“So you’re back to that, are you?” Richard folded his arms across his chest. “Back to the nonsense about prophecy?”
“It is hardly nonsense. Fathers wed to Confessors are supposed to have been taken by her power so that if by chance she happened to bear a boy, the husband would without question end its life. You changed all that by finding a way to be with her without being taken by her power. As a result, neither of you has the will or the strength to kill the tainted children the two of you conceive.”
She paused a moment as her grip on Richard’s throat tightened. “I have the will, I have the strength, and I am willing to use it. I gave you my word on that. I gave you a witch’s oath on that. And you both defied me.”
“It’s our lives,” Richard said in a surprisingly calm voice, as if trying to reason with her. “It’s our children’s lives. You have no dominion over any of our lives and no right to deny our children the right to live their lives. I will protect those children, as will Kahlan. We will teach them to be good people who care about others.”
Kahlan could see that it was like trying to reason with a stone wall.
“You two have selfishly put your own wishes ahead of the greater good. Once they are old enough, the power those two children possess will be profound. Your teaching will not be able to control such corrupting power.”
Richard’s features hardened. “You need to stop this right now, Shota. I will not allow you to harm us or our children.”
Shota slowly shook her head as she gazed into his eyes. “Better you battle the Keeper of the underworld himself, than me.”
Richard gripped her wrist and pulled her hand away from his throat. “You think so much of yourself, do you? We already faced your witch and your oath in the form of Moravaska Michec. You should know that he died with my hands around his throat and Kahlan twisting her knife in his heart.”
Shota flicked her hand dismissively. “A warlock. Such men are a poor excuse for a true witch.”
“He was a witch man,” Kahlan said. “You are a witch woman. A witch is a witch.”
“Hardly,” she huffed. “Witch women and witch men are from two entirely different lines. A witch man is not a witch by being born of a witch woman. Similar to Confessors, witch women don’t give birth to boys. At least, none that live long. A witch man is the son of a witch man and a woman with no power. He does not carry the same heredity and power as a witch woman.
“While they like to think of themselves as more than they are, and while they certainly have great power and can cause a great deal of trouble, they are but a mere shadow of a true witch. His power was but a flea on the back of a wolf compared to mine. I let him have a try at enforcing my witch’s oath, but in the end, he was an inferior witch and proved himself as much.
“He originally attached himself to Darken Rahl because he intuitively grasped the reality of his limitations as a witch and so he sought to add to his power through his association with a powerful wizard. Darken Rahl allowed him to indulge his sick desires because he was useful in the same way a vicious dog can be useful. Michec was a cruel man whom people feared—with good reason. But he made the mistake of thinking that because people feared him, that made him a more important witch than he actually was.
“With Darken Rahl gone, he sought an alliance with the Glee for the same reasons he had served Darken Rahl. He believed it made him a more powerful witch. His deluded beliefs ultimately proved to be his undoing.”
“He was witch enough,” Richard said, drawing Shota’s glare away from Kahlan. “He was more powerful than you give him credit for. And we stopped him from carrying out your witch’s oath, just as we will stop you if we have to.”
Shota showed him an icy smile. “You think so, child? You can’t begin to grasp how wrong you are about that. Michec groveled before me, the grand witch, as all witches do. He swore to carry out my oath, as all witches must. In his failure, he proved he was not a witch worthy of the task or my protection.”
“I don’t care what, in your vanity, you think of witch men,” Richard said. “But I do care about your need to continue to pursue your nonsense about our children and what you saw while looking into the flow of time. Prophecy is dead. I ended it because prophecy is a corrupting influence and it was a danger to the world of life. Your blind obsession with it is proof of its corrupting nature.”
Shota lifted her chin indignantly. “It was a true vision into the flow of time, into how events will unfold.”
“The nature of prophecy is that it looks into possibilities that branch out endlessly from root events as the world moves forward and continually changes. You plucked one leaf from the tree of prophecy while ignoring the entire forest.”
“The world may have changed, but the flow of time did not.”
“You can’t see into the flow of time anymore, can you?”
Shota squinted at him. “No, thanks to you. You destroyed one of our most valuable tools, a tool that belongs to witch women.”
“It did not belong to witch women. It was an expression of possible futures belonging in the underworld. Once it was brought to the world of life, witches long ago latched on to it in order to deceitfully gain power for themselves. It was an underworld force that had never belonged in this world.”
Shota took a threatening step closer to him. “I used the flow of time to know how certain events flow and unfold. I used it in the past to help you.”
“And had we followed your advice born of prophecy, then on more than one occasion, we would all be dead by now.”
“You were smart enough to use the prophecy I gave you to succeed in ways neither I nor you could foresee. But without that prophecy, you might not have saved anyone. That is part of the way the flow of time works. As you say, it branches into many possible futures.
“I know far more about that flow of time and prophecy than you ever will, and that flow foretold that if you have a child with this Confessor it will be a monster. Such a child would risk bringing back the terror of the dark times, and worse, considering the power these twins will be born with. They will be bonded as twins and by the power they would be born with.
“But you refuse to heed that warning of a dark future and instead would ignorantly visit upon the world a male Confessor. A male Confessor! You are selfish children, the both of you, without any care for how what you are doing would destroy lives of so many others if these monsters were to live.”
She looked pointedly over at Kahlan, then turned back to Richard. “I won’t.”
Richard lifted his hands out in frustration. “You don’t understand prophecy the way you so smugly think you do, Shota.”
She arched an eyebrow. “You have used prophecy to survive.”
“Yes, because prophecy was something that only a wizard with Subtractive Magic can rightly understand. That’s because prophecy is an underworld element. I alone understood its changeable nature and thus its limitations. I acted within those limitations, not in defiance of them.”
She dismissed his words with a flick of a hand. “This is a different form of prophecy, meant for a witch woman only.”
“Prophecy is prophecy, no matter how you wish to dress it up.”
Shota considered his words only briefly before ignoring them. “I used the flow of time to see that if you two conceived a child, it would be a monster. And now, you have conceived twins, the worst possible sign of the terrors to come.”
Richard sighed in exasperation. “We’re going around in circles. You said that we would conceive a monster, right?”