The Third Kingdom Read online

  “Because of that, Jit was able to prey on those desperate to find help. Occasionally she would help someone in need so as to create hope among other desperate people and in that way draw in more victims.

  “Do you think you have the ability to undertake a journey to find someone trustworthy who could help you? Do you think the Mother Confessor can make such a journey? Are you willing to risk her life on waiting until you can find someone else? If you become desperate will you risk her life on someone with veiled motives and perhaps end up in the hands of someone like Jit?

  “You have already seen that we are willing to help you, even at the risk of danger to ourselves.”

  “And why would you do that?” Richard asked.

  Ester shrugged. “We help because we would want someone to help us if we were in danger. It is our way. It has always been our way, handed down from generations long forgotten. We teach our children to help those in need because one day we might be the ones in need, and we can only hope to earn such help if we are worthy, if we are the kind who would give it and not just receive it. We believe in treating others as we would want to be treated.”

  “I guess that’s the way I’ve always tried to live my life as well,” Richard said.

  “Lord Rahl, I am telling you that Sammie may be only fifteen, but she is gifted and has a good heart. That is all we are able to offer. That is the best we can offer. Are you so sure that you want to turn down our help, such as it is?”

  Richard knew that he was in no condition to heal Kahlan himself. Worse, though, he didn’t think that he could. Back at the wagon he had tried to summon his gift to save her life, and his gift had not responded. It was evident that there was something seriously wrong with his gift. If it wouldn’t save her from being murdered, it would not respond to heal her, either.

  He didn’t know what could be wrong with his gifted ability. He knew only that it wasn’t working. They both needed help.

  He also knew that in his present condition he couldn’t make it far. He remembered that Zedd and Nicci had started healing them even as they lay in the back of the moving wagon. They wouldn’t have been doing that if it wasn’t urgent.

  Still, he didn’t entirely trust the motives of these people.

  If he wasn’t willing to accept the girl’s gifted help, then having Ester tend to their wounds with needle and thread, herbs, and poultices was the only other choice. He knew that Ester was right that such help wasn’t enough, especially for Kahlan.

  Richard had been wounded in the past. This time, though, he felt something different, something more than simple injuries. He wanted to ignore the way he felt, but he knew he couldn’t, at least not for long. He knew, too, that whatever the grim shadow of affliction he felt within himself was, Kahlan was suffering from it far worse than he was.

  Zedd and Nicci had been trying to heal him and Kahlan, but they hadn’t been able to finish that work. Now they were missing. Richard knew that the lives of not only Kahlan but also his friends depended on him making the right decision. He didn’t think that there was any time to waste.

  But gift or no gift, he didn’t know if he dared to trust Kahlan’s life to such a young and inexperienced girl. Where the gift was concerned, a mistake could be fatal.

  “Do you trust her abilities?”

  Ester hiked up her gray dress and again knelt beside him. “Sammie is an earnest girl. Her mother was a sorceress. That may account for Sammie seeming to be grown beyond what her years would otherwise suggest. Being ungifted myself, I don’t know much about such abilities, but I do know that her mother passed the gift on to Sammie. There is no doubt about that much of it.”

  “Where is her mother?”

  Ester’s gaze fell away. “Not long ago we found the remains of Sammie’s father, but not her mother. We think that her mother was captured and taken. Though Sammie holds out hope, I don’t think she is still alive.”

  “Taken?”

  Ester’s gaze rose to meet his. “As your people were. As nearly happened to the Mother Confessor.

  “The Dark Lands have always been a dangerous place. We have long lived with those dangers and know how to remain fairly safe. But now, terrible things are happening that we don’t understand and can’t fight. We need help.”

  Richard wiped a hand across his mouth. As he had thought, this was what the men who had helped save him back at the wagon had meant. Although they might have always lived their lives by the code of helping others as they would want to be helped, in this case they needed help that they thought only one such as the Lord Rahl could provide. Considering the frightful things he had seen, it wasn’t hard to see why they were desperate for help. He couldn’t blame them for their motives.

  His gaze turned to Kahlan. He briefly watched her shallow breathing. Did he dare to risk her life on such an inexperienced girl?

  What choice did he have?

  “All right,” he finally said with a sigh of resignation.

  CHAPTER

  7

  As soon as she had Richard’s agreement to let Sammie help, Ester sprang up. She pulled back the thick covering over the doorway and ducked under it to rush out into the hall. Richard could hear her asking the others to please give the Lord Rahl and the Mother Confessor privacy. The people murmured their understanding.

  In short order Ester ushered the girl back in, leaving all the others to wait down the corridor. With a reassuring hand on the girl’s shoulder, Ester steered her into the room as she once again let the heavy sheepskin fall across the doorway.

  A black cat ducked in under the sheepskin and casually followed the girl into the room. The cat sat sat off to the side, lifting a hind leg as it licked the glossy fur on its tummy.

  Sammie stood stiffly just inside the room, looking too fearful to approach. Her flawless skin laid over her immature features not yet fully emerged made her almost look like a statue carved of the smoothest marble.

