All too soon the kiss, the embrace, was over. His warm presence swirled away from her, allowing the awful weight of doom to settle firmly down atop her. Richard briefly hugged Cara before he hefted his pack onto a shoulder.

He turned back at the bedroom doorway.

"I love you, Kahlan. Never anyone before you, nor ever after. Only you." His eyes said it even better.

"You're everything to me, Richard. You know that."

"I love you, too, Cara." He winked at her. "Take good care of the both of you until I'm back."

"I will, Lord Rahl. You have my word as Mord-Sith."

He gave her a crooked smile. "I have your word as Cara."

And then he was gone.

"I love you, too, Lord Rahl," Cara whispered to the empty doorway.

Kahlan and Cara ran into the main room and stood in the doorway watching him running across the meadow.

Cara cupped her hands around her mouth. "I love you too, Lord Rahl," she shouted.

Richard turned as he ran and acknowledged her words with a wave.

Together, they watched Richard's dark figure flying through the dead brown grass, his fluid gait swiftly carrying him away. Just before he disappeared into the trees, he stopped and turned. Kahlan shared a last look with him, a look that said everything. He turned and vanished into the woods, his clothes making him impossible to distinguish from the trees and undergrowth.

Kahlan collapsed to her knees, sitting back on her heels as she lost control of her emotions. She wept helplessly, her head in her hands, at what seemed the end of the world.

Cara squatted beside her to put an arm around her shoulders. Kahlan hated to have Cara see her cry that way, cry in such weakness. She felt a distant gratitude when Cara held her head to her shoulder and didn't say anything.

Kahlan didn't know how long she sat on the dirt floor in her white Confessor's dress, sobbing, but after a time, she was able to make herself stop. Her heart continued to spiral down into hopeless gloom. Each passing moment seemed unendurable. The bleak future stretched out before her, a wasteland of agony.

She finally looked up and gazed about at the house. Without Richard it was empty. He had given it life. Now it was a dead place.

"What do you wish to do, Mother Confessor?"

It was getting dark. Whether it was the sunset, or the clouds getting thicker, Kahlan didn't know. She wiped at her eyes.

"Let's begin to get our things together. We'll stay here a few days, like Richard asked. After that, anything the horses can't carry that will spoil, we'd better bury. We should board up the windows. We'll close up the house good and tight."

"For when we return to paradise, someday?"

Kahlan nodded as she looked about, trying desperately to focus her mind on a task and not on that which would crush her. The worst part, she knew, was going to be night. When she was alone in bed. When he wasn't with her.

Now, the valley seemed more like paradise lost. She had trouble believing that Richard was really gone. It seemed as if he were just off to catch some fish, or hunt berries, or scout the hills. It seemed as if, surely, he would be coming back soon.

"Yes, for when we return. Then it will be paradise again. I guess when Richard returns, wherever we are will be paradise."

Kahlan noticed that Cara didn't hear her answer. The Mord-Sith was staring out through the doorway.

"Cara, what is it?"

"Lord Rahl is gone."

Kahlan rested a comforting hand on Cara's shoulder. "I know it hurts, but we must put our minds to-"

"No." Cara turned back. Her blue eyes were strangely troubled. "No, that's not what I mean. I mean that I can't sense him. I can't feel the bond to Lord Rahl. I know where he is-he's going up the trail up to that pass-but I can't feel it." She looked panicked. "Dear spirits, it's like going blind.

I don't know how to find him. I can't find Lord Rahl."

Kahlan's first flash of fear was that he fell and was killed, or that Nicci had executed him. She used reason to force the fear aside.

"Nicci knows about the bond. She probably used her magic to cloak it, or to sever it."

"Cloaked it, somehow." Cara rolled her Agiel in her fingers. "That's what it has to be. I can still feel my Agiel, so I know that Lord Rahl has to be alive. The bond is still there. . but I cannot feel it to sense where he is."

Kahlan sighed with relief. "That has to be it, then. Nicci doesn't want to be followed, so she cloaked his bond with magic."

Kahlan realized that to be protected from the dream walker by the bond to Richard, people would now have to believe in him without the reassurance of feeling the bond. Their link would have to remain true in their hearts if they were to survive.

Could they do that? Could they believe in that way?

Cara stared out the doorway, across the meadow to the mountains where Richard had disappeared. The blue-violet sky behind the blue-gray mountains was slashed with blazing orange gashes. The snowcaps were lower than they had been. Winter was racing toward them. If Richard didn't soon escape and return, Kahlan and Cara would have to be gone before it arrived.

Bouts of dizzying grief threatened to drown her in a flood of tears.

Needing to do something, she went to her room to take off her Confessor's dress. She would set to work with the task of closing up the house and preparing to leave.

As Kahlan pulled her dress off, Cara appeared in the doorway.

"Where are we going to go, Mother Confessor? You said we were going to leave, but you never said where we were going to go."

Kahlan saw Spirit standing in the window, fists at her sides as she looked out at the world. She lifted the carving off the sill and trailed her fingers over the flowing form.

Seeing the statue, touching it, feeling the power of it, made Kahlan want to reach deep inside for resolve. Once before, she had been hopeless, and Richard carved this for her. Her other hand fell to her side, and her fingers found Richard's sword lying across their bed. Kahlan focused her mind, ordering the turbulent swirl of despair thickening into wrath.

"To destroy the Order."

"Destroy the Order?"

"Those beasts took my unborn child, and now they've taken Richard. I will make them regret it a thousand times over and then another thousand. I once swore an oath of death without mercy to the Order. The time has come.

If killing every last one of them is the only way to get Richard back, then that's what I will do."

"You swore an oath to Lord Rahl."

"Richard said nothing about not killing them, just about how. My oath was not to try to drive a sword through their heart. He said nothing about bleeding them to death with a thousand cuts. I won't break my oath, but I intend to kill every last one of them."

"Mother Confessor, you must not do that."

"Why?"

Cara's blue eyes gleamed with menace. "You must leave half for me."