Wizard's First Rule - Terry Goodkind [339]
“Mistress Denna, may I use this?”
“Why?”
“Please?”
“Go ahead.”
Richard took the entire pile of neatly stacked, dried aum leaves and put them in the tin bowl, then selected a few other herbs he remembered by smell, but not by name, and dumped them in with the aum leaves. With the knife handle, he ground it all into a powder. Picking up the jar of cream, he scooped it all out and plopped it into the bowl, mixing it with two fingers. He took the bowl and sat on the bed next to her.
“Just lie still,” he told her.
“The appellation, Richard, the appellation. Will you never learn?”
“Sorry, Mistress Denna,” he smiled. “You may punish me later. For now, lie still. When I’m finished you will feel well enough to punish me all night. I promise.”
He spread the paste gently on the welts, smoothing it out as he went. Denna moaned. Her eyes closed while he worked. By the time he reached the back of her ankles, she was almost asleep. He stroked her hair while the aum cream soaked in.
“How does that feel, Mistress Denna?” he whispered.
She rolled onto her side, her eyes came open wide. “The pain is gone! How did you do that? How did you make the pain leave?”
Richard smiled in satisfaction. “I learned it from an old friend named…” He frowned. “I can’t remember his name. But he’s an old friend, and he taught me. I’m so relieved, Mistress Denna. I don’t like to see you in pain.”
She gently touched her fingers to the side of his face. “You are a very rare person, Richard Cypher. I have never had a mate like you before. The spirits take me, I have never even seen a person like you before. I killed the one who did the things to me that I have done to you, and you instead help me.”
“We all can be only who we are, no more, and no less, Mistress Denna.” He looked down at his hands. “I don’t like what Master Rahl has done to you.”
“You don’t understand about the Mord-Sith, my love. We are carefully selected, as young girls. Those chosen to be Mord-Sith are the most gentle, the most kind-hearted, that can be found. It is said that the deepest cruelty comes from the deepest caring. All of D’Hara is searched, and each year only about a half dozen are chosen. A Mord-Sith is broken three times.”
His eyes were wide. “Three times?” he whispered.
Denna nodded. “The first is the way in which I broke you, to break the spirit. The second is to break our empathy. To do it, we must watch our trainer break our mother, and make her his pet, and watch him hurt her until she dies. The third is to break us of our fear of hurting another, to make us enjoy giving pain. To do it, we must break our fathers, under the guidance of our trainer, and make him our pet, and keep hurting him until we kill him.”
Tears trickled down Richard’s cheeks. “They did all this to you?”
“What I did to you, to break you, is nothing compared to what must be done to us to break us the second and third time. The more kindhearted a girl is, the better Mord-Sith she makes, but it makes it harder to break her the second and third time. Master Rahl thinks me special because they had a very difficult time with the second breaking of me. My mother lived a long time, to try to keep me from giving up hope, but that only made it harder. On both of us. They failed at the third breaking, had given up, and were going to kill me, but Master Rahl said that if I could be broken, I would be someone special, and so took over my training himself. He is the one who broke me the third time. On the day I killed my father, he took me to his bed, as a reward. His reward left me barren.”
Richard could hardly speak past the lump in his throat. With shaking fingers, he brushed some of her hair back off her face. “I don’t want anyone hurting you. Not ever again, Mistress Denna.”
“It is an honor,” Denna whispered through tears, “that Master Rahl would spare the time to punish one as low as me with my own Agiel.”
Richard sat numb. “I hope he kills me tomorrow, so I don’t have to learn anything else that gives me this much pain, Mistress Denna.”
Her wet eyes shone in the lamplight. “I have