Blood of the Fold Read online

  Ulicia surveyed the men glancing nervously over their shoulders. “Sisters of the Light have eyes in the backs of their heads, gentlemen. See that yours look nowhere else, or it will be the last thing you see in this life.” Men nodded before bending to their tasks.

  Back in their crowded cabin, Tovi wrapped her shivering bulk in her coverlet. “It’s been quite a while since I had strapping young men leering at me.” She glanced to Nicci and Merissa. “Enjoy the admiration while you’re still worthy of it.”

  Merissa pulled her shift from the chest at the end of the cabin. “It wasn’t you they were leering at.”

  A motherly smile wrinkled Cecilia’s face. “We know that, Sister. I think what Sister Tovi means is that now that we’re away from the spell of the Palace of the Prophets, we will age like everyone else. You won’t have the years to enjoy your looks that we’ve had.”

  Merissa straightened. “When we earn back our place of honor with the Master, I will be able to keep what I have.”

  Tovi stared off with a rare, dangerous look. “And I want back what I once had.”

  Armina slumped down on a bunk. “This is Liliana’s fault. If not for her, we wouldn’t have had to leave the palace and its spell. If not for her, the Keeper wouldn’t have given Jagang dominion over us. We wouldn’t have lost the Master’s favor.”

  They were all silent for a moment. Squeezing around and past one another, they all went about pulling on their undergarments, while trying to avoid elbows.

  Merissa drew her shift over her head. “I intend to do whatever is necessary to serve, and regain the Master’s favor. I intend to have my reward for my oath.” She glanced to Tovi. “I intend to remain young.”

  “We all want the same thing, Sister,” Cecilia said as she stuffed her arms through the sleeves of her simple, brown kirtle. “But the Keeper wishes us to serve this man, Jagang, for now.”

  “Does he?” Ulicia asked.

  Merissa squatted as she sorted through the clothes in the chest, and pulled out her crimson dress. “Why else would we have been given to this man?”

  Ulicia lifted an eyebrow. “Given? You think so? I think it’s more than that; I think Emperor Jagang is acting of his own volition.”

  The others halted at their dressing and looked up. “You think he could defy the Keeper?” Nicci asked. “For his own ambitions?”

  With a finger, Ulicia tapped the side of Nicci’s head. “Think. The Keeper failed to come to us in the dream that is not a dream; that has never happened before. Ever. Instead comes Jagang. Even if the Keeper were displeased with us, and wanted us to serve penance under Jagang, don’t you suppose he would have come to us himself and ordered it, to show us his displeasure? I don’t think this is the Keeper’s doing. I think it is Jagang’s.”

  Armina snatched up her blue dress. It was a shade lighter that Ulicia’s, but no less elaborate. “It is still Liliana who has brought this upon us!”

  A small smile touched Ulicia’s lips. “Has she? Liliana was greedy. I think the Keeper thought to use that greed, but she failed him.” The smile vanished. “It is not Sister Liliana who brought this upon us.”

  Nicci’s hand paused as she drew the cord tight at the bodice of her black dress. “Of course. The boy.”

  “Boy?” Ulicia slowly shook her head. “No ‘boy’ could have brought down the barrier. No mere boy could have brought to ruin the plans we have worked so hard for, all these years. We all know what he is, about the prophecies.”

  Ulicia looked at each Sister in turn. “We are in a very dangerous position. We must work to gain back the Keeper’s power in this world, or else when Jagang is finished with us he will kill us, and we will find ourselves in the underworld, and no longer of use to the Master. If that happens, then the Keeper surely will be displeased, and he will make what Jagang showed us seem a lover’s embrace.”

  The ship creaked and groaned as they all considered her words. They were racing back to serve a man who would use them, and then discard them without a thought, much less a reward, yet none of them were prepared to even consider defying him.

  “Boy or not, he has caused all this.” The muscles in Merissa’s jaw tightened. “And to think, I had him in my grasp, we all did. We should have taken him when we had the chance.”

  “Liliana, too, thought to take him, to have his power for herself,” Ulicia said, “but she was reckless and ended up with that cursed sword of his through her heart. We must be smarter than she, then we will have his power, and the Keeper his soul.”

