Kahlan turned in her saddle and looked back at Shale. “How long until I give birth?”
The sorceress was ready with an answer. “From my experience, the babies will come any day now. It is difficult to say precisely when, but I don’t think it will be longer than three or four days, at most.”
“You’ve been awfully quiet for the last few days,” Richard said. “What’s wrong?”
Kahlan felt tears well up. Fears she had been keeping to herself wouldn’t let her have a moment of peace. Even when she slept, those fears haunted her. And now those fears were about to be realized.
Richard, right beside her, pulled in the reins and rested his wrists on the horn of his saddle. When he glanced back at the others, they waited back where they were.
“Kahlan, what’s wrong? I know you and I know that something is bothering you. This should be a joyous time. Our children are about to be born. We have reached the Keep, where they will be safe.”
She nodded, too ashamed of her fears to speak. Richard’s words only seemed to bring it to the surface, making the tears start to flow all the harder.
Richard leaned over in his saddle to get closer so he could speak privately, assuming it was something she didn’t want the others to hear. “Kahlan, what’s wrong? You can tell me.”
Kahlan couldn’t bear to tell him. How could she? These were his children, too, the children of D’Hara, the children the world needed.
Or were they?
“Kahlan, please tell me what’s bothering you,” he pressed in a whisper.
She couldn’t hold it back from him any longer.
“You know what’s wrong. Shota said that one of our children will be a monster. She saw into the flow of time. While she got her prophecies wrong in the sense of how they would come about, you know as well as I that in the end they always proved true. She was positive about this one because it was so clear-cut. I want these children so badly, but I’m terrified that one of them is going to be the monster she predicted.”
Richard relaxed a bit. “Is that all?”
She wiped a tear from her cheek. “Is that all? It’s everything. It’s everything we have wanted, it’s everything our world needs, and yet one of them is destined to be a monster who will destroy lives.”
He smiled a little. “I don’t believe in destiny any more than I believed in blindly following prophecy, and neither do you.”
“This is not destiny. This is a vision from a witch woman who had seen it in the flow of time. Now that their birth approaches, I can’t bear the thought of one of them being that monster that we bring into the world.”
Richard took a deep breath and let it out as he considered a bit. “Do you think me a monster?” he finally asked her.
“You?” She frowned at him. “No. What does that have to do with it?”
Richard shrugged. “Darken Rahl was a monster.”
“So what?”
“His father, Panis Rahl, was a monster, as was his father, and his father before that. The House of Rahl was a whole line of tyrants. Every Rahl who became a Lord Rahl was a monster and each bred a monster for a son.”
“What does that have to do with it?” she said.
“I am the son of a monster. By that logic, I should be a monster as well.”
“But you were raised by a good man and so you didn’t turn out to be like Darken Rahl.”
Richard winked at her. “Exactly.”
Unsure, Kahlan squinted at him. “What’s your point?”
Richard smiled. “Had Shota looked into her flow of time when I was conceived, what do you suppose she would have seen? Yet another monster in the making. Prophecy, after all, is in many ways merely the essence of potential. Though it would have been possible, I’m not the monster she would have seen. Monsters aren’t necessarily bred and born to be monsters. Evil people are mostly created by how they grow up—either by the terrible way they were raised, or by the terrible things they experienced that shaped them into who they turn out to be.
“Our children will grow up to be good people because we will raise them to be good people.”
Kahlan stared at him a moment. “Are you so sure of that?”
His smile widened. “Kahlan, if it wasn’t true, then I would be a monster the way all of the men in the Rahl line of rule were monsters. But I’m not like them because I was raised differently, by a good man.”
She gave him a look from under her brow. “Your brother was a monster.”
Richard drew a deep breath. “True enough. But I don’t think it was because of birth or that he was predestined to be a monster. I think he was weak and didn’t use his head. He made a lot of bad choices. His friends and the people he associated with encouraged those bad choices. In a way, they urged him on to be the evil person he became. But I don’t think he was born a monster the way Shota meant.”
Kahlan finally smiled over at him as she wiped away the last of her tears. “You always make me feel better when I think things are hopeless. Please don’t ever stop making me feel better.”
Richard bowed his head to her. “By your command, my lady, it shall be so. Now, can we get you into the Keep so that you can bring our two children into the world?”
Kahlan leaned over and touched his arm. “You are going to be a good father.”
At that, they started out again. The rest followed behind.
46
Kahlan rode close beside Richard as they crossed the stone bridge. She felt as if a weight of dread had been lifted from her. She had been secretly terrified that Shota’s prediction that one of their children would be a monster would turn out to be true, but she hadn’t wanted to burden Richard with her fears. The world had seemed a dark and threatening place. She had felt doomed, without a way out.
Richard had just made the sun come out again. Her spirits had been cheered to the point that dread suddenly turned to expectant joy at the thought of the fast-approaching birth. In the past, Shota’s prophecies had always turned out to be true, but in ways that never brought about the kind of doom she had predicted. With this one, like the others, they could work to make sure that things turned out well.
He offered her a smile, reassuring her, but she could see in his gray eyes that he was worried about things other than one of their children being a monster. She knew that, like her, he was worried about the lives of all the people down in the city once the Golden Goddess found out where they were. They both knew that she would use the lives of those people to try to force them to give themselves up.
On the one hand, she felt dreadful that their coming to Aydindril could result in the death of so many people in the city she loved. But on the other hand, if they didn’t retreat to the safety of the Keep, then they and their children would end up being hunted and eventually slaughtered. If that happened, then in the long run, everyone in the world would be naked before the onslaught of the Glee and everyone in their world would be hunted to extinction.
That was always the dilemma with hostages, but the end result of giving in was why Kahlan never submitted to hostage negotiations. As cruel as it seemed on the surface, sacrificing hostages was for the greater good.
She hated that such a phrase was what Shota had used, but in this case, it was the cold reality. Giving in to such evil only resulted in more death in the end.
At least at the People’s Palace there had been a lot of soldiers of the First File to help protect people. Even so a great many of those people had died. Here, there was no large force like that. There was only Richard, and he couldn’t be everywhere at once.