The Third Kingdom (17 page)

“It’s not like it used to be. Those gifted born as wizards have become extremely rare. There aren’t many left today. I’m one of those who was born with that gift, but I grew up without knowing anything about it, so I’m afraid that I’m no expert on the subject.

“My grandfather is First Wizard and knows a great deal
about such things as the history of the wizards at the Keep, but he’s missing. If I can find him and the others with him, maybe he would be able to tell you more.”

While Zedd probably knew a great deal about the history of the wizards’ council, Richard didn’t think that he knew anything about a north wall in such a forgotten place.

On the verge of panic, Samantha grabbed a mass of black hair in each fist. She looked out the opening through the rock wall as if looking for an answer. She looked like she wanted to pull her hair out. He could see that her world, her duty in life, was coming apart at the seams.

Richard laid a hand on her shoulder. “Slow down, Samantha. Take a deep breath and then why don’t you tell me what happened next.”

She nodded and then swallowed to help slow her breathing. “Some of our people found my father’s remains not far from here. My mother’s things—her pack and traveling supplies—were found scattered about on the ground nearby. There were drag marks, they said, that looked like she had fought them. Our people couldn’t find her anywhere. The ground was rocky and they couldn’t follow the trail.

“After that, with the north wall breached, and me being the only gifted person left, I knew that it was up to me, now.” She flung her arms up. “But I didn’t know how to get to a distant Wizard’s Keep. I don’t even know where it is, except I think it’s far to the west somewhere. I hadn’t yet learned the things I still need to learn. I didn’t know what to do.”

She looked up at him. “Fortunately, you showed up. I don’t know if it was coincidence, or fate, or if it was the good spirits themselves intervening to send you here when I needed you most.”

Richard cast her a sideways look. “I don’t believe much in coincidence.”

“Well, all I know is that you’re the one meant to hear about
this—especially since you tell me there is no longer a wizards’ council. After all, you said yourself that you’re one of those who is gifted in that way.”

Richard let out a deep breath of his own. “I’m not so sure.”

“I think that it all happened this way because you’re the one.”

“The one.” Richard cast her a skeptical look. “I’m glad you think so. I’m not so sure.”

Some of the tension eased out of her shoulders as she let out a deep sigh. “I am.”

He arched an eyebrow. “Wouldn’t you think that if I was ‘the one’ I would know something about all this? I’ve never heard of any of it. I only recently heard of the Dark Lands for the first time.”

“You killed Jit. Only you could have done that. Only the person we needed could have done that.”

In frustration, he gestured out the round opening. “Yes, but I don’t know anything at all about this north wall. This is the first I’ve ever heard of it. I killed Jit because she had captured Kahlan, then me, and she was going to kill us both if I didn’t stop her. I was just trying to survive, to live. That’s all there was to it. Kill or be killed.”

Richard paused as a thought occurred to him. He wondered why Jit had gone to so much trouble in the first place to draw them both in.

She had first gotten her hands on Henrik, then cast some kind of spell over the boy. Making him helpless to do otherwise, she had sent him on a mission to deliver her occult conjuring to Richard and Kahlan in order to get both to come to her in Kharga Trace. Because of the calculated intent of that spell, the Hedge Maid had been able to draw Kahlan to her lair and imprison her there. That, in turn, had drawn Richard to her.

Now that he thought about it, he couldn’t really imagine,
living as she did way back in the depths of that forlorn swamp, that she would have had any way to know anything about Richard and Kahlan off in the distant People’s Palace. It didn’t make any sense, unless she had merely been looking to take down anyone who was a leader and that just happened to be Richard and Kahlan.

Unless someone else had a motive and they had directed her to do it in the first place.

“That’s what we’re all doing,” Samantha said. “We’re all just trying to survive.”

He put the distracting thoughts of Jit’s intentions out of his mind and returned to the matter at hand. Samantha was still looking up at him, waiting.

“I understand,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean that I’m the one you need to tell about all this north wall business. Like I told you, I never heard of it before.”

