The pillars of creation

Her hand paused when she started grabbing her mother's clothes for her. She stopped, fingers trembling, focusing on her mother's orders. She couldn't think, so she moved like a trained animal, doing as she had been taught. They'd had to run before.

She scanned the room. Four dead D'Harans. One that morning. That made five. A quad plus one. Where were the other three? In the dark outside the door? In the trees? In the dark woods, waiting? Waiting to take her to Lord Rahl to be tortured to death?

With both hands, Sebastian seized her wrist. "Jennsen, what are you doing?"

She realized she was stabbing at the empty air.

She watched as he pried the knife from her fist and returned it to its sheath. He tucked it behind her belt. He scooped up her cloak, which the huge D'Haran soldier had ripped off her as she had first fallen into the nightmare.

"Hurry up, Jennsen. Grab anything else you want."

Sebastian rifled through the dead men's pockets, pulling out money he found, cramming it in his own pockets. He unstrapped all four knives, none as good as the one he'd tucked behind her belt, the one with the ornate letter «R» on the handle, the one from the fallen dead man, the one her mother had used.

Sebastian slipped the four knives down the side of the pack as he yelled at her again to hurry. While he took the best sword from one of the men, Jennsen went to the table. She scooped up candles and stuffed them in the pack. Sebastian attached the scabbard of the sword to his weapons belt. Jennsen collected small implements-cooking utensils, pots-pushing them in her pack. She wasn't really aware of what she was taking. She was just picking up whatever she saw and putting it in.

Sebastian lifted her pack, took one of her wrists, and stuffed it through the strap, as if he were handling a rag doll. He put her other arm through the other strap he held out for her, then threw her cloak around her shoulders. After he pulled the hood up over her head, he stuffed her red hair in the sides.

He held her mother's pack in one hand. He tugged twice and freed his axe from the soldier's skull. Blood ran down the handle as he hooked the axe on his weapons belt. With the heel of his sword hand against the small of her back, he urged her onward.

"Anything else?" he asked as they moved toward the door. "Jennsen, do you want anything else from your house before we go?"

Jennsen looked over her shoulder at her mother on the floor.

"She's gone, Jennsen. The good spirits are taking care of her, now. She's smiling down on you, now."

Jennsen looked up at him. "Really? You think so?"

"Yes. She's in a better world, now. She told us to go from here. We have to do what she said."

In a better world. Jennsen clung to that idea. Her world held only anguish.

She moved toward the door, doing as Sebastian said to do. He scanned in every direction. She simply followed, stepping over bodies, over bloody arms and legs. She was too scared to feel anymore, too heartsick to care. Her thoughts seemed completely muddled. She had always prided herself on her clear thinking. Where had her clear thinking gone?

In the rain, he pulled her by her arm toward the path down.

"Betty," she said, digging in her heels. "We have to get Betty."

He gazed at the path, then toward the cave. "I don't think we need bother with the goat, but I should get my pack, my things."

She saw he was standing in the downpour without his cloak. He was soaked to the skin. It occurred to her that she wasn't the only one who wasn't thinking clearly. He was so intent on escaping that he almost left his things. That would be the death of him. She couldn't let him die. Betty would help, but there was one other thing that she remembered. Jennsen ran back in the house.

She ignored Sebastian's yells. Inside, she wasted no time rushing to a small wooden chest just inside the door. She looked at nothing else as she pulled out two bundled sheepskin cloaks-one hers, one her mother's. They kept them there, rolled and tied, at the ready, in case they ever had to leave in a hurry. He watched from the doorway, impatient, but silent when he saw what she was doing. Without looking death in the eye, she rushed back out of her house for the last time.

Together, they ran to the cave. The fire was still crackling hot. Betty paced and trembled but was uncharacteristically silent, as if knowing something was terribly wrong.

"Dry yourself a bit, first," she said.

"We don't have time! We have to get out of here. The others could come at any moment."

"You'll freeze to death if you don't. Then what good will running do? Dead is dead." Her own reasoned words surprised her.

Jennsen pulled the two rolled sheepskin cloaks from under her wool cloak and started working loose the knots in the thongs. "These will help keep the rain out, but you need to get dry, first, otherwise you won't stay warm enough."