She couldn't breathe. One of the Sisters was using her power to constrict Kahlan's throat. She strained, trying to get air, as she clawed at the iron collar around her neck.

Sister Ulicia approached and put her face close to Kahlan's.

"You are lucky this day," she said in a venomous voice. "We don't have time to make you regret your disobedience — not right now, anyway. But don't think that you are going to get away with it without suffering the consequences."

"No, Sister," Kahlan managed to say with great effort. She knew that not to answer would only make it worse yet.

"I guess that you're simply too stupid to comprehend how insignificant and powerless you are in the face of your betters. Perhaps this time, when you are given another lesson, even one as lowly and ignorant as you will understand it."

"Yes, Sister."

Even though she knew quite well what they would make her endure to teach her that lesson, Kahlan would have done the same thing again. She regretted only failing to protect the girl, as she had promised. The day she had taken those three boxes out of Lord Rahl's palace, she had left in their place her most prized possession: a small statue of a proud woman, her lists at her side, her back arched, and her head thrown back as if facing forces that would subdue her but could not.

Kahlan had gathered strength that day in Richard Rahl's palace. Standing in his garden, looking back at the proud statue she'd had to leave there, Kahlan had sworn that she would have her life back. Having her life back meant fighting for life, even if it was the life of a little girl she didn't know.

"Let's go," Sister Ulicia growled as she marched toward the door, expecting everyone to follow.

Kahlan's boots thumped down on the floor when the force pressing her to the wall abruptly released her.

She collapsed to her knees, her bloody hands comforting her throat as she gasped for air. Her fingers encountered the hated collar by which the Sisters controlled her.

"Move," Sister Cecilia ordered in a tone that had Kahlan scrambling to her feet.

She glanced over her shoulder and saw the poor girl's dead eyes staring at her, watching her go.

Richard stood suddenly. The legs of the heavy wooden chair he'd been silting in chattered as they slid back across the rough stone floor. His fingertips still rested on the edge of the table where the book he'd been reading lay open, waiting, before the silver lantern.

There was something wrong with the air.

Not with the way it smelled, or with the temperature, or with the humidity, although it was a warm and sticky night. It was the air itself. Something felt wrong about the air.

Richard couldn't imagine why he would suddenly be struck with such a thought. He couldn't even begin to imagine what it was that could be the cause of such an odd notion. There were no windows in the small reading room, so he didn't know what it was like outside — if it was clear, or windy, or stormy. He knew only that it was deep in the night.

Cara, not far away behind him, stood up from the thickly padded brown leather chair where she, too, had been reading. She waited, but said nothing.

Richard had asked her to read several historical volumes he'd found. Whatever she could find out about the ancient times when the Chainfire book had been written might prove helpful. She hadn't complained about the task. Cara rarely complained about anything as long as it didn't in any way prevent her from protecting him. Since she was able to stay right there in the room with him, she'd had no objections to reading the books he'd given her. One of the other Mord-Sith, Berdine, could read High D'Haran and had in the past been very helpful with things written in the ancient language often found in rare books, but Berdine was far away at the People's Palace. That still left uncountable volumes written in their own language for Cara to review.

Cara watched him as he peered around at the paneled walls, his gaze passing methodically over the ornamental oddities on the shelves: the lacquered boxes with inlaid silver designs, the small figures of dancers carved from bone, the smooth stones lying in velvet-lined boxes, and the decorative glass vases.

"Lord Rahl," she finally asked, "is something wrong?"

Richard glanced back over his shoulder. "Yes. There's something wrong with the air."

He realized only after seeing the tense concern in her expression that it must have sounded absurd saying that there was something wrong with the air.

To Cara, though, no matter how absurd it might have sounded, all that really mattered was that he thought there was some kind of trouble, and trouble meant a potential threat. Her leather outfit creaked as she spun her Agiel up into her fist. Weapon at the ready, she peered around the little room, searching the shadows as if a ghost might pop out of the woodwork.

Her brow drew tighter. "The beast, do you think?"

Richard hadn't considered that possibility. The beast that Jagang had ordered his captured Sisters of the Dark to conjure and send after Richard was always a potential threat. There had been several times in the past when it had seemed to appear out of the very air itself.

Try as he might, Richard couldn't tell precisely what it was that felt wrong to him. Although he couldn't put his finger on the source of the sensation, it seemed like maybe it was something he should remember, something he should know, something he should recognize. He couldn't decide if such a feeling was real or merely his imagination.

He shook his head. "No… I don't think it's the beast. Not wrong in that way."

"Lord Rahl, on top of everything else, you've been up most of the night reading. Perhaps it's just that you're exhausted."

There were times when he did wake with a start just as he began to doze off, foggy and disoriented from the gathering descent into the dark grasp of nightmares that he never remembered when he woke. But this impression was different; it was not something borne out of the dullness of dozing off to sleep. Besides, despite his fatigue, he hadn't been about to fall asleep; he was too anxious to sleep.

It had been only the day before that he had finally convinced the others that Kahlan was real, that she existed, and that she wasn't a figment of his imagination or a delusion caused by an injury. At long last they now knew that Kahlan was not some crazy dream he was having. Now that he at last had some help, his sense of urgency to find her drove him on and kept him wide awake. He couldn't bear to take the time to stop and rest — not now that he had some pieces of the puzzle.

Back near the People's Palace, questioning Tovi just before she died, Nicci had learned the terrible details of how those four women — Sisters Ulicia, Cecilia, Armina, and Tovi — had invoked a Chainfire event. When they unleashed powers that had for thousands of years been secreted away in an ancient book, everyone's memory of Kahlan — except Richard's — had in an instant been wiped away. Somehow, his sword had protected his mind. While he had his memory of Kahlan, his sword had later been forfeited in the effort to find her.

The theory of a Chainfire event had originated with wizards in ancient times. They had been searching for a method that would allow them to slip unseen, ignored, and forgotten among an enemy. They postulated that there was a method to alter people's memory with Subtractive power in a way that all the resulting disconnected parts of a person's recollection would spontaneously reconstruct and connect themselves to one another, with the direct consequence being the creation of erroneous memory to fill the voids that had been created when the subject of the conjuring was wiped from people's minds.