“Well, you are the Lord Rahl,” she said with simple logic. “To my mind, that makes you even more important than a wizards’ council. You rule all of the D’Haran Empire, don’t you? This is part of your empire.”

Richard grudgingly had to concede her point. “I guess you’re right about that much of it, but that’s not enough to make me the one you need to tell about the north wall.”

“But that’s only a small part of it. The main reason is that you are of that place beyond the north wall.”

Richard put his hands on his hips as he looked down at the wisp of a girl. He tried to keep the frown off his face. He couldn’t imagine that it was comforting to have a big man, and the Lord Rahl besides, towering over her.

“I’m from Hartland.” He aimed a thumb back behind him toward the west. “That’s a small place in Westland, on the far side of the Midlands. That’s a very long way from here. I’m not from beyond that north wall.”

“I don’t mean it in that way,” she said in a calm voice as if he were dense and she was trying to be patient.

She was showing that exasperating side of sorceresses that made them all tend to talk in circles and riddles in a way that never failed to make him feel ignorant. He had once surmised that such a demeanor was a product of age and wisdom. But he could see now that it wasn’t. That inborn nature of a sorceress was showing in Samantha even at a young age, much like the color of her hair or her small frame. He found it annoying the way it made him feel a bit dim-witted.

“When I say that you are of that place, I don’t mean that you grew up there,” she said, patiently, when she saw that he wasn’t following her meaning. “What I meant is that you are from there … well, inwardly. You are of the place.” She tilted her head as if to ask if he finally understood.

He didn’t. “Of the place? What place?”

“The third kingdom,” she said in simple explanation.

“The third kingdom?”

“Yes,” she said as she dipped her head in a single nod, seeming to think that it was now as plain as could be. “The Grace explains the way it is all supposed to be.”

“Samantha,” he said, trying to be calm, “I don’t know what you’re getting at.”

“There are two kingdoms represented in the Grace, right? The kingdom of life starting with the inner circle, and the kingdom of the dead beginning at the outer circle.”

“So then what’s this third kingdom?”

She stretched up on her tiptoes and pointed out the opening. “That is the third kingdom, beyond the north wall that has kept it locked away for all this time, since the time of the ancient war.”

Richard had been dealt years of grief, misery, and trouble because of that ancient war. It was a war that had never been
fully resolved back when it had raged. That ancient conflict had reawakened to spawn a new war that had caused untold suffering and had taken hundreds of thousands of lives. But that war, both the ancient one and the new one it had given rise to, was at last over. He had ended it for good.

Richard glanced out the opening and then back at Samantha. “What does a place have to do with the Grace.”

“No, you don’t understand. Not a place, as such. Although, it is a place—”

“It is, but it isn’t.” He made an effort to control his voice and keep it composed. “Samantha, if I’m going to help, you need to be more clear.”

“Sorry.” She pushed some of her hair back, took a breath, and lifted both hands as she started over. “The third kingdom is neither the kingdom of life, nor the kingdom of death.” She lifted each hand alternately as if to illustrate both of those kingdoms in balance. She brought her hands together. “The third kingdom is both, together, in the same place, at the same time.”

Richard felt goose bumps tingle up his arms to the nape of his neck. “That’s not possible.”

An uncomfortable thought immediately came to him. He had once ventured to the underworld to go to the Temple of the Winds, which had been banished there for safekeeping during that ancient great war. He was life, and he had been in the world of the dead. So, in a way, both life and death had been in the same place at the same time.

When he first met Kahlan she had come looking for help from beyond the barrier that separated Westland from the Midlands. That barrier, slicing through their world, like a crack in their world, was an opening into the underworld. He had gone through that barrier with her.

So, in a way, he realized that such things were in some ways possible. Great trouble, certainly, but possible.

He turned back to the opening, this time looking at the
symbols circling it, rather than looking out the opening itself to the distant valley. He surveyed the symbols, deciphering them in his mind as he studied the entire band of elements. It was then, for the first time, that he saw that the symbols translated to “the third kingdom.”

