“Where am I?” she asked, gulping for air.
Nicci was crying for some reason. “In one of the bedrooms in the citadel.”
“No, I mean where am I?”
Nicci frowned through her tears. “I don’t understand.”
“Is this … death? It’s all wrong. It doesn’t make sense. Something isn’t right. Where am I?”
“You died,” Nicci said through her tears. “You were murdered. But you have both life and death in you, and that life sustained you for a bit while you were in the underworld.
“But now you are back, Kahlan. You’re alive. Dear spirits, you’re alive.”
Kahlan felt euphoric. She had been murdered, but now she was alive. She understood what it meant that she was going to live. Life, wonderful life, wasn’t over. She couldn’t stop smiling as she looked around. She was going to live.
“Where’s Richard?”
Nicci’s face went ashen.
Kahlan followed the woman’s stricken gaze and saw that someone lay beside her.
It was Richard.
Her heart jumped with a flash of joy at seeing him.
But as soon as she saw him, she knew that something was terribly wrong.
He was too still.
He wasn’t breathing.
He stared up at nothing with dead eyes.
Kahlan screamed when she realized the awful truth.
The instantaneous joy she had felt at seeing him, turned to horror.
She fell on him, throwing an arm over his chest, over his sword’s hilt clutched in his fists resting over his heart.
“No! Dear spirits, no! Don’t bring me back to this! Please, don’t do this to me!”
Nicci rushed to draw Kahlan back, pulling her arms from him, turning her away from Richard to take her up in her arms.
“What’s happening?” Kahlan wept against Nicci’s shoulder.
Nicci swallowed back her own sobs. “I’m so sorry, Kahlan. Richard gave up his life to go after you, to bring you back to life. He has only been gone a moment.”
Kahlan looked over at the horrifyingly still body of the man she loved, her everything. “But why isn’t he here? If I was able to return because I still had that third kingdom spark of life in me, then why didn’t he…”
She remembered, then.
It all flooded back in like a terrible, dark, profoundly troubling dream seeping back into your memory after you woke, a dream that left a sickening feeling behind in you that you couldn’t escape no matter how hard you tried.
“What?” Nicci asked, seeing the look on Kahlan’s face. “Do you remember?”
Kahlan nodded. “Richard’s spirit found me. In all that darkness, in all that eternity of nothing, Richard found me. I was lost in darkness and yet he found me.”
“Then what?” Nicci asked when Kahlan fell silent, staring off into the nightmare.
“Then he pulled the dark ones off me, drawing them away to chase after him, instead. I tried to stop him—I didn’t want him to do that to himself—but he was stronger and tore them away from me. He somehow pushed me back into the glowing lines of the Grace. I had no control. I wanted to stay with him, but I couldn’t. Those glowing lines pulled me back. I don’t know how.”
“Because you still had life in you,” Nicci said. “The Grace was healing itself, putting you back to where you belonged on that line of the gift coming from Creation.”
Kahlan gazed at Nicci in desperation. “Then why didn’t it do the same for Richard? Why didn’t he return with me?”
“He couldn’t. He went there to save you from Sulachan’s dark demons, and he did. He did what only Richard could do. He pushed you back toward life. But now, there is no one to save him, no one to help him get back to the light, to his lifeline.”
Kahlan looked over at him lying next to where she had lain. He had his sword clutched in his dead hands. His eyes no longer saw the world of life. Now, he was lost in a world of darkness.
To see Richard so still, without life in him, was beyond any kind of agony she had ever known.
“How did he die?” Her own voice sounded like someone else asking the unimaginable.
She looked back at Nicci when she heard the sorceress softly sobbing.
“Nicci, how did he die? What happened?”
She finally looked up with torment in her blue eyes.
“He asked me to stop his heart.”
Kahlan’s eyes widened. “You killed Richard?”
Nicci nodded, but couldn’t find the words as she wept with the horror at what she had done. It was a torture she would always have to bear.
“Nicci, how could you kill Richard? How could you possibly do such a thing? You, of all people. After all he has done for you, how could you have done such a thing to him?”