Stone of Tears (19 page)

Richard glared at her. “You have violated my privacy, spied on me. And as for the third of your three things, I didn’t exactly kill Darken Rahl. Not technically.”

“I can understand how you feel,” Sister Grace said quietly. “But it is only done to help you. If you wish to stand here and argue with us about whether or not these things qualify as the three triggers, I will put your doubts at ease. Once they are done, you begin the process of becoming a wizard. You may not believe it, or choose to be a wizard, but there is no doubt it has happened. We do not place this burden on you. We are only here to help you deal with it.”

“But …”

“But nothing. When the magic is triggered, at least three changes come about. First, you begin to have fetishes about food. It may be things you crave, or things you have always eaten that you now refuse to eat. We have studied this, and don’t understand its cause, but it has something to do with influences at the time the gift comes to life.

“Second, you begin to sleep, at least some of the time, with your eyes open. All wizards do this, even ones who only have the calling. It has something to do with learning to use the magic. If you have the gift, that brings it about as you use it to do these three things. If you have only the calling, the teaching brings it on.

“Third, the headaches come. The headaches are lethal. There is no cure for them other than learning to control the magic. If you don’t, sooner or later, they will kill you.”

“How soon? How much time do I have if I refuse your help?”

Kahlan put a hand on his arm. “Richard …”

“How much time!”

Sister Elizabeth spoke. “It is said that one lived with the headaches for a few years before he died. It is also said that another was dead within several months. We believe the time you have depends upon how strong your power is; the stronger the power, the stronger the headaches, and the shorter the time. But possibly within as little as a month they will begin to be strong enough to render you unconscious at times.”

Richard gave her an even look. “They already have been that strong.”

The three Sisters’ eyes widened, and they exchanged the look again.

“We began looking for you before you did these three things. Since we left the Palace, you have done all three,” Sister Verna said. “This book is magic. When messages are written in its twin back at the Palace, they appear to us here. That is how we know you have done them. How long since you have done the third—since you have killed this Darken Rahl?”

“Three days. But I was unconscious on the second night after I Killed him.”

“The second … !” Again they gave each other the look.

His irritation was back. “Why do you keep looking at each other like that?”

Sister Verna’s voice came in a soft tone. “Because you are a very rare person, Richard. In many ways. We have never encountered so many unexpected things wrapped up in one person.”

Kahlan slipped an arm around his waist. “You are right; he is a rare person. A person I love. What can you do to help him?” She was worried that he was frightening them and they wouldn’t want to help.

“There are specific rules he must follow. We all must; they are inviolate. There is no room for negotiation. He must put himself in our hands and must come with us to the Palace of the Prophets.” Sister Grace’s eyes were sad as she said, “Alone.”

“For how long?” Richard demanded. “How long does it take?”

Sister Grace’s black hair shone in the torchlight as she turned her head to him. “It depends on how quickly you learn. It takes as long as it takes. You have to stay until it is finished.”

Kahlan felt a tightness in her chest as Richard slipped his arm around her waist. “Can I visit him?”

Sister Grace shook her head slowly. “No. And there is more.” Her eyes flicked to the Agiel for an instant. She reached into her cloak and pulled something out. It was a ring of metal, hardly more than a hand across. Even though it seemed unbroken, Sister Grace did something and it unlatched, opening into hinged half circles. Its dull silver color reflected the firelight. She held it up in front of Richard. “This is called the Rada’Han. It is a collar. You must wear it.”

Richard took a step back, his hand coming away from Kahlan’s waist and going to his throat. His face paled and his eyes widened. “Why?” he asked in a whisper.

“The rules begin. Discussion is over.” Sister Verna and Sister Elizabeth moved behind Sister Grace as she spoke, standing with their hands at their sides as the black haired woman held the collar out in her hands. “This is no game. From now on, it can go only by the rules. Listen carefully, Richard.

