"What is it?" Rikka called out as Richard, Nicci, and Cara ran toward her. Nathan and Ann had already fallen far behind. Zedd was somewhere in the middle.

"Come on," Richard shouted to her as he ran past.

"Someone is coming up the Keep road," Cara called back over her shoulder as Rikka joined in the charge through the halls.

Richard veered around a long stone table set against the wall beneath a huge painting of a lake. Sheltered trails could be seen burrowed through the deeply shadowed pine groves. In the distance, through a bluish haze, majestic mountains rose up to catch brushstrokes of golden sunlight. It was a scene that made Richard long to be back in his Hartland woods on the trails he knew so well. More than anything, though, the painting always reminded him of the magical summer he'd spent with Kahlan in the home he had built for her far back in the mountains.

The summer of Kahlan's recovery from her terrible injuries, as he showed her the natural beauty of his forested world and she once again blossomed back to health, had been one of the happiest times of his life. It had ended all too suddenly when Nicci had arrived without warning and taken him away. He knew, though, that if Nicci had not interrupted it, something else would have. It had been a dream time that had to end; until the looming threat from the Imperial Order was halted, no one could live their dreams. They would all, instead, be swept up in the same nightmare.

They turned a corner around a green marble pillar with a gold capital and base and all plunged down a spiral run of granite steps, Richard and Nicci in the lead with the two Mord-Sith following close on their heels. The stairwell was small for the Keep, but would have dwarfed anything Richard had ever seen growing up back in Westland.

At the bottom, he slid to a halt, momentarily pausing to decide which would be the quickest route; in the Keep it wasn't always the way it would seem. Besides that, it was as easy to get lost in the Keep as it was to lose one's direction in a birch forest.

Cara pushed through between Richard and Nicci, not only to be sure that there would be a red-leather-clad guard to each side of him, but so that she would be the one out ahead of him. As far as Richard knew, Mord-Sith didn't have rank, but Rikka, like the other Mord-Sith, always wordlessly conceded Cara's unspoken authority.

Richard recognized the unique pattern of the thin black and gilded bands lining both sides of the mahogany wainscoting in one of the paneled corridors to the side. From almost since the time he had learned to walk, Richard had used the details of his surroundings to know his way. Like trees in the woods that he recognized because of some peculiarity like a twisted limb, a growth, or a scar, he had learned to navigate through the Keep and places like it by the details of architecture.

He gestured. "This way." Cara charged off ahead of him.

As they ran, their boot strikes echoed off the stone floor of the hall. Nicci was barefoot. He was somewhat surprised that without shoes she could keep up running across the rough stone. Nicci was not the kind of woman Richard ever envisioned running in bare feet. Even running in bare feet, though, she still looked somehow… regal.

It wasn't all that long ago that Richard would not have imagined Nicci ever running again. He was still surprised that he had managed to get her out of the spell-form after the lightning had exploded through the window. For a time, he was sure that they had lost her. If Zedd had not been there to help after Richard had shut down the verification web, they very well might have.

They turned down another hall; long carpets quieted their run and finally led them between two highly polished red marble columns and into the oval-shaped anteroom. A balcony, supported by pillars and arches, ran around the perimeter of the room. The doorways at the back of the balcony were all corridors, arranged like the spokes of a wheel, that led to different levels and areas of the Keep.

Richard bounded down the five steps ringing the room inside the columns and ran past the great clover-leaf-shaped fountain centered in the tiled floor. The fountain's waters cascaded down successive tiers of ever wider, scalloped bowls to end up in a pool contained by a knee-high white marble wall that also served as a bench. A hundred feet overhead a glassed roof flooded the room with warmth and light.

When he reached the far side of the room, Richard pushed ahead of Cara and threw open one of the heavy double doors. He paused on the top of the dozen wide granite steps outside. Nicci halted beside him, to his left, with Rikka on the far side of her. Cara took a defensive place close by on his right. All of them were still catching their breath from the brief but swift run through the Keep.

The grass in the paddock across the way was lush and green in the early-morning light. Beyond the paddock the wall of the Keep rose straight up, making the inner courtyard seem like a cozy canyon. The passing of millennia had left the soaring wall of tightly fitted, dark stone stained with pale tan sediment. Creamy drips of calcium deposits gave the impression that the rock was slowly melting.

Two horses clopped through the dark, arched opening to the left, which tunneled under part of the Keep to gain access to the inner courtyard. Richard couldn't tell who it was, hidden as they were back in the deep shadows of the broad, low archway, but whoever it was must have known where they were going and they apparently weren't afraid to enter an interior area of the Keep, an area used not by visitors but by wizards and those who had worked with them at the complex. But that was long ago. Still, Richard recalled his own trepidation the first time he cautiously ventured this far into the grounds of the Keep. His hackles rose at who might be bold enough to ride right into such a place.

When the two riders emerged into the light, Richard saw that one of them was Shota.

The witch woman locked eyes with him and smiled that quiet, knowing, private smile she wore so naturally. Like most other things about Shota, Richard didn't entirely trust the smile as significant, much less sincere, and so he couldn't be sure that it augured well.

He didn't recognize the woman, maybe ten or fifteen years older, who rode deferentially half a length behind Shota. Short, sandy hair framed the woman's pleasant face. Her eyes were as intensely blue as the sky on a sparkling clear autumn day. Unlike Shota, she wore no casual smile. As they rode, her head swiveled and those blue eyes searched, as if she feared an imminent attack of demons who might materialize out of the dark stone of the surrounding walls.

Shota, by contrast, looked calm and self-confident.

Cara leaned past Richard toward Nicci. "Shota, the witch woman," she whispered confidentially.

"I know," Nicci answered without taking her eyes off the beautiful woman riding toward them.

Shota brought her horse to a halt close to the steps. As she straightened her shoulders she casually rested her wrists across the saddle's pommel.

"I need to see you," she said to Richard as if he were the only one standing there. The smile, sincere or not, had vanished. "We have much to talk about."

"Where is your murderous little companion, Samuel?"

Shota, riding sidesaddle, slipped down off her horse in a way that Richard imagined must be how a spirit would slip to ground, if spirits rode horses.

A hint of indignation narrowed Shota's almond-shaped eyes. "That is one of the things we need to talk about."

The other woman dismounted as well and took the reins to Shota's horse when the witch woman lifted them to the side, much the way a queen would, not knowing or caring who would take them, but expecting without any doubt whatsoever that someone would. Her gaze remained fixed on Richard as she glided closer to the broad granite steps. Her thick, wavy auburn hair tumbled down over the front of her shoulders and glistened in the early light. Her revealing dress, made of an airy, rust-colored fabric that complemented perfectly the color of her hair, seemed to float with her effortless strides, clinging to her every curve, at least the ones it covered.