“So, what did he say?”
“He said he was only following orders—the ‘queen’s’ orders.”
Shale frowned darkly at him from across the fire. “What queen?”
Richard shrugged. “I don’t know. So then you have no idea, either?”
She pushed her dark hair back over her shoulder. “Not a clue.”
“He also said, ‘If you think this witch’s oath begins and ends with me, you are a fool.’”
“Ah. I can see why that would be bothering you and why you wanted to know more about me.” Creases tightened between her eyebrows. “But I thought it was his witch’s oath that he was going to kill us.”
“Apparently not. He said it didn’t begin with him, and it wouldn’t end with him. I think he was telling the truth.”
“That is disturbing.” She considered a moment. “What do you think it could mean?”
“I don’t know.” Richard looked up with that raptor gaze of his. “He said to ask you.”
Shale looked startled. “Me! How should I know?”
Richard shrugged as he pulled off a strip of meat. “That’s what he said. What do you know about witch’s oaths?”
Shale rested her elbows on her knees as she thought it over. “I didn’t know any witch women other than my mother. She never spoke of a witch’s oath, as such. What do you think he meant?”
Richard shrugged. “From the way he put it, as if it was something quite solemn and serious, it sounded to me like he was saying that once a witch gives an oath, it is somehow the duty of every witch to see to it that such an oath is carried out.”
Again, Shale looked surprised. “I can see why you were disturbed by the things he said. But I’m afraid I just don’t know anything about such oaths.” Her eyes narrowed with a memory. “Now that you mention it, though, my mother sometimes said that she had given an oath to help people, and that as a witch woman it was my duty to follow that oath. Out of respect for her, I often felt compelled to help people. Do you think that was what she meant? That it was a witch’s duty to follow such an oath?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know a whole lot about witch women,” he said. “I was hoping you could fill in some of the blanks.”
“Sorry. It’s as puzzling to me as it is to you.”
“Did you see the glint in his eye, after he was dead?”
She paused her chewing. “Glint? No, I saw no such thing.”
“I did,” Kahlan said, suddenly feeling alarmed.
Richard looked over at her. “You saw it too?” When she nodded, his brow drew down. “Then it wasn’t my imagination.”
“Maybe I was just too far away to see it,” Shale suggested.
Richard fed another stick of wood into the fire. “Whatever it was, he is nothing but ashes, now.”
Kahlan couldn’t help wondering if such a witch’s oath somehow lived on.
33
“Don’t you think it’s too early for me to be showing?” Kahlan asked the sorceress.
Shale glanced over from atop her horse. “There is no rule about such things. Different women start showing at different stages of a pregnancy. Some show much earlier than others.”
“There was that strange wood,” Cassia said from behind, “so it may actually not be as early as you think.”
Kahlan cast a worried look back over her shoulder. “What do you mean?”
Cassia arced an eyebrow as she leaned forward in her saddle. “Tell me how long you think we were there, going in circles?”
Kahlan thought about it a moment. “I’m not sure.”
“Exactly,” Cassia said. “Last night when we made camp, I took stock of all of our supplies. I thought we should have plenty still left, but we’ve used up almost all of them while we were still in that strange, misty wood.”
Kahlan stared back over her shoulder. “That seems unlikely.”
“Check them yourself if you don’t believe me. With as much as we took, they should have lasted us all the way to Aydindril, even going the long way. But they’re almost all gone and we haven’t yet even crossed the mountains.”
When Kahlan thought about it, she realized that Richard had been having to find them a lot of food to supplement the travel supplies. She had thought that maybe it was because she had been eating as much as any three of them put together. But with the unborn babies, she seemed to need to eat a lot.
The deer meat was long gone. They had fortunately been able to catch a lot of fish, as well as rabbit, pheasant, a few turkeys, and even a big snake. Kahlan hadn’t eaten any of that, though. Because of the food they had managed to catch along the way, they hadn’t needed to rely solely on their traveling supplies, so Kahlan hadn’t paid much attention to them.
Not only had they been catching a lot of the food they needed, but they had needed to spend considerable time to get that food. Fishing took time. Tracking animals took time. Hunting and cleaning their catches took time. Richard had taught all the Mord-Sith how to make snares for them to set at night, and while often successful, that took time as well.
“It can only mean that we were going in circles in those woods a lot longer than we thought,” Cassia said.
Kahlan looked over at Shale. “What do you think?”
Shale sighed unhappily. “To tell you the truth, I’ve been wondering the same thing Cassia is wondering.”
Kahlan didn’t know what had gotten into the two of them. “You mean because of how big I am?”
“Yes, but it’s more than that.” Shale gave her a sidelong look. “I don’t know how to put my finger on it, but there was something strange about those woods.”
“Well, of course there was,” Kahlan said. “We kept going around in circles.”
“There’s more to it than that alone.” Before she went on, Shale leaned forward a little and patted her horse’s neck when it began dancing around impatiently. “Now that we’re out of there and at last into different country, hilly country with views of the mountains to the west and such, I realize that it wasn’t just foggy in that forest. Thinking back on it, I realize now that my mind felt foggy as well.
“I don’t know how to explain it, but my connection with my gift felt … different, somehow. I didn’t even realize it until much later. I recognize now that I wasn’t feeling myself back there or thinking clearly. I don’t know exactly how to explain what I was feeling, but I guess I would say I felt disconnected from my gift. That may be why I didn’t realize that there was a problem with those strange woods. Something was shrouding that sense.”
Vale caught a red maple leaf as it drifted down and held it as she gestured around at the nearly bare tree branches and the decaying leaves on the ground. “And doesn’t it seem too early to all of you for the leaves to have all fallen?”
Kahlan realized that the leaf Vale had caught was one of the last few colorful leaves that had hung on to the bitter end of the season. Most had long since fallen. The bare branches and the chilly bite to the air made her keenly aware of what had been making her vaguely uneasy. Somehow they had jumped right over autumn into early winter. The change to autumn came a little early up in the mountains, but they weren’t yet up in the high country, and it wasn’t changing to early autumn, it was already early winter.
“We had to have lost more time back in those woods than we thought,” Shale said. “Somehow autumn vanished behind us and winter is already bearing down.”
“It was a strange place,” Rikka confirmed from behind. “I feel like I didn’t really wake up until Lord Rahl got us out of there.”
“Speaking of Lord Rahl,” Nyda said, using the opportunity to walk her horse up closer, “what do you think could be taking him so long?”
Kahlan couldn’t imagine. She had been trying not to worry about that very thing.