Hateful Things Read online

  “Witches aren’t always right in quite the way you expect.”

  “Believe me, I know that well enough, but Shota has vowed to kill any children we have. Given the dark history, I guess I can’t say that her fears of a male Confessor are unfounded. When I first realized that I was pregnant, there were nights I lay awake, haunted by the fear Shota’s words had planted in my mind, that our child would be a monster.”

  Shale shrugged. “Look at it this way: since you are having twins, a boy and a girl, the boy will likely have Richard’s gift, and the girl will be a Confessor. No mixing of gifts. No monster. See? Of all the things you have to fear, that shouldn’t be one of them.”

  “Can you say for sure that the boy won’t have both powers? Can you say that the girl won’t? Can you promise me that?”

  Shale hesitated. “I admit that I am not able to tell that much. I only know that they are both gifted.”

  “Well,” Kahlan said, leaning close, “Shota will not wait to find out. She will simply come to see them dead. She only agreed to Richard’s demand that she let me live on the condition that we don’t have children. Richard never agreed to her demand.

  “Because he never agreed to her demand, she warned him that she would kill me and the child if I ever became pregnant. Even if I do live long enough to give birth to them, she will come after these children and kill them both. She will be relentless.

  “Shota is a witch woman. She knows things. She finds out things. I don’t know how, but she does. For all I know, maybe she reads things in the stars.”

  “The stars are now in a different place in the sky,” Shale reminded her.

  “Yes, well, if I know Shota, she will somehow come to know that I’m pregnant with Richard’s children. Shota made it abundantly clear that she believes mixing different gifts creates monsters.” Kahlan leaned toward the sorceress to make her point. “You don’t know what witch women are like.”

  Shale cocked her head as she narrowed her eyes. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, for one thing, they are profoundly dangerous.”

  Shale’s face didn’t reveal what she might be thinking. “Is that so?”

  “Yes.”

  Kahlan felt something brushing against her ankle. She looked down and froze.

  There was a large white snake hissing, red tongue flicking the air, curling its fat body around her ankles, locking them together as it flexed and contracted.

  Kahlan’s gaze shot up to Shale. “You’re a witch woman?”

  Shale smiled in a way that Kahlan didn’t like.

  Now she understood that mysterious shadow of something behind the beauty.

  3

  “Indeed I am.”

  Kahlan’s eyes widened. “That’s not possible. You’re a sorceress.”

  “My father had the gift. He was a wizard. My mother was a witch woman. My father’s gift passed down to make me a sorceress, my mother’s makes me a witch woman. I am both.”

  “I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Kahlan said, her eyes still wide.

  “Besides the fact that fewer and fewer gifted people were being born, making the gifted rarer all the time, the House of Rahl periodically purged D’Hara of the threat purportedly posed by the gifted still remaining. Richard’s father, Darken Rahl, was one of the worst of the lot. He denounced the gifted as criminals and called for them to be eliminated for the good of all.”

  Kahlan, of course, knew all that. Darken Rahl viewed anyone gifted as a potential threat to his rule. It was, in fact, why she had crossed the boundary into Westland looking for help to stop him. That was how she met Richard.

  “Darken Rahl found a way through the boundary and put the Midlands, my people, under the boot of his tyranny,” Kahlan said. “He killed any gifted he could find. He hunted down and killed all the Confessors. Only I escaped. That made me the last of the Confessor line.”

  “That man terrorized the gifted of every kind,” Shale said with a sad nod.

  “So how did your parents escape his grasp?”

  “They fled in fear for their lives and the life of their unborn child.” Shale smiled in a sly manner. “The House of Rahl never went looking for such gifted people in the Northern Waste; it was too far away and too sparsely populated for him to bother with. Because Darken Rahl was preoccupied with his war to take over the world, populated areas were where his attention was focused, not such remote and useless places as the Northern Waste. My parents lived there in peaceful isolation, and there they had me.

  “In me, their two abilities mixed together to make me both a sorceress and a witch woman. Two gifts mixed together.” She leaned a little closer. “A monster, as you described it.”

  Kahlan forced herself not to look down at the snake compressing her ankles, preventing her from moving. “That’s what Shota called such people, not me, and she was only talking about any child that Richard and I would have. She was talking about our gifts being mixed.”

  Shale’s tone took on the quality of an interrogation. “So then, unlike most people, you don’t think me a monster because I have two different gifts mixed together?” She arched an eyebrow. “Or think I’m trouble because I am a witch woman?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Are you sure of that?”

  “You saved my life,” Kahlan said. “You didn’t have to get involved. You didn’t have to work as hard as you did to save me. You could have let me die and no one would be the wiser. You have proven you are no monster by your actions.

  “My children wouldn’t be, either, just because a wizard is their father and a Confessor their mother.”

  “Well, while you are right that witch women are quite dangerous, I am one witch woman who wants you to have those children. Just as my parents fled the tyranny of Richard’s ancestors who tried to eliminate the gifted, I, too, want to live in a world where magic exists, a world where we all, despite the unique nature of our individual abilities, can have a future without a fear of being persecuted for who and what we are. A world at peace.”

