The Third Kingdom (15 page)

“It’s always been more like the people here respect the gifted and seek their advice, much like people respect elders and seek advice from them, but don’t necessarily want to be ruled by them. When something needed deciding, people would often come to one of the gifted—my parents or aunts and uncles—seeking advice, and on occasion, a decision.”

“You mean like when we were first brought here, they sent for you because they respect your ability, but they wouldn’t expect you to think you could rule them.”

Samantha smiled at the analogy. “I guess that’s a good way to put it. So in this matter that seemed to somehow involve magic, the gifted decided among themselves that Aunt Martha and her husband, since he was gifted too, would go look into what was happening in Kharga Trace, what this Hedge Maid really was, and what she might be up to back in that swamp.

“Last fall, when the water level was at its lowest, Aunt Martha and her husband set out for the Trace to look into it.”

“And they never came back,” Richard guessed when she brooded silence for a moment.

Samantha confirmed his suspicion with a shake of her head. “Our people searched, but my aunt and uncle were never found. The wilderness of the Dark Lands is vast so they couldn’t search everywhere, of course. More than that, though, people were afraid to go too far into the uncharted depths of the dark swamp of Kharga Trace.

“Then, this past spring, someone found their remains when the overflow of spring waters washed them out of the swamp.”

Richard knew that there couldn’t have been much left of the bodies. He tried to ask a gruesome question as gently as possible.

“After all that time, being out in the swamp and all, how could you be sure it was them?”

Samantha lifted a hand in a forlorn gesture. “My mother identified their bones. She said that the bones carried the telltale trace of the Grace—of the gift—and she recognized it as that of her sister.”

Samantha stared at her hands nested in her lap. “She also said that she could read in the bones that they had died a violent death. She said they had been murdered.”

Richard wondered if it was true that a gifted person could actually tell such things from bones, or if it had been grief speaking, trying to find blame. He didn’t know enough about the gift to know the answer to that question.

He did know, though, that the Dark Lands were a dangerous place, and Kharga Trace certainly more so. He had been warned about going into the Dark Lands by soldiers who grew up in that mysterious part of D’Hara. Given everything he knew, not only of the warnings he had heard, but his own experience, it was not at all unreasonable to believe that Samantha’s aunt and uncle had been murdered.

“Not long after,” Samantha said, “my other gifted aunt,
Aunt Millicent, and her husband Gyles, were taken away by soldiers from the abbey.”

Richard frowned in surprise. “The abbey?”

“Yes, it’s a distant place off somewhere near the city of Saavedra. It’s run by Abbot Dreier. It’s a place that has something to do with collecting prophecy for Hannis Arc, who rules Fajin Province from his citadel in Saavedra.”

“What do you know about this place, this abbey?”

“Not much at all, really, other than that they collect prophecy, like I told you. I’m not sure anyone knows much about it. No one likes to talk about the abbey, or the citadel.”

Richard knew Abbot Ludwig Dreier, but he didn’t say so. Ludwig Dreier had stirred up trouble about prophecy at the People’s Palace. He had, in fact, turned a number of lands away from their alliance with the D’Haran Empire in favor of throwing their lot in with Hannis Arc, who promised to share prophecy with them, and reveal its secrets.

“Any idea why they would pick out your aunt and uncle to go to the abbey?” he asked.

Samantha idly rubbed the edge of the chair. “I don’t know, for sure. But Uncle Gyles was the one I told you about who claimed to have a bit of the gift for prophecy. Maybe that had something to do with it. Maybe they wanted him to speak of what prophecy says about our future.

“All I know for sure is that soldiers showed up and said that Aunt Millicent and Uncle Gyles had to go with them. The soldiers said that because they were gifted, they had been chosen to go to the abbey to help with prophecy. They said that it was for the good of the people of Fajin Province, that prophecy belonged to all the people.”

“And they never returned after helping with prophecy?”

By the way Samantha looked down as she shook her head, Richard got the point that no one ever returned from the abbey. He wondered why.

