Severed Souls(87)
“That’s it. That’s the explanation I gave her.” Richard tilted his head in toward her. “But, let me tell you, Samantha is really good at it. Really good.”
“What I told you about how I explode a tree trunk was a superficial explanation.” Nicci fixed him with a cynical scowl. “I never gave you any of the important details about how to do such a thing because I was never able to teach you about your gift. That means you have no knowledge of underlying principles or causative factors that you could pass along to her.
“So, you are trying to tell me that you simply gave her that superficial explanation and she was able to do it, like telling her to flap her arms and she could fly like a bird?”
“Well,” he admitted, “it wasn’t exactly that simple.”
“Really,” she mocked. “Then how did she manage to do such powerful conjuring from what you told her?”
“Sometimes, in a desperate situation, people can instinctively apply their knowledge to a new problem. We were being chased by a lot of desperate half people. They were like swarms of locusts coming at us. It seemed like there were thousands of them. I didn’t stop to count, but I probably cut down hundreds and it made little difference. They just kept coming. There were far too many for me to fight off with the sword.
“Samantha tried everything she knew, but regular magic doesn’t work very well on half people. I knew we were in a lot of trouble and needed something more or we were going to die.
“So, since half people are still harmed by things like swords, or even hitting them with a rock, I told her about making trees explode. I told her that she needed to focus her power inside tree trunks to make them explode to try to help stop the half people who were after us.
“She was afraid. She had never done anything like that before. But she couldn’t do it, so at that point all we could do was run.
“Then they managed to get around us and trap us. There were so many half people we couldn’t fight them off and we were trapped. We both thought we were going to die. I pushed her into a crevice in the rock and then I squeezed in after her.
“In that moment, hiding down in that dark, narrow crack in the rock, just before they pulled us out and we were eaten, she said that she thought about everything that they were taking away from us, all the friends and loved ones these half people were going to kill, how they killed her father and how they would kill her mother, and she got so angry thinking about it that her ability suddenly broke through that mental block and she started blowing the trees apart in order to stop them.
“But it was nothing like I ever saw the gifted do in the war. It’s hard to describe. I mean, this was on a scale you can’t imagine.”
“Oh I think I can,” Nicci said with an even look.
“She blew the forest apart,” Richard said. “I don’t mean she blew some of the trees apart, or even a bunch of trees. I mean she completely leveled everything in sight all around us. Everything. That storm of shattered splinters blasting out in every direction shredded every last one of the half people—thousands of them. Nothing was left standing other than a few splintered stumps.”
“Thousands,” Zedd repeated.
Richard nodded to his grandfather. “That’s right. I’ve never seen anything like it.
“So, that’s what I taught her—that she had to superheat the sap in a tree to make it blow apart.”
Nicci looked skeptical. “And that’s all you told her?”
His mouth twisted as he remembered the rest of it. “I guess that I also told her that getting angry was how I was able to power my gift. I told her that focusing that anger was both an effective way to fight and to use magic.”
He looked around at the three faces watching him. “Why, what did she do this time?”
“She stood there all by herself,” Kahlan said, “and brought the cliff walls to the sides of the gorge down on the Shun-tuk. They were trapped in the bottom of the narrow pass. For a time, it looked like the whole mountain was coming down.”
“Really?” Richard looked around at the grim faces. “You mean she actually brought the cliffs down? But the soldiers were going to handle it.” He frowned at Kahlan. “What happened?”
Kahlan sighed. “Zedd and Nicci used magic to eliminate all the ones they could. They killed a great many. But there were many more that were not touched by regular magic. The soldiers needed to take care of the rest of them.
“That battle was going well, and, despite their numbers, your plan was working—it was ruthlessly effective, as a matter of fact. We had them trapped and we were cutting them down.