“Can you say for sure that the boy won’t have both powers? Can you say that the girl won’t? Can you promise me that?”
Shale hesitated. “I admit that I am not able to tell that much. I only know that they are both gifted.”
“Well,” Kahlan said, leaning close, “Shota will not wait to find out. She will simply come to see them dead. She only agreed to Richard’s demand that she let me live on the condition that we don’t have children. Richard never agreed to her demand.
“Because he never agreed to her demand, she warned him that she would kill me and the child if I ever became pregnant. Even if I do live long enough to give birth to them, she will come after these children and kill them both. She will be relentless.
“Shota is a witch woman. She knows things. She finds out things. I don’t know how, but she does. For all I know, maybe she reads things in the stars.”
“The stars are now in a different place in the sky,” Shale reminded her.
“Yes, well, if I know Shota, she will somehow come to know that I’m pregnant with Richard’s children. Shota made it abundantly clear that she believes mixing different gifts creates monsters.” Kahlan leaned toward the sorceress to make her point. “You don’t know what witch women are like.”
Shale cocked her head as she narrowed her eyes. “What do you mean?”
“Well, for one thing, they are profoundly dangerous.”
Shale’s face didn’t reveal what she might be thinking. “Is that so?”
“Yes.”
Kahlan felt something brushing against her ankle. She looked down and froze.
There was a large white snake hissing, red tongue flicking the air, curling its fat body around her ankles, locking them together as it flexed and contracted.
Kahlan’s gaze shot up to Shale. “You’re a witch woman?”
Shale smiled in a way that Kahlan didn’t like.
Now she understood that mysterious shadow of something behind the beauty.
3
“Indeed I am.”
Kahlan’s eyes widened. “That’s not possible. You’re a sorceress.”
“My father had the gift. He was a wizard. My mother was a witch woman. My father’s gift passed down to make me a sorceress, my mother’s makes me a witch woman. I am both.”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Kahlan said, her eyes still wide.
“Besides the fact that fewer and fewer gifted people were being born, making the gifted rarer all the time, the House of Rahl periodically purged D’Hara of the threat purportedly posed by the gifted still remaining. Richard’s father, Darken Rahl, was one of the worst of the lot. He denounced the gifted as criminals and called for them to be eliminated for the good of all.”
Kahlan, of course, knew all that. Darken Rahl viewed anyone gifted as a potential threat to his rule. It was, in fact, why she had crossed the boundary into Westland looking for help to stop him. That was how she met Richard.
“Darken Rahl found a way through the boundary and put the Midlands, my people, under the boot of his tyranny,” Kahlan said. “He killed any gifted he could find. He hunted down and killed all the Confessors. Only I escaped. That made me the last of the Confessor line.”
“That man terrorized the gifted of every kind,” Shale said with a sad nod.
“So how did your parents escape his grasp?”
“They fled in fear for their lives and the life of their unborn child.” Shale smiled in a sly manner. “The House of Rahl never went looking for such gifted people in the Northern Waste; it was too far away and too sparsely populated for him to bother with. Because Darken Rahl was preoccupied with his war to take over the world, populated areas were where his attention was focused, not such remote and useless places as the Northern Waste. My parents lived there in peaceful isolation, and there they had me.
“In me, their two abilities mixed together to make me both a sorceress and a witch woman. Two gifts mixed together.” She leaned a little closer. “A monster, as you described it.”
Kahlan forced herself not to look down at the snake compressing her ankles, preventing her from moving. “That’s what Shota called such people, not me, and she was only talking about any child that Richard and I would have. She was talking about our gifts being mixed.”
Shale’s tone took on the quality of an interrogation. “So then, unlike most people, you don’t think me a monster because I have two different gifts mixed together?” She arched an eyebrow. “Or think I’m trouble because I am a witch woman?”
“Of course not.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“You saved my life,” Kahlan said. “You didn’t have to get involved. You didn’t have to work as hard as you did to save me. You could have let me die and no one would be the wiser. You have proven you are no monster by your actions.
“My children wouldn’t be, either, just because a wizard is their father and a Confessor their mother.”
“Well, while you are right that witch women are quite dangerous, I am one witch woman who wants you to have those children. Just as my parents fled the tyranny of Richard’s ancestors who tried to eliminate the gifted, I, too, want to live in a world where magic exists, a world where we all, despite the unique nature of our individual abilities, can have a future without a fear of being persecuted for who and what we are. A world at peace.”
“That’s what Richard and I want as well. You lived far removed from the war just ended, but that is what we both have fought so hard for, what we have both been committed to, in fact what the D’Haran Empire is all about.”
“That’s reassuring to hear.” Shale didn’t sound completely convinced. “But for that to happen you must have these children. They are the hope for magic to survive in our world, and in turn, for our way of life to survive. You must see to it that they grow and carry your power and Richard’s gift into the future.”
Kahlan felt relieved by at least that much of it, but the snake around her ankles had her not only unable to move, but afraid to try. She did her best not to think about that fat snake squeezing her ankles, even though she could feel the cold scales sliding across her bare skin.
“You are more than a sorceress and a witch woman. You are Shale. Without you I would have died, and the hope of passing our gifts on to future generations would have died with me. I would like very much for you to see my children not only when they are born, but when they grow into their power.”
Shale’s intense look finally eased, and she nodded. “Ah. Well then, I guess the snake needs to go.”
“I think that would be for the best.” Kahlan swallowed. “If I die of fright, I won’t be able to have any children.”
Shale let out a soft laugh. She gently rolled her hand to the side while bowing her head as if suggesting Kahlan look again. Kahlan glanced down. The fat white snake was gone. She let out a deep sigh of relief.
She didn’t know if witch women could make real things appear, or if they only made you believe they were there. She knew that Shota could change her appearance as well as make things appear. There was no way to know what she actually looked like, or if you were looking at the real Shota. For that matter, now she didn’t know if she was looking at the real Shale. That might explain the beauty overlaying the ageless wisdom. But Kahlan did know that Shota’s snakes, at least, were real enough that their venom would have killed her.
With a finger, Shale lifted Kahlan’s chin.
“It wasn’t my intent to threaten you or frighten you. I simply wanted you to see that just because that witch woman, Shota, said that mixing magic creates monsters, that is not necessarily true.”
“I think that sometimes it results in someone quite remarkable,” Kahlan said.