Blood of the Fold (81 page)

Ulic scratched his head. Egan stared at the floor while he sucked the tip of a finger in concentration. Raina looked to the others, hoping they would have an answer. Cara’s face finally brightened.

“
I think I remember, Lord Rahl,” she said. “But I think you were speaking of past Mother Confessors in general, not your bride-to-be.”

Richard looked from one face to another as each nodded. Something was wrong.

“
Look, I know you don’t understand, but this involves magic.”

“
You’re right, then, Lord Rahl,” Raina said, turning more serious. “If there’s a magic spell involved, then the spell would deceive us. You have magic, so you would be able to discern the difficulty. We must trust in what you tell us about magic.”

Richard rubbed his hands together as he looked off, his eyes unable to find a place to settle. Something was wrong. Something was terribly wrong. But what? Maybe Zedd lifted the spell. Maybe he had a reason. It could be that there was nothing wrong. Zedd was with her. Zedd would protect her. Richard spun around.

“
The letter. I sent them a letter. Maybe Zedd removed the spell because he knows that I’ve taken Aydindril from the Imperial Order, so he didn’t think there was any need to keep her spelled.”

“
That sounds reasonable,” Cara offered.

Richard felt a wave of worry rise into his throat. What if Kahlan was furious that he had ended the alliance of the Midlands and had demanded the surrender of the lands to D’Hara, and so she had insisted that Zedd take off the spell to let people know the Midlands still had a Mother Confessor? If so, that would mean she wasn’t in trouble, but that she was angry with him. Anger he could accept. Trouble, he could not. If she was in trouble, he had to help her.

“
Ulic, please go find General Reibisch and bring him to me at once.” Ulic tapped a fist to his chest and rushed from the room. “Egan, you go visit some of the officers and men. Don’t act as if it’s anything out of the ordinary. Just engage them in conversation about me, maybe my marriage or something like that. See if others also know that Kahlan is the Mother Confessor.”

Richard paced and thought as he waited for General Reibisch to arrive. What should he do? Kahlan and Zedd should be here at any time, but what if something was wrong? Even if Kahlan was angry about what he had done, that wouldn’t stop her from coming to Aydindril, it would only make her want to talk him out of it, or lecture him on the history of the Midlands and what he was destroying.

Maybe she would want to tell him that their marriage was off, and she never wanted see him again. No. He could not believe that. Kahlan loved him, and even if she was angry, he refused to believe that she would willingly put anything before her love for him. He had to believe in her love, just as she had to believe in his.

The door opened and Berdine struggled into the room with her arms full of books and papers. She had a pen between her teeth. She smiled as best she could with the pen in her mouth, and dumped the things on the table.

“
We need to talk,” she whispered, “if you’re not busy.”

“
Ulic went out to look for General Reibisch. It’s urgent that I talk to him.”

Berdine glanced to Cara, Raina, and the door. “Do you want me to leave, Lord Rahl? Is something wrong?”

Already, Richard had learned enough to know he was right about the journal they had found being important. He could do nothing until Reibisch returned.

“
Who am I to marry?”

Berdine opened a book on the table as she sat in his chair and shuffled through the papers she had brought. “Queen Kahlan Amnell, the Mother Confessor.” She looked up hopefully. “Do you have a bit of time? I could use your help.”

Richard sighed and went around the desk to stand beside her. “Until General Reibisch gets here I’ve got time. What do you need?”

With the back end of her pen, she tapped the open journal. “I’ve almost got this bit here translated, and it seems he was emphatic about it when he wrote it, but I’m missing two words that I think are important.” She pulled the High D’Haran version of
The Adventures of Bonnie Day
around before them. “I’ve found a place with the same two words in this. If you can remember what it says, I’ll have it.”

Richard had read
The Adventures of Bonnie Day
countless times, it was his favorite book, and he thought he could recite it by heart. He had discovered that he could not. He knew the book well, but remembering the exact words proved harder than he had thought it would be. He could remember the story, but not the exact story, word for word. Unless he could tell her the exact words of a sentence, the gist of the story wasn’t often of much help.

He had gone to the Keep several times and searched for a version of the book he could read so they could cross-reference the D’Haran version, but he hadn’t been able to find one. It was frustrating that he couldn’t be of more help.

Berdine pointed to a place in
The Adventures of Bonnie Day
. “I need these two words. Can you tell me what this sentence says?”

Richard’s hopes rose. It was the beginning of a chapter. He had had the most success with the beginnings of chapters because the starting places were memorable.

“
Yes! This is the chapter where they leave. I remember. It starts, ‘For the third time that week, Bonnie violated her father’s rule about not going into the woods alone.’”

Berdine leaned over, looking at the line. “Yes, this is ‘violated,’ I’ve already got that one. This word here is ‘rule,’ and this one ‘third’?”

Richard nodded when she glanced up. Grinning with the thrill of discovery, she dipped her pen in the bottle of ink and started writing on one of the sheets of paper she had brought, filling in a few of the blank places. When she finished, she proudly slid the paper over in front of him.

“
This is what it says in this bit of the journal.”

Richard picked up the paper and held it up in the light coming over his shoulder from the window.

The arguments rage on among us. Wizard’s Third Rule: Passion rules reason. I fear this most insidious of rules may be our ruin. Though we know better, I fear some of us are violating it anyway. Each faction presses that their course of action is reason, but in the desperation, I fear all are passion. Even Alric Rahl sends frantic word of a solution. Meanwhile, the dream walkers scythe through our men. I pray the towers can be completed, or we are all lost. Today I said good-bye to friends leaving for the towers. I wept to know I will never see those good men again in this world. How many will die in the towers for the cause of reason? But alas, I know the worse cost should we violate the Third Rule.