  “That’s what Richard and I want as well. You lived far removed from the war just ended, but that is what we both have fought so hard for, what we have both been committed to, in fact what the D’Haran Empire is all about.”

  “That’s reassuring to hear.” Shale didn’t sound completely convinced. “But for that to happen you must have these children. They are the hope for magic to survive in our world, and in turn, for our way of life to survive. You must see to it that they grow and carry your power and Richard’s gift into the future.”

  Kahlan felt relieved by at least that much of it, but the snake around her ankles had her not only unable to move, but afraid to try. She did her best not to think about that fat snake squeezing her ankles, even though she could feel the cold scales sliding across her bare skin.

  “You are more than a sorceress and a witch woman. You are Shale. Without you I would have died, and the hope of passing our gifts on to future generations would have died with me. I would like very much for you to see my children not only when they are born, but when they grow into their power.”

  Shale’s intense look finally eased, and she nodded. “Ah. Well then, I guess the snake needs to go.”

  “I think that would be for the best.” Kahlan swallowed. “If I die of fright, I won’t be able to have any children.”

  Shale let out a soft laugh. She gently rolled her hand to the side while bowing her head as if suggesting Kahlan look again. Kahlan glanced down. The fat white snake was gone. She let out a deep sigh of relief.

  She didn’t know if witch women could make real things appear, or if they only made you believe they were there. She knew that Shota could change her appearance as well as make things appear. There was no way to know what she actually looked like, or if you were looking at the real Shota. For that matter, now she didn’t know if she was looking at the real Shale. That might explain the beauty overlaying the ageless wisdom. But Kahlan did know that Shota’s snakes, at
least, were real enough that their venom would have killed her.

  With a finger, Shale lifted Kahlan’s chin.

  “It wasn’t my intent to threaten you or frighten you. I simply wanted you to see that just because that witch woman, Shota, said that mixing magic creates monsters, that is not necessarily true.”

  “I think that sometimes it results in someone quite remarkable,” Kahlan said.

  “That is what I hoped you would understand. Your children will also be remarkable. I don’t want you to let the fear that Shota planted in your mind become large enough to cause you to act on that fear.”

  “There is enough evil in the world without Shota inventing more from her twisted imagination.” Kahlan fixed the sorceress with a determined look. “If Shota threatens my children, it will be the last thing she ever does.”

  “Good,” Shale said with a satisfied smile.

  4

  Shale’s smile left as a more serious look took its place. “But I didn’t know that you had such little faith in Richard.”

  Kahlan frowned at the woman. “What are you talking about? I have total faith in him.”

  “Richard is the protector of the D’Haran Empire, is he not? His bond to his people and theirs to him is part of our world’s protection. He has proven time and time again that he would fight to the death to protect our people.”

  “I know that,” Kahlan said. “What’s your point?”

  “Well, what means more to him than anything else?”

  Kahlan didn’t need to think about it. “I do.”

  “And don’t you think he would fight to protect you and your children? Don’t you think he will use his gift and do everything in his power to protect them, even before they are born? Don’t you think he would prevent this witch woman, Shota, from ever getting near you?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Your children would be of one blood, yours and Lord Rahl’s together. You must have faith in him to protect you. This is what he was born for. This is his highest calling. We are all in his hands. The Mord-Sith will always be there to protect you. I will be there if you wish it. You need to have faith in him to protect you so that you can worry about those two children.”

  Kahlan was baffled at what the woman could be getting at. “I do have faith in him. Complete faith.”

  Shale leaned in a little. “Then he needs to know that you are going to bear his children. You have been hiding it from him. He needs to be told that you are pregnant so that he can protect you.”

  Kahlan paced to the stone railing, to the very edge of where the rain was falling only an arm’s length away. Lightning danced and darted among the roiling clouds, illuminating them from inside and the barren landscape far below in flickering flashes. Occasional distant, deep rumbles of thunder rolled across the plain.

  “I will let you stand with me, help protect me, and if possible be there when I give birth,” Kahlan said. “But there is one condition.”

  “What condition?”

  “You must not tell Richard that I’m pregnant.”

  Shale let out a soft chuckle. “I’m afraid that he is going to find out. It’s not the kind of thing you can hide.”

  Kahlan turned back. “For now I can. It won’t begin to show for a while yet.”

  Shale looked confused. “Why would you want to hide this from him? I haven’t known Lord Rahl long, but from what I’ve heard and seen, he would be overjoyed by this news. He would do whatever was needed to protect you and those unborn children.”

  “That is precisely why he must not know. At least for now. We can’t afford to have Richard distracted from his job of protecting our world. He is a war wizard. He needs to find a way to eliminate this new threat from the Golden Goddess and her kind. All our lives—my children’s lives—depend on him and what only he can do.”

  Shale, looking mystified, spread her hands. “But if he knows you are going to have his children, he will fight all the harder to protect them. That’s what you want, isn’t it—for your children to be protected?”

  “That’s the point,” Kahlan said.

  “What point?”

