Into Darkness

31

A wintery gust of wind quickly reminded Richard how cold it was outside the town walls. It sent a shiver through his shoulders. He knew that he would soon enough become accustomed to the cold again, but in the meantime it was unpleasant.

He had to read the way ahead by how the snow followed the contour of a slight depression in the ground created by the trail as it wound its way into the snow-crusted trees. Once they were into the thick of the forest, the narrow but open area through the woods more easily revealed the trail. He knew, though, that once they got down out of the mountains, the snow would be gone, it would be warmer, and the path down from the pass behind them would be much more obvious.

The wound in his side hurt with each step the horse took under him. He did his best to ignore the pain. He checked a few times, relieved to find it wasn’t bleeding. Vika watched him checking.

After the sun was down and it grew both darker and colder, Richard glanced over at Vika. “I’m not tired. The moon on the snow provides enough light. I’m going to keep going. I don’t intend to stop unless we’re forced to.” He swept his gaze over the rest of them. “Is that a problem for any of you?”

Vika glanced over at him suspiciously. “You aren’t planning on leaving us behind, are you?”

Richard frowned. “No, of course not.”

Vika shrugged. “Then there is no problem. We are Mord-Sith. We will ride as long as you want to ride. If you get too tired to ride, you can ride on my horse behind me.”

Even though Richard wasn’t in a smiling mood, he smiled briefly at that. “Thanks. I’ll let you know if I need you to carry me.”

“Riding is a bit rough, though,” she said. “You just be sure to let me know if that wound in your side starts bleeding again. If it does, I will need to fix it.”

Richard turned his eyes ahead to the moonlit, snowy trail. “I need to be strong to stop Shota and get Kahlan back, so you just make sure I stay healthy.”

Vika showed him an earnest smile. “By your command, Lord Rahl.”

A few hours later, when Richard departed the trail and took a route leading down through a broad valley, Rikka rode up close to him. “Aydindril is to the north, Lord Rahl. Are you sure they aren’t going to head there to take the Keep in order to be safe from the Glee? Surely even the witches don’t want to tangle with the Glee.”

“No, they’re taking Kahlan west, to Agaden Reach.” He gestured ahead to some of the depressions in the snow. “Those are their tracks joining us now, but they are days old.”

Richard had assumed that they would follow the trail, so he hadn’t taken the time to stop and look for tracks in the dark. He was a bit alarmed to see that their tracks were now intersecting their route. That meant that he hadn’t realized the coven had somehow taken a shortcut up until that point. That would put them even farther ahead than he thought.

“I can’t see any tracks,” Berdine said. “It’s too dark.”

“I can see them well enough,” he told her. “The wind and sun have worn them down over the days they had a head start, but fortunately there hasn’t been more snow to cover them.” He was angry at himself for not looking earlier for their tracks to cut away from the trail to take a shortcut. Even though it was dark, if he had spotted that deviation he would have seen where they had gone. “Even if it does snow, now, this confirms where they are headed. That is what matters.”

For most of the rest of the night, they rode on through the dead quiet, snowy woods. They descended steadily through the mountainous forest and eventually down into the sparsely wooded hill country. As they got lower, tufts of long grass started to appear in open patches of the snow. Richard could see that in the distance, revealed by the pale moonlight, the valley out ahead was clear of snow.

Even so, they had to maintain a slower pace than he would have liked, because it would be dangerous to go too fast in the dark—snow or no snow. A horse could break a leg or easily come up lame if it stepped in a dangerous place it couldn’t see. If they lost horses, they would lose a lot of time to the witch women they chased. If they had to take to traveling on foot, it would mean a disastrous loss of time to get to Shota.

The whole while they rode in silence, Richard’s mind churned with questions about what he was going to do when they got to Agaden Reach. He ran through endless possibilities, trying to think through every likelihood, and even things less probable. None of the outcomes looked good to him.

When dawn broke behind them and gradually brought color and light to the landscape, and more open ground, Richard was finally able to pick up the pace. By midday, the horses were winded. He brought them all to a halt on a broad, flat plain so they could move the saddles over to the fresh horses.

