Chainfire: Chainfire Trilogy Part 1

But while he'd still been Nicci's captive, he had worked for months in the construction of the emperor's palace. That palace was gone, now, erased from the face of the ground. Only a semicircle of columns from the main entrance remained to stand watch around the proud statue in while marble that marked the place where the flame of freedom had first ignited in the heart of darkness.

After the revolt against the rule of the Order, the statue had been carved and dedicated to the free people of Altur'Rang and the memory of those who had given their lives for that freedom. This place, where people had first spilled blood to gain their liberty, was now hallowed ground. Victor had named the place Liberty Square.

Lit by the warm light of the low sun, the statue shone like a beacon.

"What do you two see?" Richard asked.

Cara, too, had a hand on his arm. "Lord Rahl, it's the same statue we saw the last time we were here."

Nicci nodded her agreement. "The statue that the carvers created after the revolt."

The sight of the statue made Richard ache. The feminity of its exquisite shape, the curves, the bone and muscle, were clearly evident beneath the flowing robes of stone. The woman in marble almost looked alive.

"And where did the carvers get the model for this statue?" Richard asked the two women.

Both gave him a blank look.

With a hooked finger, Nicci pulled back a strand of hair that the humid breeze had lifted across her face. "What do you mean?"

"To carve such a statue, expert carvers typically scale it up from a model. What do you recall about that model?"

"Yes," Cara said as her face brightened in recollection, "it was something you carved."

"That's right," he said to Cara. "You and I searched together for the wood for the small statue. You were the one who found the walnut tree I used. It had been growing on a slope just above a broad valley. The tree had been knocked over by a windblown spruce. You were there when I cut the wood from that fallen, weathered walnut tree. You were there when I curved that small statue. We sat together on the banks of the stream and talked the hours away as I worked on it."

"Yes, I remember you carving while we sat in the countryside." A hint of a smile ghosted across Cara's face. "What of it?"

"We were at the home I built in the mountains. Why were we there?"

Cara looked up at him, puzzled by the question, as if it seemed too obvious to warrant the effort of retelling. "After the people of Anderith voted to side with the Imperial Order, rather than with you and D'Hara, we gave up on trying to lead people against the Order. You said that you couldn't force people to want to be free, but that they must choose it for themselves before you could lead them."

It was difficult for Richard to calmly tell things to a woman who should know them as well as he did, but he knew that reproach wouldn't help to spark her memory. Besides, whatever was going on, he knew it wasn't a willfull deception on the part of Nicci and Cara.

"That was part of it," he said. "But there was a much more important reason why we were there in those trackless mountains."

"A more important reason?"

"Kahlan had been beaten nearly to death. I took her there so that she would be safe while she recovered. You and I spent months caring for her, trying to nurse her back to health.

"But she wasn't getting better. She sank into a deep despondency. She had despaired of ever recovering, of ever being whole again."

He couldn't bring himself to say that part of the reason Kahlan had nearly given up was because when those men had beaten her nearly to death, it had caused her to lose her child.

"And so you carved this statue of her?" Cara asked.

"Not exactly."

I le stared off at the proud figure in white stone rising up against the deep blue sky. He had not intended the little statue he'd carved to look like Kahlan. Through this figure, her robes flowing as she faced into a wind, as she stood with her head thrown back, her chest out, her hands fisted at her silk's, her back arched and strong as if in opposition to an invisible power trying to subdue her, Richard had conveyed not what Kahlan looked like, but rather a sense of her inner nature.

This was not a statue of Kahlan, but of her living force, her soul. The magnificent statue before them was her spirit encased in stone.

"It's Kahlan's courage, her heart, her valor, her determination. That's why I named this statue Spirit.

"When she saw it, she understood what she was seeing. It made her hunger to be well again, to be strong and independent again. It made her want to be fully alive again. That was when she started to get well."

Both women looked more than simply dubious, but they didn't dispute his story.

"The thing is," Richard said as he started out across the broad stretch of grass, "if you were to ask the men who carved this statue where that small statue is, that statue I carved and which they used as a model to scale up this one, they would not be able to find it or tell you what happened to it."