Stone of Tears

“Because I am going to ask you to help him, and I want you to understand exactly how much you will be hurting him before you agree to it. You must understand what it is you will have to do in order to save him. I won’t trick you into doing it. It must be with your full knowledge. Only in that way will you know how to save him. If you don’t understand, you could fail.

“He is in danger from more than this mark. He is sick with a madness, madness I put there. It will kill him as surely as will the Keeper’s mark.”

“Richard is probably the most sane person I know. He has no madness. It is the mark we must remove.”

“He is marked in other ways: he has the gift. I knew from the moment he came to kill me. I can see it in him now, the aura of it. I know it is killing him, and I know his time is very short. I don’t know how long, only that there is not much time left. We can’t save him from the Keeper just to have him die anyway from the gift.”

Kahlan nodded as she wiped her nose on the back of her hand. The Sisters of the Light say they can save him. They say he must put a collar on to save himself. Richard will not put it on. He told me what you did to him, why he won’t wear a collar. But Richard is not crazy. He will see in the end what must be done, and do it. That is the way he is. He will see the truth.”

Denna shook her head. “What he told you does not scratch the surface of it. You cannot imagine what he has not told you. I know his madness. He will not tell you the rest of it. I must.”

Kahlan’s anger boiled. “I don’t think it would be wise for you to tell me. If he doesn’t want to tell me, then I don’t think I should know it.”

“You must. You must understand him if you are to help him. In some ways, I understand him better than you. I have taken him to the edge of madness, and beyond. I have seen him in a wasteland of insanity.

“I have stood over him and held him there.”

Kahlan glared. She recognized the look in Denna’s eyes when she looked at Richard. She didn’t trust her. “You love him.”

Denna stared at her. “He loves you. I used that love to hurt him. I took him to the brink of death and held him there, on the cusp. Others would bring a man to the edge faster, but they couldn’t hold him there. They always went one step too far, too quickly, and killed them, ending it before they could extract the most exquisite pain, inflict the crudest of the insanity. Darken Rahl chose me because I had a talent for keeping them alive and giving them that pain, and then more, and then even more. Darken Rahl himself taught me.

“I had to sit for hours, sometimes, and wait, knowing that if I touched him just once more with the Agiel, it would be one touch too many; it would kill him. As I sat, waiting for him to recover enough so that I might hurt him more, he would whisper your name, over and over, for hours. He wasn’t even aware he was doing it.

“You were the thread that kept him alive. It was the one thread that allowed me to give him that extra pain. Allowed me to take him further toward death, deeper into madness. I used his love for you to punish him beyond anything otherwise possible.

“As I would sit there, listening to him whisper your name, I wished it would once, just once, have been my name he called out. It never was. I hurt him more for that than for anything else.”

Tears ran down Kahlan’s cheeks, falling from her face. “Please, Denna, I don’t want to hear any more. I can’t bear to hear any more—to know I made it possible for you to do what you did.”

“You must. I have not yet even begun to tell you what you must hear if you want to help him. You must understand how I used magic against him; why he hates the magic within himself. I understand, because what I did to him was also done to me, by Darken Rahl.”

As Kahlan sat shaking, staring blankly at nothing, almost in a trance, Denna began telling her what she had done to Richard. How she used the Agiel. She flinched at the description of every kind of touch, at everything it could do.

Kahlan remembered all too well what its touch felt like, the maddening pain. She learned that what she had felt was the least of it.

She cried as Denna told her how Richard had hung in shackles as she pulled his head back by his hair and made him stay perfectly still while she pushed the Agiel in his ear, or risk damage inside his head. And how he had been able to do it because of his love for Kahlan. She shook, when she heard the horrifying description of what it did to him, what the magic did to him; what his own magic did to him. She couldn’t look at Denna as the other spoke. Couldn’t meet her eyes. And that was only the beginning.

She clutched her stomach and held a trembling hand to her mouth to keep from vomiting as Denna described one unspeakable act after another. Kahlan couldn’t make herself stop crying. She gagged as she closed her eyes tight.

As she listened, she prayed to the good spirits that Denna wouldn’t tell her the one thing she knew she couldn’t bear to hear.