Faith of the Fallen

Richard rose up and drew his sword. This time, when its distinctive sound rang out in the night, Kahlan was awake. Her first instinct was to sit up. Before she even had time to think better of it, Richard had crouched and gently restrained her with a reassuring hand. She lifted her head just enough to see that it was Cara, leading a man into the harsh, flickering light of the campfire. Richard sheathed his sword when he saw who Cara had with her: Captain Meiffert, the D'Haran officer who had been with them back in Anderith.

Before any other greeting, the man dropped to his knees and bent forward, touching his forehead to the soft ground strewn with pine needles.

"Master Rahl guide us. Master Rahl teach us. Master Rahl protect us,"

Captain Meiffert beseeched in sincere reverence. "In your light we thrive.

In your mercy we are sheltered. In your wisdom we are humbled. We live only to serve. Our lives are yours."

When he had gone to his knees to recite the devotion, as it was called, Kahlan saw Cara almost reflexively go to her knees with him, so ingrained was the ritual. The supplication to their Lord Rahl was something all D'Harans did. In the field they commonly recited it once or, on occasion, three times. At the People's Palace in D'Hara, most people gathered twice a day to chant the devotion at length.

When he'd been a captive of Darken Rahl, Richard, often in much the same condition as Tommy Lancaster just before he died, had himself been forced to his knees by Mord-Sith and made to perform the devotion for hours at a time. Now, the Mord-Sith, like all D'Harans, paid that same homage to Richard. If the Mord-Sith saw such a turn of events as improbable, or even ironic, they never said as much. What many of them had found improbable was that Richard hadn't had them all executed when he became their Lord Rahl.

It was Richard, though, who had discovered that the devotion to their Lord Rahl was in fact a surviving vestige of a bond, an ancient magic invoked by one of his ancestors to protect the D'Haran people from the dream walkers. It had long been believed that the dream walkers-created by wizards to be weapons during that ancient and nearly forgotten great war-had vanished from the world. The conjuring of strange and varied abilities-of instilling unnatural attributes in people-willing or not, had once been a dark art, the results always being at the least unpredictable, often uncertain, and sometimes dangerously unstable. Somehow, some spark of that malignant manipulation had been passed down generation after generation, lurking unseen for three thousand years-until it rekindled in the person of Emperor Jagang, Kahlan knew something about the alteration of living beings to suit a purpose. Confessors were such people, as had been the dream walkers. In Jagang, Kahlan saw a monster created by magic. She knew many people saw the same in her. Much as some people had blond hair or brown eyes, she had been born to grow tall, with warm brown hair, and green eyes-and the ability of a Confessor. She loved and laughed and longed for things just the same as those born with blond hair or brown eyes, and without a Confessor's special ability.

Kahlan used her power for valid, moral reasons. Jagang, no doubt, believed the same of himself, and even if he didn't, most of his followers certainly did.

Richard, too, had been born with latent power. The ancient, adjunct defense of the bond was passed down to any gifted Rahl. Without the protection of the bond to Richard-the Lord Rahl-whether formally spoken or a silent heartfelt affinity, anyone was vulnerable to Jagang's power as a dream walker.

Unlike most other permutations conjured by wizards in living people, the Confessor's ability had always remained vital; at least it had until all the other Confessors had been murdered by order of Darken Rahl. Now, without such wizards and their specialized conjuring, only if Kahlan had children would the magic of the Confessors live on.

Confessors usually bore girls, but not always. A Confessor's power had originally been created for, and had been intended to be used by, women.

Like all other conjuring that introduced unnatural abilities in people, this, too, had had unforeseen consequences: a Confessor's male children, it turned out, also bore the power. After it had been learned how treacherous the power could be in men, all male children were scrupulously culled.

Kahlan bearing a male child was precisely what the witch woman, Shota, feared. Shota knew very well that Richard would never allow his and Kahlan's son to be slain for the past evils of male Confessors. Kahlan, too, could never allow Richard's son to be killed. In the past, a Confessor's inability to marry out of love was one of the reasons she could emotionally endure the practice of infanticide. Richard, in discovering the means by which he and Kahlan could be together, had altered that equation, too.