Phantom: Chainfire Trilogy Part 2 tsot-10 Page 14

  “Queen Cyrilla was the queen of Galea,” Shota said to Richard. “She inherited the crown, rather than—”

  “Prince Harold,” Richard finished as he looked up at the witch woman. “Cyrilla’s brother was Harold. Harold declined the crown, preferring to lead the Galean army.”

  Shota arched an eyebrow. “You seem to know a lot about the monarchy of Galea.”

  “Their father was King Wyborn,” Richard said. “King Wyborn was also Kahlan’s father. Kahlan is half sister to Cyrilla. That is the reason I know so much about the monarchy of Galea.”

  If Shota was surprised to hear it, or if she didn’t believe him because Kahlan was involved, she didn’t betray either. She finally broke eye contact with him and went back to her pacing, allowing Jebra to continue her story.

  “Cyrilla resumed her place on the thrown as if she had never left. The city seemed exhilarated to have her back. Galea had been struggling in its recovery from the horrifying time that the advance army of the Imperial Order had sacked the crown city. That attack had been a massive tragedy with tremendous loss of life.

  “But with those invaders long gone the repairs of the destruction had been under way for quite some time. Even the burned buildings were being rebuilt. Businesses had started up again. Commerce had returned. People once again came to the city from all over Galea to make a better life for themselves. Families had begun to grow and knit together again. With hard work, prosperity had begun to return. With the queen back, it seemed to invigorate the spirit of the city all the more, and make the world seem right again.

  “People said that lessons had been learned and such a tragedy would never happen again. To that end, new defenses were built, along with a much larger army. Cyrilla, like many of the people of Galea, put that appalling time behind her and was eager to be about the business of her land. She accepted audiences and kept her hand in many of the matters of state. She kept herself immersed in every sort of activity, from mediating trade disputes to attending formal balls where she danced with dignitaries.

  “Prince Harold, being the head of the Galean army, kept her informed of the latest news about the invasion of the New World, so she was fully aware that the horde was pouring into the southern reaches of the Midlands. I always knew when she had received the latest reports; I would find her twisting her handkerchief, mumbling to herself, as she paced in a dark room without windows. It almost seemed to me that she was seeking the dark hiding place in her mind—the stupor she had been in before—but she couldn’t find it, couldn’t get back into it.”

  Jebra gestured briefly up the steps to the old man watching her speak. “Zedd told me to watch over her, to give her what advice I could. Even though she may have outwardly appeared to be her old self, and she didn’t lapse back into the wooden daze, I could tell that she remained on the edge of insanity. My visions were unclear, probably because of that, because while she may have seemed normal again, she was still inwardly haunted by terrible fears. It was much like the land of Galea; things appeared normal but, with the Imperial Order in the New World, things were hardly normal. There was always a dark, underlying tension.

  “When we heard from the scouts that the Order was moving up the Callisidrin Valley, coming up the center of the Midlands intent on dividing the New World, I advised the queen that she must support the D’Haran army, that she must send the Galean army to fight with the rest of the forces of all the lands that had been joined together with the D’Haran Empire. I tried to tell her, as did Prince Harold, that our only chance at a real defense was in unity with the forces resisting the Order.

  “She would not hear of it. She said that it was her duty as the queen of Galea to protect Galea alone, not other peoples or other lands. I tried to make her see that if Galea stood alone then it stood no chance. Cyrilla, though, had heard stories of other places that had been invaded, stories of the Order’s ruthless brutality. She was terrified of the men of the Order. I told her that she would be safe only if we helped stop the invaders before they ever reached Galea.

  “We received desperate requests for troops. Ignoring those requests, Cyrilla instead commanded Prince Harold to gather all the men he could into arms and that he use the army to protect Galea. She said that his duty, that the duty of the Galean army, was to Galea alone. She commanded that the invaders not be allowed to cross the borders, not be allowed to set foot on Galean soil.

  “Prince Harold, who at first had tried to advise her of the wisest course of action, abandoned his own advice and in an act of pointless loyalty acceded to her wishes. She commanded that the defenses be set up to protect Galea at all costs. Prince Harold went to see to her instructions. She didn’t care if the rest of the Midlands, or the entire New World for that matter, fell to the Order, as long as the Galean army—”

  “Yes, yes.” Shota impatiently rolled a hand as she paced before the woman. “We all know that Queen Cyrilla was loony. I didn’t bring you all this way to describe life under a batty queen.”

  “Sorry.” Ill at ease, Jebra cleared her throat and went on. “Well, Cyrilla grew impatient with me, with my insistent advice. She told me that her decision was final.

  “With her determined commitment to a course of action, it finally fixed events, fixed our future and our fate. I think that for this reason I was at last beset with a powerful vision. It started not with the actual vision itself, but with a bloodcurdling sound that filled my mind. That terrible sound set me to trembling. With the frightening sound the visions came flooding forth, visions of the defenders being crushed and overrun, visions of the city falling, visions of Queen Cyrilla being given to the howling gangs of men to be . . . to be used as a whore and an object of amusement.”

