Richard blinked. "Are you saying that he did something while he was at the Temple of the Winds so that someone would again be born with Subtractive Magic?"

"By 'someone, I presume that you mean… you?" She arched an eyebrow as if to underscore the sobriety of the question.

"What are you suggesting?"

"None has been born with Subtractive Magic and more, born a war wizard, since then, since the Temple was sent from this world."

"Look, I don't know for sure if that's true but even if it is that doesn't mean — "

"Do you know what war wizard Baraccus did upon his return from the Temple of the Winds?"

Richard was taken aback by the question, wondering what relevance it could have. "Well, yes. When he returned from the Temple of the Winds… he committed suicide." Richard gestured weakly to the vast complex above them. "He threw himself off the side of the Wizard's Keep, off the outer wall overlooking the valley and the city of Aydindril below."

His mother nodded sorrowfully. "Overlooking the place where the Confessors' Palace would eventually be built."

"I suppose so."

"But first, before he threw himself off that wall, he left something for you."

Richard stared down at her, not completely sure that he'd heard her correctly. "For me? Are you sure?"

His mother nodded. "The account you read was not privy to everything. You see, when he returned from the Temple of the Winds, before he threw himself from the side of the Keep, he gave his wife a book and sent her with it to his library."

"His library?"

"Baraccus had a secret library."

Richard felt like was was tiptoeing across fresh ice. "I didn't even know he had a wife."

"But Richard, you know her." His mother smiled in a way that made the already stiff hair at the back of his neck stand out even more.

Richard could hardly breathe. "I know her? How is that possible?"

"Well," his mother said with a one-shouldered shrug, "you know of her. Do you know the wizard who created the first Confessor?"

"Yes," Richard said, confused by her change of subject. "His name was Merritt. The first Confessor was a woman named Magda Seams. There is a painting of them across the ceiling down in the Confessors' Palace."

His mother nodded in a way that made his stomach knot. "That's the woman."

"What woman?"

"Baraccus's wife."

"No…" Richard said as he touched his fingers to his forehead, trying to think it through. "No, she was the wife of Merritt, the wizard who had made her into a Confessor, not Baraccus."

"That was later," his mother said with a dismissive gesture. "Her first husband was Baraccus."

"Are you sure?"

She nodded firmly. "When Baraccus returned from the Temple of the Winds, Magda Searus was waiting for him, where he had asked her to wait, in the First Wizard's enclave. For days she had waited, fearful that he would never return to her. To her great relief he finally did. He kissed her, told her of his undying love, and then, in confidence, and after securing her oath of eternal silence, he sent her with a book to his hidden, private, secret library.

"After she had gone he left his outfit — the one you now wear, including those leather-padded silver wristbands, the cape that looks as if it has been spun from gold, and that amulet — in the First Wizard's enclave, left them for the wizard he had just insured would be born into the world of life… left them for you, Richard."

"For me? Are you sure that they were really meant for me, specifically?"

"Why do you think that there as so many prophecies that speak of you, that wait for you, that name you — 'the one born true, 'the pebble in the pond, 'the bringer of death, 'the Caharin'? Why do you think those prophecies that revolve around you came about? Why do you think that you have been able to understand some of them when no one else for centuries, for millennia, has been able to decipher them? Why do you think that you have fulfilled others?"

"But that doesn't mean that it was explicitly meant to be me."

With an indifferent gesture, his mother declined to either support or deny his assertion. "Who is to say what came first, the Subtractive side finally finding a child to be born in, or it finally finding the specific child it was meant to be born in. Prophecy needs a kernel to spark its growth. Something must be there to engender what will be, even if it is merely the color of your eyes that has been passed down to you. Something must make it come about. In this case, is it chance or intent?"

"I would like to think a chance series of events."

"If it pleases you. But at this point, Richard, does it really matter? You are the one born with the ability that Baraccus released from its confinement in another world. You are the one he intended to be born, either by chance or specific intent. In the end, the only thing that matters is what is: you are the one born with that ability."

Richard supposed that she was right; exactly how it came to be didn't change what was.

His mother sighed as she went on with the story. "Anyway, it was only then, after he had made his preparations for what he had insured would come about, that Baraccus emerged from his enclave and leaped to his death. Those who wrote the accounts did not know that he had already been back long enough to send his wife on an urgent covert mission. She returned to discover that he was dead."

Richard's head spun. He couldn't believe what he was hearing. He felt dizzy from the unexpected account of ancient events. He knew, though, from having been to the Temple of the Winds, that such things were possible. He had given up the knowledge that he had gained there as the price of returning to the world of life. Even though he'd lost that knowledge, he was left with a sense of how profound it had been. The one who had demanded the price of leaving behind what he had learned in exchange for his return to Kahlan had been the spirit of Darken Rahl, his real father.

"In her grief, Magda Searus volunteered herself to be the subject of a dangerous experiment that Merritt had come up with, volunteered to become a Confessor. She knew there was a good chance that she would not live through the unknown hazards of that conjuring, but in her grief, with her beloved husband, the First Wizard, dead, her world had ended. She didn't think that there was anything for her to live for, other than finding out who was responsible for the fateful events that had resulted in her husband's death, so she volunteered for what everyone expected might very well be a fatal experiment.

"Yet she survived. It was only much later that she began to fall in love with Merritt, and he with her. Her world came back to life with him. The accounts of that time are in spots blurred, with pieces missing or misplaced in the chronology of events, but the truth is that Merritt was her second husband."

Richard had to sit down on the marble bench. It was almost too much to take in. The implications were staggering. He had trouble reconciling the coincidences: that he had been the first in thousands of years to be born with Subtractive Magic, that Baraccus had been the last one to go to the Temple of the Winds until Richard himself, that Baraccus had been married to a woman who became the first Confessor, that Richard had fallen in love with and married a Confessor — the Mother Confessor herself, Kahlan.

"When Magda Searus used her newborn Confessor power on Lothain, they discovered what he had done at the Temple of the Winds, what only Baraccus had known."

Richard looked up. "What did he do?"

His mother gazed into his eyes as if she were looking into his soul. "Lothain betrayed them when he was at the Temple by seeing to it that a very specific magic that had been locked away there would at some future point be released into the world of life. Emperor Jagang was born with the power that Lothain allowed to seep out of the safety of its confinement in another world. That magic was the power of a dream walker."