Faith of the Fallen

"What do you think this will accomplish?" Ann whispered in despair.

"It will be a start at halting your meddling in the lives of the people of the Midlands, and the rest (,f the New World-in my life, in Richard's life. It's the only beginning I can think to make, short of killing you both; you would not like to know how close I am to that alternative. Now, give me the journey book."

Ann stared down at Kahlan's hand open before her. She blinked at her tears. Finally, she pulled off a woolen mitten and worked the little book out from behind her belt. She paused a moment, reverently gazing at it, but in the end laid it on Kahlan's palm.

"Dear Creator," Ann whispered, "forgive this poor hurting child of yours for what she is about to do."

Kahlan tossed the book in the fire.

With ashen faces, Ann and Sister Alessandra stood staring at the book in the hissing flames.

Kahlan snatched up Richard's sword. "Cara, let's get going."

"The horses are ready. I was saddling them when these two showed up."

Kahlan dumped the hot water to the side while Cara started quickly collecting their belongings. They both stuffed items in the saddlebags.

Other gear they slung over their shoulders and carried to the horses to be strapped back on the saddles.

Without looking back at Ann or Alessandra, Kahlan swung up into her cold saddle. With a grim Cara at her side, she turned her mount and cantered off into the swirling snow.

CHAPTER 28

As soon as she saw Kahlan and Cara vanish like vengeful spirits into the whiteness, Ann fell to her knees and thrust her hands into the fire to snatch the burning journey book from its funeral pyre in the white-hot coals.

"Prelate!" Alessandra cried. "You'll burn yourself!"

Flinching back from the ferocity of the pain, Ann ignored the gagging stench of burning flesh and thrust her hands again into the wavering heat of the fire. She saw, rather than felt, that she had the priceless journey book in her fingers.

The entire rescue of the burning book took only a second, but, through the prism of pain, it seemed an eternity.

Biting down on her lower lip against the suffering, Ann rolled to the side. Alessandra came running back with her hands full of snow. She threw it on Ann's bloody blackened fingers and the journey book clenched in them.

She let out a low wail of agony when the wet snow contacted the burns.

Alessandra fell to Ann's side, taking her hands by the wrists, gasping in tears of fright.

"Prelate! Oh, Prelate, you shouldn't have!"

Ann was in a state of shock from the pain. Alessandra's shrill voice seemed a distant drone.

"Oh, Ann! Why didn't you use magic, or even a stick!"

Ann was surprised by the question. In her panic over the priceless journey book burning there in the fire, her mind was filled only with the single thought to get it out before it was too late. Her reckless action, she knew, was precipitated by her bitter anguish over Kahlan's accusations.

"Hold still," Alessandra admonished through her own tears. "Hold still and let me see what I can do about healing you. It will be all right. Just hold still."

Ann sat on the snowy ground, dazed by the hurt, and by the words still hammering her from inside her head, as she let Alessandra work at healing her hands.

The Sister could not heal her heart.

"She was wrong," Alessandra said, as if reading Ann's thoughts. "She was wrong, Prelate."

"Was she?" Ann asked in a numb voice after the searing pain in her fingers finally began to ease, replaced by the achingly uncomfortable tingling of magic coursing into her flesh, doing its work. "Was she, Alessandra?"

"Yes. She doesn't know so much as she thinks. She's a child-she couldn't be a paltry three decades yet. People can't learn to wipe their own noses in that much time." Alessandra was prattling, Ann knew, prattling with her worry over the journey book, and with her worry over the anguish caused by Kahlan's words. "She's just a foolish child who doesn't know the first thing about anything. There's much more to it. Much more. It isn't so simple as she thinks. Not so simple at all."

Ann wasn't so sure anymore. Everything seemed dead to her. Five hundred years of work-had it all been a mad task, driven on by selfish desires and a fool's faith? Wouldn't she, in Kahlan's place, have seen it the same way?

Endless rows of corpses lay before her in the trial going on in her mind. What was there to say in her defense? She had a thousand answers for the Mother Confessor's charges, but at that moment, they all seemed empty.

How could Ann possibly excuse herself to the dead?

"You're the Prelate of the Sisters of the Light," Alessandra rambled on during a pause in her work. "She should have been more considerate of who she was talking to. More respectful. She doesn't know everything involved.

There's a great deal more to it. A great deal. After all, the Sisters of the Light don't casually choose their Prelate."

Nor did Confessors casually choose their Mother Confessor.