The Third Kingdom Read Free Page B

caution rose. “Yes.”
    “I don’t think that we can do anything for her here,” he said.
    The other man spotted the sword and picked it up from the ground. His gaze glided over the ornately wrought gold and silver scabbard before taking in the word TRUTH made of gold wire woven through the silver wire wrapping the hilt.
    “Then you would be the Lord Rahl?”
    “That’s right,” Richard said.
    “Then there is no doubt. You are the ones we came looking for,” the man said. “The boy, Henrik, told us who you were. We came to find you.”
    Richard’s concern eased at hearing that it was Henrik who had told them exactly who he and Kahlan were.
    “Enough,” the woman said. She quickly turned back to Richard. “Glad we were in time, Lord Rahl. I’m Ester. Now we have to get you both back to safety.”
    “Richard will do.”
    “Yes, Lord Rahl,” she said absently, as if no longer listening as she pressed at wounds, checking their depth.
    Ester motioned to some of the other men behind her. “Youwill need to help him. He’s badly hurt. We have to get out of here before those who did this come back.”
    Several men, relieved to hear that she was finally ready to leave, rushed in to help Richard to his feet. Once up, Richard insisted on going to Kahlan. The men steadied him when he staggered to the wagon.
    Richard saw that Kahlan was still unconscious, but breathing. He laid a hand on her, aching with fear over her condition. Her clothes were soaked in blood from the ordeal with the Hedge Maid. The thought of that vile creature and what she had been doing to Kahlan again awakened Richard’s anger.
    The Hedge Maid had been drinking Kahlan’s blood.
    He slid his hand through the long slit in her shirt, feeling where Jit’s familiars had slashed open Kahlan’s abdomen to bleed her and collect her blood for the Hedge Maid to drink. He was worried not only about the severity of the terrible wound, but how much blood she had lost. To his astonishment, he found only a few swollen ripples in her skin where the long wound had been nearly healed.
    Richard recalled, then, the touch he had felt—the touch of a healing begun, but not finished. Zedd or Nicci must have healed the deep wound on Kahlan, but from the rest of the wounds still evident on her, Richard could see that, as with him, they hadn’t finished what they had started. Because he remembered that it had been Nicci’s healing touch on him, he suspected that it would have been Zedd who had started healing Kahlan.
    Richard was thankful that Zedd had managed to heal the terrible gash in Kahlan’s abdomen, but he hadn’t had time to heal everything. She had a number of wounds that still bled. He knew, too, that she must have other serious injuries or she would not be unconscious.
    “Do you have someone who can help her?” Richard asked. “A gifted person?”
    Ester hesitated. “We have someone gifted who may be able to help,” she finally said.
    One of the men behind leaned close, taking hold of Ester’s dress at her shoulder to pull her back a bit as he whispered in her ear. “Do you think that wise?”
    The woman turned an angry look on the man. “What choice is there? Should we instead let them die?”
    He straightened, his only answer a sigh.
    “But we must hurry,” Ester said. “She can’t heal them if they’re dead.”
    “Besides that,” another man reminded her, “we need to get all of us in out of the night.”
    At his words, others glanced around in the darkness. Richard noted that they all seemed terrified of being out after dark. Having once been a woods guide, he had often visited country folk. It was a relatively common attitude among them to want to shut themselves in when the sun went down. People in more remote places tended to be more superstitious than most, and the one common thing they all feared was darkness.
    Although, he had to admit that these people certainly had real things to fear.
    Richard watched as several men gently