“People are rarely satisfied by hearing such things,” Kahlan said. “But I don’t have a choice.”
The woman nodded. “I can feel the sickness in you.”
Kahlan took a deep breath as she looked off into the woods ahead. “Thank you for bringing me.”
“Do not thank me before you see the oracle. Afterwards, for bringing you here, you may yet curse the day I was born.”
“I choose to thank you. Neither of us has a choice in what we do today.”
The woman smiled. “In that you are right. While you speak with the oracle, I will wait back in our village with those you travel with. If the oracle decides that you may pass, I will know and I will bring them.”
Once the blindfolded woman turned back toward the way they had come, Kahlan started off in the other direction. She was glad at least to once again be in a more normal-looking forest rather than the spooky black wood. She found a small brook, where gloomy light filtered down to the lacy leaves of some of the young trees growing along the mossy rocks along the bank. Kahlan fanned her hand in front of her face as she passed through little clouds of gnats hovering above the brook.
Up on the banks to the sides grew thickets of brush and larger trees. Even with the gnats and other buzzing bugs, it was easier to walk along the brook than to make her way through the congested forest to the sides. She could occasionally see through gaps in the trees that the rock walls that had narrowed the passage had receded back to become the lower reaches of forested mountains rising up to either side.
The brook eventually led her through a stand of birches. The dark spots on the white bark looked like a thousand eyes watching her. The birches eventually thinned out as she moved along the brook into a more open grassland. The dark wall of forest receded into the distance to the sides, leaving a flat, grassy plain. The brook broadened out in a series of shallow pools as crystal-clear water moved quietly over gravel beds.
Out in the open at last, Kahlan was finally able to better see the true enormity of the mountains. They stood like hazy, pale gray-blue walls rising up to either side. She couldn’t see any other way through the towering, snow-covered peaks. As far as she could tell, they had indeed found the pass through the mountains that would lead them to Saavedra.
Now, all she had to do was get the oracle to give her blessing for them to travel through the pass.
In among small, grassy, rolling rises she found the source of the brook. The water, looking to be fed from a spring below, flowed up through a split in a knee-high boulder and down the sides. Through the clear water in the pool around the boulder, she spotted minnows above the gravelly bottom swimming into the gentle current. The place vaguely reminded Kahlan of something she had seen before, but she couldn’t bring it to mind.
Beyond the spring, over a grassy rise, she saw a broad valley forested with huge oaks and maples. The massive trunks of the spreading oaks created a beautiful, natural cathedral below the crowns. Had her mission not been so vital, and her worry for Richard so great, Kahlan would have marveled at the size and beauty of the trees set among the lush expanse of grass.
As she walked through the waist-high grass, something began crunching under her feet. Sometimes the grasses collapsed inward when her foot broke through. She paused and looked down. Among the tussocks, she saw something slightly round just under the brown thatch of dead grass. She noticed that the ground all around looked lumpy. With the side of her boot, she scraped at the thick layer of dead grass down at the base of the new green shoots. Her foot exposed something that looked like bone.
Kahlan scanned the entire area all around her, and saw that all of it was cluttered with the smallish round humps. Those round bulges were what had been crunching and collapsing inward as she had stepped on them. With the side of her boot, she worked to expose more of the round mound.
It was a skull. She squatted and pulled it out so she could turn it over. Empty eye sockets stared blindly up at her.
The skull was human.
Kahlan stood in a rush. She peered out over the grassy area and saw that there were small round mounds everywhere, as far as she could see. Even in the distance she could detect the telltale rounded spots down beneath the grass. They were all so close together that it would be impossible not to tread on a skull with every step.
There had to be hundreds of human skulls littering just the area close in around her. By the way the ground in all directions was mounded, Kahlan suspected that the skulls were not merely lying on the surface of the ground, but heaped up in deep piles. She had no idea how many human skulls she was standing on, but she quickly changed her estimate from hundreds to thousands.