  Richard held out his good hand and waggled his fingers in invitation. “Please, Sammie, come sit here beside me.”

  When Sammie shuffled closer, he gently took her hand and urged her to kneel down beside him. She sat back on her heels, wary to get too close. Her big eyes sparkled in the candlelight as they remained fixed on him. If she only knew that he probably had more to fear than she did.

  Once Ester saw that the girl was in his hands, she used her foot to slide the bucket of water across the floor with her as she carried the bandages and other supplies over to Kahlan, where she squatted down and hurriedly began cleaning the worst of Kahlan’s wounds.

  “I’m very sorry to hear about your father and that your mother is missing,” Richard said.

  Sammie’s eyes welled up with tears at the mention of her parents. “Thank you, Lord Rahl.” Her voice was as thin and timid as the rest of her, and it carried the lonely, painful tone of inconsolable grief.

  “Maybe if you can help us, then when I’m able to, I can help find your mother.”

  Sammie’s brow twitched. She looked confused. “You are the ruler of the D’Haran Empire.” She wiped the tears from under her eyes. “Why would you be concerned with helping someone from the little village of Stroyza?”

  Richard shrugged. “I didn’t become a leader because I wanted to rule people. I became a leader because I wanted to help protect our people from harm. If one of the people I’m sworn to protect is hurt or in danger, no matter who they are, then that is my concern.”

  She looked perplexed. “Hannis Arc rules all the Dark Lands, including our village. I’ve never met him, but I’ve never heard anyone say that he is concerned about protecting us. Far from it; I’ve heard that he only cares about prophecy.”

  “I’ve heard the same thing,” Richard said. “I don’t share his concern for prophecy. I believe we make our own future. In part that’s what brought me here. The Mother Confessor and I were both hurt while making sure that a terrible prophecy did not come true and harm our people. Our free will, not prophecy, made the ultimate
difference in what happened.”

  The girl glanced at Kahlan out of the corner of her eye. “I’m sorry about your wife being hurt.” Her big eyes turned back to Richard. “My mother often said that I was gifted, but it was up to me, not fate, to make something of it.”

  “Wise advice. And did she teach you about using your gift?”

  A bit of the tension went out of the girl’s bony shoulders. “All my life she taught me things about my gift, but mostly in little ways.”

  “Little things are a good place to start. Larger understanding is built on little things. We put those little things we learn together into larger concepts.”

  With a thumb, Sammie smoothed a fold in her dress along the length of her thigh. “She was just starting to teach me more, to teach me about using our calling to heal. She said that I was old enough to start learning more. But I’m still only a young sorceress. My ability is nothing compared to my mother’s gift, and especially nothing compared to one such as yours must be, Lord Rahl.”

  Richard couldn’t help but to smile. “I didn’t even find out that I had the gift until I was a lot older than you are now. No one taught me about it as I was growing up. I imagine that with all your mother taught you, you must know more about the gift than even I do.”

  Her smooth brow bunched skeptically. “Really?”

  “Really. I’ve since used my ability, but in a different way than most gifted people. I’ve both destroyed and healed with my ability, but I’ve done it through instinct and desperate need, through letting my gift guide me, rather than from anything I was taught.”

  Sammie sat over on her hip as she thought it over. The black cat strolled over to rub against the girl before padding on silent paws toward Kahlan.

  “That must be frightening to have the gift and not know how to use it, not know how to control it.”

  Despite the pain he was in and his worry for Kahlan, he couldn’t help letting out a small ripple of laughter. “You don’t know the half of it.”

  She regarded him with an unreadable look. “But still, you must be able to use your power well enough. After all, you are the Lord Rahl. I’ve heard it said that the people of D’Hara are the steel against steel so that you might be the magic against magic.”

  Richard didn’t tell her that at the moment his power didn’t work.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the cat cautiously stretched forward to smell Kahlan’s boot. The little black nose glided along, hovering just above her leg and then up along her arm, not quite touching her skin. The cat abruptly drew back. Its lips curled with a hiss that bared sharp little teeth. Richard thought that it must not like a stranger who smelled of blood being among them.

  “Are all the cats that live here black?” Richard asked Sammie.

  She looked up at him from under her brow. “They are when they need to be.”

  Richard frowned. “What does that mean?”

  “In the dark they are all black,” she said, cryptically.

  Ester, kneeling beside Kahlan, flapped her rag at the cat, chasing it away. Ears laid back, the cat scurried out of the room.

  Richard looked back at Sammie. He wasn’t sure what she meant, but he had more important things on his mind. He turned the conversation to the matter at hand. “So what do you know about healing?”

  Sammie’s brow twitched as she considered her answer. “My mother was just starting to teach me how to heal people. She talked to me about the fundamentals and then had me help with small things. I’ve only done simple healing—cuts and scrapes, a sick stomach, headaches, rashes. Things like that. She guided me in how to let my ability go down into a person to feel the trouble within them.”

  Richard nodded. “I’ve experienced that when I’ve healed people.” He stared off into grim memories. “On occasion, because the need was so great, I’ve had to let myself go so far down into a person that it felt as if I lost who I was as I sank into their soul to lift their pain away and take it into myself.”

