Stone of Tears

“One reason for the collar is to open my mind to the gift. That’s what you said. If I’m using the gift, which is what you want me to do, and if it is what I need, then I don’t see how that is dangerous.”

“What you need and what’s right are not necessarily the same. Just because you want something, that does not make it right.” She nodded to the sword. Take it back. I cannot accept it now. You must keep it.”

“I told you, I don’t want it.”

Then throw it in the fire. I cannot take it. It’s tainted.”

Richard snatched it out of her hands. “I’m not throwing it in the fire.” He put his head through the baldric and straightened the scabbard at his hip. “I think you’re too superstitious, Sister. It’s just a sword. It is not tainted.”

She was wrong. It was the magic that was tainted, and he had not offered that to her. Even if he wanted to be rid of its magic, all magic, he could not. It was part of him. Kahlan had seen that, and she had rid herself of it. Of him.

She turned from him and mounted Jessup. Her voice was cold and distant. “We must be on our way.”

Richard settled into his saddle and followed after. He hoped the little gar would have a chance at life, after the meal it had needed. He said a silent good-bye to it as he rode into the night behind Sister Verna.

Though he had meant what he said about giving her the sword, he felt strangely relieved to have it back. It belonged with him, and somehow made him whole. Zedd had given it to him; it was what had changed him, but it was also all he had to remind him of his friend and home.

Chapter 25

The horse was exhausted, but still ran with wild abandon. Adie held a tight grip on Zedd’s waist as he leaned over the horse’s withers, clutching her mane. Muscles bunched and flexed rhythmically beneath him. Trees in the dense forest flashed by in an endless blur. The horse leapt over rocks and logs without pause.

The skrin was only a heartbeat behind. Being taller than the horse, it struck branches as it ran. Zedd could hear the limbs snap and splinter. He had tried felling trees across the way right behind them, but it didn’t slow the bone beast. He had tried tricks and spells and wizardry of every sort. None had worked, but he refused to admit defeat. Admitting defeat established a mental state of resignation that would make it certain.

“I fear the Keeper has us this time,” Adie called at his back.

“Not yet he doesn’t! How did he find us? The bones of the skrin have been in your house, hiding you, for years! If they have been hiding you, then how did he find us?”

She had no answer.

They were running the path where the boundary had been, headed toward the Midlands. Zedd was thankful the boundary walls were no longer there, or they could have inadvertently run into the underworld by now. Boundary or not, this couldn’t go on for much longer, and then the skrin would have them. Boundary or not, the underworld would have them. The Keeper would have them.

Think, he ordered himself.

Zedd was using magic to lend strength and stamina to the horse, but even so, heart, lungs and sinew could not endure long past their natural limits. He was nearly as weary as the frightened animal. This couldn’t go on much longer.

He had to stop trying to slow the skrin, and put his mind to solving the problem. But that could be a dangerous shift in tactics. It could be that although what he was doing wasn’t stopping the skrin, it was keeping it from them.

He thought he saw a flash of green light to the left. A shade of green he had seen from only one place: the boundary. From the underworld. Impossible, he thought. The horse’s hooves thundered on.

“Adie! Do you have anything with you that the skrin would recognize?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know! Anything! It has to have found us by something. Something to connect us to the underworld.”

“I have nothing. It must have found us by the bones at my house.”

“But the bones have been what have been hiding you!”

There was no mistaking the flash of green light this time. It was to the right. Another came to the left.

“Zedd! I think the skrin be bringing up the underworld, to force us into it!”

Bones.

“Can it do that?”

Her voice wasn’t as loud this time. “Yes.”

“Bags,” he muttered into the cold wind at his face.

Eerie green light flickered between the trees. It was closer. If he didn’t think of something, they were going to die.

Think.

Suddenly the green light seemed to ignite into a solid wall to each side. It made a thump he could feel deep in his chest when it arrived, whole, in this world. The horse galloped down the path between them. The way between the walls was narrowing.

Bones.

Skrin bones.

“Adie! Give me the necklace around your neck!”

The luminous green walls of the boundary pressed in to each side. They were out of time. They were out of options.

Adie pulled off her necklace and put her arm around him again, holding out the bone necklace. Her hand was slick with blood. Zedd yanked his own necklace over his head and snatched hers in the same hand.