The Third Kingdom (31 page)

When the world finally went silent, Richard still didn’t move. He wasn’t sure he should, wasn’t sure it was really over. Samantha still had her hand protectively over his head, holding it down.

Samantha slowly withdrew her hand. “Lord Rahl?” she asked in a soft voice choked with tears. “Are you still alive? Are you all right? Dear spirits, please be alive.”

Richard blinked as he brought his head up. He had to push piles of bloody splintered wood off himself. There was so much debris piled into the narrow opening in the rock where he and Samantha hid that they were nearly buried.

“I’m alive.” He rotated and bent his arms. “I think I’m all right. Are you?”

He rocked his shoulders back and forth in order to squeeze himself out of the opening enough to turn and look back. Tears streamed down Samantha’s face. She looked more than miserable, more than merely exhausted.

She managed a nod. “I think so.”

Richard flicked his sword, shedding all the debris covering it, and then uncurled himself enough to stand up and take a quick look around to check for any threat from the half people, even though he truly didn’t expect to see anyone standing. He didn’t.

It looked like the world of life had been blasted out of existence.

The dense forest that had closed them in from overhead with a thick canopy that shut out the sky and daylight had been completely ripped open. Overhead, there was a large, open patch of sky, thickly overcast with leaden clouds. He could smell fresh, wet wood, as if from sawing logs. The scent of fresh wood was mixed with the gagging stench of blood.

Off in every direction around them, not a single tree still stood. All around them the trees lay felled.

Here and there a few grotesquely splintered trunks jutted
from stumps. In other places toppled trees had pulled up mats of forest floor along with their broken roots.

It was a scene of such mass destruction that it was hard for Richard to believe what he was seeing. Timber lay everywhere like hundreds of broken sticks cast to the ground by a giant. The patches of forest floor he could see between downed trees were covered with a deep layer of shattered, splintered wood, sticking up every which way in fragmented, spiked debris.

Everywhere under tree trunks, enormous limbs, branches, and man-sized splinters, lay a carpet of bloody, shredded bodies. No one could have lived through such a fierce storm of fragmented splinters driven by so many violent explosions.

Gazing out over the expanse of that destruction, Richard didn’t see a single movement.

The half people caught in that violent rage of explosions had been torn to pieces. The pieces of bloody flesh he could see were unrecognizable. Most of what he saw looked like ground meat.

Richard turned back to Samantha. She watched him from the darkness of that split in the rock, as if not sure whether she wanted to come out or not.

Richard held his arms out to her in invitation. When he did, she sprang out of the narrow cleft in the rock and raced into his arms, finally giving in to sobs.

“It’s all right, Samantha,” he said softly as he smoothed her wild tangle of black hair, gently holding her head to his chest. “It’s all right. We’re safe.”

She cried in racking sobs.

He gently shushed her, letting her know that it was all right, that it was over, that she was safe, now.

“I’m so sorry,” she sobbed.

Richard frowned. “Sorry? Why would you be sorry?”

“Because I almost got us killed.”

“What are you talking about?”

She looked up at him, her big dark eyes brimming with tears. “You brought me along because I said I could help you. I convinced you that you needed me, that it was important to take me because I’m gifted.

“Then, when you needed me most, when everything was at risk, you told me what I needed to do. You even explained how to make the trees explode. You brought me along to help you, and when you told me what I needed to do and how to do it, I failed you.

“You could have easily been killed any one of a hundred times fighting off those monsters while we tried to get away. I didn’t do anything to help you.

“You are the one. I recognized that from the beginning, and I failed to do as I promised and as you asked of me. You were nearly killed. You are the one to save us all. It would have been my fault that the world of life ended. All because you told me what to do, and how to do it, and I didn’t do it.”

Richard shook his head reassuringly. “Samantha, that’s not true. You were doing your best.”

“No I wasn’t.”

“What do you mean?”

