The First Confessor (5 page)

Not far away, out in front of her in midair, a raven rode an updraft, its glistening black feathers ruffling in the wind as its black eyes watched her prepare to leap.

Magda bent at the knees, readying herself for a maximum effort to jump clear of the wall. In a daze, she felt as if she were only watching herself. The whispers urged her on.

Her heart hammering, Magda took a deep breath, crouched down even more, and started rocking back and forth, swinging farther out each time, standing, crouching, standing, crouching, back and forth, farther out over the edge of the wall, farther out toward the drop that would take her pain away, building up speed for the final, big push.

In a swelling moment of doubt, she heard a voice within whisper for her not to think, but to simply do it.

As she swung herself out past the wall on the last rocking arc before the great leap, she realized in a single, crystal-clear instant the true enormity of what she was doing.

She was ending her life, ending it forever, ending it for all time. Everything that she was would be no more.

The voice became more insistent, telling her not to think, telling her to end her misery once and for all.

She was struck by how odd that seemed. How could she not think? Thinking was critical to any important decision.

In that icy flash of comprehension, in spite of the whispers, she realized just how terrible a mistake she was making.

It was as if, since learning of her husband’s death, she had been carried along in a raging river of emotions, urged onward by an inner voice pressing her toward the only thing that seemed like it could make the agony stop. She realized only now that she hadn’t thought it through, she had simply allowed herself to be swept along toward the spot where she now stood.

She was making no loving sacrifice. She was not trading her life for something she believed in, offering it for something of value as she knew Baraccus had. She was instead throwing it away for nothing. She was giving in to weakness, nothing more.

She was thoughtlessly rejecting all she believed in, all she had fought for. How many times had she gone before the council to speak for the lives of those who couldn’t speak for themselves? How many times had she argued for the importance of their lives, for the value of all life?

Was hers not just as important? Was her own life to be so carelessly, so foolishly, thrown away? Was she not going to fight for the right to her own life as she had fought for others?

She remembered telling Tilly that every life was precious. This was her only life and, despite her crushing agony, her life was precious to her. In her grief, she had allowed herself to be blind to that.

As if coming out of a fog, she realized, too, that there were things going on that didn’t make sense. There had to be more to everything that had happened than she was seeing. Why had Baraccus killed himself? What had been his purpose? Who was he protecting? For what had he traded his life?

She suddenly regretted thinking that she wanted to die, regretted being up on that wall. In fact, it now seemed to her as if she had somehow arrived at that spot in a dream.

As much as she hurt, she wanted to live.

But she was already moving too fast to stop, already flying out toward empty space.

Magda’s fingers clawed frantically at the stone to each side, but it wasn’t enough to halt her momentum. She swept out through the opening in the battlement toward the terrifying drop, with a scream caught in her throat.

Just as she lost her footing going over the brink of the stone wall, a powerful gust of wind rising up the side of the mountain caught her body, lifting some of her weight as she snatched at the wall to each side and helping her get herself back to solid footing. The push from the wind coming up the mountain had been just the help she needed to stop herself from going over the edge.

As she started to fall back toward the Keep, her left hand came up off the wall and she wheeled that arm in the air, trying to maintain her balance. As she toppled back, she grabbed at the wall to the right side and caught a joint of stone blocks. With the help of her grip on that joint, she was able to hold on tight enough to get her balance and keep herself from falling back off the wall. Finally solidly back on her feet, she let out a deep, frightened sigh. She knew that it would be a while before her galloping heart would slow.

Her head was suddenly more clear than it had been all day.

She was alive. She wanted to stay alive. She suddenly had a thousand questions and wanted the answers. She clutched at the stone block for support so that she wouldn’t accidentally fall, now that she knew she didn’t want to go over the side.

That was when her fingers felt something odd in the joint between the blocks.

It wasn’t rough like the stone. Rather, it had a smooth edge.

In the fading light, Magda frowned as she looked over at the joint in the massive granite blocks. There, wedged between the dark, mottled stones, was a folded piece of paper.

She couldn’t imagine what a folded piece of paper was doing, stuck there. It made no sense. Who would put a piece of paper there in the joint at the edge of the wall? And why?

She leaned close, narrowing her eyes, trying to see better. The paper looked to be wedged tightly in place. She could only get ahold of the very edge of it with a finger and thumb. Being careful not to tear it, she gently wiggled the folded paper from side to side to loosen it from its hiding place.

At last she was able to work it free.

Careful not to let a gust of wind catch it and pull it from her fingers, she stepped down off the wall onto the deserted rampart as she unfolded the paper.

There was something written on the paper. She immediately recognized her husband’s handwriting. With trembling fingers, she held the paper close in order to read it in the last light of the dying day.

My time has passed, Magda. Yours has not. Your destiny is not here. Your destiny is to find truth. It will be difficult, but have the courage to take up that calling.

Look out to the rise on the valley floor below, just outside the city to the left. There, on that rise, a palace will one day be built. There is your destiny, not here.

Know that I believe in you. Know, too, that I will always love you. You are a rare, fierce flower, Magda. Be strong now, guard your mind, and live the life that only you can live.

Magda blinked the tears away and again silently read it to herself. In her mind, she could hear her husband’s voice speaking the words to her.

