Witch's Oath

33

“Don’t you think it’s too early for me to be showing?” Kahlan asked the sorceress.

Shale glanced over from atop her horse. “There is no rule about such things. Different women start showing at different stages of a pregnancy. Some show much earlier than others.”

“There was that strange wood,” Cassia said from behind, “so it may actually not be as early as you think.”

Kahlan cast a worried look back over her shoulder. “What do you mean?”

Cassia arced an eyebrow as she leaned forward in her saddle. “Tell me how long you think we were there, going in circles?”

Kahlan thought about it a moment. “I’m not sure.”

“Exactly,” Cassia said. “Last night when we made camp, I took stock of all of our supplies. I thought we should have plenty still left, but we’ve used up almost all of them while we were still in that strange, misty wood.”

Kahlan stared back over her shoulder. “That seems unlikely.”

“Check them yourself if you don’t believe me. With as much as we took, they should have lasted us all the way to Aydindril, even going the long way. But they’re almost all gone and we haven’t yet even crossed the mountains.”

When Kahlan thought about it, she realized that Richard had been having to find them a lot of food to supplement the travel supplies. She had thought that maybe it was because she had been eating as much as any three of them put together. But with the unborn babies, she seemed to need to eat a lot.

The deer meat was long gone. They had fortunately been able to catch a lot of fish, as well as rabbit, pheasant, a few turkeys, and even a big snake. Kahlan hadn’t eaten any of that, though. Because of the food they had managed to catch along the way, they hadn’t needed to rely solely on their traveling supplies, so Kahlan hadn’t paid much attention to them.

Not only had they been catching a lot of the food they needed, but they had needed to spend considerable time to get that food. Fishing took time. Tracking animals took time. Hunting and cleaning their catches took time. Richard had taught all the Mord-Sith how to make snares for them to set at night, and while often successful, that took time as well.

“It can only mean that we were going in circles in those woods a lot longer than we thought,” Cassia said.

Kahlan looked over at Shale. “What do you think?”

Shale sighed unhappily. “To tell you the truth, I’ve been wondering the same thing Cassia is wondering.”

Kahlan didn’t know what had gotten into the two of them. “You mean because of how big I am?”

“Yes, but it’s more than that.” Shale gave her a sidelong look. “I don’t know how to put my finger on it, but there was something strange about those woods.”

“Well, of course there was,” Kahlan said. “We kept going around in circles.”

“There’s more to it than that alone.” Before she went on, Shale leaned forward a little and patted her horse’s neck when it began dancing around impatiently. “Now that we’re out of there and at last into different country, hilly country with views of the mountains to the west and such, I realize that it wasn’t just foggy in that forest. Thinking back on it, I realize now that my mind felt foggy as well.

“I don’t know how to explain it, but my connection with my gift felt … different, somehow. I didn’t even realize it until much later. I recognize now that I wasn’t feeling myself back there or thinking clearly. I don’t know exactly how to explain what I was feeling, but I guess I would say I felt disconnected from my gift. That may be why I didn’t realize that there was a problem with those strange woods. Something was shrouding that sense.”

Vale caught a red maple leaf as it drifted down and held it as she gestured around at the nearly bare tree branches and the decaying leaves on the ground. “And doesn’t it seem too early to all of you for the leaves to have all fallen?”

Kahlan realized that the leaf Vale had caught was one of the last few colorful leaves that had hung on to the bitter end of the season. Most had long since fallen. The bare branches and the chilly bite to the air made her keenly aware of what had been making her vaguely uneasy. Somehow they had jumped right over autumn into early winter. The change to autumn came a little early up in the mountains, but they weren’t yet up in the high country, and it wasn’t changing to early autumn, it was already early winter.

“We had to have lost more time back in those woods than we thought,” Shale said. “Somehow autumn vanished behind us and winter is already bearing down.”

“It was a strange place,” Rikka confirmed from behind. “I feel like I didn’t really wake up until Lord Rahl got us out of there.”