She hesitated, looking for the words. “I was afraid. I was afraid to do what you said. I was afraid that I’d mess it up, that I’d do it wrong, that I wouldn’t be able to do it good enough, and that I’d fail you, fail everyone. So I couldn’t do it. I tried, but I was afraid that I’d fail.”

Richard smiled as he looked down at her, smoothing her hair. “You didn’t fail, Samantha.” He swept an arm out, gesturing around them. “You stopped the threat.”

She wiped at her eyes and finally looked around, really looked around. She blinked, seeing the totality of it for the first time.

“I did this?”

“It wasn’t me,” Richard said.

“It’s just as you said,” she whispered, mostly to herself. “It would save us if I did what you told me.”

“But you said you tried and couldn’t.” Richard was puzzled. She had tried—he’d seen her try—but she hadn’t been able to do it. “So why did it finally work?”

Samantha stared off for a time, perhaps looking into her own visions as she seemed to search for the words to explain it.

“When I was back in that hole,” she finally said, “shaking and terrified that I was going to die, that those unholy half people were going to drag me out of there, rip me apart with their teeth, and eat me alive, I suddenly thought of my mother.”

“Your mother? What do you mean?”

“She saw that happen to my father. That’s what they did to him. She saw those monsters, like a pack of wild animals, using their teeth to rip into the man she loved, the man I loved, and devour his flesh and blood. I could finally, truly, understand how horrified and afraid she must have been.

“Then they took her. After murdering the man she loved, they took her. Can you imagine what she must have been thinking? How horrified, despairing, and afraid she must have been?

“If she really is still alive, then you are her only hope of rescue. I’m her daughter, the one who loves her more than anything, who insisted on coming along because I’m supposed to be helping you so that you can get her away from these savages. You’re my mother’s only hope, her last hope, and there I was cowering in a hole, shaking from head to foot.”

“You shouldn’t be ashamed of being afraid,” Richard offered in solace. “I was afraid, too.”

She looked up. “You were?”

“Of course. I can’t imagine not being afraid in such a situation. It’s a normal reaction of anyone with a soul. But I was also afraid because I was thinking that it was me who failed us, failed everyone depending on me.”

She laid a hand, her tiny fingers, against his chest.

“But you brought me to help you. You gave me the chance. Then, when we were attacked, you had the idea of how to get us out of such a tough spot and you told me what to do. You knew what was needed because you are the one. You even explained how it worked. I’m the one who failed.”

Richard looked around at the scene of destruction. “I don’t think you failed at all, Samantha. In the end you didn’t give up. You redoubled your effort and then you did it. You protected me. You stopped the threat. That’s what matters.”

She smiled with a bit of relief, if not pride, as she looked around with him. “When you told me about doing this, I
didn’t know that it would do this much damage. I never imagined.”

Richard turned more serious as he glanced across the expanse of destruction. “Well, I have to tell you, I never saw a sorceress create quite so much havoc. But you did what was needed. Anything less, I think, would have not been enough to save us.”

She looked out where his gaze went across the leveled forest. “I never imagined I could do such a thing. I didn’t know the gift could be so destructive.”

“Destruction in the cause of good is a glorious thing.”

She smiled at such an odd sounding concept.

“So,” he finally asked, “if you tried and couldn’t do it, then what happened? How were you suddenly able to do it?”

“I got angry,” she said rather quietly, almost as if she were ashamed of it.

“Angry?”

She nodded. “I was back in the hole, thinking about how I was about to die, and then I thought of my mother, like I told you, about what had happened to her. That made me angry, angry at myself for failing myself, for failing her, for failing you, for failing everyone. I was so angry.

“But mostly, more than being furious with myself, I was enraged at these half people, enraged that they would harm so good a man as my father, as so many others, as you. I was enraged at what they were doing, at what they want to do to everyone. Our souls are ours. What gives them the right to our souls?”

“I don’t think they can really steal our souls, Samantha. Naja said as much.”

“Yes but they want to. They intend to. They try to. That they can’t doesn’t really mean much if we’re dead. They murder innocent people to try to get their souls, and that’s what matters.