  One hand held across her abdomen, her elbows tight against her sides, Jebra wiped tears back off one cheek. She briefly smiled up at Richard, a self-conscious smile that could not hold back the horror he could so clearly see in her eyes. “Of course,” she said, “I’m not telling you all of the terrible things I saw in that vision. But I told her.”

  “I don’t expect that it did any good,” Richard said.

  “No, it didn’t.” Jebra fidgeted with a strand of her hair. “Cyrilla was enraged. She summoned her royal guard. When they all rushed in through those double, tall blue and gilt doors she thrust a finger at me and proclaimed me a traitor. She ordered me thrown into a dungeon. The queen screamed orders to the guards as they were seizing me that if I spoke even one word of my visions—my blasphemy, as she called it—then they were to cut out my tongue.”

  A little laugh rattled out, a laugh incongruous with her trembling chin and wrinkled brow. Her words came out in a thin whine of apology. “I didn’t want my tongue cut out.”

  Zedd, having made his way down the steps, laid a reassuring hand on the back of her shoulder. “Of course not, my dear, of course not. At that point it would have done you no good to have pressed the issue. No one would expect you to go beyond what you did; it would have served no purpose. You did your best; you showed her the truth. She made the conscious choice to be blind to it.”

  Fussing with her fingers, Jebra nodded. “I guess that her insanity never really left her.”

  “Those who are far from insane often act in an irrational manner. Don’t excuse such conscious and deliberate actions with so convenient an explanation as insanity.” When she gave him a puzzled look, Zedd opened his hands in a gesture of pained frustration at an old dilemma he had seen all too often. “All sorts of people who strongly want to believe in something are frequently unwilling to see the truth no matter how obvious it is. They make that choice.”

  “I guess so,” Jebra said.

  “Seems like, rather than heed the truth, she instead believed a lie that she wanted to believe,” Richard said, remembering part of the Wizard’s First Rule, the rule he had learned from his grandfather.

  “That’s right.” Zedd swept an arm out in a grim parody of a wizard granting a wish. “She decided what she wished to happen and
then assumed that reality would bend to her wishes.” His arm dropped. “Reality doesn’t indulge wishes.”

  “So Queen Cyrilla was angry with Jebra for speaking the truth aloud, for bringing it out where it could not be so easily overlooked and ignored,” Cara said. “And then punished her for doing so.”

  Zedd nodded as his fingertips gently rubbed Jebra’s shoulder. Her tired eyes had closed under his touch. “People who for whatever reason don’t want to see the truth can be acutely hostile to it and shrill in their denunciation of it. They frequently turn their venomous antagonism on whoever dares point out that truth.”

  “That hardly makes the truth vanish,” Richard said.

  Zedd shrugged with the straightforward simplicity he saw in it. “To those seeking the truth, it’s a matter of simple, rational self-interest to always keep reality in view. Truth is rooted in reality, after all, not the imagination.”

  Richard rested the heel of his hand on the hickory handle of the knife at his belt. He missed the sword being at hand, but he had traded it for information that eventually led him to the Chainfire book and the truth of what had happened to Kahlan, so it had been worth it. Still, he sorely missed the sword and worried over what Samuel might be using it for.

  Thinking of the Sword of Truth, wondering where it was, Richard stared off at nothing in particular. “Seems hard to fathom how people can turn away from seeing what is in their own best interest.”

  “Doesn’t it, though.” Zedd’s voice had changed from a tone of casual conversation to that thin, reedy tone that told Richard there was something more on his mind. “Therein lies the heart of it.”

  When Richard looked his way, Zedd’s gaze focused intently on him. “Willfully turning aside from the truth is treason to one’s self.”

  Shota, arms folded, paused in her pacing to lean toward Zedd. “A wizard’s rule, wizard?”

  Zedd arched an eyebrow. “The tenth, actually.”

  Shota turned a meaningful look on Richard. “Wise advice.” After holding him in the grip of that iron gaze for an uncomfortably long time, she went back to her pacing.

  Richard imagined that she thought he was ignoring the truth—the truth of the invading army of the Imperial Order. He wasn’t in the least bit ignoring the truth, he just didn’t know what more she expected he could do to stop them. If wishes worked he would already long ago have banished them back to the Old World. If he only knew what to do to stop them, he would do it, but he didn’t. It was bad enough to know the horror that approached and feel helpless to stop it, but it infuriated him that Shota seemed to think he was simply being obstinate in not doing something about it—as if the solution was within his grasp.

  He glanced up the steps at the statuesque woman watching him. Even in a pink nightdress she looked noble and wise. While Richard had been raised by people who encouraged him to deal with things the way they really were, she had been indoctrinated by people who were driven by the beliefs taught by the Order. It took a remarkable individual, after a lifetime of authoritarian teachings, to be willing to see the truth.

  He gazed into her blue eyes for a long moment, wondering if he would have had her courage . . . the courage to grasp the nature and magnitude of the terrible mistakes she had made, the courage to then embrace the truth and change. Very few people had that kind of courage.

