Naked Empire

Ann gathered her thoughts, as well as her voice, before she spoke. "I thought I had come to understand something like that while I sat all alone down here, but I realize now that I hadn't, really. All those years I felt bad for locking you away, but I never really examined my rationale for doing so.

"You're right, Nathan. I believed you held the potential for great harm. I should have helped you to understand what was right so you could act rationally, rather than expect the worst from you and lock you away. I'm sorry, Nathan."

He put his hands on his hips. "Do you really mean it, Ann?"

She nodded, unable to look up at him, as her eyes filled with tears.

She always expected honesty from everyone else, but she had not been honest with herself. "Yes, Nathan, I really do."

Confession over, she went to her bench and slumped down. "Thank you for coming, Nathan. I'll not trouble you to come down here again. I will take my just punishment without complaint. If you don't mind, I think I'd like to be alone right now to pray and consider the weight on my heart."

"You can do that later. Now get up off your bottom, on your feet, and pick up your things. We have matters to attend to and we have to get going."

Ann looked up with a frown. "What?"

"We have important things to do. Come on, woman. We're wasting time. We need to get going. We're on the same side in this struggle, Ann. We need to act like it and work together toward preserving our causes." He leaned down toward her. "Unless you've decided to retire to sit around the rest of your life. If not, then let's be on our way. We have trouble."

Ann hopped down from the stone bench. "Trouble? What sort of trouble."

"Prophecy trouble."

"Prophecy? There is trouble with a prophecy? What trouble? What prophecy?"

Fists on his nips, Nathan fixed her with a scowl. "I can't tell you about such things. Prophecy is not meant for the unenlightened."

Ann pursed her lips, about to launch into scolding him up one side and down the other, when she caught the smile working at the edges of his mouth.

It caught her up in a smile of her own.

"What's happened?" she asked in the tone of voice friends used when they had decided that past wrongs were recognized and matters now set on a correct path.

"Ann, you'll not believe it when I tell you," Nathan complained. "It's that boy, again."

"Richard?"

"What other boy do you know who can get in the kind of trouble only Richard can get into."

"Well, I no longer think of Richard as a boy."

Nathan sighed. "I suppose not, but it's hard when you're my age to think of one so young as a man."

"He's a man," Ann assured him.

"Yes, I guess he is." Nathan grinned. "And, he's a Rahl."

"What sort of trouble has Richard gotten himself into this time?"

Nathan's good humor evaporated. "He's walked off the edge of prophecy."

Ann screwed up her face. "What are you talking about? What's he done?"

"I'm telling you, Ann, that boy has walked right off the edge of prophecy itself-walked right off into a place in prophecy where prophecy itself doesn't exist."

Ann recognized that Nathan was sincerely troubled, but he was making no sense. In part, that was why some people were afraid of him. He often gave people the impression he was talking gibberish when he was talking about things that no one but he could even understand. Sometimes no one but a prophet could truly understand completely what he grasped. With his eyes, the eyes of a prophet, he could see things that no one else could.

She had spent a lifetime working with prophecy, though, and so she could understand, perhaps better than most, at least some of his mind, some of what he could grasp.

"How can you know of such a prophecy, Nathan, if it doesn't exist? I don't understand. Explain it to me."

"There are libraries here, at the People's Palace, that contain some valuable books of prophecy that I've never had a chance to see before. While I had reason to suspect that such prophecies might exist, I was never certain they actually did, or what they might say. I've been studying them since I've been here and I've come across links to other known prophecy we had down in the vaults at the Palace of the Prophets. These prophecies, here, fill in some important gaps in those we already know about.

"Most importantly, I found an altogether new branch of prophecy I've never seen before that explains why and how I've been blind to some of what's been going on. From studying the forks and inversions off of this branch, I've discovered that Richard has taken a series of links that follow down a particular pathway of prophecy that leads to oblivion, to something that, as far as I can tell, doesn't even exist."