  Armina wiped a tear from her lower eyelid. “But in the meantime, there must be some way we can avoid having to return—”

  “And how long do you think we could remain awake?” Ulicia snapped. “Sooner or later we would fall asleep. Then what? Jagang has already shown us he has the power to reach out to us, wherever we are.”

  Merissa returned to fastening the buttons at the bodice of her crimson dress. “We will do what we must, for now, but that does not mean we can’t use our heads.”

  Ulicia’s brows drew together in thought. She looked up with a wry smile. “Emperor Jagang may believe he has us where he wants us, but we’ve lived a long time. Perhaps, if we use our heads, and our experience, we will not be quite as cowed as he thinks?”

  Malevolence gleamed in Tovi’s eyes. “Yes,” she hissed, “we have indeed lived a long time, and we’ve learned to bring a few wild boars to ground, and gut them while they squeal.”

  Nicci smoothed the gathers in the skirt of her black dress. “Gutting pigs is all well and good, but Emperor Jagang is our plight, and not its cause. Nor is it advantageous to waste our anger on Liliana; she was simply a greedy fool. It is the one who truly brought this trouble upon us who must be made to suffer.”

  “Wisely put, Sister,” Ulicia said.

  Merissa absently touched her breast where it was bruised. “I will bathe in that young man’s blood.” Her eyes went out of focus, opening again the window to her black heart. “While he watches.”

  Ulicia’s fists tightened as she nodded in agreement. “It is he, the Seeker, who has brought this upon us. I vow he will pay with his gift, his life, and his soul.”

  2

  Richard had just taken a spoonful of hot spice soup when he heard the deep, menacing growl. He frowned over at Gratch. The gar’s hooded eyes glowed, lit from within by cold green fire as he glared toward the gloom among the columns at the base of the expansive steps. His leathery lips drew back in a snarl, exposing prodigious fangs. Richard realized he still had a mouthful of soup, and swallowed.

  Gratch’s guttural growl grew, deep in his throat, sounding like a moldy old castle’s massive dungeon door being opened for the first time in a hundred years.

  Richard glanced to Mistress Sanderholt’s wide, brown eyes. Mistress Sanderholt, the head cook at the Confessors’ Palace, was still uneasy about Gratch, and not entirely confident in Richard’s assurances that the gar was harmless. The ominous growl wasn’t helping.

  She had brought Richard out a loaf of freshly baked bread and a bowl of savory spice soup, intending to sit on the steps with him and talk about Kahlan, only to discover that the gar had arrived a short time before. Despite her trepidation over the gar, Richard had managed to convince her to join him on the steps.

  Gratch had been keenly interested at the mention of Kahlan’s name; he had a lock of her hair that Richard had given him hanging on a thong around his neck, along with the dragon’s tooth. Richard had told Gratch that he and Kahlan were in love, and she wanted to be Gratch’s friend, just as Richard was, and so the inquisitive gar had sat down to listen, but just as Richard had tasted the soup, and before Mistress Sanderholt had been able to begin, Gratch’s mood had suddenly changed. He looked savagely intent, now, on something that Richard couldn’t see.

  “Why is he doing that?” Mistress Sanderholt whispered.

  “I’m not sure,” Richard admitted. He brightened his smile and shrugged offhandedly when the creases in her brow de
epened. “He must just see a rabbit or something. Gars have exceptional eyesight, even in the dark, and they’re excellent hunters.” Her concerned expression didn’t ease, so he went on. “He doesn’t eat people. He would never hurt anyone,” he reassured her. “It’s all right, Mistress Sanderholt, really, it is.”

  Richard glanced up at the sinister-looking, snarling face. “Gratch,” he whispered out of the side of his mouth, “stop growling. You’re scaring her.”

  “Richard,” she said as she leaned closer, “gars are dangerous beasts. They are not pets. Gars can’t be trusted.”

  “Gratch isn’t a pet, he’s my friend. I’ve know him since he was a pup, since he was half my size. He’s as gentle as a kitten.”

  An unconvincing smile twitched onto Mistress Sanderholt’s face. “If you say so, Richard.” Dismay suddenly widened her eyes. “He doesn’t understand anything I’m saying, does he?”

  “It’s hard to tell,” Richard confided. “Sometimes he understands more than I think possible.”