“What makes them think they have the right to someone else’s soul, someone else’s life?”

Richard could only shake his head.

“I was so angry,” she said, “that it just sort of boiled over. I wanted more than anything to wipe them all out of the world of life. So, when I got that angry, trying to think of how to strike back at them for what they were doing, I latched on to what you told me to do with the trees.

“I let that anger build toward the ones who were causing so much suffering and death. When I did that, I realized that I was beginning to feel the trees all around us.”

“Feeling the trees?” Richard asked.

“That’s right. I reached out to them with my mind, feeling where they all were, and I focused all that anger boiling over inside me into putting intense heat in a spot inside the trunks of those trees I could feel, just like you told me to do. I guess I couldn’t do it at first because I was only scared. I couldn’t really do it until I was angry.”

Richard studied her big eyes a moment.

“That’s how my gift works—through anger.”

“Really?”

He nodded. “I sometimes wish I was able to control my gift more so I could direct it to the tasks at hand, control it intentionally, but I’m afraid that as a war wizard my gift works differently than in others. It’s anger or intense need that summons my gift, gives it its power. Yours seems to work both ways—by intent and then also through anger.”

She looked around again. “But even so, I never could have imagined that I would be able to do this. I never imagined that I could muster this much force, create this much destruction. It’s kind of, I don’t know … frightening.”

“I guess that you put the force into it that the task required, and the task was just. If you want to lift something light, it’s easy. Lifting something heavier takes more muscle.

“I guess that in this case, anything less would have failed to do the job and evil would have won out. Your mind directed your gift to do what was needed, the same way you would use more muscle to lift something heavy. You don’t have to think about it, your mind and body simply adjust to the weight of the task.

“I would guess that in this case, that’s what happened when you used your gift.” Richard gazed out across the open area. “And this is what was needed.”

Still, the level of destruction was astounding and he could understand her apprehension at seeing what she had done. He had seen a number of things done by gifted people, but he didn’t think he had ever seen anything quite like this.

He remembered the way Ester seemed to have a shadow of fear for Samantha. Samantha had even mentioned how people feared her and her relatives because they were gifted. That was certainly true enough with the gifted anywhere. Most people who couldn’t wield magic feared those who could. They feared the unknown, feared what the gifted might be able to do.

Richard remembered when he first met Kahlan, how surprised he was when he learned how much people feared her. He had seen people, even queens, quake in her presence. A Confessor was in many ways much more frightening to people than an ordinary gifted person.

A gifted person could take your life. A Confessor could take your mind.

He guessed that, in essence, a Confessor could take your soul.

In much the same way, ordinary people feared prophets. They feared what a prophet might see of their future. They feared what secret knowledge they might have of coming events. Because of that, while they feared prophets, they also wanted to know what prophecy foretold about coming events for them.

Right before he had come to the Dark Lands to get Kahlan out of Jit’s clutches, Richard had a great deal of trouble back at the palace because visiting rulers, there for Cara’s wedding to Benjamin, wanted to know about prophecy. They thought Richard was hiding prophecy from them, that he didn’t trust them to hear it. For that reason, some of those leaders had abandoned him and the unity of the D’Haran Empire to throw the lot of their lands and people in with Hannis Arc, the head of Fajin Province, all for the promise of leadership guided by prophecy.

While Hannis Arc was the ruler of the Dark Lands as part of Fajin Province, Richard ruled the D’Haran Empire, and the D’Haran Empire ruled Fajin Province. Hannis Arc and his followers appeared to want to break away from that alliance to instead follow prophecy.

He glanced over at Samantha, lit by the heavy overcast of the now open sky. He was beginning to see her in a new light.

He had thought she was an inexperienced sorceress who was only now beginning to come into her own. As he looked around at the destruction, he wondered if she was something more.

He wondered about the role of Stroyza and the gifted living there. He wondered if Naja Moon’s people back in ancient times had left gifted in Stroyza to be more than mere sentinels meant to watch for the barrier failing. He wondered if they had a larger purpose than to warn others, as he had thought at first.