After they had made their way down narrow, rocky trails, the terrain leveled out somewhat. Irena and Samantha used the opportunity to move in close to each side of Richard to protect him as they went through more open birch groves. Nicci stayed behind them where she could keep an eye on Irena. Irena, for her part, always managed to be right there near Richard, sometimes even stepping in front of Kahlan and Nicci to do so.
Kahlan wasn’t in the mood to start an argument with the woman. The wise thing to do was to ignore it and get to Saavedra. Besides, for all she knew they might need Irena’s extra abilities to cure them.
When the trail narrowed again as they had to go down a narrow pass between steep, gray, rocky slopes to each side, and she had the chance, Kahlan took up Richard’s hand and made it clear to the others, in a gentle manner, that she wanted to be with her husband. Irena, surprisingly enough, got the message. Kahlan wondered if perhaps the woman wasn’t as inconsiderate as she had believed.
At first, Samantha didn’t get the idea, instead staying close to Richard as the way through began to widen so she could pepper him with trivial questions about how the trees could ever come to cling to such stony slopes overhead and how it compared to places he had been to and things he had seen before. She seemed to have an endless supply of questions and looked genuinely interested in every word of his answers. Richard seemed distracted and wasn’t in a chatty mood, but he was nice enough as he answered her questions, if briefly.
As they walked along an animal trail through knee-high grass, Zedd finally slipped in close and put an arm around the young woman’s shoulders. He told her that he wanted to show her some of the herbs that a young sorceress needed to know about. He steered her off through tall grasses and shrubs to point out plants with red berries growing up the soil bank below the steeper rock above. He launched into a lecture about the many uses of the berries, the leaves, and the roots of the plants he was showing her.
“Everything all right?” Kahlan asked Richard once they were relatively alone.
He gave her a puzzled look. “No, not really.”
“Why, what’s wrong?”
“Well,” he said as if trying to think of something, “there was a man who has been dead for three thousand years and when Hannis Arc poured my blood over his mummified corpse, he came back to life. And now he wants to rule the world of life, with Lord Arc as the ruler of the D’Haran Empire, I suppose. Oh, and you and I are near death from a poison we both carry, but we may all be eaten alive by half people before we ever die from the poison.”
“Sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to get you upset.”
He waved a hand. “No, it’s not that.”
“Then what is it?”
He let out a deep sigh. “It’s just everything.”
“Everything? Anything in particular getting you down? I mean more than the things you mentioned.”
For a time he looked off to the sparse woods off through the grass to the side before answering.
“I’d just like to be alone with you, that’s all.”
“Ah,” she said with a knowing smile. “That.” It was rather difficult being intimate in the middle of a camp of soldiers.
“That’s not what I mean—well, that too—but that’s not what I mean.”
“Then what do you mean?”
“I mean like when I built that cabin for us way back to the west, in Westland. I’ve just been thinking about the time when we were alone and far from all the troubles of the world.”
Kahlan briefly pressed her head against the side of his shoulder. “It will happen, Richard. Things will get better. We’ll get rid of this awful poison and then you will do whatever it is that you need to do to stop the unruly twins and then we will be able to live in peace.”
He smiled at her description of Emperor Sulachan and Hannis Arc as if they were little more than mischievous boys.
“But I don’t want to live in a tiny cabin,” she said. “I mean, I would, if we had to, but I would rather we live at the People’s Palace.”
“Ah,” he said with a smile, “so I’ve married a girl with her eye on the finer things in life.”
Kahlan circled an arm around his waist. “Finer than traipsing through a damp and gloomy wilderness with a bunch of soldiers? You bet. For one thing, I want a real bed. In a room with a door. With a lock on the door.”
Richard couldn’t help smiling. “I would like that very much.”
“I bet you would,” she teased with a gentle shove of her hip.
He smiled again. She was happy that she had been able to lighten his mood. She didn’t know what was bothering him, but she was at least happy that she had been able to make him smile.