The Pillars of Creation (62 page)

“Really? You mean you want me to go with you?”

“If you’re willing,” Kahlan said. She leaned on Richard, looking like she was at the end of her strength.

“Tom,” Richard said, “might we—”

“Of course!” Tom said, dashing over to offer his arm to Kahlan. “Come on over. I have some nice blankets in back where you can lay down—just ask Jennsen, they’re real comfortable. I’ll drive you back up the easy way.”

“That would be much appreciated,” Richard said. “It’s just about dark. We’d better stay here for the night and ride out as soon as it’s light enough. Hopefully, before it gets too hot.”

“The rest of them will want to sit back there with the Mother Confessor, I expect,” Tom whispered to Jennsen. “If you don’t mind, you could ride up on the seat with me.”

“First I want to know something—the truth, now,” Jennsen said. “If you’re a defender to Lord Rahl, what would you have done, standing over there, if I had harmed Lord Rahl?”

Tom looked down at her with a serious expression. “Jennsen, if I really thought that you would or could, I’d have put this knife in you before you had the chance.”

Jennsen smiled. “Good. I’ll ride with you, then. My horse is up there,” she said pointing up past the Pillars of Creation. “I’ve become good friends with Rusty.”

Betty bleated at the sound of the horse’s name. Jennsen laughed and scratched Betty’s fat middle. “You remember Rusty?”

Betty bleated that she did as her kids frolicked near by.

In the distance behind, Jennsen could hear the murdering Oba Rahl demanding to be let out. She stopped and looked back, realizing that he, too, was a half brother. A very evil one.

“I’m sorry I thought such terrible things about you,” she said, looking up at Richard.

He smiled as he held Kahlan close with one arm, and then pulled Jennsen close with the other. “You used your head when confronted with the truth. I couldn’t ask for any more than that.”

The weight of the rock that had fallen was slowly crushing the sandstone boulders holding up the pillar trapping Oba. It was only a matter of hours until Oba was crushed to death in his inescapable prison, or, if not, until he died of thirst.

After such a defeat, the Keeper wasn’t going to reward Oba with any help. The Keeper would have eternity to make Oba suffer for failure.

Oba was a killer. Jennsen suspected that Richard Rahl had no shred of mercy for someone like that, or anyone who hurt Kahlan. He showed Oba none.

Oba Rahl would be buried forever with the Pillars of Creation.

In the morning, Tom gave them a ride out among the towering Pillars of Creation. The view in the early morning, with the sun throwing long shadows and lending striking colors to the landscape, was spectacular. It was a sight that no one else had ever come out of the valley to report.

Rusty was happy to see Jennsen, and turned positively frisky when she saw Betty and her two kids.

Jennsen, with Richard and Kahlan at her side, went into the squat building and discovered that Sebastian, unable to reconcile his beliefs and his feelings, had granted Jennsen her last wish.

He had taken all the mountain fever roses he’d had in the tin. He sat dead at the table.

Jennsen, sitting beside Tom, listened to Richard and Kahlan explain the whole story of how they came to be together. Jennsen could hardly believe that he was so much different than she had ever thought. His mother, having been raped by Darken Rahl, had run away with Zedd to protect Richard. Richard grew up far away in Westland, not knowing anything at all about D’Hara, or the House of Rahl, or magic. Richard had ended the evil rule of Darken Rahl. Kahlan, having been hunted by real quads, had killed their commander. With Richard as Lord Rahl, there were no more quads.

Jennsen felt proud and honored, now, that Richard had asked her to keep the knife with the ornate letter “R” on it. He said she had earned the right to carry it. She intended to keep it and hold sacred its true purpose. Now, she truly was a protector, just like Tom.

As they rode along, Betty stood in the wagon beside Friedrich, with her front hooves up on the seat between Tom and Jennsen, each holding a sleeping little goat. Rusty was tied behind, where Betty frequently went back to visit. Richard, Kahlan, and Cara rode along at the side.

Jennsen turned to her brother after having considered what he’d just told her. “So, you’re not making that up, then? It really said that about me in that book
—The Pillars of Creation
?”

“It was speaking about those like you: ‘The most dangerous creature walking the world of life is the ungifted child of a Lord Rahl, because they are completely immune to magic. Magic can’t harm them, can’t affect them, and even prophecy is blind to them.’ But I guess you turned out to prove the book wrong.”

She thought it over. Some of it still didn’t make sense to her. “I don’t understand why the Keeper was using me. Why was his voice in my head?”

“Well, I only had time to translate a small bit of the book, and other parts are damaged. But, from some of what I did read, I guess that the ungifted child, since he has no magic, is what the book calls a ‘hole in the world,’” Richard explained, “so they’re also a hole in the veil—making you potentially a conduit between the world of life and the world of the dead. In order for the Keeper to consume the world of life, he needed such a gateway. The need for vengeance was the final key. Your surrender to his wishes—when you went out in the woods with the Sisters of the Dark—had to be consummated by you being slain, by you completing the bargain with death by dying.”

“So, if anyone had killed me—Sister Perdita, for example—after I went out in the woods with those Sisters of the Dark, wouldn’t that have opened such a gateway?”

“No. The Keeper needed a protector of the world of life. It took the balance to your lack of the gift. It took a gifted Rahl—the Lord Rahl, to accomplish such a thing,” Richard said. “If I had killed you to save myself, or Kahlan, then the Keeper would have been loosed into this world through the breach created. I had to force you to choose life, not death, if you were to live, and if the Keeper was to be kept in the underworld.”

“I might have…destroyed life,” Jennsen said, shaken at truly understanding how close she’d come to unleashing cataclysmic destruction.

“I’d not have let you,” Tom said, good-naturedly.

Jennsen put her hand on his arm, realizing that she had never had feelings before like she had for him. The man positively made her heart sing. His smile made her life worth living. Betty stuck her nose in, wanting attention, and to see her sleeping babies.

“There is no greater treason to life than delivering the innocent to the Keeper of the Dead,” Cara said.

“But she didn’t,” Richard said. “She used reason to discover the truth, and truth to embrace life.”

“You sure know a lot about magic,” Jennsen said to Richard.

Kahlan and Cara laughed so hard that Jennsen thought they might fall off their horses.

“I don’t see what’s so funny,” Richard grumbled.

The two of them laughed all the harder.