Soul of the Fire

The Mud People were positive they had collected every chicken in the village, so the chicken for which he was searching had to be one of the chickens in the three buildings. Richard had no answer for that.

She asked why this one chicken-risen from the dead-would have been following them around all day. To what purpose? Richard had no answer for that, either.

Kahlan realized she hadn't been very supportive. She knew Richard was not given to flights of fancy. His persistence wasn't really bullheaded, nor was it meant to rile her.

She should have listened more receptively, more tenderly. She was his wife. If he couldn't count on her, then who? No wonder he hadn't been in the mood to make love to her. But a chicken…

Kahlan pushed open the door to be greeted by a sodden gust. Cara had gone to bed. The hunters protecting the spirit house spotted her and rushed over to gather around. All their eyes stared up at her candlelit face floating in the rainy darkness. Their glistening bodies materialized like apparitions whenever lightning crackled.

"Which way did Richard go?" she asked.

The men blinked dumbly.

"Richard," she repeated. "He is not inside. He left a while ago. Which way did he go?"

One of the men looked at all his fellows, checking, before he spoke. All had given him a shake of their heads.

"We saw no one. It is dark, but still, we would see him if he came out." •

Kahlan sighed. "Maybe not. Richard was a woods guide. The night is his element. He can make himself disappear in the dark the same way you can disappear in the grass."

The men nodded with this news, not the least bit dubious. "Then he is out here, somewhere, but we do not know where. Sometimes, Richard with the Temper can be like a spirit. He is like no man we have ever seen before."

Kahlan smiled to herself. Richard was a rare person-the mark of a wizard.

The hunters one time had taken him to shoot arrows, and he had astonished them by ruining all the arrows he shot. He put them in the center of the target, one on top of the other, each splitting apart the one before.

Richard's gift guided his arrows, though he didn't believe it; he thought it simply a matter of practice and concentration. "Calling the target" was how he termed it. He said he called the target to him, letting everything else vanish, and when he felt the arrow find that singular spot in the air, he loosed it. He could do it in a blink.

Kahlan had to admit that when he taught her to shoot, she could sometimes feel what he meant. What he had taught her had even once saved her life. Even so, she knew magic was involved.

The hunters had great respect for Richard. Shooting arrows was only part of it. It was hard not to have respect for Richard. If she said he could be invisible, they had no reason to doubt it.

It had almost started out very badly. At the first meeting out on the plains, when Kahlan had brought him to the Mud People, Richard had misunderstood the greeting of a slap, and had clouted Savidlin, one of their leaders. By doing so he had inadvertently honored their strength and made a valuable friend, but had also earned him the name "Richard with the Temper."

Kahlan wiped rain water from her- face. "All right. I want to find him." She signaled off into the darkness. "Each of you, go a different way. If you find him, tell him I want him. If you don't see him, meet back here after you have looked in your direction, and we will go off in new places, until we find him."

They started to object, but she told them she was tired and wanted to get back to bed, and she wanted her new husband with her. She pleaded with them to just please help her, or she would search alone.

It occurred to her that Richard was doing that very thing: searching alone, because no one believed him.

Reluctantly, the men agreed and scattered in different directions, vanishing into the darkness. Without cumbersome boots, they didn't have the time she did navigating the mud.

Kahlan pulled off her boots and tossed them back by the door to the spirit house. She smiled to herself at having outwitted that much of the mud.

There were any number of women back in Aydindril, from nobility, to officials, to wives of officials, who, if they could have seen the Mother Confessor at that moment, barefoot, ankle-deep in mud, and soaked to the skin, would have fainted.

Kahlan slopped out into the mud, trying to imagine if Richard would have any method to his search. Richard rarely did anything without reason. How would he go about searching the entire village by himself in the dark?

Kahlan reconsidered her first thought, that he was searching for the chicken. Maybe he realized that the things she, Zedd, and Ann said made sense. Maybe he wasn't looking for a chicken. But then what was he doing out in the middle of the night?