Warheart

CHAPTER 2

The soldiers waited for Kahlan’s order, not wanting her to give that order, yet knowing that she must.

She felt panic swelling in her at the thought of being the one to do so, of never being able to forget the moment of giving such a terrible command.

But she knew that it was what Richard would have wanted. He had done the same for Zedd. Richard had told her at the time that he couldn’t stand the thought of animals digging up his grandfather’s corpse.

Now there were animals in human form loose in the world.

It was up to the living, to those he’d left behind, to those who loved him, to care for his worldly remains. His ancestors, almost every Lord Rahl before Richard, had been entombed in ornate vaults in the lower reaches of the People’s Palace, their ancestral home.

But with Emperor Sulachan and his armies of half people and reanimated dead rampaging across the land, Kahlan didn’t want there to be any chance for the enemy to capture the palace and exhume Richard’s body as a trophy, or worse. Hannis Arc had used Richard’s blood to reanimate the corpse of Emperor Sulachan. Kahlan didn’t want to think of what they might do with Richard’s body if they could get their hands on it.

Kahlan couldn’t allow any chance of that happening to her husband’s remains. It was up to her to see to it that nothing remained of him in this world.

There was only one way to make sure she had done the most loving thing she could do, now, and that was to let the flames consume him. She had but to give the word and it would be done.

So then why couldn’t she?

Kahlan’s mind raced in a thousand different directions, trying to find a way out of doing her duty, trying to think of a reason not to give that order to toss the torches on the pyre.

She could think of none.

In hopeless despair, she went to her knees, pushed the hood of her cloak back, placed her hands on Richard’s shoulders, and bowed her head.

“Master Rahl guide us,” she whispered as everyone silently watched her give the ancient devotion to the Lord Rahl. “Master Rahl protect us. In your light we thrive. In your mercy we are sheltered. In your wisdom we are humbled. We live only to serve. Our lives are yours.”

Her words echoed back to her as she knelt there in the wet square, her trembling hands on Richard’s shoulders.

No one joined her in the devotion. They knew that, this time, it was hers alone to give. It was her good-bye.

Tears ran down her cheeks, through the cold specks of mist and dots of rain, to drip off her face. Sucking back a sob before it could escape her restraint, she finally rose to her feet and took on a Confessor’s face that revealed nothing of her inner torment.

When Kahlan looked up, she saw through a gap between the soldiers gathered in the square the distant figure of Hunter sitting quietly on his haunches at the edge of the dark woods. Even at that distance, she could see that Hunter’s green eyes were fixed on her.

The catlike creature didn’t look the least bit bothered by the drizzle. It ran off his thick fur like water off a duck.

Kahlan looked down again at the only man she had ever loved. Still wearing her Confessor face, she cupped a hand to Richard’s cold cheek. Even though his flesh was cold, the magic kept it as soft as it had been in life.

In a way, her own face was like his: still, calm, and showing no emotion.

Richard’s soul was now on the eternal journey. She had seen it descending into the darkness, weighed down by the demons of the underworld, their wings wrapped tightly around him. At the time she had been dead as well, or at least on the journey into death. The demons of the dark had been dragging her down into eternal night, away from the lines of the Grace, but Richard passed through the veil to the underworld and drew them away. Once he had pulled them away from her, Kahlan’s soul, that mysterious element within the Grace, had been able to return to her body in the world of life.

Though a knife had been plunged through Kahlan’s heart, Nicci had been able to heal the damage, and Kahlan’s soul had returned in time. Returned because Richard had sacrificed his own life to come after her and save her in time.

Kahlan frowned at the thought … in time.

There was no such thing as time in the eternity of the underworld. Time only mattered in the world of life.

Was it possible that Richard still carried with him the spark of life, as she had–the balance to the deadly poison that had touched them both? Was it possible that after all this time he still carried that connection to the world of life, even as he journeyed ever farther into the eternal, timeless world of the dead?

How long could that spark, that connection, exist in such a place? Especially if his worldly form was still preserved by occult magic so that it remained as it had been at the moment of his death? The decomposition of his body had been prevented by magic involving the timeless element of the underworld. In that way, it was in a sense still connected to his soul.

Richard had removed the poisonous taint of death from her, drawn away the demons, and used her spark of life to send her along the lines of the Grace back from the underworld to the world of the living. They hadn’t used occult magic to preserve her, but they hadn’t needed to because she had only just died. It had seemed an eternity in the underworld, but in the world of life it had been only a brief time.

Richard had been dead for a considerable time, but that had meaning only in the world of life. Time had been suspended for his worldly form by elements of the underworld, where his soul had gone, and in the underworld time did not exist as such.

What if there was a way?

Kahlan glanced up at Hunter watching her from the distance.

She had thought that Red, the witch woman, had sent Hunter as a gesture of condolence.

What if Kahlan was wrong, and that had not been the reason Red had sent Hunter?

Somehow, it was all beginning to make a crazy kind of sense. A Richard kind of sense. His ideas often seemed crazy at first, only to turn out to be true. What if what she was thinking was one of those impossible, crazy kinds of ideas that were actually true?

She was Richard’s only hope, now. He had no one but her to find a way. No one but her to fight for him.

Kahlan knew that if there really was a chance, any chance at all to bring him back, no matter how crazy it might seem, she was the one who had to find it.

“I have to go,” she whispered.

She turned suddenly to Nicci and said aloud, “I have to go.”

Nicci, her brow bunched, looked up from her silent weeping. “What? Go where?”

“I have to go see the witch woman.”

Nicci’s frown deepened at the urgency in Kahlan’s voice.

“Why?”

Kahlan looked at Hunter, then looked back and met the sorceress’s gaze. “One of love’s desperate acts.”