A/N:

Timeline: During "Reckoning" (SPOILERS!) I was trying to get through the endless waiting for the new episodes, and this idea popped into my head based on the pictures released on the website.

Spoilers: Sacrifice, Reckoning
Disclaimer: I do not own the characters or situations or anything with respect to Legend of the Seeker. I am not financially profiting from this story.

The One in White

Part One: Nicholas

My father was a great man. Although he was also what lesser mortals would call "cruel," to me he showed only kindness. But he warned me against such wasteful feelings as remorse and pity, for these are the marks of the weak and indecisive.

I killed my first man when I was eight, on my father's instructions. The sacrificial lamb was a shepherd who had slept with his brother's wife, a crime that to my pre-pubescent sense of ethics seemed far less severe than the seizure of a friend's rock collection. Yet they tied his hands behind his back and shoved him hard on his knees into the gravel walk before me, and my father held his head so the victim's wide gray eyes stared into mine. I botched it. The blade caught in his ribs, and I couldn't get it out with my feeble strength. He sat there moaning and groaning as I twisted the knife round and round, trying to wrench it free. At last he slumped over, his chin upon my shoulder, and he was silent. My father said he was proud of me for not flinching.

When I was eleven, I gave my father a present of twelve heads hewn from the bodies of the children plucked from the street, my boyhood persecutors. My father called it excessive, but he was not displeased.

. . . If my mother had known any of this, perhaps she would not have died.

In my scant and dying memories, my mother's gaze is distant, the spirit absent from her body. Her cheek is pale, such that the granite effigy now lying above her remains in the cavernous sepulcher beneath my father's house exhibits more life. Yet she is beautiful . . . a beautiful remnant of the only time when I desired another's love, and a constant reproach for the only act that ever caused me anguish.

I will never forget the scent of her perfume. Fresh cut roses and dew upon the battered grass after a summer torrent mingle and escape the vault of my mind long after I have forgotten the sound of her laughter, the wayward curve of her smile, the touch of her hand. Of the few words I remember from her, each seemed to hold some quaver of expectant hope. She lectured endlessly on Wizards and Seekers and the forgotten "heroes" of the olden days, reviled by my father and his cohorts. I loved to hear her stories, told in the soft and loving voice she reserved only for me.

My friend Ethan and I would reenact the great battles of the past that I had learned about from my mother's tales. He would be a wizard, laying waste all villages who gave succor to our mortal enemies. I would be the Seeker, wielding the great Sword of Truth, and before us our foes fell like stalks of wheat before the thresher. Our battle cry was, "Truth!" and the other boys of the palace fled before our wrath as we beat them down with toy swords constructed of sticks. Sometimes, I even imagined that I was fighting my father for his cruelty towards the mother I loved.

One day we were playing in the hall and my father came upon us.

"Are you playing general?" he asked.

I knew better than to tell the truth, but Ethan didn't. "We're playing Wizard and Seeker, and we're fighting the D'Haran forces!"

When Ethan's mother brought him to play again, he was beaten black and blue, and he wouldn't play my games any more. When I ordered him to join me, he refused. A commoner must never refuse an order given by his prince, so I taught him a lesson. What difference did it make?

What I did to earn my mother's hatred, I cannot understand. Do you know what it is to wake up to your mother standing over you with a dagger? She told me she loved me, yet that last night in the throne room, I saw her look upon me as if she thought of me not as half of her own self, but a parasite, who had slithered out comprised solely of parts robbed from her: her eyes, heart, flesh, hair, soul. Then she turned her head away and did not look at me again, not even when I took her hand in mine and led her to the scaffold. Her hand was cold as stone, as if she were already entombed. She shook me off when we came to the place. I watched her fold the tall collar of her dress down, exposing the lily white nape of her neck. She knelt before the executioner without a word, although I thought perhaps she would explain herself to me. She didn't. She laid her head upon the scarred wooden block, and the axe came down.

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