When Richard finished the translation, he turned away, toward the window. He had been in those towers. He knew that wizards had given their life force into them to ignite the tower’s spells, but they had never seemed real people to him before. It was chilling to read the anguish in the words of the man whose bones had lain in that room in the Keep for thousands of years. Through the words in the journal, his bones seemed to be coming to life.

Richard thought about the Third Rule, trying to reason it out for himself. Before, for the first and second, he had had Zedd, and then Nathan to explain it for him, to make him see how the rules worked in life. He would have to work this one out himself.

He recalled going down to the roads leading out of Aydindril, to talk to some of the people fleeing the city. He had wanted to know why they would leave, and had been told by fearful people that they knew the truth: that he was a monster who would slaughter them for his twisted pleasure.

When pressed, they quoted rumor as if it were fact seen with their own eyes, rumor of how the Lord Rahl had children as slaves in the palace, how he took countless young women to his bed, leaving them senseless from the experience to wander the streets naked. They claimed to know young women and girls whom he had gotten pregnant, and furthermore knew people who had actually seen the miscarriages of some of these poor victims of his rape, and they had been hideous, misshapen freaks, the spawn of his evil seed. They spat at him for the crimes he committed against helpless people.

He asked them how they could be so frank with him if he were such a monster. They said that they knew he wouldn’t do them harm in the open, that they had heard how he pretended to be compassionate in public so as to fool people, so they knew he would do nothing to them in front of the crowds, and they would soon have their womenfolk away from his evil clutches.

The more Richard tried to put to rest the baffling beliefs, the more tenaciously the people clung to them. They said they had heard these things from too many others for it to be anything but true. Such common knowledge could not be false, they said, as it would be impossible to fool so many people. They were passionate in their belief and their fear, and would hear no arguments of logic. They simply wanted to be left alone to run to the protection they had heard was offered by the Imperial Order.

Their passion was going to bring them to true ruin. He wondered if this could be how violation of the Third Rule hurt people. He didn’t know if it was a solid enough example. It seemed tangled with the First Rule: People would believe any lie, either because they wanted it to be true, or because they feared it was. It seemed it could be several rules mixed together, violated in tandem, and he couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.

And then Richard recalled the day back home in Westland when Mrs. Rencliff, who could not swim, had wrenched her arms from the men trying to hold her back, refusing to wait for the rowboat, and had leapt into a flood swollen river after her boy who had fallen in. The men rushed up a few minutes later with the rowboat and saved the boy’s life. Chad Rencliff grew up without a mother; they never found her body.

Richard’s skin prickled as if ice had touched it. He understood. Wizard’s Third Rule: Passion rules reason.

It was a distressing hour of detailing the way people’s passion instead of reason brought them to harm, and worse, wondering how magic could add ruin to the equation, as he knew it would, before Ulic finally returned with the general.

General Reibisch clapped a fist to his heart as he entered the room. “Lord Rahl, Ulic said you were in a hurry to see me.”

Richard gripped the bearded man’s dark uniform. “How long will it take you to get men ready to leave on a search?”

“
Lord Rahl, they’re D’Harans. D’Haran soldiers are always ready to leave on a moment’s notice.”

“
Good. You know my bride-to-be, Queen Kahlan Amnell?”

General Reibisch nodded. “Yes. The Mother Confessor.”

Richard winced. “Yes, the Mother Confessor. She’s on her way here from the southwest. She’s past due, and there may be trouble. She had a spell over her to protect her identity as the Mother Confessor, so that her enemies couldn’t hunt her. Somehow, the spell has been removed. It might be nothing, but it could be that it means trouble. For sure, her enemies will now know of her.”

The man scratched his rust-colored beard. His grayish green eyes came up at last. “I see. What would you like me to do?”

“
We have close to two hundred thousand men in Aydindril, with another hundred thousand scattered all around the perimeter of the city. I don’t know exactly where she is, except that she’s supposed to be to the southwest and on her way here. We have to protect her.

“
I want you to get a force together, half the troops in the city, a hundred thousand at least, to go out after her.”

The general stroked his scar as he heaved a sigh. “That’s a lot of men, Lord Rahl. Do you think we need to take that many from the city?”

Richard paced between the desk and the general. “I don’t know exactly where she is. If we take too few we could miss her by fifty miles and wander off without ever making contact. With that many men we can fan out as we go, cast a wide net, covering all the roads and trails so we don’t miss her.”

“
You will be going with us, then?”

Richard desperately wanted to go find Kahlan and Zedd. He glanced to Berdine sitting behind the desk as she worked, and thought about the words of warning from a three-thousand-old wizard. Wizard’s Third Rule: Passion rules reason.

Berdine needed his help to translate the journal. He was already learning important things about the last war, and the towers, and the dream walkers. A dream walker again walked the world.

If he did go, and Kahlan slipped past him where he searched, it might take longer for him to join with her than if he simply waited in Aydindril. And then there was the Keep. Something had happened at the Keep, and it was his duty to guard the magic there.

Richard’s passion told him to go—he desperately wanted to go search for Kahlan—but in his mind’s eye, he saw Mrs. Rencliff diving into the dark, rushing water, refusing to wait for the boat. These men were his boat.

The troops could find Kahlan and protect her. He could do nothing to add to that protection. Reason told him to wait here, as much anxiety as that would cause him. Like it or not, he was a leader now. A leader had to act with reason, or everyone would pay the price of his passion.

“
No, General. I’ll remain in Aydindril. Get the troops together. Take the best trackers.” He looked to the man’s eyes. “I know I don’t have to tell you how important this is to me.”

“
No, Lord Rahl,” the general said in a compassionate tone. “Don’t worry, we’ll find her. I’ll go with the men to make certain that everything is done with the same care as you would do it if you were there.” He put his fist to his heart. “Every one of our lives before harm touches your queen.”