some iron supports for the piers. He suggested that a blacksmith loyal to the Order and the Creator would get them made.”

Richard nodded. “I think it’s calmed down enough. When?”

“I could really use it now, but I can make do until the day after tomorrow. I have some of these fussy chisels to make, for the detail work, and I’m short men, so it can wait that long.”

“Day after tomorrow, then. It should be safe enough by then.”

The sun had set as Richard was walking up the street to his room with Nicci, but the twilight let him see his way well enough. He was thinking about Victor when half a dozen men stepped out from behind a building.

“Richard Cypher?”

They weren’t dressed like regular city guards, but that didn’t mean a whole lot, lately. There were a number of special men, not in uniform, who, it was said, hunted down troublemakers.

“That’s right. What is it you wish?”

He saw the men each had swords under their light capes. They each had a hand on a long knife at their belts.

“As sworn officers of the Imperial Order, it is our duty to place you under arrest for suspicion of insurrection.”

When Nicci woke, Richard still wasn’t home. She growled unhappily. She rolled onto her back and saw that light was coming in through the curtains.

By the angle of the sunlight, it looked like it must be shortly past dawn.

She yawned and stretched in her bed, letting her arms drop back as she stared at the ceiling, the clean, whitewashed ceiling. She felt her anger building. It was upsetting when he wasn’t there at night, but it made her feel a fraud if she berated him for working so hard. Her intent had been to make him see how hard ordinary people had to work to get along in life, to make him see how the Order was the only hope of improving the lives of the common people.

She had warned him not to become involved in the recent uprising. She was pleased he didn’t try to argue with her about it. If anything, he seemed opposed to them. It surprised her that he had even stayed home from work while the marches took place. He warned Kamil and Nabbi, in the strongest terms, to keep away from the insurrection.

Now that the rebellion had been crushed, and the authorities had arrested many of the troublemakers, it was safe again, so Richard had finally been able to return to work. The rebellion had been a shock. The Order needed to do more to make people understand their duty to help make the lives of those less fortunate more tolerable. Then there wouldn’t be any trouble in the streets. To that end, many of the officials had been purged for not doing enough to further the cause of the Order. At least there was that much good out of it.

Nicci splashed water on her face from the basin Richard had brought home one day. The flowers around the edges matched the salmon-colored walls, and the rug he had been able to purchase from savings. He was certainly industrious, managing to save from his meager wage.

She pulled off her sweaty nightshirt and bathed herself as best she could with a wet washcloth. It felt refreshing. She hated to look sweaty and dirty in front of Richard.

She saw that the bowl of stew she’d made for his dinner the night before was still sitting on the table. He hadn’t told her that he had to work at night, but sometimes he didn’t have time to come home for dinner first. When he worked at night, he usually came home shortly after dawn, so she expected to see him at any moment.

He would likely be hungry. Maybe she would make him eggs. Richard liked eggs. She realized she was smiling. She had been angry when she first woke, and now, thinking about what Richard liked, she was smiling. She combed her fingers through her hair, already eagerly looking forward to seeing him walk in, to asking if he would like her to make him eggs. He would say yes, and she would have the pleasure of doing something she knew he wanted.

She loathed doing things she knew he didn’t like.

It had been several months since that awful night with Gadi. That had been a mistake. She knew that afterward. At first, she had enjoyed it, not because she wanted to have sex with that repulsive thug, but because she had been so humiliated by Richard refusing to make love to her that she wanted to get back at him. She had in the beginning of it reveled in what Gadi did to her, reveled in how he hurt her, because it was hurting Kahlan, too.

Nicci enjoyed it only in the sense that it was punishment for what he had done to her. Nothing hurt Richard like hurting Kahlan.

Gadi hated Richard. Having Nicci, he thought, got back at Richard and made Gadi a king again. As much as he wanted her, he wanted to get back at Richard more. Richard had taken Gadi’s kingdom and made it his own. Nicci was only too happy to let the little bully be king again. Every sincere cry, she knew, Richard heard, and would know that Kahlan felt the same pain.

But as Gadi went at her with wild abandon, doing his best to degrade Richard by what he did to her, Richard’s words—“Nicci, please don’t do this. You’re only hurting yourself”—began to haunt her.

As Gadi took her, she tried to make believe it was Richard, tried to have Richard if even by proxy. But she couldn’t make herself believe it, not even for the pleasure of such a fantasy. Richard, she knew, would never humiliate and hurt a woman in that way. She couldn’t even pretend for a second that it was Richard.

More, though, Nicci began to comprehend that Richard’s words were not a plea to spare Kahlan pain, but to spare Nicci the pain. As much as he must hate her, Richard had expressed concern for her. As much as he must hate her, he didn’t want to see her hurt.

Nothing else Richard could have said would have cut deeper into her heart. That kindness was the cruelest thing he could have done to her.

The pain afterward was her punishment. Nicci was so ashamed of what she had done that she pretended to Richard that she hadn’t suffered in the incident. She wanted to spare him the distress of knowing what Kahlan was suffering along with her. The next morning, she told Richard that she had made a mistake. She didn’t expect his forgiveness; she wanted him to know she knew she had been wrong, and that she was sorry.

Richard said nothing; he only watched her with those gray eyes of his as he listened before leaving for work.

She bled for three days.

Gadi had bragged to his friends about having her. To her further humiliation, he revealed all the details. To Gadi’s surprise, Kamil and Nabbi had been furious at him. They were intent on dripping hot wax in his eyes and doing some other things—what, Nicci wasn’t sure, but could imagine.

The threat was so deadly serious that Gadi had gone off and joined the Imperial Order army that very same day. He had joined just in time to leave with a new troop on their way north to the war. Gadi had sneered to Kamil and Nabbi that day, telling them that he was going off to be a hero.

Nicci heard footsteps coming down the hall. She smiled and pulled three eggs out of the cupboard. Instead of Richard opening the door, as she was expecting, someone knocked.

Nicci stepped to the middle of the room. “Who is it?”

“Nicci, it’s me, Kamil.”

The urgency in his voice made the fine hairs on her arms stand on end.

“I’m decent. Come in.”

The young man burst in, panting. His face was white, as were his knuckles around the doorknob. Tears stained his cheeks.

“They’ve arrested Richard. Last night. They have him.”

Nicci was only dimly aware of the eggs hitting the floor.