Blood dripped down onto Cara's bare chest, vivid red against the expanse of her white skin.

"Cara, stop!" His jaw worked, if painfully, so he reasoned it wasn't broken. "It's me. Stop. You'll kill Kahlan." Cara stilled under him, staring up in angry confusion. "What you do to Nicci happens to Kahlan, too."

"You had better listen to him," Nicci said from behind him in that velvety voice of hers.

Cara reached up when Richard released her wrists and touched the side of his mouth. "I'm sorry," she whispered, realizing what she had done. Her tone told him she meant it. Richard nodded and then stood, pulling her up by her hand before rounding on Nicci.

Nicci stood tall, in that proud and proper posture she had. Her attention and her magic was focused on Kahlan. The calm but violent power from within him had awakened, waiting to be commanded. Richard didn't know how to use it to stop Nicci. He held back, fearing that anything he did would only make Kahlan's peril worse.

Kahlan was on her feet, too, but once again pinned to the wall of the house by the milky rope of light. Her green eyes were wide with the trembling torment of whatever it was Nicci was doing.

Nicci's hands lifted. She laid her palms to her heart, over the light.

Her back was to Richard, but he could see the light through her, like fire eating through the center of a piece of paper, the incandescent hole expanding outward, appearing to consume her. The twisting flare of light was doing the same thing to Kahlan, seeming to burn through her, yet Richard could see that she was not being killed by it. She was still breathing, still moving, still alive-not reacting at all the way a person would if they were really having holes burned through them. With magic, he knew better than to believe his eyes.

At the center of Nicci's chest, under her hands, she began to become solid again, re-forming where the light had spent itself in glowing rays working out toward the edges of her.

The light cut off. Kahlan, her own hands pressed to the wall behind her, sagged in relief as it extinguished, her eyes closing as if it was too much to endure looking at the woman standing before her.

Richard was restrained fury. His muscles screamed to be released. The magic within was a coiled viper waiting to strike. He wanted almost more than anything to cut down this woman. The only thing he wanted more was for Kahlan to be safe.

Nicci smiled pleasantly at Kahlan before turning to Richard. Her calm blue eyes momentarily took in his white-knuckled fist on the hilt of his sword.

"Richard. It's been a long time. You look well."

"What have you done?" He growled through gritted teeth.

She smiled. It was a smile a mother gave a child-a smile of indulgence.

She took a breath, as if recovering from a difficult bit of labor, and lifted a hand to indicate Kahlan.

"I have spelled your wife, Richard."

Richard could hear Cara's breath close behind his left shoulder. She was staying out of the way of his sword arm.

"To what end?" he asked.

"Why, to capture you, of course."

"What's going to happen to her? What harm have you done?"

"Harm? Why, none. Any harm that comes to her will only be by your hand."

Richard frowned, understanding her, but wishing he were wrong. "You mean, if I hurt you, Kahlan will suffer it, too?"

Nicci smiled with the same discerning, disarming smile she used to have when she came to give him lessons. He could hardly believe that he used to imagine that she must look like nothing so much as a good spirit in the flesh.

Richard could sense the magic crackling around this woman. He had come to know in most cases, through his own gift, when a person had the gift.

What others couldn't see, he saw. He could see it in their eyes, and sometimes sense the aura of it around them. He had rarely met gifted women who made the very air about them sizzle with their power. Worse, though, Nicci was a Sister of the Dark.

"Yes, and more. Much more. You see, we are now linked by a maternity spell. Odd name for a spell, yes? The name, in part, is derived from the spell's nurturing aspects. As in lifegiver-the way a mother nurtures her child and keeps it alive.

"That light you saw was an umbilical cord of sorts: an umbilical cord of magic. By bending the nature of this world, it links our lives, no matter the distance between us. Just as I am the daughter of my mother and nothing could ever change that, so neither can this magic be altered by anyone else."

She spoke as an instructor, as she had once spoken to him at the Palace of the Prophets when she had been one of his teachers. She always spoke with a quiet economy of words that he had once thought added an air of nobility to her bearing. Back then, Richard couldn't have imagined coarse words coming from Nicci's mouth, but the words she spoke now were vile.

She still moved with an unmatched, slow elegance. He had always thought her movements seductive. He now saw them as the sinuous movements of a snake.

The magic of his sword thundered through him, screaming to be loosed.

The sword's magic had been created specifically to combat what the sword's wielder considered evil. At that moment, Nicci fit the requirement to such an extent that the magic of the sword was close to overpowering him, near to taking command in order to destroy this threat. With the pain from the Agiel still throbbing in his head, it was a struggle to maintain his control over the power of the sword. Richard could feel the raised gold letters of the word TRUTH on the hilt pressing into his palm.

This was a time, perhaps more than any other, that he knew had to be faced with truth, and not his raw wishes. Life and death hung in the balance.

"Richard," Kahlan said in a level voice. She waited until his eyes met hers. "Kill her." She spoke with a quiet authority that demanded obedience.

In her white Mother Confessor's dress, her words carried the unequivocal weight of command. "Do it. Don't wait another moment. Kill her. Don't think about it, do it."

Nicci calmly watched to see what he might do. What he would finally decide seemed no more than a matter of curiosity to her. Richard had no need to think or to decide.

"I can't," he said to Kahlan. "That would kill you, too."

Nicci lifted one eyebrow. "Very good, Richard. Very good."

"Do it!" Kahlan shrieked. "Do it now, while you still have the chance!"

"Keep still," he said in a calm voice. He looked back at Nicci. "Let's hear it."

She clasped her hands in the way the Sisters of the Light were wont to do. Only she was not a Sister of the Light. There looked to be something deeply felt behind that blue-eyed gaze, but what those feelings could be, he didn't know and feared to imagine. It was one of those intense gazes that held a world of emotion, everything from longing to hatred. One thing he was sure he saw was a dead serious determination that was more important to her than life itself.

"It's like this, Richard. You are to come with me. As long as I live, Kahlan will live. If I die, she dies. It's as simple as that."

"What else?" he demanded.

"What else?" Nicci blinked. "Nothing else."

"What if I decide to kill you?"

"Then I will die. But Kahlan will die with me-our lives are now finked."

"That's not what I mean. I mean, you must have some purpose. What else will it mean if I decide to kill you."

Nicci shrugged. "Nothing. It's up to you to decide. Our lives are in your hands. Should you choose to preserve her life, you will have to come with me."

"And what do you intend to do with him?" Kahlan asked as she edged her way over to Richard's side. "Torture a sham confession out of him, so that Jagang can put him on some kind of show trial followed by a very public execution?"