Magda brought the paper to her lips and kissed the words written there.

She looked up from the paper, out through the opening in the stone wall, and below saw a beautiful green rise that overlooked the city of Aydindril. For the life of her, she could not fathom what Baraccus meant about a palace, or about her destiny there.

Baraccus was a wizard. Part of his talent was prophecy. She swallowed past the lump in her throat, wondering for a moment if what he meant was that he wanted her to go on with her life and marry another.

She didn’t want another man. She didn’t want to marry anyone else. She had married the man she had loved.

And now he was gone.

She read the words yet again. There was something more to them, she knew there was. There was something more important than a simple prophecy, or even the simple message asking her to embrace life.

Wizards existed in a complex world all their own. They rarely if ever made anything simple to understand. Baraccus was no different.

There was a purpose to these carefully chosen words, a hidden message, she knew there was. He meant for her to know something more.

Your destiny is to find truth. It will be difficult, but have the courage to take up that calling.

What could he possibly mean by that? What truth? What truth was he expecting her to find? What calling did he expect her to take up?

Her head spun with thoughts scattering in every direction. She began to imagine all sorts of things he could have meant. Maybe he meant the truth of what he had done at the Temple of the Winds. Maybe the truth of why the moon had stayed red even though he had told her that he had gotten inside.

Maybe the truth of why he had returned from the world of the dead only to end his life.

It seemed to her, though, that there was more to the message than any of that. There was meaning hidden with the words. There was a reason he had not made the message clear.

Baraccus had told her in the past that foreknowledge could taint prophecy and cause dire, unintended consequences. Knowing a prophecy could alter how one behaved, so it was sometimes necessary to withhold information in order for free will to be able to let life play itself out.

Even without understanding the meaning of the note, she knew that Baraccus was telling her as much as he could without tainting it with what more he knew.

Magda knew that Baraccus had given her a message that involved life and death. She grasped just how important the message had been to him. From that, she knew that it was perhaps even more important to her.

Magda gazed out again over a landscape growing more dark by the moment.

She had to know what Baraccus had been trying to tell her with his last words. She couldn’t let his effort, his sacrifice, be in vain. She had to find out what he had really wanted her to know.

Her life suddenly had a purpose.

Your destiny is to find truth.

She had to find out what he had meant by that.

Baraccus had reached out from the world of the dead and given her a reason to live.

He believed in her.

She kissed his words again as she slumped to the ground and wept at all that was lost to her, at all that she had just gained. She wept with grief for her loss, and with the relief of being alive.

Near her rooms, in a quiet corridor softly lit by reflector lamps hung at regular intervals on the dark wood panels to each side, men-at-arms blocked her way. A lot of men. They weren’t regular soldiers, nor were they the elite Home Guard. At first, from a distance, Magda had found herself worrying that they might be troops from the prosecutor’s office.

As head prosecutor, Lothain had his own private army, men who took orders from and were loyal to him and him alone. It was a privilege of his high office that no other in the Keep enjoyed. It was argued that to be independent and remain above outside influence, the prosecutor’s office had to have its own guard to protect the office from coercion and threats, and to enforce decrees against those who would otherwise resist.

These men, though, were not dressed in the dark green tunics of the prosecutor’s office. These were hulking men, towering men, with bull necks, powerful shoulders, beefy arms, and massive chests. Under their leather armor they wore chain mail that was well used, scuffed, and discolored by tarnish. She could smell the oil they used to help keep rust from their mail and weapons. The whiff of slightly rancid oil mixed disagreeably with the smell of stale sweat.

There was no mistaking that the armor these men wore was not meant for show. The weapons they carried—swords, knives, maces, and scarred battle-axes—likewise had the single-minded purpose of life and death.

These grim-faced men were not the kind who marched on a field of review or a polished patrol.

These were men who had looked death in the eye and grinned.

Magda stood frozen, unable to reach the door to her rooms, not knowing quite what to do. They in turn stood silently watching her like a curiosity come into their midst, but made no attempt to advance on her.

Before she could ask the men what they were doing there or tell them to move out of the way, another man, long locks of blond hair to his shoulders and dressed in layers of dark traveling clothes and leather, stepped out from behind the wall of men. He was just as big as the men all around him and likewise heavily armed, but he was a bit older, perhaps just entering his forties. Character creases had begun to take a permanent set.

As he moved forward through the armored soldiers he pulled off long gauntlets and tucked them behind a broad leather weapons belt. Two men, larger even than him or the soldiers, stayed close behind him but a little off to each side. Like all the others, they, too, had blond hair. Magda saw that above their elbows the two men wore metal bands with wicked blades jutting out, weapons for brutal, close-quarters combat. Instead of mail, the two wore elaborately fitted leather armor sculpted to the contours of their prodigious muscles. On the center of their powerful chests a stylized letter “R” was engraved into the leather breastplates.

The man with the long hair and the cutting, raptor gaze dipped his head in a quick bow.

“Lady Searus?”

Magda glanced to the blue eyes of the guards behind his shoulders, then back to the man who had spoken.

“That’s right.”

“I am Alric Rahl,” he said before she had a chance to ask.

“From D’Hara?”

He confirmed it with a quick nod.

“My husband has spoken highly of you.”