It was a smile of compassion and determination laced with madness.
“Yes, Mother Confessor. I am all right, now. Finally, things are about to be right again.”
Kahlan ignored the strange feeling and took a step forward to throw her arms around the woman. Cara felt cold as ice. The Mord-Sith reached up with her free hand and half returned the hug, then parted.
“I have to go, now,” Cara said in a voice like a mother speaking tenderly to a child.
Kahlan frowned. “Go? Go where? You’re home now.”
Cara shook her head. “Not yet, but I soon will be.”
With icy fingers, she gently touched Kahlan’s cheek. She turned then toward the bed for the first time as if she had always known that Richard was there. At the side of the bed, standing over him, she looked back over her shoulder.
“Don’t weep for me, Mother Confessor. Know that I love you both, and that I do this by my own choice alone. Know that I will be at peace. This is the way it is meant to be, the way it must be.”
Kahlan wanted to ask what she was talking about, but she couldn’t seem to find her voice.
Looking down, Cara spread her arms above Richard. It reminded Kahlan of nothing so much as a graceful bird spreading its wings. Or a good spirit.
Kahlan blinked at what she was seeing. The Mord-Sith seemed to have a glow about her, or rather within her. White robes made of light, almost like wings, draped from her arms.
There seemed to be a spirit form made of light in the same place as Cara. Kahlan knew that it was not Cara she was seeing. The features were similar in their graceful femininity, and yet they were different.
Cara bent over and placed her Agiel, hanging from the gold chain, around Richard’s neck. She cupped his cheek with a hand for a moment, just looking at him as she and the form made of light smiled lovingly at him.
And then she leaned forward and pressed her mouth to his, as if kissing him, but it was not a kiss.
Nicci stepped up beside Kahlan and whispered, “She is giving him the breath of life.”
Kahlan nodded. Richard had told her how a Mord-Sith shared her victim’s breath while he was on the cusp of death. It was a sacred thing to a Mord-Sith to share his pain, share his breath of life as he slipped to the brink of death, as if to view with lust the forbidden sight of what lay beyond in the next world. Sharing, when the time came to kill him, his very death by experiencing his final breath of life, and taking it for her own. Kahlan imagined that to some, it was a grotesquely intimate trophy–part of the madness of the Mord-Sith’s world and life.
Richard knew because Denna had done that to him when he had been her captive, used the breath of life to keep him alive, keep him on that cusp of death to prolong his agony.
But Kahlan had also seen Cara do that to a woman who had just died. Kahlan had at first thought it was some outrageous ritual of a Mord-Sith, but Cara had told her that she could sometimes give a person back the breath of life.
Cara now breathed that breath into Richard, his chest rising as his lungs filled with the breath she gave him, with her own breath of life.
Cara pulled away a few inches, Richard’s chest slowly sinking as she drew another deep breath. Once again she pressed her mouth over Richard’s, hand covering his nose, filling his lungs with her deep, life-giving breath.
“What are you talking about?” Red whispered from right behind them.
“She is the living bridge,” Nicci said, tears running down her face as well. “She is the one the spirits said he would need in order to return.”
Kahlan felt a spike of hope mixed with fear for Cara.
“That is a spirit with her, helping her,” Red whispered to them.
Nicci nodded. “It is the spirit of a Mord-Sith I saw protecting him in the underworld.”
“Denna,” Kahlan whispered, choking on her tears, her chin quivering, hardly able to believe what she was seeing.
What she was seeing was a good spirit joined with Cara in purpose. It was a sight of hope, of love, and at the same time it was horrifying to know what it meant for Cara.
“This is her choice,” Nicci said as if reading Kahlan’s mind. “She is doing what she must, and doing it of her own free will.”
CHAPTER 20
Richard opened his eyes as he gasped in a breath.
The world of life seemed to explode into existence.
Out of nothingness, bright light, shapes, and colors began to materialize all around him. At first he sensed only gossamer traces of something more; then tangible matter began to solidify into shape and substance, as if it had always been in the same place at the same time as the void where he seemed to have been for so long. It felt confusing to not have realized what had been there all along.
He began to recognize walls, a ceiling, a floor. There were now limits to the space around him where there had been none. He blinked at candlelight that was too bright, the colors too vivid. The air felt heavy and thick, but he breathed it in greedily, letting it fill his lungs in a heady rush.
With each breath he drew and then let out, he felt himself exhaling an alien void, breaking the connection to that other world. With every breath he let out, that void dissipated, dissolving away as life came back to take its place.
This was where he belonged. He could smell the nearly infinite variety of the world of life, he could taste it. Some of the smells were sweet perfume he recognized and he relished, while some was a repulsive stench. It all mixed together into the diversity that was the world of life.
The air filling his lungs felt luxurious, intoxicating. He couldn’t get enough of it. It was wonderful. It felt as if he had needed to get his breath forever. At last it was coming freely. He could feel his pulse moving through him with every deep breath he drew. Even so, to an extent it was still an unfamiliar effort to breathe.
“Richard!”
Richard smiled, then, at the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life. Kahlan was leaning in over him. She was the sweet bouquet he had smelled.
“Are you all right?” she asked, tears running down her cheeks, her voice a mix of panic and expectant joy, as if she was too afraid to believe he was really with her, and afraid he might unexpectedly leave again.
“I was with the dead.”
She nodded, half laughing, half crying as tears continued to overflow from her beautiful green eyes.
“I know.” She grasped his face in her hands a moment, as if unable to believe it was really him. She looked back then and seized Nicci’s hand. She pulled the sorceress forward. “Nicci went to the underworld to find a way to bring you back.”
Richard put a hand to his forehead as he saw it all again, but this time in his mind’s eye. “The dark ones. I remember them.” Gooseflesh tingled down his arms. “They were all around me.”
Nicci nodded. “I know. I saw them.”
Richard looked up into Kahlan’s beautiful eyes, eyes that also revealed the inner beauty of her soul. “Zedd was there, Kahlan. He was somehow meant to be there to help me, to help free me from the grasp of Sulachan’s dark ones. He let me know that it was all to a purpose, that his time in this world had come to its end, and he had needed to move on to be where he could help me.”
A woman with strange red hair standing behind Nicci was nodding. “It was all part of the flow of time. It was all meant to be.” Her gray dress seemed to be moving as if in a light breeze, even though the air in the room was still. “Events happened as they must in order for you to return. You were not yet meant to be finished with this world. Prophecy yet lives.”