The soldiers reluctantly slowed to a halt, remaining near the cobblestone square piled with the rubble of the tower. Nicci, Kahlan, and the three Mord-Sith ignored his instructions and followed him without pause. At the moment he needed to catch the person responsible and didn’t want to stop to argue with them, but he knew he couldn’t let them go all the way.
Rather than go down the road, he instead headed in the other direction, around the citadel. She wouldn’t likely be down in the city. She would have come out of the cover of the uninhabited woods.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Kahlan asked as she walked faster to catch up with his big strides.
Richard nodded. “It has to be her.”
“Who?” Cassia asked from behind. “What are you talking about?”
“Samantha,” Nicci said.
The Mord-Sith frowned suspiciously. “Samantha. You mean the young sorceress who stabbed the Mother Confessor?”
“That would be the one,” Richard said without looking back.
“How could she do such a thing?” Cassia asked.
“It’s drizzling and wet,” Nicci said to keep the Mord-Sith from distracting Richard as he scanned all the places she could be hiding. “Samantha can use her ability to heat the moisture in solid objects to make it expand and blow them apart–objects like trees and even rock.”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Cassia said.
“Your Lord Rahl generously taught her how to do it,” Nicci said with obvious displeasure.
“I learned it from you,” Richard reminded her.
Nicci’s mouth twisted with displeasure but she didn’t answer. Richard slowed as he approached the opening in the wall at the edge of the more formal citadel grounds. The gardens were nowhere near as ornate as some of the places Richard had seen, but the maze of hedges, stone walks, and orderly patches of wildflowers were lavish for the small city of Saavedra. Hannis Arc would have had the grounds kept up as a demonstration of his importance, not because he cared about going for a stroll to gaze at wildflowers.
Richard held his arm out as he slowed, stopping all the women. “I want you all to wait here. I mean it. She’s dangerous.”
“Yes, she is,” Nicci said, “and she wants revenge against you.”
“And to get that revenge she would love to kill all of you to get back at me, the same way she stabbed Kahlan to hurt me.”
Kahlan put an imploring hand on his shoulder. “Richard, she has already done that. She stabbed me. Now she will want to kill you.”
“Kahlan is right,” Nicci said. “You shouldn’t be going out there to face her at all, much less alone. That’s what she wants. We can distract her and keep her from–”
“I said stay here.” His harsh tone caused them to fall silent.
They knew he was in no mood to argue with them, and they knew, too, that they couldn’t afford to waste time and let her get away. Once he was sure they weren’t going to argue, he started for the opening in the wall that led to the marshy fields around the citadel grounds that kept the forest back and insured that it would be harder for anyone to sneak up unseen. There was no gate. Hannis Arc was more feared than what was out beyond.
Richard lifted his sword a few inches, checking that it was clear in the scabbard. He let it drop back in place before he moved into the opening, leaning out to check both ways on the far side. Standing under the arch, he gazed out across the field of soggy grasses, looking for anything that didn’t belong.
Richard spotted her in the distance among the rushes.
Samantha stood like a statue among grasses taller than her. She was about halfway across the marshland to the dark forest behind her. Richard turned back and held up a hand to Kahlan, Nicci, and the three Mord-Sith, letting them know that he meant for them to stay put and he would brook no argument.
“If she makes it past me,” he told Nicci, “you make sure you stop her before she can get to Kahlan again. Understand?”
Nicci stared into his eyes a moment before answering. “I didn’t go to the underworld to get you back only to have a girl with a bad temper kill you.”
“I asked if you understood.”
Nicci pressed her lips tight for a moment. Finally she folded her arms. “I understand.”
“Good. Thank you.”
“You came back to the world of life to take care of important matters,” Kahlan warned him. “Samantha isn’t one of them.”
“I can’t do anything about Sulachan if Samantha kills us all first, now can I?”
Kahlan didn’t look at all happy, but she didn’t say anything. She knew he was right. The young woman was the one forcing the issue. It wasn’t like they had a choice.
When he was confident that they would wait where they were, he started out the opening.
CHAPTER
23
As he made his way among the thick clumps of grasses and reeds, out across the sodden field toward the young sorceress, Richard reminded himself to keep control of his anger. Samantha had stabbed Kahlan through the heart, and there was nothing else that would ignite his anger the way harming Kahlan would. But he knew that he couldn’t focus on that to the exclusion of everything else.
Righteous anger could be a valuable tool, but it needed to be rational anger. Anger against evil. Anger against wrongs. It had to be wielded the same way any weapon was wielded. It needed to be wielded with reasoned wisdom tempered with maturity. It had to be respected for the damage it could do not only to evil, but also to the innocent. He knew that sometimes ability grew faster than the sense to know when not to use it, like a young man who grew muscles before growing wise enough not to be easily provoked into using them.
Although Samantha had been his friend and had helped him a number of times, and had even used her anger to save his life and the lives of a lot of good people, her temper wasn’t always governed by reason. It obviously sometimes got the best of her. When it got out of control in that way, she was capable of anything, capable of hurting anyone, even someone as innocent as Kahlan.
