The pillars of creation

"All the time. Whenever they found out some thread of news about you, as a child fathered by Darken Rahl, they perceived you, and reported you, as newborn. When you were two months, ten months, four years, five years, six years old, they were all still looking for a newborn, despite how long they had known of you. The spell slowed their perception of time, in relation to you alone, so that they were always looking for a newborn baby, rather than a girl growing up.

"In this way, until you were six, I hid you right under their noses. That threw everyone's calculations off by six years. To this day, anyone who suspected your existence would believe you to be around fourteen or so, when you are actually more than twenty, because they thought you were newborn when the spell ended, when you were six. That's when they began to mark your age."

Jennsen rose up onto her knees. "But that could work. You must only do it again. If you were to cast a spell like that for me now, like you did when I was little, it would work the same, wouldn't it? Then they wouldn't know I was grown up. They wouldn't be hunting me. They would be looking for a newborn. Please, Althea, just do that again. Do what you did once before."

From the corner of her eye, Jennsen saw Friedrich, now sitting at his bench in a back room, turn away. By the look on Althea's face, Jennsen knew that she had somehow said the wrong thing, and precisely what the sorceress had planned on her saying Jennsen realized that this had been a trap of sorts, and she had just talked herself right into it.

"I was young and masterful in my skill with magic," Althea said. In her dark eyes glimmered the spark of recollection of that grand time in her life. "In thousands of years, few had been through the great barrier and back. I had, I had studied with the Sisters of the Light, had audiences with their Prelate, and with the great prophet. I had accomplished such things as few others had. I was well over a hundred years old and still young, with a handsome and charming new husband who believed I could walk to the moon and back if the fancy struck me.

"I was well over a hundred years of age, yet still youthful, with a full life ahead of me; wise with age, yet still young. I was clever, oh so clever, and powerful in my gift. I was experienced, knowledgeable, and attractive, with many friends and a circle of people who hung on my every worldly pronouncement."

With long graceful fingers, Althea pulled up the hem of her skirt, uncovering her legs.

Jennsen drew back at the sight.

She saw, then, why Althea had not stood before; her legs were withered, deformed, shriveled bones covered with a dry veneer of pallid flesh, as if they had died years ago, but never been buried because the rest of her was still living. Jennsen didn't know how the woman could keep from screaming in constant anguish.

"You were six," the sorceress said in a terribly calm and quiet voice, when Darken Rahl finally discovered what I had done. He was a very ingenious man. Much more shrewd, as it turned out, than a young sorceress of a hundred-odd years in age.

"I only had time to tell my sister to warn your mother, before he caught me."

Jennsen remembered running. When she was little, she and her mother had fled the palace. It had been night. It had been shortly after a visitor had come to their door. In the dark hall, there had been whispering. And then they had fled.

"But, he… he didn't kill you?" Jennsen swallowed. "He showed you mercy-he spared your life."

Althea chuckled without humor. It was an empty laugh at encountering a profoundly naive notion.

"Darken Rahl did not always believe in simply killing those who displeased him. He preferred, instead, that they should live a good long time; death would have been a release, you see. If they were dead, how could they regret, how could they suffer, how could they serve as an example to others?

"You cannot imagine, and I could not begin to tell you, the terror of such a capture, of the long walk to be taken before him, of what it was like being in the grip of that man, of what it was like to look up into his calm face, his cold blue eyes, and know you were at the mercy of a man who had none. You cannot imagine what it was like to know in that single terrible instant, that everything you were, everything you had, everything you had hoped for in life, was about to forever change.

"The pain was what you might expect, I suppose. Perhaps my legs can partly attest to it."

"I'm so sorry," Jennsen whispered through her tears, hands pressed over her heartache.

"But the pain was not the worst of it. Not the worst by far. He stripped me of everything I had, but took for granted. He did to my power, to my gift, worse than he did to my legs. You just cannot see it-you are blind to it. Every day, I see it. That hurt, I assure you, you cannot begin to imagine.