Into Darkness

22

“So you decided to trap us here because you like us?” Richard asked. “You put lives of innocent people in danger because you like us? You more than likely caused the deaths of unwitting travelers because you like us?”

Shota gently gripped Richard’s throat as she glared with menace into his gray eyes. “I warned you that all the children a Confessor bears are Confessors. Over time it came to pass that most give birth only to girl children. I told you that if you give the Mother Confessor a child, it would be a boy, and that boy child would be a Confessor. Beyond that, even a girl child with Confessor power and the gift of a war wizard from two lines of wizards, one with Subtractive Magic, would be an abomination. I told you that for those reasons you must not have a child with this woman.”

“So you’re back to that, are you?” Richard folded his arms across his chest. “Back to the nonsense about prophecy?”

“It is hardly nonsense. Fathers wed to Confessors are supposed to have been taken by her power so that if by chance she happened to bear a boy, the husband would without question end its life. You changed all that by finding a way to be with her without being taken by her power. As a result, neither of you has the will or the strength to kill the tainted children the two of you conceive.”

She paused a moment as her grip on Richard’s throat tightened. “I have the will, I have the strength, and I am willing to use it. I gave you my word on that. I gave you a witch’s oath on that. And you both defied me.”

“It’s our lives,” Richard said in a surprisingly calm voice, as if trying to reason with her. “It’s our children’s lives. You have no dominion over any of our lives and no right to deny our children the right to live their lives. I will protect those children, as will Kahlan. We will teach them to be good people who care about others.”

Kahlan could see that it was like trying to reason with a stone wall.

“You two have selfishly put your own wishes ahead of the greater good. Once they are old enough, the power those two children possess will be profound. Your teaching will not be able to control such corrupting power.”

Richard’s features hardened. “You need to stop this right now, Shota. I will not allow you to harm us or our children.”

Shota slowly shook her head as she gazed into his eyes. “Better you battle the Keeper of the underworld himself, than me.”

Richard gripped her wrist and pulled her hand away from his throat. “You think so much of yourself, do you? We already faced your witch and your oath in the form of Moravaska Michec. You should know that he died with my hands around his throat and Kahlan twisting her knife in his heart.”

Shota flicked her hand dismissively. “A warlock. Such men are a poor excuse for a true witch.”

“He was a witch man,” Kahlan said. “You are a witch woman. A witch is a witch.”

“Hardly,” she huffed. “Witch women and witch men are from two entirely different lines. A witch man is not a witch by being born of a witch woman. Similar to Confessors, witch women don’t give birth to boys. At least, none that live long. A witch man is the son of a witch man and a woman with no power. He does not carry the same heredity and power as a witch woman.

“While they like to think of themselves as more than they are, and while they certainly have great power and can cause a great deal of trouble, they are but a mere shadow of a true witch. His power was but a flea on the back of a wolf compared to mine. I let him have a try at enforcing my witch’s oath, but in the end, he was an inferior witch and proved himself as much.

“He originally attached himself to Darken Rahl because he intuitively grasped the reality of his limitations as a witch and so he sought to add to his power through his association with a powerful wizard. Darken Rahl allowed him to indulge his sick desires because he was useful in the same way a vicious dog can be useful. Michec was a cruel man whom people feared—with good reason. But he made the mistake of thinking that because people feared him, that made him a more important witch than he actually was.

“With Darken Rahl gone, he sought an alliance with the Glee for the same reasons he had served Darken Rahl. He believed it made him a more powerful witch. His deluded beliefs ultimately proved to be his undoing.”

“He was witch enough,” Richard said, drawing Shota’s glare away from Kahlan. “He was more powerful than you give him credit for. And we stopped him from carrying out your witch’s oath, just as we will stop you if we have to.”

Shota showed him an icy smile. “You think so, child? You can’t begin to grasp how wrong you are about that. Michec groveled before me, the grand witch, as all witches do. He swore to carry out my oath, as all witches must. In his failure, he proved he was not a witch worthy of the task or my protection.”

“I don’t care what, in your vanity, you think of witch men,” Richard said. “But I do care about your need to continue to pursue your nonsense about our children and what you saw while looking into the flow of time. Prophecy is dead. I ended it because prophecy is a corrupting influence and it was a danger to the world of life. Your blind obsession with it is proof of its corrupting nature.”

Shota lifted her chin indignantly. “It was a true vision into the flow of time, into how events will unfold.”

“The nature of prophecy is that it looks into possibilities that branch out endlessly from root events as the world moves forward and continually changes. You plucked one leaf from the tree of prophecy while ignoring the entire forest.”

“The world may have changed, but the flow of time did not.”

“You can’t see into the flow of time anymore, can you?”

Shota squinted at him. “No, thanks to you. You destroyed one of our most valuable tools, a tool that belongs to witch women.”

“It did not belong to witch women. It was an expression of possible futures belonging in the underworld. Once it was brought to the world of life, witches long ago latched on to it in order to deceitfully gain power for themselves. It was an underworld force that had never belonged in this world.”

Shota took a threatening step closer to him. “I used the flow of time to know how certain events flow and unfold. I used it in the past to help you.”

“And had we followed your advice born of prophecy, then on more than one occasion, we would all be dead by now.”

“You were smart enough to use the prophecy I gave you to succeed in ways neither I nor you could foresee. But without that prophecy, you might not have saved anyone. That is part of the way the flow of time works. As you say, it branches into many possible futures.

