go out and look for you.”
Cara sighed and reluctantly agreed. Retrieving a cool, wet cloth, she set to mopping Kahlan’s forehead and temples. Kahlan didn’t like to complain when people were doing their best to care for her, so she didn’t say anything about how much it hurt her torn neck muscles when her head was shifted in that way. Cara never complained about any of it. Cara only complained when she believed her charges were in needless danger—and when Richard wouldn’t let her eliminate those she viewed as a danger.
Outside, a bird let out a high-pitched trill. The tedious repetition was becoming grating. In the distance, Kahlan could hear a squirrel chattering an objection to something, or perhaps arguing over his territory. He’d been doing it for what seemed an hour. The stream babbled on without letup.
This was Richard’s idea of restful.
“I hate this,” she muttered.
“You should be happy—lying about without anything to do.”
“And I bet you would be happy to trade places?”
“I am Mord-Sith. For a Mord-Sith, nothing could be worse than to die in bed.” Her blue eyes turned to Kahlan’s. “Old and toothless,” she added. “I didn’t mean that you—”
“I know what you meant.”
Cara looked relieved. “Anyway, you couldn’t die—that would be too easy. You never do anything easy.”
“I married Richard.”
“See what I mean?”
Kahlan smiled.
Cara dunked the cloth in a pail on the floor and wrung it out as she stood. “It isn’t too bad, is it? Just lying there?”
“How would you like to have to have someone push a wooden bowl under our bottom every time your bladder was full?”
Cara carefully blotted the damp cloth along Kahlan’s neck. “I don’t mind doing it for a sister of the Agiel.”
The Agiel, the weapon a Mord-Sith always carried, looked like nothing more than a short, red leather rod hanging on a fine chain from her right wrist. A Mord-Sith’s Agiel was never more than a flick away from her grip. It somehow functioned by means of the magic of a Mord-Sith’s bond to the Lord Rahl.
Kahlan had once felt the partial touch of an Agiel. In a blinding instant, it could inflict the kind of pain that the entire gang of men had dealt Kahlan. The touch of a Mord-Sith’s Agiel was easily capable of delivering bone-breaking torture, and just as easily, if she desired, death.
Richard had given Kahlan the Agiel that had belonged to Denna, the Mord-Sith who had captured him by order of Darken Rahl. Only Richard had ever come to understand and empathize with the pain an Agiel also gave the Mord-Sith who wielded it. Before he was forced to kill Denna in order to escape, she had given him her Agiel, asking to be remembered as simply Denna, the woman beyond the appellation of Mord-Sith, the woman no one but Richard had ever before seen or understood.
That Kahlan understood, and kept the Agiel as a symbol of that same respect for women whose young lives had been stolen and twisted to nightmare purposes and duties, was deeply meaningful to the other Mord-Sith. Because of that compassion—untainted by pity—and more, Cara had named Kahlan a sister of the Agiel. It was an informal but heartfelt accolade.
“Messengers have come to see Lord Rahl,” Cara said. “You were sleeping, and Lord Rahl saw no reason to wake you,” she added in answer to Kahlan’s questioning look. The messengers were D’Haran, and able to find Richard by their bond to him as their Lord Rahl. Kahlan, not able to duplicate the feat, had always found it unsettling.
“What did they have to say?”
Cara shrugged. “Not a lot. Jagang’s army of the Imperial Order remains in Anderith for the time being, with Reibisch’s force staying safely to the north to watch and be ready should the Order decide to threaten the rest of the Midlands. We know little of the situation inside Anderith, under the Order’s occupation. The rivers flow away from our men, toward the sea, so they have not seen