The horses chomped on grass while they had the chance. A small stream meandering through the flat ground provided water for them to drink deeply. Berdine and Nyda broke out some of the fresh food from the supplies the townspeople had packed.

Nyda waited until he finished cinching up the saddle, then handed him some freshly cooked pork. Berdine gave him a chunk of cheese from a different pack. Seeing the cheese reminded him of the way Kahlan had hated cheese but craved it now that she was pregnant. That craving came from at least one of the unborn children.

He ate the cheese in three bites, washing it down with water, then held the chunk of pork in his teeth as he saddled up again. In mere moments they were on their way on fresh horses and with some much-needed food. None of the Mord-Sith had voiced a single word of complaint. Of course, they wouldn’t even if they had any. Charging onward without resting was something they were used to.

By the second night a thick cloud cover had rolled in, completely blocking the moon and stars. It quickly grew so dark he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face, much less the lay of the land. With a flint and steel he lit strips of birch bark from a stock of them he had in his pack and used that to light travel candles so that they could at least see each other.

Richard knew that he couldn’t risk the horses in the dark over unknown terrain, so they were forced to stop for the night. Since they had not stopped to sleep the night before, they were all exhausted. There was no way to see if there was a good place for shelter, and Richard didn’t think it was worth searching the surrounding countryside with a candle to look for wood to build a fire, so they all rolled themselves up in their bedrolls. Despite the chill, they all quickly fell asleep, all of them too tired even to eat.

The next day dawned overcast and gloomy, but it was warmer, and better yet they had made it down out of the mountains. Before them lay the rolling hills and broad valleys of the Midlands, which would be much easier and faster traveling. There were trees, but they were in scattered clusters along hillsides overlooking meandering streams through stretches of gravel beds.

They rode hard and switched horses at regular intervals to keep them fresh, using those opportunities to grab some food, which they ate while riding. Fortunately, the people in Bindamoon had packed oats for the horses. For the next few days there would also be grass for them to eat.

Richard knew that they would need to cross the Callisidrin River in order to get to Agaden Reach up in the vast spine of rock that ran northeast up through the Midlands. He wanted to cross the river north of Tamarang in order to avoid anyone seeing them, so that the Golden Goddess likewise wouldn’t see them. They were fortunate that, so far, since leaving Bindamoon, they hadn’t encountered any people. He was thankful they hadn’t been forced into another battle with the Glee.

Richard pressed ahead as fast as they could throughout the day. As darkness began to gather, Vika rode up beside him. She reached over and put a hand on his forearm to bring him out of his brooding thoughts.

“Lord Rahl, we need to stop,” she told him.

Richard gestured ahead. “We can still see well enough to keep going.”

“You’re bleeding,” she said. “We need to stop so I can tend to your wound.”

Richard put his hand on his ribs. His shirt was wet with blood. He sighed in annoyance. “We don’t have time for this.”

“We can stop, and I can take care of it while we get a quick bite to eat and let the horses graze for a bit, and then we can keep going if you want.”

Richard knew she was right. “All right. We have a long way to go. I don’t want this wound to get worse and slow us down.”

“That’s why I need to fix it now,” Vika said.

“How much farther is it?” Nyda asked.

“It’s still quite a ways,” he told her. “But worse, not long after we cross the Callisidrin River, we will have to leave the horses and make it the rest of the way up into the rugged Rang’Shada Mountains on foot. Ordinarily it would take close to a week of climbing once we get to the mountains and have to leave the horses. If we’re to catch up to them, we need to do it in less time than that. The last part of it up and into the Reach will not be easy.”

Richard hoped that Shota and her coven would not be traveling as swiftly as he and the Mord-Sith had been and that he was closing the distance. They, too, had to make the same strenuous climb up into the mountains on foot, so he intended to press on as quickly as possible to catch them before they could do whatever it was Shota had planned.

She had said that they would wait until Kahlan delivered the twins, rather than simply kill her and thus the unborn babies. But since the battle at her winter palace, he knew that everything had changed.

The witches most likely intended to get Kahlan to Agaden Reach, where Shota would feel safe on her home ground, and then end Kahlan’s pregnancy. He feared to contemplate how she intended to accomplish her ends.