He understood Zedd’s advice, and Kahlan’s feelings. He just didn’t see how he could do anything but what he was doing. If he didn’t act, he would end up being slaughtered as well. While he hadn’t sought leadership, leadership had fallen to him.
Up ahead, between the dingy two-story buildings crowded in close to the street, he got his first glimpse of the stone citadel high up above the city.
Samantha, walking not far behind him with her mother, leaned closer. “Lord Rahl, I’m so excited that you and the Mother Confessor are finally going to be well. And I can’t wait to see the containment chamber and how such a thing is done.”
Richard looked back and showed her a smile. She had done a lot to help get them this far. Without her help, they could have lost their lives any number of times.
Besides the people who watched from a corner of their eye, Richard saw others along the roads staring with vacant expressions. None of them looked happy, or expectant, or excited, or even curious about the people accompanied by so many soldiers.
Richard leaned toward Nicci. “What does this place remind you of?”
Nicci glanced over. “The cities of the Old World—cities without hope—where people lived their whole lives under the thumb of the Imperial Order.”
“Exactly,” he said. “I had no idea that this part of D’Hara was like this. I had no idea that we had a petty tyrant right under our noses all this time. Makes me wonder what other parts of D’Hara are like, parts I’ve never even heard of.”
“Hannis Arc is no longer so petty,” Kahlan said without looking over. “He wants to kill everything good, and he has a good chance to accomplish it.”
Even here, in the wilds of the Dark Lands, a nest of evil had taken root until eventually it had begun to spread.
Richard was tempted to ask her how, while such a threat existed, he could quit, but he thought better of it.
Kahlan, as the Mother Confessor, had originally come to his home in Hartland in Westland to find the old wizard so that he could name a Seeker. Unbeknownst to Richard, the old wizard had turned out to be Zedd.
It didn’t matter, though. Richard knew who Zedd really was. He was his grandfather, his teacher, his friend.
He was also the one who had named Richard the Seeker of Truth and given him the long-hidden sword that went with that duty. Zedd had told them that it was his responsibility as First Wizard to pick the right person, and Richard was the right person to carry that sword. While at first it hadn’t seemed so, Richard now understood that Zedd had picked the right man.
As he looked into the eyes of the frightened people silently watching, he wondered how he could now turn his back on the responsibility with which Zedd had entrusted him. How could he turn his back on those who had made this sword? Or any of those who had left him clues to help him along the way in his struggle to see justice prevail? How could he fool himself into thinking that he could go off somewhere safe and be left alone to live his life while turning his back on a firestorm and pretend it didn’t exist? How could he live a lie?
The happiest time of his life had been living with Kahlan back in the wilderness. He had tried turning his back on the world. He had tried to give it up to live his life with Kahlan.
When she had recovered, Kahlan had become ever more restless and uneasy, continually trying to convince him that they needed to return to the world and their place in it.
Nicci had shown up and captured him. She had taken him away to a long ordeal of captivity. Richard knew that he had only been fooling himself to think that they could quit the world and find a place to hide, to think they could live in peace without someone coming for him. Someone would always come.
Whether or not he wanted to admit it, the reality was that too many things were connected to him. His only chance at life was to face reality, not hide from it. You either had to fight evil as you encountered it, or evil would come to control your life. Even these people here, way out in the wilds of the Dark Lands, could not escape it.
Nests of depravity always grew stronger and spread if not fought.
What really bothered him, though, was that Kahlan was his rock. He was stronger, physically, than she was, but she was his emotional stability, always steadfast in what was right. There had been times when he had felt too weak to go on. In those times Kahlan had always been his strength. He had always gotten to his feet for her.
It rattled him to see her strength falter.
He knew, though, that she was too strong, too committed, to feel this way for long. He supposed it was unreasonable to expect her to be strong every moment. She was only human.
As much as he wished he could do what Zedd had advised, what she had begged him to do in a moment of human weakness, he knew that in the end she couldn’t really live that way. Sooner or later, and likely sooner, she would start to get uneasy and need to return to life’s struggle.