Phantom Read Free Page B

it was a lie, but her heart would not allow the truth.
    The slender slip of a girl pawed at Kahlan’s arms. It must have seemed to her as if she were being held by a spirit clutching at her from the underworld. If she even saw Kahlan, Kahlan knew that the girl would forget her before her mind could transform perception into cognition. Likewise, Kahlan’s words of comfort would evaporate from the girl’s mind before they had a chance to even begin to be comprehended. Within an instant after seeing her, no one ever remembered that Kahlan existed.
    Except Orlan. And now he was dead.
    Kahlan hugged the terrified girl tight. She didn’t know if it wasn’t really more for her own sake than the girl’s. At that moment, keeping the girl away from the terror of what was befalling her parents was all Kahlan could do. The girl, for her part, writhed madly in Kahlan’s arms, trying to twist away, as if she were being held by a monster intent on bloody murder. Kahlan hated adding to her terror, but letting her go out into the other room would be worse.
    Lightning flashed again, making Kahlan glance to the window. The window was large enough for her to get through. It was dark outside, and the dense forest lay tight up to the buildings. She had long legs. She was strong and quick. She knew that if she chose, she could, in a few heartbeats, be through the window and into the thick of the woods.
    But she had tried to escape the Sisters before. She knew that neither night nor woods would conceal her from women with such dark talents. Kneeling there in the dark, her arms holding the girl in a tight embrace, Kahlan began to tremble. The mere contemplation of an attempt at escape was enough to make her brow bead in sweat for fear that such a notion would unleash within her the embedded constraints. Her head swam dizzily with the memory of past attempts, memories of the agony. She couldn’t take such suffering again—not when it was to no purpose. Escaping the Sisters was impossible.
    When she glanced up, Kahlan saw the dark shadow of a Sister descending the stairs.
    “Ulicia,” the woman called out. It was Sister Cecilia’s voice. “The rooms upstairs are all empty. There are no guests.”
    In the front room Sister Ulicia growled a dark curse.
    The shadow of Sister Cecilia turned from the stairs to fill the doorway, like death itself turning its withering gaze on the living. Beyond, Emmy wailed and wept. In her confusion, grief, pain, and terror she was unable to answer Sister Ulicia’s shouted questions.
    “Do you want your mother to die?” Sister Cecilia asked from the doorway in that deadly calm voice of hers.
    She was no less cruel or dangerous than Sister Armina, or Sister Ulicia, but she had a quiet, composed way of speaking that was somehow more terrifying than Sister Ulicia’s screaming. Sister Armina’s straightforward threats were simple and sincere but delivered with a bit more bile. Sister Tovi had a kind of sick glee in her approach to discipline and even torture. When any of them wanted something, though, Kahlan had long ago learned that to deny them would only bring nearly unimaginable suffering, and in the end what they had wanted in the first place.
    “Do you?” Sister Cecilia repeated with calm directness.
    “Answer her,” Kahlan whispered in the girl’s ear. “Please, answer her questions. Please.”
    “No,” the girl managed.
    “Then tell us where Tovi is.”
    In the room behind Sister Cecilia, the girl’s mother gasped in a terrible rattle and then went silent. Kahlan heard bony thumps as the woman hit the wood floor. The house fell quiet.
    From the dim, flickering light beyond the doorway, two more shadows glided up behind Sister Cecilia. Kahlan knew that Emmy would answer no more questions.
    Sister Cecilia slipped into the room, closer to the girl Kahlan held tightly in her arms.
    “The rooms are all empty. Why are there no guests in your inn?”
    “None have come,” the girl managed as she