"Go?" She stared down into her bowl of rice and sausage, stirring it around as if it might reveal a secret. She looked up. "No, Richard, then I will kill you."

"I see." He hardly thought that was a way to encourage his cooperation in her search, but he didn't say so. "And Kahlan'? After you kill me, I mean."

"You have my word that if I decide I must kill you, as long as I live, she will, too. I have no ill will toward her."

He tried to find solace in that much of it. For some reason, he believed Nicci. Knowing that Kahlan would be all right gave him courage. He could endure what was to happen to him, if only she would be all right. It was a price he was willing to pay.

"So, `wife, where are we going? Where is it you're taking me?"

Nicci didn't look at him but instead used her bread to sop up some of her dinner. She considered his question as she nibbled.

"Who are you fighting, Richard? Who is your enemy?" She took another small bite of her bread.

"Jagang. Jagang and his Imperial Order."

Like an instructor correcting him, Nicci slowly shook her head. "No.

You are wrong. I think perhaps you are in need of answers, too."

Games. She was playing foolish games with him. Richard ground his teeth, but held his temper in check.

"Then who, Nicci? Who, or what, am I fighting if it is not Jagang."

"That is what I hope to show you." She watched his eyes in a way he found unsettling. "I am going to take you to the Old World, to the heart of the Order, to show you what you are fighting-the taste nature of what you believe to be your enemy."

Richard frowned. "Why'?"

Nicci smiled. "Let's just say it amuses me."

"You mean we're going back to Tanimura? Back to where you lived all that time as a Sister?"

"No. We are going to the heart and soul of the Old World: Altur'Rang.

Jagang's homeland. The name means, roughly, `the Creator's chosen. » Richard felt a chill run up his spine. "You expect to take me, Richard Rahl, there, into the heart of enemy territory? I hardly doubt we will be living as `husband and wife' for long."

"Besides not using your magic, you will not use the name associated with that magic-Rahl-but instead the name you grew up with: Richard Cypher.

Without your magic, or your name, no one will know you are anyone but a humble man with his wife. That is exactly what you shall be-what we both shall be."

Richard sighed. "Well, if the enemy should find I'm more, I guess a Sister of the Dark can. . exert her influence."

"No, I can't."

Richard's eyes turned up. "What do you mean?"

"I can't use my power."

Gooseflesh prickled his arms. "What?"

"It's devoted to the link with Kahlan, to keeping her alive. That is how a maternity spell works. It requires a prodigious amount of power to even establish such a complex spell, much less maintain it. My power must be invested into the labor of preserving the living link. A maternity spell leaves nothing to spare; l doubt I could make a spark.

"If we have any trouble, you will have to handle it. Of course, I can at any time call upon my ability as a sorceress, but to do so I would have to draw the power from our link. If I do that without her near. . Kahlan dies."

Alarm raced through him. "But what if you accidentally "I won't. As long as you take good care of me, Kahlan will be safe enough. If, however, I should fall off my horse and break my neck, her neck snaps, too. As long as you take good care of me, you are taking good care of her. This is why it's important that we live as husband and wife-so that you can be close at hand, and so that I can guide and help you, too. It will be a difficult life with both of us living without our power, just as any other married couple, but 1 believe this to be necessary if I am to find what I seek from you. Do you understand?"

He wasn't sure he really did, but he said "Yes," anyway.

Numb dismay swamped him. He would never have believed this woman would have willingly given up her power for some unspecified knowledge. The very idea of it unleashed cold panic through his veins.

Richard couldn't make sense of it. With his mind groping blindly in a world gone insane, he spoke without even considering his words.

"I'm already married. I'll not sleep with you as your husband."

Nicci blinked in surprise, then let out a dainty titter, covering it with the back of her hand, not in shyness, but at his presumption. Richard felt his ears heating.

"That is not the way in which I want you, Richard."

Richard cleared his throat. "Good."

In the quiet of the wayward pine, with the rain outside falling in a gentle patter and the glowing checkered wood hissing softly, Nicci's focused, intense, resolute expression turned very cold and very still.

"But if I should decide I do, Richard, you will comply with that, too."

Nicci was a beautiful woman, the kind of woman most any man would eagerly accept. It was hardly that, though, that made him believe her. It was the look in her eyes. Never had the vague possibility of the act of sex seemed so vicious.

Her voice lost the conversational quality. It went on in a lifeless drone, a thing not human, pronouncing a sentence on his life. A sentence he himself would enforce, or Kahlan would die.

"You will act as my husband. You will provide for us as any husband would. You will care for me, and I for you, in the sense of worldly needs. I will mend your shirts and cook your meals and wash your clothes. You will provide us with a living."

Nicci's leaden words slammed into him with the deliberate methodical force of a beating delivered with an iron bar.

"You will never see Kahlan again-you must understand that-but as long as you do as I wish, you will know she lives. In that way you will be able to show your love for her. Every day she wakes, she will know you are keeping her alive. You have no other way to show her your love."

He felt sick to his stomach. He stared off into memories of another place and time.

"And if I choose to end it?" The weight of such madness was so crushing that he earnestly considered it. "Rather than be your slave?"

"Then perhaps that is the form the knowledge I seek will take. Maybe that senseless end will be what I must learn." She brought her first and second fingers together in a snipping motion, simulating the cutting of the umbilical cord of magic that sustained Kahlan's life. "One last evil convulsion to finally confirm the senselessness of existence."

It dawned on Richard that this woman could not be threatened, because she was a creature who, he was beginning to understand, welcomed any terrible outcome.

"Of all there is to me in this world," he whispered in dim agony, more to himself and to Kahlan than to his implacable captor, "there is only one thing that is irreplaceable: Kahlan. If I must be a slave in order for Kahlan to live, then I shall be a slave."

Richard realized Nicci was silently studying his face. He met her gaze briefly, then looked away, unable to bear the terrible scrutiny of her beautiful blue eyes while he held the image of Kahlan's love in his mind.

"Whatever you shared with her, whatever happiness, joy, or pleasure, will always be yours, Richard." Nicci seemed almost to be peering inside him, reading the pages of his past written in his mind. "Treasure those memories. They will have to sustain you. You will never see her again, nor she you. That chapter of your life is ended. You both have new lives, now.

You may as well get used to it because that is the reality of the situation."

The reality of what was. Not the world as he would wish it. He himself had told Kahlan that they must act according to the reality of what was, and not waste their precious lives wishing for things that could not be.