“Speaking of Lord Rahl,” Nyda said, using the opportunity to walk her horse up closer, “what do you think could be taking him so long?”

Kahlan couldn’t imagine. She had been trying not to worry about that very thing.

“He and Vika have been gone way too long,” Berdine said. “I think we should go after him.”

Kahlan hooked some of her long hair behind an ear as she looked back. “He told us to wait here while he scouted ahead.”

Berdine leaned forward in her saddle to gesture. “That’s the other thing. Why would he do that? It doesn’t make any sense. He is always saying that the nine of us have to stay together because of his magic law thing.”

“The Law of Nines,” Kahlan murmured. “But now that I think about it, it did seem like maybe he was looking a bit restless and distracted, like something was wrong.” She turned back in her saddle to look at all the Mord-Sith in their red leather. “Did any of you pick up on that?”

After sharing blank looks, they all shook their heads.

“We don’t know his small mannerisms nearly as well as you do,” Nyda said. “You would be the first to recognize it if he was acting differently.”

Kahlan idly rubbed her palm on the saddle’s horn as she started to remember the odd little signals that told her something was bothering him. She hadn’t put them together at the time. She should have.

“Now that I think about it, why wouldn’t he tell us all we could go ahead and dismount, if he was planning to be gone this long?” That was one more thing that confirmed to her that she had good reason to worry.

“Do you want to go look for him?” the sorceress asked.

Kahlan thought it over briefly, finally forcing out an unhappy breath. “No. The woods in this area are pretty dense. There are low spots with bogs making it a maze to get through. We don’t know the route Richard took. He knows where we are and how to find us as long as we stay here. We shouldn’t take the chance on going a different way and getting separated.”

Too troubled to sit still any longer, she swung her leg over the back of her horse to get down. “But I’m tired of sitting in the saddle.”

The rest of them agreed with her sentiment and were happy to dismount. After staring off into the distant woods for a while longer, Kahlan tied the reins of her horse to a branch so she could pace. A few of the others sat on a nearby outcropping of granite ledge covered with colorful splotches of lichen, and a couple of the others on a log. Kahlan saw a squirrel, up on a branch, chirping down at them to get out of its territory.

As she paced, she had a sudden thought. “When we were in that wood, do any of you remember seeing any animals?”

Shale thought it over briefly. “No, as a matter of fact, I can’t say that I do. But now, when I try to remember that strange wood, for some reason, the memory of the place seems dim and distant, like a dream you forget later on.”

Cassia snapped her fingers. “That’s it, exactly. That’s how I feel thinking back on it. Like it was a dream. Now that I think about it, I can’t even say that we were really there.”

The others agreed about that part of it. None of them, though, could remember ever seeing any wildlife.

Kahlan looked up at the bare bark of the maple trees. To the right, a breeze rattled the exposed branches of the birches. As she stared around at the thinning trees, she ran her hand over the swell of her belly.

She unexpectedly began to worry about how long they had actually been there in those woods, traveling around in big circles. It made her apprehensive to realize that she could be a lot farther along in her pregnancy than she thought. If that was true, how was she to judge when the babies would be due?

“There were no birds,” she said at last, picturing the place in her mind. “I remember thinking at the time that it was strange that I didn’t see any birds.” She looked over at the others. “Anyone remember seeing birds there?”

No one did.

They sat around, or paced, for what had to be several more hours, growing more edgy the whole time. Picking at the reindeer moss on the rough trunk of an oak tree, Kahlan glanced up and saw the sun sinking low in the sky. Like time itself, the day was slipping away on them. She worried that Richard wasn’t back.

As she was flicking a piece of moss off the tree, Kahlan heard something. She rushed forward a few steps, peering into the distance. Everyone looked expectantly toward the noise off in the shadows. They were all relieved when they saw Richard and Vika on their horses riding back into view among young pines.

As soon as they reached Kahlan and the small group, rather than apologizing for how long it had taken them, Richard and Vika hurriedly jumped down off their horses.

“We have a problem,” Richard said without any greeting.