  “You don’t know Richard. He already feels guilty for letting me go alone to question Nolo. He thinks that what happened was because he wasn’t there to protect me, even though he knows that, as a Confessor, a lone man has never been a threat to me before. He wrongly thinks he made a mistake in not protecting me. With me nearly being killed fresh in his memory, he will not want to again make what he feels was a mistake. If I know Richard, I bet that you had a time of it trying to get him to stay out of here so that you could heal me, am I right?”

  Shale made a face as she sighed. “That’s the truth.” She looked a bit embarrassed. “As a matter of fact, when I first met him in the great hall, I told him that he was an idiot for letting you go alone to question Nolo.”

  “Well, if he knew that I was pregnant, that would only make him more determined to protect me. He would shift his focus away from where it needs to be right now. Protecting me would become his central focus. Don’t you see? We can’t afford that right now.

  “Of course he can do both—protect us from this new threat and protect me, and he will—but if he knew I was pregnant, it would unavoidably split his attention. I have no idea how he will be able to solve this new threat from the Golden Goddess and her kind. That is for him to figure out. For our part, we dare not burden him with the additional worry of me being pregnant.”

  “But Mother Confessor, sooner or later it is going to become obvious.”

  “Yes, later,” Kahlan said as she put a hand over those children. “But for now, it’s not obvious. For now, we must let him do his job of figuring out how to protect our world. Right now, he needs to worry about everyone before it’s too late and our children no longer have a world to grow up in.”

  “You realize, of course, that when he finds out he is going to be angry with you for keeping it from him.”

  “Better he is angry then, than we all die in the meantime because he is distracted.”

  Shale’s smile returned. “And you will do your job of having these children in order to protect our world in the future.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Shale thought it over for a moment before finally sighing. “All right. You have my word. I will not tell him. It will be up to you when you feel the time is right.”

  Kahlan held up a cautionary finger. “And you can’t tell the Mord-Sith, either. I know how incredibly difficult it is to keep anything from Richard. If one of the Mord-Sith knew, he would soon after find out.”

  Shale rubbed her forehead with her fingertips as she turned and paced off a few strides before turning back. “All right. No one will know but you and me until you decide otherwise.”

  “Good. Thank you, Shale.”

  “But I hope you are prepared for how angry and upset he will be when he learns you have been hiding it from him.”

  Kahlan flashed a lopsided smile. “I’m not afraid of the big guy. I will smooth his ruffled feathers when the time comes.”

  5

  Holding the scabbard and baldric together in one hand, Richard pulled open the bedroom door. When he did, Vika, who had been sitting on the floor leaning against the door, tumbled back inward. She jumped to her feet, quickly rubbing the sleep from her eyes. Holding her arms out to keep him behind her, her single blond braid whipped one way and then the other as she checked all around for any threat. It was obvious to Richard that she had been sitting on the floor, leaning against the door so that he couldn’t sneak off without her.

  Some of the other Mord-Sith must have warned her about him occasionally doing just that. There had been times when he had deliberately slipped away from Cara or the others, but not without good reason. Of course, to Mord-Sith, whose sworn duty it was to protect him with their lives, there was no such thing as a good reason to go anywhere without them. They didn’t realize, or refused to accept, that when he did that it was most often to pr
otect them from dangers they couldn’t fathom or handle. The fact that he did worry about their safety was another reason they were so fiercely loyal to him.

  “Any word from Shale or Kahlan?”

  Vika shook her head. “No, Lord Rahl.”

  Shale had been healing Kahlan, and she didn’t want Richard looking over her shoulder. At her insistence he had gone off to another bedroom to get some sleep. But with his worry over Kahlan, he had gotten precious little rest.

  The soldiers, weapons to hand, were all looking off down the hall to Richard’s left, ready to protect him from whatever they were concerned about. The men had been standing guard nearby outside the bedroom he had been using, and apparently something down that hallway had brought them in close to his room. Whatever had them on high alert had drawn their swords.

  “What was that sound?” he asked as he slipped the leather baldric over his head to lie on his right shoulder. “I thought I heard something.”

  The commander of the detachment pointed with his sword down the hallway to the side. “We heard an odd sound as well, Lord Rahl, but I’m not exactly sure what it was. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a natural sound, like the creaking of the palace you sometimes hear.”

  Richard secured his sword at his left hip. The ornate gold and silver of the scabbard gleamed in the lamplight. He knew from the window back in the bedroom he had been sleeping in that it was not yet dawn.

  Before he could ask the commander to describe the sound, Richard heard something new, loud and distinct. Even though it was some distance down the hall, it was clear that this time it was a bloodcurdling cry.

  Richard immediately took off down the hall toward the source of the shriek. The entire group of big men of the First File abruptly fell in behind him.

  Richard raced down an elegant blue and gold carpet of the broad corridor toward the sounds of yet more screams. Without slowing, he made a turn to the right down a narrower hall, following the frantic cries. It was hard to turn on the slippery stone, so he deliberately hit the paneled wall with his left shoulder and rebounded off of it to help him turn the corner down a narrower hall.