It was certainly understandable that she would be enraged by the sight of Richard killing her mother, but she didn’t know all the facts. She knew him and she should know that he wouldn’t harm someone, especially not her mother, without a very good reason. He hoped that by coming out and talking to her, he could convince her to let her better judgment take over.
As he made his way through the tall rushes and among patches of blue vervain and swamp milkweed, he could see Samantha up ahead waiting for him. Her frizzy mass of black hair was stuffed into the hood of her cloak to protect it from the steady drizzle. Under the cloak her skinny arms were bare. He thought she had to be cold standing out in the wet weather. But he knew, too, that anger could heat a person and make them forget the cold. She stood stone-still, waiting for him, her dark-eyed glare locked on him as he made his way among the clumps of the grasses bowed over under the wet weight of accumulated mist.
The spongy ground was covered with a tangled web of matted, dead grass. In places it sank down when he put weight on it, so that clear water rose up over the toes of his boots. He reminded himself to be careful and not lose his footing. He wouldn’t want to fall and find himself down on the ground with Samantha standing over him. She had already proven that there were no bounds on what she could or would do.
“Samantha,” he called through the veil of rushes when he was still a good distance away from her. He tried to keep a familiar tone she would remember. “I need to talk to you.”
When he stepped out from a screen of grasses, she spoke in a low voice that was little more than a growl. “My name is Sammie. You gave me the name Samantha. My mother called me Sammie. The people of Stroyza all called me Sammie. That is my name–Sammie. I don’t want a name from you.”
“Fine. Sammie, then,” he said as he kept weaving his way among the tall thickets of rushes and shorter knots of grasses, steadily making his way closer to her. “We still need to talk.”
/> “There is nothing to talk about. You killed my mother.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“It is that simple. She’s dead. You are the one who killed her. I saw you do it.”
He thought that there was something odd-looking about the young woman, some kind of shimmering aspect to her, something in her big, dark eyes, but in the dreary light he couldn’t tell for sure what it was, or if it was his imagination. He had often seen the aura of power around sorceresses, seen it crackling with menace. He could do that, though, only when his own gift worked. Because he still had the poisonous touch of death in him, his gift didn’t work. Still, he was sure that he saw something, even though he couldn’t tell what.
He came to a halt when he was close enough to talk to her without having to yell. He didn’t want to get any closer if he didn’t have to. He knew what a temper she had, and it was true, after all, that he had killed her mother.
“Samantha, you don’t understand. You have to listen to me.”
“Sammie.”
“You drove a knife through Kahlan’s heart.”
“Because you killed my mother. It was what you deserve. I want you to suffer the same kind of pain I suffer. I want to make you lose everything that matters to you, the same as you did to me.”
Richard reminded himself to keep his voice calm, the same as when he had talked to her so often before. He plucked a few yellow buds from a blooming oxeye and rolled them between his finger and thumb as he considered his words.
“Your mother wasn’t who you thought she was, Sammie. She wasn’t on our side, on the side of the good people of your village of Stroyza, the way we thought she was.”
“She was a protector to our people.”
“She killed your aunts. She killed Zedd.”
Samantha’s brow twitched for just a moment before her glare darkened. “You’re lying.”
“It’s the truth.” Richard tossed away the oxeye buds and pulled a small black book from his pants pocket. He held it up for her to see. “This was your mother’s journey book. Journey books possess ancient magic that allows them to send messages back and forth to each other.”
“So?”
“Ludwig Dreier had the twin to your mother’s. He probably gave her the one she had on her. She used it to plot with him. She had been working with him for years.
“She knew all about the barrier failing long before she let on. She wasn’t really going to warn anyone. She and Dreier were keeping it a secret because they wanted that evil to escape. They wanted to rule over everyone. They wanted power for themselves. They were using the barrier failing as a way to accomplish their ends.”
Samantha was shaking her head, objecting to what he was telling her even as he was saying it. “My mother was the sorceress in charge of Stroyza. She didn’t even like that much power. She did not want to rule anyone.”
“It was an act she put on, the same as Ludwig Dreier hid his own abilities until it was time for him to make his move. It was all part of their plan. No one knew their secret.”
“You’re making it all up. I know my mother better than you ever could.”
Richard held up the journey book again so she could see it. “It’s all in here. All of her conversations with Dreier are still in here. These books are twinned. What is written in one shows up in the other. Your mother had this one and Dreier had the other. Her journey book has all of their conversations and scheming going back for several years.
“There were messages from Ludwig Dreier telling Irena the specifics of what he wanted her to do for him, along with promises of rewards for her loyalty and service to him.”
“He was using her?”
Richard shook his head. “I’m not going to lie to you, Samantha. She understood exactly what she was doing and she was doing it willingly. He wasn’t fooling her into anything. She was a partner in his plot to gain power.”
Samantha used a thumb to hook a curly lock of her black hair back off her face. “So you say.”
“She says it, in her own words.”