Kahlan looked from Richard’s face to Vika. Both of them were sweaty and looked pale.

“What is it?” Kahlan stepped closer and gripped his forearm. “What happened?”

As they all came closer to gather around Kahlan, Richard ran his fingers back through his hair as he tried to think of a way to explain it.

“We ran into the boundary.”

Kahlan squinted as she leaned in toward him. “The boundary? What boundary?”

He gestured irritably back over his shoulder. “The boundary. You know, the boundary.” Then he gestured off at the mountains to the west. “Remember the boundary that used to run down those mountains between D’Hara and the Midlands? Like the boundary that was between the Midlands and Westland—the one you came through with Shar. That boundary.”

“Who is Shar?” the sorceress asked.

Kahlan flicked her hand and shushed the woman.

She was having difficulty in her own mind making sense of what he was saying. He was pretty upset. She thought he had to mean something else and she just wasn’t understanding him.

“What did it look like?”

Richard threw up his hand. “You know what the boundary looks like, Kahlan! As you get close it becomes a big green wall. The closer you get, you start melting into it, the green grows stronger and then turns dark. The voices on the other side start to call to you. You start seeing their faces—faces of people you know, people calling you by name.”

Kahlan looked over at Vika’s ashen face. “You saw the same thing?”

The Mord-Sith swallowed. “When we got close enough, the surroundings disappeared as everything turned dark. My mother called to me from the other side of that dark wall. I saw her.” Her eyes welled with tears. “She reached out for me.” Vika swallowed back the tears again. “I tried to go to her. Lord Rahl pulled me back just in time, or I would have been lost.”

Shale looked exasperated. “What in the world are you people talking about? What in the name of Creation is a boundary?”

“It’s nothing from Creation.” Richard took a breath, trying to regain his patience so he could explain it. “Think of it as a kind of fracture in the world of life. It lies like a curtain across the land. That curtain is death itself in this world. If you were to walk far enough into it, it’s like walking off the edge of a cliff and falling into the underworld.”

The sorceress stammered as if such a thing were unreasonable. “But what if someone comes along and walks into it without knowing what it is?”

Richard leaned toward her. “Then they die, right then and there.”

Shale’s gaze shifted about uneasily, as if she was searching for some kind of answer that made sense to her. “Well, how long is this curtain of death? Can’t we simply ride around the end of it?”

Kahlan could see the muscles in Richard’s jaw flex as he gritted his teeth.

“That’s why it took Vika and me so long to get back,” he finally said. “We rode a long way in each direction trying to see if it ends somewhere. It doesn’t. If you go to the right, it goes straight west. To the left it starts hooking back up this way as it goes to the northeast.”

“Could we all go farther than you were able to go and find an end, do you think?” Kahlan asked.

Richard gave her a look she understood all too well. “Could we have done that with the boundaries before? The ones between our lands? Could we have gotten around it that way? Their nature is to be a boundary, to restrict passage, so while I can’t say for sure, but knowing what the boundary from before was like, it isn’t likely that it has an end we could simply travel around. It completely blocks us from our plan of going south to get around the worst of the mountains.”

Kahlan searched around for a solution. “Can’t you find us a way through, like you did before?”

Richard had obviously already considered that and had an answer ready. “That boundary was failing. This one isn’t. It’s much more powerful than the last one I saw. We aren’t going to be able to get through it.”

“Then what are we going to do?” Kahlan asked, feeling a rising sense of panic at the thought of having her children exposed, out in the middle of nowhere.

The Glee were likely to be somewhere behind, looking for them. They needed to get to the safety of the Keep before they found her and the twins. Every moment they were out in the open increased the danger.

Richard averted his eyes and reluctantly gestured to the west. “We have no choice but to go west, directly over that imposing mountain range. We have no choice.”

“Well,” she finally said, trying to find a reason for optimism, “if we can find a way over the mountains, that would be a shorter route to get to Aydindril.”

The sorceress wasn’t about to be placated. “Show me this boundary thing.”