Because Richard loved and respected his grandfather, that actually made it all that much more difficult for him than it had been for Nicci. Despite everything Richard had accomplished, his strength, his knowledge, his ability, his mastery, he could not argue or reason his way out of the reality of having disappointed his grandfather, and, because he loved and respected him, it hurt all the more.

"Go on," Nicci told Cara as she gently put her hand on the small of the woman's back. "Do as he says for now. I think Richard could use some time alone to think this through and get his bearings."

Cara, her gaze going back and forth between Nicci and Richard, looked like she thought this was something Nicci might be better able to handle and so nodded her agreement.

"You, too," Zedd told Nicci. "The Mother Confessor needs to be laid to rest; let Richard see to it. I need to know your part in this, every bit of it, so that I can try to figure out how to reverse all the trouble born not just of this, but of what Jagang has done."

"All right," Nicci said. "Get the horses and I'll be right there."

Zedd cast a brief last look at Richard still huddled on his knees beside the coffin before agreeing with a nod to Nicci.

After he'd vanished with Cara through the junipers and into the fog, Nicci crouched down beside Richard and laid a hand on his back between his slumped shoulders.

"It will be all right, Richard."

"I wonder if anything will ever be all right again."

"It may not seem that way right now, but it will. Zedd will get over his anger of the moment and come to understand that you were doing your best to act responsibly. I know that he loves you and that he didn't intend what he said to hurt you so."

Richard nodded without looking up as he knelt in the mud beside the open coffin holding the corpse of the long dead Kahlan Amnell, the woman he had imagined had been his love.

"Nicci," he finally asked so softly she could hardly hear him over the soft sound of the gentle rain, "will you do something for me?"

"Anything, Richard."

"One last time — be Death's Mistress for me."

She rubbed his back and then stood, tears mixing with the rain on her face. By sheer force of will, past the sob struggling to escape, she made her voice steady.

"I can't Richard. You've taught me to embrace life."

CHAPTER 49

The heavy paneled door opened partway. Rikka stuck her head into the silent room. "Someone is coming."

Nicci pushed her padded chair away from the polished library table. "Coming?"

"Up toward the Keep."

"Do you know who?" she asked as she stood.

Rikka shook her head. "Zedd just told me that the shields warned him that someone was on their way up the road. He thought you ought to know. I tell you, all the magic flying around in this place makes my skin crawl."

"I'll go find Richard."

Rikka nodded before vanishing out of the doorway. Nicci quickly returned the book she had been studying to its slot in the vast expanse of mahogany shelves that filled the quiet library. The book was a tedious report on activities in the Keep during the great war. Nicci found it rather strange, reading about all the people who had once lived in the Wizard's Keep thousands of years ago. It seemed a disconnected history except when she intermittently reminded herself that they were talking about the very place where she was. She considered how, in contrast, the Palace of the Prophets had been so full of life and activity for so long. Nicci couldn't imagine the Palace of the Prophets empty of all but a few souls, and the Keep was vastly larger. Of course, now the palace was no more while the Keep still stood.

Nicci hadn't really been interested in the book she'd been reading. It was boring but she didn't really care. It was merely something to occupy her time. She couldn't force herself to concentrate on anything that would be absorbing or that would require her to put any great effort into thinking. She was too distracted.

The new moon at the time they had dug up the grave of the Mother Confessor had grown to a full moon and was now approaching its last quarter again, and yet nothing much had changed. A few days after digging up the body, Zedd had told Richard that he loved him and was sorry to have been so hard on him when maybe he should have found out a little more before saying the things he'd said. Zedd promised that they would figure out a way to get Richard's sword back and everything would be all right.

It might have been sincere, and it might have been true, but for Richard the hurt of such a personal failure was hard to put back into the bottle. He had not just disappointed and angered his grandfather; he had failed to prove his dream was in fact the truth. He had put everything he had into the effort. He had been certain and in the end he had only proved himself wrong.

Richard had only nodded to Zedd's words. Nicci didn't think it mattered much to him either way if Zedd had softened his viewpoint. He had reached the end of his ideas, his hopes, and his efforts. Nothing had helped him. After that night, the life had gone out of him.

Zedd had interrogated Cara and Nicci for hours that first night. Nicci had been stunned to hear from Cara what Shota had said about the beast becoming a blood beast because Nicci had inadvertently given it the measure of Richard's ancestral blood. She was horrified to learn that she had been responsible for intensifying the danger to Richard.

While astonished at how Nicci had accomplished saving Richard's life, Zedd had quietly assured her that had she not acted, Richard would most certainly have died right then and there. He said that she had given Richard a chance at life, and now they could work to solve the problem of the beast Jagang's Sisters had created, as well as Richard's strange delusions and the matter of recovering his sword. From what Shota had revealed about the beast, on top of what Nicci already knew, it didn't look to Nicci that they had much of a chance of success. She had no idea at all of how to even begin to destroy such a beast spawned of dark powers.

She had also been embarrassed to hear Cara telling about how Shota had revealed to Richard Cara's plan for Nicci to interest Richard romantically. Zedd, thankfully, had withheld any comments on that part of Cara's story.

That, among other things, had left Nicci feeling rather hopeless-and helpless. The Imperial Order was rampaging unchecked through the New World, the beast was stalking Richard, and he was not himself, to say the least.

In some ways, it reminded her of her dead attitude toward life, back before Richard. She had been taught that she had been born lucky in every way, and because she had ability it was her duty to devote herself to those in need. No matter how hard she worked, the needs always outpaced her ability to meet them, leaving her perpetually in debt to the ever worsening lives of others while her own life was not her own. Her feeling about what was happening now with the beast and Richard's delusions were different in almost every way, except they were the same in that they gave her that familiar feeling of hollow hopelessness.

Richard had spent the long days, since opening the grave and discovering the truth, off by himself-with the exception that Cara, after answering all of Zedd's tedious questions about everything she knew about what had happened with Shota, refused to leave Richard's side for any reason. Since Richard was in no mood to talk to anyone, Cara had become his silent shadow.

It was strange seeing the two of them together, totally at ease with each other even at such a time. It didn't seem to Nicci like the two of them even needed to speak, yet they managed, with a look, a slight shrug, or a nothing at all, to all the time understand each other.