Naked Empire

She looked out through the trees when they heard Cara's whistle. The warning signal Richard had taught Cara was the plaintive, high, clear whistle of a common wood pewee, although Cara didn't know that's what it was. When he'd first told Cara that he wanted to teach her a pewee birdcall as a warning signal, she said she wasn't going to learn the call of any bird named a pewee. Richard gave in and told her that he would instead teach her the call of the small, fierce, short-tailed pine hawk, but only if she would be willing to work hard at getting it right, since it was more difficult.

Satisfied to have her way, Cara had agreed and readily learned the simple whistle. She was good at it and used it often as a signal. Richard never told her that there was no such thing as a short-tailed pine hawk, or that hawks didn't make whistles like that.

Out through the screen of branches, the dark form of the statue stood guard over an area of the pass that for thousands of years had been deserted. Richard wondered again why the people back then would have put such a statue in a pass no one was likely to ever again visit. He thought about the ancient society that had placed it, and at what they must have thought, sealing people away for the crime of not having a spark of the gift.

Richard brushed pine needles off the back of the sleeve of Kahlan's dress. "Here, hold still; let me look at you."

Kahlan turned back, arms at her sides, as he smoothed the fabric at her upper arms. Her unafraid green eyes, beneath eyebrows that had the graceful arch of a raptor's wings in flight, met his gaze. Her features seemed to have only grown more exquisite since he had first met her. Her look, her pose, the way she gazed at him as if she could see into his soul, struck a chord in him. Clearly evident in her eyes was the intelligence that had from the first so captivated him.

"Why are you looking at me like that?"

Despite everything, he couldn't hold back his smile. "Standing there like that, in that dress, your long hair so beautiful, the green of the trees behind you… it just suddenly reminded me of the first time I saw you."

Her special smile, the smile she gave no one but him, spread radiantly through her bewitching eyes. She put her wrists on his shoulders and locked her fingers behind his neck, pulling him into a kiss.

As it always did, her kiss so completely consumed him with his need of her that he momentarily lost track of the world. She melted into his embrace. For that moment there was no Imperial Order, no Bandakar, no D'Haran Empire, no Sword of Truth, no chimes, no gift turning its power against him, no poison, no warning beacons, no black-tipped races, no Jagang, no Nicholas, no Sisters of the Dark. Her kiss made him forget everything but her. In that moment there was nothing but the two of them.

Kahlan made his life complete; her kiss reaffirmed that bond.

She pulled back, gazing up into his eyes again. "Seems like you've had nothing but trouble ever since that day you found me."

Richard smiled. "My life is what I've had since that day I found you.

When I found you, I found my life."

Holding her face in both hands, he kissed her again.

Betty nudged his leg and bleated.

"You two about ready?" Jennsen called down the hill. "They'll be here, soon. Didn't you hear Cara's whistle?"

"We heard," Kahlan called up to Jennsen. "We'll be right there."

Turning back, she smiled as she looked him up and down. "Well, Lord Rahl, you certainly don't look the way you did the first time I saw you."

She straightened the tooled leather baldric lying over the black tunic banded in gold. "But you look exactly the same, too. Your eyes are the same as I saw that day." She cocked her head as she smiled up at him. "I don't see the headache of the gift in your eyes."

"It's been gone for a while, but after that kiss, it would be impossible to have a headache."

"Well, if it comes back," she said with intimate promise, "just tell me and I'll see what I can do to make it go away."

Richard ran his fingers through her hair and gazed one last time into her eyes before slipping his arm around her waist. Together they walked through the cathedral of trees that was their cover off to the side near the crown of the ridge, and out toward the open slope. Between the trunks of the pines, he could see Jennsen running down the hill, leaping from rock to rock, avoiding the patches of snow. She rushed in to meet them just within the small cluster of trees.

"I spotted them," she said, breathlessly. "I could see them down in the gorge on the far side. They'll be up here soon." A grin brightened her face.

"I saw Tom leading them."

Jennsen took in the sight of both of them, then-Kahlan in the white dress of the Mother Confessor and Richard in the outfit he had in part found in the Keep that had once been worn by war wizards. By the surprise on Jennsen's face, he thought she might curtsy.