“I know far more about that flow of time and prophecy than you ever will, and that flow foretold that if you have a child with this Confessor it will be a monster. Such a child would risk bringing back the terror of the dark times, and worse, considering the power these twins will be born with. They will be bonded as twins and by the power they would be born with.

“But you refuse to heed that warning of a dark future and instead would ignorantly visit upon the world a male Confessor. A male Confessor! You are selfish children, the both of you, without any care for how what you are doing would destroy lives of so many others if these monsters were to live.”

She looked pointedly over at Kahlan, then turned back to Richard. “I won’t.”

Richard lifted his hands out in frustration. “You don’t understand prophecy the way you so smugly think you do, Shota.”

She arched an eyebrow. “You have used prophecy to survive.”

“Yes, because prophecy was something that only a wizard with Subtractive Magic can rightly understand. That’s because prophecy is an underworld element. I alone understood its changeable nature and thus its limitations. I acted within those limitations, not in defiance of them.”

She dismissed his words with a flick of a hand. “This is a different form of prophecy, meant for a witch woman only.”

“Prophecy is prophecy, no matter how you wish to dress it up.”

Shota considered his words only briefly before ignoring them. “I used the flow of time to see that if you two conceived a child, it would be a monster. And now, you have conceived twins, the worst possible sign of the terrors to come.”

Richard sighed in exasperation. “We’re going around in circles. You said that we would conceive a monster, right?”

“You already know that I did.”

He gestured expansively. “All right, for the sake of argument, let’s say you were right.” Richard held up a finger as he leaned toward her. “But what you may not realize is that your look into prophecy has already come to pass. That flow of time has run its course and is over. It already happened.”

Shota folded her arms. “What are you talking about?”

“When the chimes caused magic to fail—caused the magic of the necklace you gave Kahlan to fail—we didn’t know that your necklace wasn’t working as you designed it, and as a result, we conceived a child. Unfortunately, Kahlan lost that child before it could be born. If your prophecy is true, that means the first child conceived, the one Kahlan lost, was in fact the monster you so fear, the very one you saw in the flow of time.

“That means that the prophecy you saw in the flow of time has already happened and has already been fulfilled. Since Kahlan became pregnant but lost that first child, that means the child you saw in the flow of time that would be a monster, is already long dead. The world has already been saved from the dark times you saw in the flow of time caused by that monster.”

Richard gestured at Kahlan as he went on. “This pregnancy is now a different one. This time, these children Kahlan now carries are exactly what the world needs to survive. They are not the monsters that would destroy the world, but rather they are the other side of that prophecy, the balance to it that magic requires: the saviors of the world.”

Shota scowled at him for a moment. “It is not possible for them to be saviors of our world.”

“Yes, it is, because without them, our gift—mine and Kahlan’s—will eventually pass out of existence when we die. The Grace each of us was born with will carry us and our gift beyond the veil. Right now, our gift, Kahlan’s and mine, is what is holding magic together and preventing the Golden Goddess from completing her lust to take our world and kill everyone in it.

“Don’t you see? Without our magic carrying on through these children of D’Hara, the Glee will be able to ravage our world. If you think the dark times were bad, you have not seen the terror visited upon people by the Glee. We have seen a small bit of it, and I can tell you that no one will survive. If these children don’t live, then no one will.

“If you were to kill these children, you would, in essence, be killing everyone.”

With her hands on her hips, Shota regarded Kahlan for a long moment before looking back at Richard and again folding her arms.

“That’s a nice story, but I can’t risk the world on a nice story. I won’t risk it. I know of the Golden Goddess. What you don’t see is that she is not my concern.” She unfolded her arms to poke Richard’s chest with a finger. “The Glee are your concern, your responsibility, as the Lord Rahl. It is up to you to protect our world, and as such it is your responsibility to deal with the threat posed by the Glee. It is as simple as that.

“My concern is the monsters you have conceived. It is my responsibility—since you abdicated it—to make sure the twins you two have conceived never come to be.”

Richard’s hands fisted at his sides. “I don’t have any way to fight a threat from another world! Any hope for the future will slip away without these gifted children!”

Richard took a settling breath to compose himself before going on. “Shota, your fault, your flaw, is that you are so focused on your narrow belief, that you are not able to see the bigger picture. You are fighting the last battle from dark times long forgotten.”

“It is you who are not seeing the big picture and the obvious solution,” she said. “You simply need to stop the threat from the Golden Goddess and her kind, wizard. When you do that, then our world will be safe from the Glee. That is your duty as Seeker and as the Lord Rahl. Do your job. My concern is that these children are not allowed to live in this world. That is my job.

“Had you not ended prophecy, I would be able to look into the flow of time and see if anything has changed and if your theory could possibly be true. But because you took it upon yourself to end prophecy, that opportunity is lost to us. Because the consequences would be too grave to risk doing otherwise, the original prophecy must stand.

“My witch’s oath stands. It will be carried out.”

Richard’s eyes took on the hawklike glare that Kahlan knew so well. “Shota,” he said in a low, dangerous tone, “if you have forced us to come all this way so that you can kill us along with these innocent children yet unborn, you have made a very big mistake. You have no right to their lives or ours, and as the Lord Rahl of the D’Haran Empire, I am telling you to once and for all to end your obsession.

“Believe me, you do not want to fight me.” He gestured to Kahlan. “Nor do you want to fight the Mother Confessor. Have you ever seen a mother bear protect her cubs? I have. She is ferocious. You cross her at great peril.”