“That left my mother as the only gifted person left in Stroyza.”

“There’s you,” Richard said. “You’re gifted.”

Samantha shrugged one shoulder. “I guess. I guess I should say it left my mother as the only adult gifted person in Stroyza. Now, she is gone. That means the ancient duty we were given has fallen to me.”

Richard didn’t think he liked the sound of that. He flicked a piece of straw off his pant leg.

“Do you know what the name of your village, your people, means? What ‘Stroyza’ means?”

Samantha pushed back some of her black hair as she frowned up at him. “No. I thought it was just a name. I never heard anyone say that it meant anything.”

“It’s a High D’Haran word.”

“High D’Haran is an ancient, dead language. No one today understands High D’Haran.”

“I do.”

“Really?” Intrigued, she leaned in. “So what does it mean, then?”

“It means ‘sentinel.’ ”

Samantha’s smile ghosted away as her face lost its color.

“Dear spirits,” she whispered.

“Does that word in an ancient language have something to do with your ancient duty?” Richard asked.

Her eyes beginning to brim with tears, Samantha nodded.

“That’s what my mother had been doing. She had been keeping watch. My parents left Stroyza to report what she had seen, but she was never able to complete that duty. They didn’t make it far when my father was killed. My mother is missing and I fear that she has also been murdered.”

“We don’t know that, yet,” Richard said. “What was she watching?”

Samantha gestured toward the door with the Grace carved into it. “I need to show you.”

Samantha touched her slender fingers lightly to the design of the Grace carved into the door.

“This is our duty,” she said. “Our duty to the world of life.”

“You mean, to be guardians of what the Grace represents?”

“That’s right,” she said as she pushed open the door.

Richard couldn’t imagine how these people in this remote place could be guardians of the Grace. That symbol embraced all that existed. He looked back at Kahlan, making sure she was still breathing peacefully, before following Samantha through the doorway emblazoned with a Grace, as if it was meant to serve as a reminder of that duty.

The room inside, as well made as the outer room, was dimly lit with a few candles. A rumpled blanket lay pushed to the side of a mat where she must have been sleeping as she waited for him to wake. A simple but well-made tall cabinet stood to the side of a curved bench with a small pack and waterskin under it.

Samantha led him into a dark hallway at the back of the room. She took a lantern from a shelf, lighting it with a gesture, a flick of her hand, that sent a flame sparked by her gift into the wick. The lamplight sent a mellow glow down a hallway that was longer than he expected it would be.

The hallway led them past a few rooms that he thought were likely to have been more bedrooms. There was a small recess cut into the wall. Three plank shelves in the niche held a few small, simple clay statues. One of the figures was a shepherd standing beside several sheep. Another was of a man, hand shielding his eyes, apparently gazing into the distance. On the lower shelves were a few books, and some folded linens. After passing several more darkened rooms to the sides, the hallway continued on without interruption, going deeper yet into the mountain, finally ending at a rather strange dead end.

The single opening at the end of the passageway was closed off on the far side by what looked to be a slab of stone. Carved in the center of the stone blocking the passageway was another Grace. To the side of the doorway Richard spotted a metal plate set into the wall. The plate was so corroded and pitted with age that it looked like part of the stone of the wall and he almost missed it.

Richard had seen similar metal plates before, though they had been in better condition. They had also been located in important restricted areas. Such plates were a kind of lock requiring the key of the gift.

Richard’s gift had in the past allowed him access to many such shielded passageways and restricted areas. It had even allowed him access to areas with the kind of deadly protective shields that required both Additive and Subtractive Magic in order to pass, places no one had been able to enter for hundreds of years.

“No one else in your village, none of your ungifted people, can get through here, can they?”

Samantha shook her head. “No. This is a place meant only for those who are gifted. Others are never allowed in here. Most people are at least a little fearful of the gifted and none of them ever enter the gifted’s quarters unless invited, and I’ve never known of anyone invited back this far into this place. I’ve
never heard anyone but the gifted even mention this place. I’m not sure, but I don’t think that anyone but the gifted among us even know that this place exists.”

