Confessor: Chainfire Trilogy Part 3

"Are you out of your mind!" Ann roared as she rounded on Nicci, her face going scarlet. "You named yourself a player for the power of Orden!"

"No, that's not at all what happened," Cara said, once more drawing the attention of the prophet and the former prelate. "She named Richard the player."

Cara smiled just the slightest bit, as if pleased to prove that Nicci was better than Nathan and Ann seemed to think. For their part, Nathan and Ann stood thunderstruck.

While it had indeed been quite an accomplishment, Nicci didn't feel any pride for having done such a thing-she had been driven to it out of desperation.

Standing there in the hallway in the vast complex of the People's Palace, acutely aware of the interlocking layers of problems they faced, Nicci suddenly felt overwhelmingly weary, and it wasn't from her power being drained by the spell around the People's Palace. Besides the recent events, exhaustion was beginning to take its toll. There was so much to do and so little time.

Worse, only she had the necessary knowledge or ability to deal with many of the problems they faced. Who but she had a chance to teach Richard about the use of Subtractive Magic that was necessary to open the boxes of Orden? There was no one else. Nicci felt the terrible weight of that responsibility.

There were moments when the enormity of the battles facing them stood out for her in stark clarity. Sometimes when that happened Nicci's courage wavered. She sometimes feared that she was deluding herself that they could actually solve the monumental problems they faced.

She remembered how, as a little girl, her mother had forced her to go out with bread to feed the poor and, later, how Brother Narev of the Fellowship of Order had shamed her into working tirelessly to serve the endless needs of people. No matter how much effort she put into solving the problems of all those who were needy, their problems only seemed to grow, outpacing her ability to satisfy them, binding her ever tighter in slavery to the growing ranks of those in need. She was taught that, because she had the ability, it was her duty to ignore her own wants and needs and to sacrifice her life to the wants and needs of others. Their inability, or unwillingness to try, made them her masters.

In those moments when she thought their present problems were insurmountable, she felt again the way she had as a child, like a slave to the problems. In those dark moments of self-doubt she wondered if she could ever really shed the mantle Jagang himself had laid around her shoulders when he named her the Slave Queen. He'd had no idea how apt the title really was.

In a way, that was how she sometimes felt in this struggle. While she knew that this cause was right, it still seemed hopeless to think that they could win when they were up against so many who sought to crush them.

Sometimes, in the face of the seemingly insurmountable, Nicci wanted nothing so much as to sit down and give up. In private moments in the past, Richard had confessed to having the same self-doubts as she felt, and yet she'd seen how he still forged ahead. Whenever Nicci felt discouraged, she thought of Richard, of how relentless he was, and she once again made herself get to her feet if for no other reason than to make him proud of her.

She believed in and fought for their cause, but that cause was crystallized in Richard.

They needed him. She didn't know how they were ever going to find him or, if they did, how they would get him back. That was assuming he was still alive.

Richard being dead, though, was a thought that she refused to contemplate and so she immediately shoved the very idea aside.

Ann seized Nicci's upper arm in a firm grip, bringing her out of her dark thoughts. "You put the boxes of Orden in play, and you named Richard the player?"

Nicci wasn't in the mood to address the denouncement within the rhetorical question, to yet again have the same argument she'd already had with Zedd.

"That's right. I had no choice. Zedd at first had the same reaction as you. When I explained it all to him, explained why I had to do as I had done, and once he'd calmed down, he came to see that there truly is no other way."

"And who are you to decide such a thing?" Ann demanded.

Nicci chose not to rise to the insult and instead kept her voice, if not deferential, at least civil. "You yourself said that Richard is the one who must lead us in this battle. You and Nathan have waited nearly five hundred years for Richard to be born and worked to make sure that he could lead us. You yourself saw to it that he had The Book of Counted Shadows so that he could fight this fight. You seem to have decided a great deal for him before I ever came along.