“You will be offered three chances to take the Rada’Han; three chances to take our help, a Sister for each chance. There are three reasons for the Rada’Han, a Sister to reveal each. Before each offer, and chance to refuse, a different Sister will give you one of the reasons. After each reason, you will be offered the chance to accept or refuse.

“After the third refusal, as I hope you never learn, there are no more chances. You will receive no further help from the Sisters of the Light. You will die from the power of the gift.”

Richard’s hand still clutched at his throat. His voice was still hardly more than a whisper. “Why do I have to wear a collar?”

Sister Grace stiffened with authority. “No discussion. You will listen. You must put the Rada’Han around your neck yourself, of your own free will. Once on, you will not be able to remove it. It can only be removed by a Sister of the Light. It will stay on until we say it comes off. We will only say that when you are trained. Not before.”

Richard’s chest heaved with each labored breath. His stare was fixed on the collar. His eyes had a strange, wild, haunted look she had never seen before. Kahlan was frozen at seeing his terror, at her own terror.

Sister Grace held his eyes with a vengeance when he looked up at her. “Your first offer is at hand. Each offer comes from a different sister. The first offer comes from me.

“I, Sister of the Light, Grace Rendall, give the first reason for the Rada’Han, give the first chance to be helped. The first reason for the Rada’Han is to control the headaches and open your mind so you may be taught to use the gift.

“You now have the chance to accept or to refuse. I strongly advise you to accept the first offer of our help. Please believe me, it will only be much more difficult for you to accept the second time, and worse yet the third time.

“Please, Richard, accept the offer now, on the first of the three reasons and offers. Your life depends on this.”

She stood still, waiting. His gaze went back to the dull silver collar. He looked on the verge of panic. The room was dead quiet except for the slow crackle of the fire and the soft hiss of the torches.

He looked up, and his mouth opened, but no words came as he stared unblinking at her intense gaze.

At last he blinked and spoke in a hoarse whisper. “I will not wear a collar. I will never again wear a collar. For anyone. For any reason. Never.”

She straightened a little, lowering the collar, looking genuinely surprised. “You refuse the offer and the Rada’Han?”

“I refuse.”

Sister Grace stood a while, staring with what seemed to be a mix of sadness and worry. Pale, she turned to the two Sisters behind her. “Forgive me Sisters, I have failed.” She handed the Rada’Han to Sister Elizabeth. “It is upon you now.”

“The Light forgives you,” Sister Elizabeth whispered as she kissed Sister Grace on each white cheek.

“The light forgives you,” Sister Verna whispered, giving the same kisses.

Sister Grace turned back to Richard, her voice less steady. “May the Light cradle you always with gentle hands. May you someday find the way.”

Holding Richard’s gaze, she brought her hand up, giving it a flick. A knife appeared from her sleeve. But rather than a blade, it had what seemed to be a pointed, round rod coming from the silver handle.

Richard leapt back, drawing the sword in one swift, smooth motion. Its distinctive ring sounded in the air.

Deftly, Sister Grace flipped the knife in her hand so it stopped with the blade pointing not toward Richard, but toward herself. She held it with practiced grace, without taking her eyes from Richard.

And then she plunged the knife between her breasts.

There was a flash of light that seemed to come from within her eyes, and she collapsed to the ground, dead.

Richard and Kahlan both took a step back in wide-eyed shock and horror. Sister Verna bent and pulled the knife from the dead woman. She stood and looked at Richard.

“As we told you: this is no game.” She slipped the silver knife into her cloak. “You must bury her body yourself. If you let another do it for you, you will have nightmares for the rest of your life; nightmares caused by magic. There is no cure for them. Don’t forget, you must bury her yourself.” Both Sisters pulled their hoods up. “You have been offered the first of three chances, and refused. We will return.”

The two Sisters glided to the door and were gone.

The sword’s point slowly settled to the ground. Richard stared at the dead woman, tears running down his face.

“I won’t wear a collar again,” he whispered to no one but himself. “Not for anyone.”

