Severed Souls(105)

“Sure. Let’s go over there. We can sit on that low boulder under the ash trees.”

Nicci glanced back at the place Kahlan had pointed to. “That works.”

As it turned out, Kahlan was the one who sat on the rock and covered her yawn with a hand as Nicci paced before her. Kahlan waited, watching Nicci walk back and forth for a while, before she finally decided that the sorceress wasn’t going to talk unless encouraged.

“Nicci, what is it? What’s wrong?”

It occurred to Kahlan that it was a pretty open-ended question. There were whole constellations of things that were wrong.

“I don’t trust Irena.”

That was not one of the stars that had been twinkling for attention among the constellations of problems in Kahlan’s mind. She would have picked something like her and Richard being on death’s doorway.

“All right,” Kahlan said in an even tone.

Nicci stopped pacing and faced her. “Didn’t you hear me? I’m telling you, I don’t trust the woman.”

Kahlan shrugged. “All right. Why not?”

Nicci scowled. “Do I need to have a reason?”

Kahlan thought about it a moment as Nicci stared at her. People usually found such a glare from the bewitching sorceress uncomfortable in the extreme, but Kahlan was not one of those people. She was in no mood for cryptic personal reports in the dead of night. If there was a point, she wanted to hear it.

“Well, if you’re asking me to cross her off the guest list for the next palace ball, I suppose I don’t need to have your reasons. You’ve got it. Consider it done.

“But on the other hand, if you are asking me for permission to kill the woman, then I guess I ought to hear your reasons.”

Nicci folded her arms as she went back to pacing. She huffed a sigh. “Irena said that when the bones washed out of the swamp, she identified them as the remains of her sister.”

“That’s right. She said that she detected the residue of the gift in them and she recognized it as her sister’s gift.”

Nicci came to a halt and leaned toward Kahlan, arms still folded. “Kahlan, I’m pretty experienced—I’ve been a Sister of the Light, a Sister of the Dark, and Death’s Mistress—and I’ve never heard of the gift being detectable in bones.”

That gave Kahlan pause. “You can’t recognize traces of the gift in the bones of a person?”

“No.”

Kahlan was surprised, but she was tired and didn’t feel like working out what seemed like a trivial puzzle.

“Well, just because you never heard of it and you can’t do it, that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.”

“In this case I’m pretty sure it does.” By her tone of voice, Nicci was in no mood for games, either. She expected her word in this to be taken seriously. “I know a lot about the gift. I used to teach its use. I’ve worked and studied at the Palace of the Prophets for more than four of your lifetimes, plus the lifetimes of Irena and her daughter added in.

“I’m telling you, I know about these things and you can’t detect the gift in human remains, much less identify the person they came from. Maybe occult conjuring can do such things, but the gift cannot. She also said that she knew the captive had occult powers. Zedd and I couldn’t detect anything.”

“Well, I admit that is kind of odd, but maybe, as she explained, living this close to the barrier some people may have begun to accumulate some of those occult abilities.”

“Maybe,” Nicci admitted under her breath.

“Is that it? That’s the reason you don’t trust her?”

Nicci started pacing again. “How did you get to Jit’s lair in Kharga Trace?”

Realizing that this was far from over, Kahlan pushed some of her hair back away from her face and turned more serious. “I followed the road toward Kharga Trace until it eventually diminished down into a small trail that led out across the swamp. The trail was hard to miss. It was built out of branches and saplings and such to keep you up out of the water. In some places it was like a bridge, spanning long stretches of open water on its way to Jit’s place.”

“So it was all up above water, where you could see it.”

“Of course. You must know that, though. You would have had to come in the same way to get Richard and me out.”

Nicci confirmed with a nod that she did indeed know it.

“Irena said that none of her people knew where the Hedge Maid’s lair was located in the swamp, so she didn’t know where to look for her sister.”

Kahlan scratched an eyebrow. “What of it?”

“You found the way into Jit’s. That boy, Henrik, found his way in. People hoping to be healed found their way in. We found the trail made of branches and vines. It’s the only way into the Hedge Maid’s lair. None of us has ever been in the Dark Lands before and we found it. Stroyza is the nearest village to Kharga Trace. How could Irena not know where Jit’s lair was, or about the trail across the swamp?”