Wizard's First Rule - Terry Goodkind [40]
“When I went to my father’s house after the murder, I looked in the message jar. It was about the only thing not broken. Inside was a piece of vine. For the last three weeks, I’ve been looking for the vine, trying to find out what my father’s last message meant. And when I found it, well, that’s the thing that bit me.” He was glad to be finished; his tongue felt thick.
Zedd bit off a chunk of carrot while thinking. “What did the vine look like?”
“It was… Wait, I still have it in my pocket.” He took out the sprig and plunked it down on the table.
“Bags!” Zedd whispered. “That’s a snake vine!”
Richard felt a shock of icy cold sweep through him. He knew the name from the secret book. He hoped against hope it did not mean what he feared it did.
Zedd sat back. “Well, the good part is now I know the root to use to cure the fever. The bad part is I have to find it.” Zedd asked Kahlan to tell her part but to make it short, as there were things he must do and not much time. Richard thought about the story she had told in the wayward pine the night before, and wondered how she could possibly make it shorter.
“Darken Rahl, son of Panis Rahl, has put the three boxes of Orden in play,” Kahlan said simply. “I have come in search of the great wizard.”
Richard was thunderstruck.
From the secret book, the Book of Counted Shadows, the book his father had had him commit to memory before they destroyed it, the line jumped into his mind: And when the three boxes of Orden are put into play, the snake vine shall grow. Richard’s worst nightmares—everyone’s worst nightmares—were coming to pass.
CHAPTER 7
Pain and dizziness from the fever made Richard only dimly aware that his head had sunk to the table. He groaned while his mind spun with the implications of what Kahlan had told Zedd; of the prophecy of the secret Book of Counted Shadows come to life. Then Zedd was at his side, lifting him, telling Kahlan to help get him into the house. As he walked with their help, the ground slipped this way and that, making it difficult to catch it with his feet. Then they were laying him down on a bed, covering him up. He knew they were talking, but he couldn’t make sense of the words, which slurred in his mind.
Darkness sucked his mind in; then there was light. He seemed to float back up, only to spiral down again. He wondered who he was and what was happening. Time passed as the room spun and rolled and tilted. He gripped the bed to keep from being flung off. Sometimes he knew where he was, and tried desperately to hold on to what he knew… only to slip away again into blackness.
He became aware again, realizing that time had passed, though he didn’t have any idea how much. Was it dark? Maybe it was just that the curtains were pulled. Someone, he realized, was putting a cool, wet cloth on his forehead. His mother smoothed back his hair. Her touch felt comforting, soothing. He could almost make out her face. She was so good, she always took such good care of him.
Until she died. He wanted to cry. She was dead. Still, she smoothed his hair. That couldn’t be; it had to be someone else. But who? Then he remembered. It was Kahlan. He spoke her name.
Kahlan was smoothing his hair. “I am here.”
It came back to him, rushing back in a torrent: the murder of his father, the vine that bit him, Kahlan, the four men on the cliff, his brother’s speech; someone waiting for him at his house, the gar, the night wisp telling him to seek the answer or die; what Kahlan said, that