When Samantha only glanced at the book he was holding up without saying anything, he went on.
“Ludwig Dreier advised her on how she should react to people, what to say, and how to behave. He told her the things he wanted her to find out for him. She reported those things back to him. She was eager to help him and for their plan to succeed. She let herself be captured by Hannis Arc so that she would be closer to him in order to report on what he was doing to raise the spirit king from the dead. She was keeping him apprised of his progress and what was happening within the third kingdom.
“He told her to be especially careful not to let anyone know of her occult abilities. You didn’t even know of the dark talents she possessed, did you? That’s because she didn’t want you to know.
“She was writing to him the whole time we were traveling here, letting him know our progress. She told Dreier of how she was keeping the act up for our benefit, playing along so that we would think she was one of us.
“Your mother betrayed us, Samantha. She told Dreier that Kahlan and I needed a containment field in order to be healed. She lied to us, Samantha, telling us that there was one here and that she had seen it. You heard her say that. There was no containment field here, so how could she have seen it?
“She used that lie as a way to get us to come here, to the citadel, where Dreier laid a trap to capture us. He told her where he wanted her to say the containment field was located within the citadel, and how to get down there as a way to get us to the dungeons where he could take us by surprise. He laid the trap and she walked us right into it.”
“Lies. My mother wouldn’t do such a thing.”
Richard held up the book again. “It’s all in here, Samantha, in her own words, in her own hand. Your mother and Dreier discussed how they couldn’t risk any of the gifted in Stroyza learning that the barrier was failing. She wrote to Dreier, telling him that she had killed her sister Martha and Martha’s husband when they had gone to see if the reports about Jit were true. She told him that she dumped their bodies in the swamp to make it look like they died on that journey to Jit’s lair. Dreier said he would send soldiers to collect her other sister, Millicent, and her husband, Gyles, and take them to the abbey to make sure they couldn’t interfere, either. They died there by his hands, but it was by your mother’s design.
“Samantha, you have to listen to the truth, even though the truth is painful. The truth is that your mother told Dreier that your father was starting to ask too many questions. There was no attack by half people. They didn’t kill your father and capture her. Your mother is the one who killed your father.”
Samantha’s hands fisted at her sides. “Lies! All lies!”
“It’s the truth. She is the one who killed Zedd. She wrote in this book, ‘the old wizard was getting suspicious.’ She describes to Dreier how she went about tricking Zedd and then killing him. She called him a troublesome old man. You knew Zedd. You know what a good man he was. She beheaded him for no other reason than that he was good.
“It’s all here, Samantha. It’s all here in her own words. You can have her journey book and read it for yourself.”
Samantha folded her arms. “I told you, my name is Sammie.”
“I thought you had outgrown that name when you took on the responsibility of protecting your village and warning people about the barrier failing.” He pointed a thumb back over his shoulder. “You helped me rescue all those people back there. You helped me, Samantha. You did the right things, the things the people of Stroyza would have admired. You grew from a girl into a young woman and did the right things. You grew into Samantha.
“This is the moment you must choose. You can either open your eyes to the hard truth, face the facts, or you can remain a child. This is the moment when you must choose to remain Sammie, the child hiding from truth, or to be more, to be Samantha, a brave young woman I admired.”
CHAPTER
24
/> She folded her skinny arms. “I’m Sammie. That is the name my mother gave me. It’s what my people called me. Sammie, not Samantha. I don’t want the name you want to give me. You have no right to name me.”
Richard let out a breath. “Maybe you’re right about that much of it. If you won’t hear the truth even though it is about your mother–especially if it is about your mother–then maybe you are still a girl, still Sammie, and not really ready to carry the name Samantha like I thought. But you can’t hide your eyes from the truth forever.”
“I’m not hiding my eyes from the truth. I don’t believe anything you say. I don’t believe that anything you are telling me really is the truth. I know the truth. The truth is that you’re a liar. All those things you’re saying about my mother are lies you invented to cover the truth that you murdered her.”
“Why would I want to hurt your mother if she was as innocent as you wish to believe? Why would I want to do that? The truth is, I didn’t.” Richard waggled the journey book again. “It’s all in here. You can read it for yourself.”
“You expect me to think that proves anything? You got a little book and wrote out those lies yourself. You made it all up to make my mother look bad because she was a nobody from a little village and you think you are so much more important than us because you are the Lord Rahl. You made it up as an excuse for why you murdered her.”
Richard nodded. “I killed her. But it was not murder and I don’t regret it. I wish it wouldn’t have had to be that way, but I don’t regret killing her. She was a murderer of innocent people and she deserved to die. She got what she deserved. I won’t apologize for doing what was right.”
“So you say. You invented a story to make yourself look noble and wrote those things down to try to cover up your own crime of murder. You murdered a good woman and now you smear her memory for your own need to be an important man, a big important ruler over all the people of D’Hara.”
“Samantha, we traveled together long enough that you should know me, know my heart. You should know that I wouldn’t lie to you. As painful as the truth might be, I would never hide it from you. I’m telling you the truth.