Confessor: Chainfire Trilogy Part 3

As far as Kahlan was concerned, the people who believed in, supported, and fought for the convictions of the Imperial Order did not belong in the world of life among those who valued it.

Through the gauze fabric covering the vents in the top of the tent, Kahlan could see the furious flashes of lightning to the west illuminating the sky overhead to announce the approaching storms. The emperor's tent, with its hangings, carpets, and padded walls, was relatively quiet, considering the constant din of the sprawling encampment out beyond, so it was hard to hear the thunder, but she could occasionally feel rumbles of it through the ground.

With the cold weather settling in, the rain would make it all the more miserable.

As tired as she was, Kahlan couldn't stop thinking about the man from earlier that day, the man who had looked out from that cage as it had rolled through the camp, the man with the gray eyes, the man who had seen her-actually seen her-and had called out her name. It was a galvanizing moment for her.

For anyone to see her bordered on miraculous. Kahlan was invisible to almost everyone. Invisible wasn't really accurate, though, because they actually did see her. They simply forgot having seen her as soon as they had, forgot that they had been aware of her only an instant before. So, while she wasn't really invisible, she might as well have been.

Kahlan knew well the icy touch of oblivion. The same spell that made people forget her as soon as they'd seen her had also wiped out every memory she had of her past. Whatever there was to her life before the Sisters of the Dark, it was now lost to her.

Among the millions of troops sprawled out across the vast, barren plain, her captors had found only a handful of soldiers who could see her-forty-three, to be exact. These forty-three were men who, like the collar around her neck, the Sisters, and Jagang himself, stood between her and freedom.

Kahlan made it her business to know every one of those forty-three men, to know their strengths, their weaknesses. She studied them silently, mentally making notes about each of them. Everyone had habits-ways of walking, of observing what was going on around them, of paying attention or failing to pay attention, of doing their job. She had learned everything she could about their individual characteristics.

The Sisters believed that an anomaly in the spell they had used was responsible for a handful of people being aware of Kahlan. It was possible that out among the Order's vast army there were others who could see and remember her, but Jagang had so far not discovered any more. The forty-three soldiers were thus the only men able to serve as her guards.

Jagang, of course, could see her, as well as the Sisters who had used the spell in the first place. Much to the Sisters' horror they had been captured by Jagang and they, too, had ended up with Kahlan in the wretched encampment of the Imperial Order. Other than the Sisters and Jagang, none of those few who could see her really knew her-knew her from her forgotten past, a past that even Kahlan didn't know.

But that man in the cage was different. He had known her. Since she didn't remember ever seeing him before, that could only mean that he was someone who knew her from her past.

Jagang had promised her that when she finally had her past back and knew who she was, when she knew everything, then the real horror for her would begin. He delighted in explaining in vivid detail exactly what he intended to do to her, how he would make her life one of endless torment. Since she didn't remember her past, his promises of retribution didn't mean as much to her as he would have liked. Still, the things he'd promised were terrifying enough in and of themselves.

Whenever Jagang promised such vengeance, Kahlan returned only a blank look. It was a way of walling off her emotions from him. She didn't want to give him the satisfaction of seeing her emotions, her fear. Despite what it would mean for her, Kahlan was proud to have earned the contempt of such a vile man. It gave her the confidence that whatever she had done in her past, her convictions could only have placed her in direct opposition to the will of the Order.

Because of Jagang's ghastly oaths, Kahlan greatly feared remembering her past, yet after seeing the raw emotion in the captive man's eyes she longed to know everything about herself. His joyous reaction to seeing her stood out in sharp contrast to all those around her who despised and reviled her. She had to know who she was, who the woman was that could be held in such regard by that man.

She wished she could have looked at the man for longer than the brief glimpse she had gotten. She'd had to turn away. If she had been caught showing any interest in a captive, Jagang surely would have killed him. Kahlan felt protective of the man. She didn't want to inadvertently bring trouble to someone who knew her, someone so obviously overcome by the sight of her.