Blood of the Fold

The door opened and Berdine struggled into the room with her arms full of books and papers. She had a pen between her teeth. She smiled as best she could with the pen in her mouth, and dumped the things on the table.

"We need to talk," she whispered, "if you're not busy."

"Ulic went out to look for General Reibisch. It's urgent that I talk to him."

Berdine glanced to Cara, Raina, and the door. "Do you want me to leave, Lord Rahl? Is something wrong?"

Already, Richard had learned enough to know he was right about the journal they had found being important. He could do nothing until Reibisch returned.

"Who am I to marry?"

Berdine opened a book on the table as she sat in his chair and shuffled through the papers she had brought. "Queen Kahlan Amnell, the Mother Confessor." She looked up hopefully. "Do you have a bit of time? I could use your help."

Richard sighed and went around the desk to stand beside her. "Until General Reibisch gets here I've got time. What do you need?"

With the back end of her pen, she tapped the open journal. "I've almost got this bit here translated, and it seems he was emphatic about it when he wrote it, but I'm missing two words that I think are important." She pulled the High D'Haran version of The Adventures ofBonnie Day around before them. "I've found a place with the same two words in this. If you can remember what it says, I'll have it."

Richard had read The Adventures of Bonnie Day countless times, it was his favorite book, and he thought he could recite it by heart. He had discovered that he could not. He knew the book well, but remembering the exact words proved harder than he had thought it would be. He could remember the story, but not the exact story, word for word. Unless he could tell her the exact words of a sentence, the gist of the story wasn't often of much help.

He had gone to the Keep several times and searched for a version of the book he could read so they could cross-reference the D'Haran version, but he hadn't been able to find one. It was frustrating that he couldn't be of more help.

Berdine pointed to a place in The Adventures of Bonnie Day. "I need these two words. Can you tell me what this sentence says?"

Richard's hopes rose. It was the beginning of a chapter. He had had the most success with the beginnings of chapters because the starting places were memorable.

"Yes! This is the chapter where they leave. I remember. It starts, 'For the third time that week, Bonnie violated her father's rule about not going into the woods alone. »

Berdine leaned over, looking at the line. "Yes, this is 'violated, I've already got that one. This word here is 'rule, and this one 'third'?"

Richard nodded when she glanced up. Grinning with the thrill of discovery, she dipped her pen in the bottle of ink and started writing on one of the sheets of paper she had brought, filling in a few of the blank places. When she finished, she proudly slid the paper over in front of him.

"This is what it says in this bit of the journal."

Richard picked up the paper and held it up in the tight coming over his shoulder from the window.

The arguments rage on among us. Wizard's Third Rule: Passion rules reason, I fear this most insidious of rules may be our ruin. Though we know better, I fear some of us are violating it anyway. Each faction presses that their course of action is reason, but in the desperation, I fear all-are passion. Even Alric Rahl sends frantic word of a solution. Meanwhile, the dream walkers scythe through our men. I pray the towers can be completed, or we are all lost. Today I said good-bye to friends leaving for the towers. I wept to know I will never see those good men again in this world. How many will die in the towers for the cause of reason? But alas, I know the worse cost should we violate the Third Rule.

When Richard finished the translation, he turned away, toward the window. He had been in those towers. He knew that wizards had given their life force into them to ignite the tower's spells, but they had never seemed real people to him before. It was chilling to read the anguish in the words of the man whose bones had lain in that room in the Keep for thousands of years. Through the words in the journal, his bones seemed to be coming to life.

Richard thought about the Third Rule, trying to reason it out for himself. Before, for the first and second, he had had Zedd, and then Nathan to explain it for him, to make him see how the rules worked in life. He would have to work this one out himself.

He recalled going down to the roads leading out of Aydindril, to talk to some of the people fleeing the city. He had wanted to know why they would leave, and had been told by fearful people that they knew the truth: that he was a monster who would slaughter them for his twisted pleasure.