  Gratch appeared oblivious of them as they talked. He was frozen in concentration, seeming to have either the scent or the sight of something he didn’t like. Richard thought he had seen Gratch growling like that one time before, but he couldn’t place where or when. He tried to recall the occasion, but the mental image kept slipping away, just out of grasp. The harder he tried, the more elusive the shadowy memory became.

  “Gratch?” He clutched the gar’s powerful arm. “Gratch, what is it?”

  Stone still, Gratch didn’t react to the touch. As he had grown, the glow in his green eyes had intensified, but never before to this ferocity. They were glowing formidably.

  Richard scanned the shadows below, where those green eyes were fixed, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. There were no people among the columns, or along the wall of the palace grounds. It must be a rabbit, he decided at last; Gratch loved rabbit.

  Dawn was just beginning to reveal wisps of purple and pink clouds above the brightening horizon, leaving but a few of the brightest stars to glimmer in the western sky. With the faint first light came a gentle breeze, unusually warm for winter, that ruffled the fur of the huge beast and billowed open Richard’s black mriswith cape.

  When he had been in the Old World with the Sisters of the Light, Richard had gone into the Hagen Woods, where lurked the mriswith—vile creatures looking like men half melted into a reptilian nightmare. After he had fought and killed one of the mriswith, he had discovered the astonishing thing its cape could do; it had the ability to blend with its background so perfectly, so flawlessly, that it made the mriswith, or Richard when he concentrated while wearing the cape, seem invisible. It also prevented anyone with the gift from sensing them, or him. For some reason, though, Richard’s own gift allowed him to sense the presence of the mriswith. That ability—to sense the danger despite its cloak of magic—had saved his life.

  Richard found it difficult to focus on Gratch’s growling at rabbits in the shadows. The anguish, the numb misery, of believing that his beloved, Kahlan, had been executed, had evaporated in a heart-pounding instant the day before when he had discovered she was alive. He felt blind joy that she was safe, and exultant at having spent the night alone with her in a strange place between worlds. His mind was in song this beautiful morning, and he found himself smiling without even realizing it. Not even Gratch’s annoying fixation with a rabbit could dampen his mood.

  Richard did find the guttural sound distracting, though, and obviously Mistress Sanderholt found it alarming; she sat woodenly on the edge of a step beside him, clutching her wool shawl tight. “Quiet, Gratch. You just had a whole leg of mutton and half a loaf of bread. You couldn’t be that hungry already.”

  Although Gratch’s attention remained riveted, his growling lessened to a rumbling deep in his throat, as if he was absently trying to comply.

  Richard directed a brief glance once more toward the city. His plan had been to find a horse and hurry on his way to catch up with Kahlan and his grandfather and old friend, Zedd. Besides being impatient to see Kahlan, he dearly missed Zedd; it had been three months since he had seen him, but it seemed years. Zedd was a wizard of the First Order, and there was much that Richard, in light of his discoveries about himself, needed to talk to him about, but then Mistress Sanderholt had brought out the soup and freshly baked bread. Good mood or not, he had been famished.

  Richard glanced back, past the white elegance of the Confessors’ Palace, up at the immense, imposing Wizard’s Keep embedded in the steep mountainside, its soaring walls of dark stone, its ramparts, bastions, towers, connecting passageways, and bridges, all looking like a sinister encrustation growing from the stone, somehow looking alive, as if it were peering down at him from above. A wide ribbon of road wound its way up from the city toward the dark walls, crossing a bridge that looked thin and delicate, but only because of the distance, before passing under a spiked dropgate and being swallowed into the dark maw of the Keep. There had to be thousands of rooms in the Keep, if there was one. Richard snugged his cape closer under the cold, stony gaze of that place, and looked away.

  This was the palace, the city, where Kahlan had grown up, where she had lived most of her life until the previous summer when she had crossed the boundary to Westland in search of Zedd, and had come across Richard, too.

  The Wizard’s Keep was where Zedd had grown up and lived prior to leaving the Midlands, before Richard was born. Kahlan had told him stories about how she had spent much of her time in the Keep, studying, but she had never made the place sound in the least bit sinister. Hard against the mountain, the Keep looked baleful to him now.

