The Third Kingdom

She answered by snatching up his hand and starting out at a trot. Richard started running, rapidly passing her and half pulling her along with him as he raced up the deer trail. As fear overcame her exhaustion, she had no trouble racing to keep up with him. The trail wound haphazardly through the woods as it made its way past trees, steep ledges, and drops, so they didn’t encounter any obstacles in the path. As open as it was, Richard was able to keep moving along the winding deer trail at a rapid pace.

It seemed, though, that no matter how much ground Richard covered, the half people were still coming and getting closer all the time. He noticed that while they were mostly coming in from the direction of the trail off to Richard’s right, some were coming up from behind, back in the direction of the field.

Richard knew that he had to do something to slow them down so that he and Samantha could vanish. He just couldn’t imagine what would slow them. He was only one person, and it sounded like there were hundreds in pursuit. He knew that he could fight them off for a while in the woods, but if their numbers were great enough it would eventually be a losing war.

“How did you know to do that?” he asked Samantha.

“My mother taught me the wind trick,” she said, gulping for air as she was sometimes pulled up and over steeper places by his hand holding hers.

“And the heat to dry out the dirt?”

“I don’t know. I guess it was just something I put together on my own out of desperation.”

Richard smiled down at her. “Inventing magic?”

She smiled back with a breathless “I guess.”

“Well, do you have any magic tricks to use to slow them down so we can escape and disappear into the forest?”

“Sorry, Lord Rahl, but I don’t know what else to do.”

Richard nodded as he pressed onward. The trees around them were becoming larger and farther apart, while at the same time the forest floor began to thin out of underbrush that couldn’t grow in the deep shade. The Dark Lands seemed to have precious little sunlight in the first place, but on the hushed floor in under the massive pines it was darker yet.

Although that made it easier to run, the problem was that as the forest became more open, they could more easily be spotted.

Richard spotted them first, though. He saw ten or twelve of the half people in tattered clothes racing through the woods, dodging trees and jumping rocks and rotting logs as they steadily angled in to intercept Richard and Samantha. The deeper into the woods they went, the more open the forest down below became. The immense pines had no boughs down low. The huge trunks stood in sprawling beds of fern, beside streams, and among exposed rock ledges. The more ground that Richard and Samantha covered, the rockier the ground became and the broader the girth of the trees grew.

To make progress, Richard had to start climbing over the occasional layer of rocks and lines of ridges thrusting up through the leaf litter of the forest floor. The problem was that while he was slowed by the lay of the land, the half people, still some distance off on flatter ground, were able to run faster and close some of the distance.

More than that, though, they ran headlong, utterly careless as they ran, driven by the mad need to devour a soul. Richard saw one man hit a tree square, rebound, and go down. Another tripped jumping over a log. He didn’t rise out of the brush. Another caught a limb across the throat. His feet went flying out and he went down on his back onto rock with a heavy thud. The odd person running would occasionally catch a foot in a hole or under a downed limb and snap their leg.

But for every one who went down, it seemed like a dozen more showed up to join in the chase.

Richard frantically tried to think of a way to slow them, or to gain enough distance that he and Samantha could disappear into the trackless forest. He couldn’t come up with a way to slow so many people. The trick with the wind that Samantha had used to such great effect in the open field would not work in the forest. It might be inconvenient and distracting, but it wouldn’t stop their pursuers.

Richard had a sudden idea. He looked over at Samantha running beside him. Having to take two or three steps for every one if his strides, her feet seemed to fly over the ground, sometimes not even touching as he occasionally pulled her over an obstacle as they raced through the woods.

“That thing you did with heat, to dry the dirt and make dust, how did you do that?”

“Just gathered heat out of the air,” she said, sounding a bit perplexed by the question. “It was pretty simple.”

“Did your mother teach you to gather heat like that? Did she teach you how to make things hot?”

Samantha made a face. “I don’t know. A little, I guess. She taught me a lot of things growing up. Not necessarily a lesson, just little things, like pulling heat out of the air and putting it someplace.”

“Did she teach you how to heat rocks to keep you warm on cold nights?”