It was naming what the opening showed.

When he had first seen that encircling emblem, and had recognized the device within the design that meant “kingdom,” he had assumed that the circle of symbols would merely be the name of an ancient kingdom. After all, what was now D’Hara had once been made up of many kingdoms.

Samantha reached up and tapped her finger on his chest. “You have both life and death in you at the same time. Right now, you are neither of the world of life, nor of the world of the dead. Right now, you belong in both places. You have both life and death in you at the same time, as does the Mother Confessor. If that touch of death is not removed from you, it will claim you both and you both will die. But for now, you carry both life and death within you.”

Richard stared at her.

“That is why I say that you are of that place.” Without taking her eyes from him, she flicked a finger toward the opening looking out into the distance. “You are of the third kingdom beyond the north wall.”

“The north wall? Why do you keep calling it that?”

She frowned at him, puzzled by the question. “Because that’s what it’s called.”

“No it’s not,” Richard said.

Her smooth brow creased. “What are you talking about?”

Richard gestured back at the symbols stretching back along the wall. “It’s called the barrier wall. There is no mention of a north wall anywhere in these writings. It only speaks of the barrier wall. So why do your people call it the north wall?”

Samantha’s dark eyes grew large and round. Her face looked pale against the dark frame of her hair.

“Do you mean to say that you can read those strange markings on the walls?”

“Yes.” He pointed to the circle of symbols around the opening. “This one here says ‘the third kingdom.’ It’s naming what it shows: ‘the third kingdom.’ ”

Richard ran the flat of a hand along the wall to the side, where ancient symbols had been carefully cut into the smooth, polished surface. “This here speaks of the barrier wall. See, right here? This symbol combined with this one under it means ‘barrier wall.’ Nowhere does it call it the north wall.”

Samantha followed behind him, ignoring where he pointed,
instead gaping up at him. “You can read these markings? Are you saying that you really know what they all mean? You really understand them? For real?”

He nodded as he swept his hand past another grouping of symbols. “These markings, here, all deal with the barrier. There’s a tremendous amount of information written here. I’d have to study it awhile to be able to translate it all, but I understand enough of what I see to know that it all pertains to the barrier and the third kingdom that lies beyond.” He glanced back over his shoulder. “So why do you call it the north wall?”

She looked at a loss. “I don’t know. It has always been called the north wall. We’ve never had any reason to think it might be called something different.”

It was Richard’s turn to be taken aback. He stopped and stared at her.

“Do you mean to say that it has been the duty of the gifted people here in Stroyza to watch the barrier so they could warn others if the gates ever opened, and none of you could read the information about it all, the instructions and warnings that have been left right here on the walls?”

She looked bewildered, confused, and somewhat embarrassed. “I’m sorry, Lord Rahl, but from what I’ve been taught, the markings are an ancient, dead language. I never heard my mother, aunts, or uncles say that the things on the walls here were important. Aunt Martha always smiled when she saw them and called them the pretty decorations our ancestors left for us.

“My mother mentioned that others used to think it might be some kind of message, but I was always told that if it was, their ancient meaning had long ago been lost.”

“But your people have been here all this time, apparently since the time that this was all built and this information was placed here. How could you not know what it says? Why
wasn’t the understanding of these writings passed down? Why weren’t young people taught how to read this?”

She gazed at the wall a moment before looking back at him. “I’m sorry, Lord Rahl, but I don’t have an answer.”

“It doesn’t make any sense.” Richard lifted a hand and then let it drop. “Why wouldn’t the gifted here teach their descendants, teach their children, to read this? After all, this was apparently their purpose, their duty—to be sentinels. This wall tells them about their purpose.”

Samantha scratched her brow as she considered the problem. “Well, sometimes a skip is born—you know, a person who doesn’t inherit the gift.”

Richard nodded as he rested the palm of his left hand on the hilt of his sword. “The gift skipped my mother.”