Faith of the Fallen

Thereafter, it became a game Kahlan wanted to win. Richard never let her win, not even just to be nice when she was feeling low because of her slow progress at getting stronger. He repeatedly humbled her in front of Cara. Kahlan knew he was doing it to make her push herself to use her muscles, to forget her aches, to stretch and strengthen her body. Kahlan just wanted to win.

They each carried their willow-switch swords sheathed behind a belt, always at the ready. Every day, she would attack him, or he would attack her, and the fight was on. At first, she was no challenge to him, and he made it clear she was no challenge. That, of course, only made her determined to show him that she was no novice, that it was not so much a battle of strength, but of leverage, advantage, and swiftness. He encouraged her, but never gave her false praise. As the weeks passed, she slowly began making him work for his kills.

Kahlan had been taught to use a sword by her father, King Wyborn. At least, he had been king before Kahlan's mother took him for her mate. King was an insignificant title to a Confessor. King Wyborn of Galea had had two children with his queen and first wife, so Kahlan had both an older half sister and a half brother.

Kahlan wanted very much to make a good show of her training under her father. It was frustrating to know she was far better with a weapon than she was showing Richard. It wasn't so much that she didn't know what to do, but that she simply couldn't do it; her muscles were not yet strong enough, nor would they respond nearly quickly enough.

Something about it, though, was still unsettling: Richard fought in a way Kahlan had never encountered in her training, or in the real combat she had seen. She couldn't define or analyze the difference, but she could feel it, and she didn't know what to do to counter it.

In the beginning, Richard and Kahlan had most of their battles in the meadow outside their house, so that Kahlan wouldn't be as likely to trip over something, and if she did, not as likely to hit her head on anything granite. Cara was their everpresent audience. As time passed, the battles lasted longer, and grew more strenuous. They became furious and exhausting.

A couple of times Kahlan had been so upset by Richard's relentless attitude toward their sword fights that she didn't speak to him for hours afterward, lest she let slip words she didn't really mean and which she knew she would regret.

Richard would then sometimes tell her, "Save your anger for the enemy.

Here it will do you no good; there, it can overcome fear. Use this time now to teach your sword what to do, so later it will do it without conscious thought."

Kahlan well knew that an enemy was never kind. If Richard gave in to kindnessawarded her false pride-it could only serve her ill. As aggravating as such lessons sometimes were, it was impossible to remain angry with Richard for very long, especially because she knew she was really only angry with herself.

Kahlan had been around weapons and men who used them all her life. A few of the better ones, in addition to her father, were on occasion her teachers. None of them had fought like Richard. Richard made fighting with a blade look like art. He gave beauty to the act of dealing death. There was something about it, though, tickling at her, something she knew she still wasn't grasping.

Richard had told her once, before she had been hurt, that he had come to believe that magic itself could be an art form. She had told him she thought that was crazy. Now, she didn't know. From the bits of the story she'd heard, she suspected that Richard had used magic in something of that way to defeat the chimes: he had created a solution where it had never before existed, or even been imagined.

One day, in one of their fierce sword fights, she had been positive she had him dead to rights and that she was delivering the stroke of victory. He effortlessly evaded what she had been sure was her killing strike and killed her instead. He made what had seemed impossible look natural.

It was in that instant that the whole concept came clear for her. She had been looking at it all wrong.

It wasn't that Richard could fight well with a sword, or that he could create beautiful statues with a knife and chisel, it was that Richard was one with the blade-the blade in any form: sword, knife, chisel, or willow switch. He was a master-not of sword fighting or carving as such, but, in the most fundamental way, of the blade itself.

Fighting was but one use of a blade. His balance for using his sword to destroymagic always sought balance-was using a blade to carve things of beauty. She had been looking at the individual parts of what he did, trying to understand them separately; Richard saw only one unified whole.