Page 48 of The Third Kingdom (Sword of Truth 13)

“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.

As he scanned the massive destruction wrought by this small, frail-looking young woman, he began to wonder if those people in ancient times with such mysterious abilities had perhaps given the gifted here at Stroyza more than an explanation written in the language of Creation on their walls.

He wondered if they had given them some ability to fight. Naja said that they didn’t have a way to end the threat, so they wouldn’t have been able to give such an ability to any of the gifted of Stroyza, but they might have at least been able to give them the ability to fight.

Samantha had certainly demonstrated more resolve and strength than he would have expected.

He wondered if she was perhaps intended to be more than a mere sentinel.

He wondered if she was in fact a weapon left by the ancients.

This day she had certainly proven herself to be so.

CHAPTER

44

After retrieving his bow from the split in the rock that had protected them and hooking it back over his shoulder, Richard stepped to the edge of the rock outcropping where he and Samantha had been protected from the lethal storm of splintered trees. He used his foot to clear the thick covering of sharp, bloody fragments off the top part of a torso. There wasn’t a lot of it left, but there was enough to see that, like the others, it was clothed in little more than filthy rags.

“These half people are different,” he said to himself.

Samantha regarded the remains with revulsion. “Different? What are you talking about? What do you mean they’re different?”

Having been deep in thought, Richard hadn’t realized that he’d said it out loud. He gestured out across the shattered landscape as he started out.

“Well, look at them all,” he said, pointing here and there along the way toward the undamaged forest some distance off.

Samantha hurried to stay close as she followed behind, glancing at each place he pointed. Along the way, as he walked through the ruin, he paused to point out a headless corpse.

“See? They’re all dressed basically the same, like that one, there. They’re wearing little more than rags. It almost looks like they dug up corpses and stole their clothes.”

“Disgusting,” she muttered.

“The men who attacked me and Kahlan in the wagon were bigger than most of these people here.”

“You mean those men who gave you those terrible bite wounds?”

“That’s right. Those men were strong, well fed, and dressed in simple clothes that you and I would think of as normal. They were half people, intent on eating me to try to get my soul, but they didn’t dress much differently than the men in your village.

“These people here are smaller, thinner, and a lot of them look sickly.” He gestured to a disembodied arm sticking up out of the rubble. It was covered with open sores and scabs. “Most of them look to be diseased, like that. They all appear ill fed. They look like they live like animals.

“Besides the difference in size and apparent health, the men who attacked me talked. They sounded relatively intelligent. They thought through what had likely happened before they came across us and made plans for what they wanted to do.”

“Plans? What do you mean? What kind of plans?”

“They wanted to eat me on the spot to try to get my soul, but they were going to take Kahlan for later, possibly for her trade value.” He flicked a hand around, pointing out a head, a shoulder with an arm still attached, a few headless torsos, all of the torn remains peppered with everything from splinter-sized fragments to long, sharp spears of wood. “Did you ever hear any of these half people speak? Tell us to stop, anything like that?”

“I only heard them growling and howling,” she said as she hugged her arms to herself.

Richard nodded. “So, even though the men who attacked me at the wagon and these here are both half people who want to steal our souls, they’re considerably different.”

Samantha pushed her tangle of black hair back out of her way as she looked around, stepping carefully among all the debris as she followed him.

She frowned as she thought it over. “It seems odd that these half people would be so different.”

“And then there were the bodies I saw,” Richard said as he sat sidesaddle on a fat, splintered fallen tree trunk and then swung his legs over.

It was too big for Samantha, so she went around. “What bodies?” she asked.

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