Faith of the Fallen

The fragrance of balsam and pine filled her lungs, helping to settle her stomach. It was not the aroma of trees among other smells in the forest, among damp dirt and toadstools and cinnamon ferns, but the redolence of trees freshly felled and limbed. She concentrated on focusing her sight and saw beyond the foot of the bed a wall of pale, newly peeled timber, here and there oozing sap from fresh axe cuts. The wood looked to have been split and hewn in haste, yet its tight fit betrayed a precision only knowledge and experience could bestow.

The room was tiny; in the Confessors' Palace, where she had grown up, a room this small would not have qualified as a closet for linens. Moreover, it would have been stone, if not marble. She liked the tiny wooden room; she expected that Richard had built it to protect her. It felt almost like his sheltering arms around her. Marble, with its aloof dignity, never comforted her in that way.

Beyond the foot of the bed, she spotted a carving of a bird in flight.

It had been sculpted with a few sure strokes of a knife into a log of the wall on a flat spot only a little bigger than her hand. Richard had given her something to look at. On occasion, sitting around a campfire, she had watched him casually carve a face or an animal from a scrap of wood. The bird, soaring on wings spread wide as it watched over her, conveyed a sense of freedom.

Turning her eyes to the right, she saw a brown wool blanket hanging over the doorway. From beyond the doorway came fragments of angry, threatening voices.

"It's not by our choice, Richard… We have our own families to think about… Wives and Children Wanting to know what was going on, Kahlan tried to push herself up onto her left elbow. Somehow, her arm didn't work the way she had expected it to.

Like a bolt of lightning, pain blasted up the marrow of her bone and exploded through her shoulder.

Gasping against the racking agony of attempted movement, she dropped back before she had managed to lift her shoulder an inch off the bed. Her panting twisted the daggers piercing her sides. She had to will herself to slow her breathing in order to get the stabbing pain under control. As the worst of the torment in her arm and the stitches in her ribs eased, she finally let out a soft moan.

With calculated calm, she gazed down the length of her left arm. The arm was spitted. As soon as she saw it, she remembered that of course it was. She reproached herself for not thinking of it before she had tried to put weight on it. The herbs, she knew, were making her thinking fuzzy.

Fearing to make another careless movement, and since she couldn't sit up, she focused her effort on forcing clarity into her mind.

She cautiously reached up with her right hand and wiped her fingers across the bloom of sweat on her brow, sweat sown by the flash of pain. Her right shoulder socket hurt, but it worked well enough. She was pleased by that triumph, at least. She touched her puffy eyes, understanding then why it had hurt to look toward the door. Gingerly, her fingers explored a foreign landscape of swollen flesh. Her imagination colored it a ghastly black-and-blue. When her fingers brushed cuts on her cheek, hot embers seemed to sear raw, exposed nerves.

She needed no mirror to know she was a terrible sight. She knew, too, how bad it was whenever she looked up into Richard's eyes. She wished she could look good for him if for no other reason than to lift the suffering from his eyes. Reading her thoughts, he would say, "I'm fine. Stop worrying about me and put your mind to getting better."

With a bittersweet longing, Kahlan recalled lying with Richard, their limbs tangled in delicious exhaustion, his skin hot against hers, his big hand resting on her belly as they caught their breath. It was agony wanting to hold him in her arms again and being unable to do so. She reminded herself that it was only a matter of some time and some healing. They were together and that was what mattered. His mere presence was a restorative.

She heard Richard, beyond the blanket over the door, speaking in a tightly controlled voice, stressing his words as if each had cost him a fortune. "We just need some time. ."

The men's voices were heated and insistent as they all began talking at once. "It's not because we want to-you should know that, Richard, you know us…. What if it brings trouble here?. . We've heard about the fighting. You said yourself she's from the Midlands. We can't allow. . we won't. ."

Kahlan listened, expecting the sound of his sword being drawn. Richard had nearly infinite patience, but little tolerance. Cara, his bodyguard, their friend, was no doubt out there, too; Cara had neither patience nor tolerance.

Instead of drawing his sword, Richard said, "I'm not asking anyone to give Me anything I want only to be left alone in a peaceful place where I can care for her. I wanted to be close to Hartland in case she needed something." He paused. "Please. . just until she has a chance to get better."