With labored movements, he retrieved a small shovel and a handle from his pack, and hooked them onto his belt. He then rolled Sister Grace onto her back, folded her hands across her, and lifted her lifeless form in his arms. One arm slipped from its place, loose, swinging. Her head hung down, limp. Her dead eyes stared. Black hair dangled. There was a small blossom of blood on the front of her white blouse.

Richard’s pained eyes sought Kahlan. “I’m going to bury her. I would like to go alone.”

Kahlan nodded and watched him shoulder the door open. After it had been pushed shut, she sank to the ground and started crying.

She was sitting, staring into the fire when Richard came back. He had been gone a long time. After Kahlan had stopped crying, she had gone to tell Savidlin and Weselan what had happened, and then came back to the spirit house to wait for Richard. They had told her to come get them if she needed anything.

Richard sat down next to her and put his arms around her, his head on her shoulder. She ran her fingers through the back of his hair and held him close. She wanted to say something, but was afraid to say anything, so she just held him.

“I hate magic,” he whispered at last. “It’s going to come between us again.”

“We won’t let it. We just won’t. We will think of something.”

“Why did she have to kill herself?”

“I don’t know,” Kahlan whispered.

Richard took his arms away and fingered some of Nissel’s leaves out of his shirt pocket. He sat chewing them as he gazed into the fire, a slight frown of pain on his face.

“I feel like running away, but I don’t know where to go. How do you run away from something inside you?”

Kahlan rubbed her fingers back and forth on his leg. “Richard, I know this is hard for you to hear, but please listen. Magic isn’t bad.” He didn’t object, so she went on. “How people use it is sometimes bad. Like the way Darken Rahl used it. I have had magic all my life. I’ve had to learn to live with who I am. Do you hate me because I have magic?”

“Of course not.”

“Do you love me despite my magic?”

He thought a minute. “No. I love everything about you, and your magic is part of you. That was how I got past the Confessor’s magic. If I would have loved you despite your power, I wouldn’t have been accepting you for who you are. Your magic would have destroyed me.”

“So you see? Magic isn’t all bad. The two people you love most in the world have magic. Zedd and me. Please listen. You have the gift. It is called a gift, not a curse. It is a wonderful, rare thing. It could be something used to help others. You have already used it to help others. Maybe you should try to think of it in this way, instead of trying to fight something that can’t be fought.”

He stared into the fire a long time as she smoothed his pant leg. She could hardly hear him when at last he spoke.

“I won’t wear a collar again.”

Kahlan’s gaze went to the Agiel. The red leather rod hung from a fine gold chain at his neck, swinging slightly with his breathing. She knew the Agiel was used to torture people, but she didn’t know how. She only knew she didn’t like him wearing it.

Kahlan swallowed. “Did the Mord-Sith make you wear a collar?”

He stared unblinking at the fire. “Her name was Denna.”

She turned to him, but he didn’t respond. “Did she … . Did Denna make you wear a collar?”

“Yes.” A tear ran down his cheek. “She used it to hurt me. It had a chain on it. She hooked the chain to her belt and led me around by that collar like an animal. When she would attach the chain to some resting place, I couldn’t move it. She controlled the magic that gives me pain when I use the sword to kill. She could amplify the magic, the pain. It prevented me from so much as putting tension on the chain. I tried. I tried hard. You can’t imagine how much it hurt. Denna made me put the collar around my own neck. She made me do a lot of things.”

“But the headaches will kill you. The Sisters said the collar will stop the headaches and help you learn to control the gift.”

“They said that was one of the reasons. They also said there are two more reasons for the collar. I don’t know what those other two reasons are. Kahlan, I know you think I’m being foolish. I think I’m being foolish, too. My head tells me the same things you are saying. But my insides tell me something altogether different.”

Kahlan reached out and took the Agiel in her fingers, rolling it back and forth. “Because of this? Because of what Denna did?” He nodded, still staring at the fire. “Richard, what does this do?”

Richard looked to her at last. He gripped the Agiel in his fist. “Touch my hand. Don’t touch the Agiel, just my hand.”