  “I’ve never gone that deep.” Sammie looked uneasy. “I don’t know that I’d ever be able to go down into a person’s soul.”

  “If you’ve healed people then I suspect you have, even if you didn’t realize it,” Richard said. “That’s how it works. While healing, you are venturing down into the essence, in other words the soul, of who they are. At least, that’s how it works for me.”

  “That sounds … frightening.”

  “Not if you really care about helping them.”

  She watched his eyes for a moment as if they held some deep secret. “If you say so, Lord Rahl.”

  Richard looked over at Kahlan lying not far away. Ester, her face set in a frown of focused concentration, carefully cleaned and inspected cuts along Kahlan’s arms.

  “I’ve healed Kahlan before,” Richard said, “but I’m not strong enough to do it now and I’m terribly worried for her.”

  Sammie’s gaze left Kahlan to wander over some of his more serious bite wounds. Her worry about the task he was asking of her was clearly evident in her tense expression.

  “I don’t know how deeply I may have gone into a person’s essence, but I do know that I’ve never healed such terrible injuries. I’ve only healed small things. I’ve never tried to heal anything so grievous.”

  “Well, from my experiences I can tell you that, to a certain extent, anyway, the severity of the injuries is irrelevant. Of course, in some cases it isn’t, such as when the person is near the veil and in the process of crossing over from the world of life into the world of the dead. That’s different.”

  Sammie’s eyes widened. “You mean as the person is crossing the boundaries of the Grace?”

  Richard regarded her more seriously. “Your mother taught you about the Grace?”

  Sammie nodded. “The symbol that represents the spark of creation, the world of life, the world of the dead, and the way the gift crosses those boundaries to link everything. Those with the gift, she told me, must know about the Grace so as not to violate it. It defines how the gift flows and how it works—its capability and its limits—as well as the order of creation, life, and death. All our work, my mother said, is represented by the Grace, guided by it, and ultimately must be governed by it.”

  “That’s what I learned as well,” Richard said. “By allowing myself to flow along those lines of the gift as represented by the Grace, I’ve found that healing most injuries is basically the same process. If you let the person’s need guide you, then through your gift you can feel what is necessary. Through your empathy you lift away the hurt and hold it within yourself so that the healing power of your gift can then flow into the person you’re helping. I have always found that the person’s need actually guides me, draws me onward toward it.”

  Except that for some reason his gift had stopped working.

  The girl frowned. “I think I know what you mean. My mother had me feel deep down into people, feel the trouble within them.”

  “And did she teach you to lift that pain out of them and take it into yourself?”

  Sammie hesitated. “Yes. But I was afraid. It’s hard when you can feel the pain they feel. I’ve done that. I’ve felt what they felt, though it was for smaller injuries. Then I try to lift it away from them and, like you say, let the warmth of the gift flow from me and into them to heal them.”

  Richard was nodding as she spoke. “That’s been my experience as well.”

  “But you said that you have healed people when they have been at the boundaries of the Grace, when they have been crossing over into the world of the dead. You have flowed along those lines of the Grace that flow into the world of the dead.”

  It didn’t sound at all like a question so much as a lecture for doing things she had been taught were forbidden.

  “You would be surprised, Sammie, what you would do for ones you love.” He again looked over at Kahlan. “I love her very much and I’m afraid for her, but this time I don’t have the strength for the sustained effort needed to heal
her. Can you do that for her?”

  Sammie’s gaze glided over to watch Ester gently cleaning blood from Kahlan’s face. “What’s wrong with her?”

  “I don’t know for sure. A Hedge Maid had captured her and was starting to drink her blood and—”

  “Jit?” Sammie abruptly leaned toward him, her eyes intent. “Are you talking about Jit?” When Richard nodded she asked, “How did you ever manage to get away from the Hedge Maid?”

  “I killed her.”

  “Indeed he did,” Ester said back over her shoulder. She dipped the cloth in the bucket and then wrung red water out of it. “That’s how they were both hurt,” she said with a last look before going back to her work cleaning Kahlan’s wounds.

  Sammie seemed not to notice Ester. She instead stared in wonder at Richard.

  “Then you really are a protector of your people.” She caught herself, glanced at Ester busy with her work, then leaned closer to Richard and spoke confidentially. “You are the one.”

  CHAPTER

  8

  Richard didn’t know what she meant about him being the one. He was having enough trouble remaining upright and besides, he had far greater concerns at the moment.

  “Will you help Kahlan, then? I need you to help us both, but I want you to help Kahlan first. I need to know that she’s out of danger.”

  Anxiety tightened the gentle features of Sammie’s face. “She’s the Mother Confessor.”

  Richard wasn’t sure exactly what she was getting at. “That’s right.”

  Sammie winced a little with a sideways look, apparently fearful of posing the question. “Won’t I, well, you know, won’t I be harmed by her power? When I go down into the essence of who she is, won’t I be taken by her Confessor power?”

  Richard was shaking his head even before she had finished the question.

  “No, it doesn’t work that way.”