  Richard’s smile returned at the thought of how Kahlan must have looked when she was a little girl, a Confessor in training, strolling the halls of this palace, walking the corridors of the Keep, among wizards, and out among the people of this city.

  But Aydindril had fallen under the blight of the Imperial Order, and was no longer a free city, no longer the seat of power in the Midlands.

  Zedd had produced one of his wizard’s tricks—magic—to make everyone think they had witnessed Kahlan’s beheading, allowing them to flee Aydindril, while everyone here thought she was dead. No one would chase after them now. Mistress Sanderholt had known Kahlan since she was born, and was delirious with relief when Richard told her that Kahlan was safe and well.

  The smile touched his lips again. “What was Kahlan like when she was little?”

  She stared off, a smile on her lips as well. “She was always serious, but as precious a child as I’ve ever seen, who grew to be a stalwart and beautiful woman. She was a child not only touched by magic, but also of a special character.

  “None of the Confessors were surprised by her accession to Mother Confessor, and all were pleased because her way was to facilitate agreement, not to dominate, though if someone wrongly opposed her they’d find her cast with as much iron as any Mother Confessor ever born. I’ve never known a Confessor with her passion for the people of the Midlands. I’ve always felt honored to know her.” Drifting into memories, she laughed faintly, a sound not nearly as frail as the rest of her appeared. “Even one time when I swatted her bottom after I discovered she had made off with a just roasted duck without asking.”

  Richard grinned at the prospect of hearing a story about Kahlan misbehaving. “Punishing a Confessor, even a young one, didn’t give you pause?”

  “No,” she scoffed. “Had I pampered her, her mother would have turned me out. We were expected to treat her respectfully, but fairly.”

  “Did she cry?” he asked, before he took a big bite of bread. It was delicious, coarse ground wheat with a hint of molasses.

  “No. She looked surprised. She believed she had done no wrong, and started explaining. Apparently a woman with two young ones almost Kahlan’s age had been waiting outside the palace for someone she thought would be gullible. As Kahlan started for the Wizard’s Keep, the woman approached her with a sad story, telling her that she
needed gold to feed her youngsters. Kahlan told her to wait, and then took her my roasted duck, reasoning that it was food the woman needed, not gold. Kahlan sat the children down—” With a bandaged hand, she pointed off to her left. “—around that side over there, and fed them the duck. The woman was furious, and started yelling, accusing Kahlan of being selfish with all the palace’s gold.

  “As Kahlan was telling me this story, a patrol of the Home Guard came into the kitchen dragging the woman and her two young ones along. Apparently, as the woman had been railing at Kahlan the Guard had come upon the scene. About this time Kahlan’s mother showed up in the kitchen wanting to know what the trouble was. Kahlan told her story, and the woman fell to pieces at being in the custody of the Home Guard, and worse, at finding herself before the Mother Confessor herself.

  “Kahlan’s mother listened to her story, and to the woman’s, and then told Kahlan that if you chose to help someone then they became your responsibility, and it was your duty to see the help through until they were back on their own feet. Kahlan spent the next day on Kings Row, with the Home Guard dragging the woman behind, going from one palace to another, looking for one that was in need of help. She wasn’t having much luck; they all knew the woman was a sot.

  “I felt guilty about giving Kahlan a swat before at least hearing her reasons for taking my roasted duck. I had a friend, a stern woman in charge of the cooks at one of the palaces, and so I rushed over and convinced her to accept the woman into her employ when Kahlan brought her around. I never told Kahlan what I’d done. The woman worked there a long time, but she never again came near the Confessors’ Palace. Her youngest grew up to join the Home Guard. Last summer he was wounded when the D’Harans captured Aydindril, and died a week later.”

  Richard, too, had fought D’Hara, and in the end had killed its ruler, Darken Rahl. Though he still couldn’t help feeling a twinge of regret at being sired by that evil man, he no longer felt the guilt of being his son. He knew that the crimes of the father didn’t pass on to the child, and it certainly wasn’t his mother’s fault she had been raped by Darken Rahl. His stepfather loved Richard’s mother no less for it, nor did he show Richard any less love for not having been his own blood. Richard would not have loved his stepfather any less had he known George Cypher was not his real father.