Kahlan reached out and put her fingers against his fist.

She jerked back with a yelp of pain. She shook her wrist, trying to ease the sting. “Why didn’t it hurt before when I touched it?”

“Because it was never used to train you.”

“Then why isn’t it hurting you to hold it?”

Richard still had his fist around the middle of the red leather rod. “It is. It hurts whenever I hold it.”

Kahlan’s eyes widened. “You mean it’s hurting you right now, like when I touched your hand?”

The pain of the headache was in his eyes. “No. My hand was shielding you from what it really feels like.”

She reached out again. “I want to know.”

He dropped the Agiel. “No. I don’t want it to hurt you like that. I don’t want anything to ever hurt you like that.”

“Richard, please? I want to know. I want to understand.”

Richard stared into her eyes, and then let out a breath. “Is there anything you ask I wouldn’t do?” He took the Agiel in his fist again. “Don’t grip it; you may not be able to let go quick enough. Just touch it. Hold your breath and keep your teeth together so you don’t bite your tongue. Tense your stomach muscles.”

Kahlan’s heart was pounding as her hand went toward the Agiel. She didn’t want to feel the pain. It had hurt enough just to touch his hand, but she wanted to know because it was part of who he was now. She wanted to know everything about him. Even the things that hurt.

It felt like touching a bolt of lightning.

The pain shot up her arm, exploding in her shoulder. She screamed as the shock threw her on her back. She rolled over on her face, gripping her shoulder with her other hand. She couldn’t move her arm. Her hand tingled and shook. She was shocked and frightened by the sheer power of the pain. She cried into the dirt as Richard’s hand touched her back in sympathy. She cried, too, because now she understood, just a little, what had been done to him.

When at last she was able to sit up, he was still watching her, still holding the Agiel in his fist. “It hurts like that for you to hold it?”

“Yes.”

She hit him on the shoulder with her fist. “Let go of it!” she cried. “Stop it!”

He released the Agiel, letting it hang again. “It helps distract me from the headaches, sometimes, to touch it. Believe it or not, it helps.”

“You mean the headache hurts more that that?”

He nodded. “If it wasn’t for what Denna taught me about pain, I would be unconscious right now. Denna taught me how to control pain, how to tolerate it, so she could give me more.”

She tried to hold back the tears. “Richard, I …”

“What you felt was the least of what the Agiel can do.” He picked it up again and touched the tip to the inside of his other forearm. Blood gushed from under the Agiel. He took it away. “It can strip the flesh right off you. It can break your bones. Denna liked to use it to crack my ribs. She would press it against me and I could hear the bone crack. They still aren’t healed; it still hurts to lie down, or when you hug me tight enough. It can do a lot of other things too. It can even kill with a touch.”

He stared at the fire. “Denna shackled my wrists, and later locked my arms behind me, and held me up with a rope from the ceiling. She used the Agiel on me for hours at a time. I would beg until I was hoarse, for her to stop. She never did. Not once.

“There was no way for me to fight back, nothing I could do to stop her. She trained me, she taught me, until I sometimes thought I had no blood or breath left. I begged her to kill me, to end the pain. I would have done it myself, but she used magic to prevent it. She had me kneel in front of her and beg her to use the Agiel. I would have done anything she said. She had a friend who came along sometimes, so they could share the … fun.”

Kahlan sat frozen, hardly able to breathe. “Richard I …”

“Every day, she led me by the collar to a place where she could hang me up by a rope, a room where she could use the Agiel on me without distraction, where it didn’t matter so much if my blood got everywhere. Sometimes she did it from the first thing in the morning until night. And then at night …

“That is what wearing a collar means to me. You can tell me about how much sense it makes, about how it will help me, and about how I have no choice, but that is what wearing a collar means to me.

“I know exactly what your shoulder feels like right now. It feels like the skin has been burned, and the muscle has been torn, and bone is splintered. That is what it feels like to wear a Mord-Sith’s collar. Only everywhere on your body all at once, and all day long. Add to that the thought that you are helpless to stop it, that you can never escape, that you’ll never again see the only person you will ever love.

