Chainfire: Chainfire Trilogy Part 1

"There's no telling. I had no choice but to use extreme methods. You were beyond what I thought were all limits. You have to try to understand that you were not yourself there for a while."

Cara hooked a thumb behind her red leather belt. "Nicci is right, Lord Rahl. You weren't yourself. You were fighting us. I had to hold you down just so she could help you.

"I've stood over men at the cusp of death. Strange things happen when they're in that place. Believe me, you were there a long time into that first night."

Richard knew very well what she meant when she said that she had stood over men on the cusp of death. The profession of Mord-Sith had been torture-at least it had been until he changed all that. He carried the Agiel of Denna, the Mord-Sith who had once stood over him in that capacity. She had given him her Agiel as a solemn gift in gratitude for freeing her from the madness of her terrible duty — even though she had known that the price of that freedom was to be his sword through her heart.

Right then Richard felt a very long way from the peaceful woods where he'd grown up.

Nicci spread her hands as if imploring him to try harder to understand. "You were unconscious and then asleep for quite a time. I had to revive you enough to get you to drink water and a broth, but I needed you to stay in a deep sleep so that you could begin to recover your strength. I had to use a spell to keep you in that state. You'd lost a lot of blood; had I allowed you to awake too soon it would have sapped your tenuous strength and you still could have slipped away from us."

Died, that was what she meant. He could have died. Richard took a deep breath. He'd had no idea of everything that had gone on over the last three days. He basically recalled the battle and then waking when he heard the wolf howl.

"Nicci," he said, trying to show her that he could be calm and understanding even though he felt neither, "what does this have to do with Kahlan?"

Her features were set in an uneasy mix of empathy and disquiet. "Richard, this woman, Kahlan, is just a product of your mind when you were in that confused state of shock and delirium before I could heal you."

"Nicci, I wasn't imagining.»

"You were at the brink of death," she said as she held up a hand, commanding silence and for him to listen. "In your mind you were grasping for someone to help you-someone like this person, Kahlan. Please believe me when I say that it's understandable. But you're awake now and must face the truth. She was figment born of your dire condition."

Richard was dumbfounded to hear her even suggesting such a thing. He turned to Cara, imploring her to come to her senses, if not his rescue. "How could you possibly think such a thing? How could you believe it?"

"Haven't you ever had a dream where you were terrified and then your long-dead mother was there, alive, and she was going to help you?" Cara's unblinking blue eyes seemed focused elsewhere. "Don't you remember waking after such dreams and feeling sure that it had been real, that your mother was alive again, really alive, and that she was going to help you?

Don't you remember how much you wanted to cling to that feeling? Don't you remember how desperately you wanted it to be real?"

Nicci lightly touched the place where the arrow had been, where his flesh was now whole. "After I'd healed you to the point that you were past the worst of the crisis, you went into a long dreaming state of sleep. You carried these desperate illusions forward with you. You dreamed about them, added to them, lived with them longer than any ordinary sleep. This prolonged dream, this comforting illusion, this divine longing, had time to seep into every corner of your thoughts, saturate every part of your mind, and became real to you, just as Cara says, but, because of the length of time you were asleep, it gained even more power. Now that you've only just come awake from that protracted sleep you are merely having a little trouble filtering out what part of your ordeal was a dream and what was real."

"Nicci is right, Lord Rahl." Richard couldn't remember Cara ever looking so dead serious. "You just dreamed it-like you dreamed that you heard a wolf howl. It sounds like a nice dream-this woman you dreamed you married-but that's all it is: a dream."

Richard's mind reeled. The concept of Kahlan being nothing more than a dream, a figment of his imagination born in his delirium, was, at its core, terrifying. That terror stormed unchecked through him. If what they were saying was true, then he didn't want to be awake. If it was true, then he wished that Nicci had never healed him. He didn't want to live in a world where Kahlan wasn't real.,

He groped for solid ground in a sea of dark disorder, too stunned to think of a way to fight such a shapeless threat. He felt confused by his ordeal and that he didn't remember much of it. His certainty in what he regarded as truth began to crumble.