Richard was a very rare person.
He was the one.
He was the one for her, the only one. In so many ways, Richard was the only one. He was a point of singularity.
She had felt a pull to him that they had both felt from the first moment their eyes had met that fateful day in the Hartland woods.
Richard was referred to in prophecy as the pebble in the pond. Ripples from that pebble touched everything. He rippled through so much about prophecy that in that way he had created ripples through time itself.
Sometimes it made her head hurt to think about all the interlocking connections, so she simply loved him and tried not to think about all the wider implications of any of it.
But Richard was always thinking about it, even when he didn’t consciously realize it. She could see it in his gray eyes when he was quietly watching the sun set. Even when he looked into her eyes, she could tell that there were always some kind of cosmic calculations going on somewhere in the deep recesses of his mind.
Since he had come into her life, others had come to treat her differently, to accept her. She now got smiles and sincere nods. Especially from soldiers like these. She had fought beside them and they had come to know her for who she was, and that she was more than simply a Confessor.
Richard had done that. He had changed everything.
While she waited for the men to scout the climb, Kahlan joined some of the soldiers under the gentle falls to wash blood out of her hair and off her clothes. They shared a bar of soap with her—soldiers all, passing it around to wash off the blood of their enemy. Fortunately, after the exertion of battle, the cold water felt good on her sore muscles. It wasn’t a proper bath with her clothes on, but they needed to be washed as well, and in the wilds of the Dark Lands even this much was a luxury she very much appreciated.
As she wiped the clean water back off her long hair, some of the men told her how proud they were of how much blood she’d had all over her. They had viewed her blood-soaked hair as a mantle she had earned. They seemed especially pleased to see that she was just as committed as they were to killing the enemy, that she was willing to do all that she asked of them, and that she had waded into the task with every ounce of commitment they did.
Kahlan understood their feelings, but she still wanted all the blood off her.
She was looking forward to Richard waking and giving him a kiss. She wanted to look her best for that first kiss welcoming him back to the world of life.
CHAPTER
30
Once the scouts had found a good route, the climb was easier than they’d thought it would be. Fortunately, the way up was easy enough that the horse could negotiate the steep climb without too much difficulty, so they were able to save time by leaving Richard lashed in place.
The climb was mercifully short, but Kahlan’s legs kept cramping from the effort of the long scramble up through the gorge, much of it at a dead run, to say nothing of what had seemed like an endless battle. The steeper ascent up the prominence and out of the gorge, short as it was, demanded that she dig deep for enough strength to make it.
Her arms felt like lead from swinging the sword. She knew that she was going to be sore for a couple of days. She reminded herself to be thankful for the sore muscles; it was better to be alive to feel sore than to be dead. She tried not to think of how many times she had come close to dying. She thought of Richard and tried not to think of how close both of them still were to dying.
At the top of the climb, in the lap of surrounding mountains, the land flattened out. A small lake collecting mountain runoff fed the falls and the brook down in the gorge. One of the men scouted out ahead beyond swampy ground thick with reeds and then through the woods beyond the far shore while another two scouted to either side. The center scout ran back from the woods and motioned for them with three sparks from his steel and flint. At seeing the three small flashes of sparks, they all hurried around the small moonlit lake, beyond the expanse of reeds, and into the woods beyond.
After following the man a brief distance across ground covered with a soft bed of pine needles beneath a stand of towering pines, they emerged on the far side, where they were brought to a halt at the brink of a chasm. In the moonlight it looked like a black snake stretching off to the left and right as far in each direction as they could see. Nicci cast a sparkling flame down the deep fissure. The light continued sinking far longer than Kahlan would have expected. Seeing how deep it was, they all took a step back from the edge. It was far too steep and too deep to climb down.
As far as she could see, there was no way over the chasm.
“Looks like we’re going to have to go either left or right,” Zedd offered.
Kahlan scanned the forest on the far side of the chasm. “Not a lot of choice. We’re hemmed by the gorge and this rift. If we could get to the other side, this kind of natural barrier would make it a safer place to get the rest we all need.”