“I would rather die than put a collar around my neck again.”

Kahlan rubbed her shoulder. It felt just as he had described it. She couldn’t think of anything to say. She hurt too much, inside, to say anything. So she sat and watched him look at the fire as tears ran down her face. She ached for him.

And then she heard herself ask something she had promised herself she wasn’t ever going to ask. “Denna took you for her mate, didn’t she.” She wished she could call the words back, and at the same time, she didn’t.

Richard didn’t flinch. “Yes,” he whispered as he stared at the fire. Another tear ran down his cheek. “How did you know?”

“Demmin Nass brought two quads to take me. He had a spell-web from Darken Rahl to protect him from Zedd’s magic. From mine too. Zedd couldn’t do anything; he was frozen by a web. Demmin Nass told me what had happened to you. He said you were dead. That was when I called forth the Con Dar and killed him.”

Richard’s eyes closed as another tear ran down. “There was no way for me to stop her. I swear, Kahlan … I tried. You can’t imagine what Denna did to me for trying to stop her. There was no way for me to fight back. She could do anything she wanted. It wasn’t enough for her to hurt me just in the day. She wanted to hurt me at night, too.”

“How can anyone be that evil?”

Richard stared at the Agiel as he slowly grasped it in his fist again. “She was captured when she was twelve. They trained her with this Agiel. This very one. Everything she did to me, they had done to her. Over and over. For years. They tortured her parents to death in front of her. There was no one to help her.

“She grew into a woman at the end of this Agiel, surrounded only by people who wanted her to hurt. There was no one to give her even a single word of hope, of comfort, of love.

“Can you imagine her terror? They gave her a life of endless pain. They raped her body and her spirit. They broke her. They made her one of them. Darken Rahl, personally, made her one of them.

“The whole time she used this Agiel on me, it hurt her. The same as it hurts me to hold it now. There’s some magic for you.

“One day, Darken Rahl beat her, for hours, because he thought she wasn’t hurting me enough. He flailed the skin right off her back.”

Richard’s head hung as he cried. “And then at the end of all that, at the end of a life of pain and madness, I come along, turn the Sword of Truth white, and run it through her. The only thing she asked before I killed her was for me to wear her Agiel and remember her. I was the only one who understood her pain. It was the only thing she wanted: for someone who understood to remember her.

“I promised, and she hung it around my neck. And then she just sat there as I pushed my sword through her heart. She had been hoping I would be the one with the power to kill her.

“That is how someone can be that evil. If I had the power, I would bring Darken Rahl back to life so I could kill him again.”

Kahlan sat stunned, motionless, caught in a vortex of conflicting emotions. She hated this Denna for hurting Richard, she was unaccountably jealous of her, and at the same time, she felt unexpected, wrenching sorrow for her. Finally, she turned away and wiped the tears from her face.

“Richard, why didn’t they win? Why wasn’t Denna able to break you? How did you keep your sanity?”

“Because, as the Sisters said, I partitioned my mind. I don’t know how to explain it. I didn’t even know exactly what it was I was doing, but that’s how I saved myself. I put the core of myself away and sacrificed the rest. I let her do what she would. Darken Rahl said that I have the gift because I did that. That was when I first heard the word—partitioned.”

Richard lay back, resting his arm over his eyes. Kahlan pulled out a blanket and bunched it under his head. “I’m so sorry, Richard,” she whispered.

“It’s over. That is what matters.” He took his arm from his eyes and at last smiled up at her. “It’s over and we are together. In some ways, it was good. If she wouldn’t have taught me, I wouldn’t be able to deal with this headache. Maybe Denna has helped me. Maybe I can use what I know to get out of this.”

She winced in sympathy. “Is it really bad right now?”

He nodded a little. “But I’ll die before I ever put a collar around my neck again.”

She understood now, though she wished she didn’t. She lay down snug against him. The fire was a watery blur.