Richard pressed his hand to the plate to open the door. Nothing happened.

“My gift doesn’t open it,” he said, a bit surprised.

He recalled that his gift hadn’t worked to protect Kahlan, or to heal her. It was further confirmation, as if he needed any, that for some reason his gift was not working.

In a fluid gesture, Samantha’s fingers traced the lines of the Grace carved into the stone blocking the opening, doing it in the proper sequence in which a Grace was to be drawn. First the outer circle representing the limits of life, then the square inside that circle that represented the world of life, then another circle inside the square that represented the beginning of life, then the eight-pointed star, representing Creation, within the inner circle. Lastly she traced the lines coming from each point of the star, crossing the inner circle that marked the beginning of the world of life, and then the outer circle that represented the end of life and the beginning of the world of the dead.

“The gift,” Samantha said as she traced the last of the eight lines going outward, “as it is meant to be.”

Richard frowned, wondering what she was getting at. “The world of life and the spirit world, with the spark of the gift connecting it all.”

“As it is meant to be,” she again prompted. “In the proper order,” she stressed. “The world of life, and then after life ends, the spirit world—the underworld, the world of the dead.”

“I know,” he said, still frowning, still not understanding what she was getting at, but a bit unsettled by how easily she slipped into the enigmatic temperament of a sorceress.

“Your said that your gift does not work.”

“That’s right.”

“From the things my mother taught me about the gift and its connection to everything as shown in the Grace, I think your gift isn’t working because it is corrupted.”

“Go on. I’m listening.”

“You have death in you, do you not?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Death in the world of life,” she said as she arched an eyebrow. “That can’t be. That is not the order of things, not as the Grace shows it should be.

“There is supposed to be the world of life, and the world of the dead. They each exist in their own place, as shown by the Grace. You have both at the same time, in the same place. That violates the Grace.”

Richard felt goose bumps on his arms. He had not thought of it in that way before.

“That is how I know you are the one,” she said in a confidential tone as she leaned in.

Richard’s brow drew even tighter. “What do you mean?”

“Right now, you are neither of the kingdom of life, nor the kingdom of death.”

“How does that make me the one you think you’re looking for?”

“I have to show you,” she said as she straightened.

She placed the flat of her hand against the metal plate. At her touch, the stone blocking the doorway began to roll to the right, revealing a passageway beyond. Richard stood in silence, staring into the darkness, as the heavy stone rumbled to a stop at the side.

“What is this place?”

“A place for the gifted of Stroyza. For those who keep watch.”

Richard wondered what they were keeping watch for. He stepped through the opening, to a bracket holding a glass sphere just on the other side. He knew what that was as well. He had often used the light spheres left from ancient times.

But this time, as he approached, the glass sphere remained dark. He brushed his fingertips along the smooth surface, but it remained dead and dark.

As Samantha came closer and reached for the glass sphere, it began to glow, lighting the hall. She picked up the glowing sphere and then set her lantern down back in the hall before touching another metal shield placed on the inside to shut them in. The massive stone began to roll back into place across the opening.

“My gift doesn’t work for that either, I guess,” Richard said in frustration as he gestured to the light sphere.

“What I don’t understand,” she said with a twitch of a frown, “is why, if your gift doesn’t work, the magic of your sword did. It seems a contradiction.”

“If your theory is correct, and I think it is, then it isn’t a contradiction at all. My gift is something within me.” Richard lifted the sword a few inches and then let it drop back into its scabbard. “The sword, on the other hand, is external magic, something constructed. It doesn’t need the gift to work. Anyone, including those who are not gifted, could use the sword and its magic would work for them. Its magic is independent of any person. It only requires the intent of the person wielding it.”

Samantha nodded thoughtfully at the explanation. “That makes sense.”