  Richard wondered if she, too, thought that he was neglecting the invasion of the Imperial Order for irrational and selfish reasons. He wondered if she, too, thought that he was not doing something vital that would save innocent people from horrific suffering. He dearly hoped not. There were times when Nicci’s support seemed like the only thing that gave him the strength to go on.

  He wondered if she expected him to give up trying to find Kahlan in order to turn his full attention to trying to save a great many more lives than just that one, no matter how precious. Richard swallowed back the anguish; he knew that Kahlan herself would have made that demand. As much as she had loved him—back when she remembered who she was—Kahlan would not have wanted him to come after her if it meant that he would have to do so at the expense of trying to save so many more people who were in mortal danger.

  The thought he had just had suddenly struck home: back when she knew who she was . . . who he was. Kahlan couldn’t love him anymore if she didn’t know who she was, if she didn’t know who he was. His knees went weak.

  “That’s the way I saw it,” Jebra said, opening her eyes and seeming to come awake as Zedd withdrew his comforting touch, “that I had done my best to show her the truth. But I didn’t like being in that dungeon. Didn’t like it one bit.”

  “So what happened then?” Zedd scratched the hollow of his cheek. “How long were you down in the dungeon?”

  “I lost track of the days. There were no windows, so after a time I didn’t even know if it was day or night. I didn’t know when the seasons changed, but I knew that I had been there long enough for them to come and go. I began to lose hope.

  “They fed me—never enough to be satisfied, but well enough to keep me alive. Every once in a great while they left a candle burning in the dingy central room beyond the iron door. The guards weren’t deliberately cruel to me, but it was terrifying being locked away in the darkness of that tiny stone room. I knew better than to complain. When the other prisoners cursed or complained or raised a ruckus they were warned to be silent and, on occasion, when a prisoner didn’t follow those orders, I could hear the guards carry out their threats. Sometimes the prisoners were there only a short time before being taken to their execution. From time to time new men were brought in. From what I could see as I peeked out the tiny window, the men they brought in were a violent and dangerous lot. Their vile oaths in the pitch black sometimes woke me and gave me nightmares when I fell back to sleep.

  “The whole time I waited in dread of having a vision that would reveal to me my final fate, but such a vision never came. I hardly needed a vision, though, to know what the future held. I knew that as the invaders drew close, Cyrilla would likely come to think of it as my fault. I’ve had visions my whole life. People who don’t like the things that happen to them often blame me for having told them what I saw. Rather than use that information to do something about it, it’s easier for them to take out their displeasure on me. They often believed that I had caused their troubles by telling them what I had seen, as if what I saw was by my choice and brought to be through malice on my part.

  “Being locked away in that dark cell was almost beyond endurance, but I could do nothing other than endure it. As I sat there endlessly, I could understand how being thrown in the pit had driven Cyrilla mad. At least I didn’t have the brutes to contend with—those kind of men were locked in the other cells. As it was, I thought that I would surely die there, forsaken and forgotten. I lost track of how long I had been locked away from the world, from the light, from living.

  “All the while I never had any more visions. I didn’t know at the time that I would never have another.

  “Once, the queen sent an emissary to ask if I would recant my vision. I told the man who came to see me that I would happily tell the queen any lie she wished to hear if she would only let me out. It must not have been what the queen wanted to hear because I never saw the emissary again and no one came to release me.”

  Richard glanced over to see Shota watching him. He could read in her eyes her silent accusation that he was doing that very thing—wanting her to tell him something other than what she saw was in store for the world. He felt a stab of guilt.

  Jebra gazed up at the skylights high overhead, as if soaking up the simple wonder of light. “One night—I only later learned that up in the world it was night as well—a guard came to the tiny window in the iron door to my cramped little room. He whispered that Imperial Order troops approached the city. He told me that the battle was at last about to begin.

  “He sounded almost cheered that the agony of waiting was finally over, that the reality of it relieved them a
ll of having to pretend otherwise for their queen. It was as if knowing the truth of what was coming somehow made them faithless traitors, but that treason against the queen’s wishes would now be transferred to reality. Still, that was only part of the queen’s delusions, the part that was too obvious to avoid.

  “I whispered back that I feared for the inhabitants of the city. He scoffed, said that I was daft, that I had not seen Galean soldiers fight. He professed confidence that the Galean army, a force of well in excess of one hundred thousand good men, would trounce the invaders and send them packing, just as the queen had said.

  “I kept silent. I dared not contradict the queen’s wishful illusions of their invincibility, dared not say that I knew that the massive numbers of Imperial Order troops I had seen in my vision would easily crush the defending army and that the city would fall. Locked in my cell as I was, I could not even run.

  “And then I heard that strange, sinister sound from my vision. It ran shivers up my spine. My skin went cold with goose bumps. At last I knew what it was: it was the wail of thousands of enemy battle horns. It sounded like the howl of demons come up from the underworld to devour the living. Not even the thick stone walls could keep out that terrible, piercing sound. It was a sound announcing the approach of death, a sound that would have made the Keeper himself grin.”

  Chapter 13

  Jebra rubbed her shoulders, as if the mere memory of the shrill call of the battle horns had again given her goose bumps. She took a deep breath to regain her composure before she looked up at Richard and went on with her story.