Chapter 16: Everything I Want (All You Dread)
The feeling of breaking did not rear up as a stranger.
In truth, it was the most markedly familiar sensation Cara had felt in months. Not like the pin at her chest. Not like the glassy and genuine admiration in the eyes of her recruits. Not the way the courtyard-and-street glances had begun to transform from surprised fear or stifled fury to tentative, careful respect. Not the weight settling in her ribs at the sight of Kahlan's sparkling-eyed smile - an entity which was surfacing more and more rarely itself. Not Kahlan's bedsheets, Kahlan's closeness, Kahlan's desperate hands, her longing mouth. Kahlan's skin, grasped all over, claimed, ruined. Being put into the throes of pleasure, then, by the touch that could destroy her. Would destroy her.
(Kahlan's touch could destroy her in more ways than the obvious.)
Kahlan. The sensation of her. Just her. Words, pure heart, beating, beating all the way to the equinox, beating for what? Too much push and pull. Familiar, unfamiliar, too familiar, false, hopeless, a fracture running through everything. Just Kahlan. And even thinking of the name, now, passed over and stormed away without a backward glance, was enough to send Cara's chest heaving, jaw tightening. Her own empty bedchambers were cold. That, too, was unfamiliar.
But the breaking feeling, no, this was so closely-held. Brittle pieces bending and cracking. Bones, merely chalk and glass. Skin on fire, blood pulsing, carrying venom, with the inability to swallow any cure. The reflex to scream, but no air in her lungs to relieve the deep urge. Everything falling away. Her very thoughts falling away, spiraling down into eternity. Control. She could control her emotions. It was the only damnable thing she could do. Now was not the time to break. But she had no control and she was breaking. She was already broken. Cara was the breaking itself, every inch of her thralled. You thrill me. All the time. Words had the power to break. And she hurt, with a spinning head and a smoldering, disoriented rage in her throat.
So many times broken. Nine years old, bruised and rat-bitten. Her father on his knees before her, pleading in wretched, helpless silence: please, Cari. And somehow only now could Cara hear his voice, even though she couldn't remember his voice at all, or her mother's. Just his eyes, begging, despairing, teeming with several kinds of anguish. And Cara wished she could have read those eyes, then. Maybe she wouldn't have carried out the unspeakable; maybe this all would have been different if she could have just read a soul, his soul, one of the souls that engendered her own. If she could read a soul like Kahlan. Kahlan. No. (I can't.)
Broken again at twenty-five. Forced to her own knees, skull ringing, blood in her mouth, blade in her hair. Dispatched, dismantled, but not dishonored. Not fully. Not when there was still a Lord Rahl to serve and a bond to tether her to that vastness of honor - not when she still had a purpose. She still had a purpose. As long as the Mother Confessor's pure heart beats. Take care of her. Keep her safe. The last command from her master. Richard's simple but pivotal words invoking solemn duty, extending through time and the veil of death - even if the memory of his voice had grown distorted. The bond cemented the words. And now the bond was smoke, but the words remained.
Cara's body did not feel like her own. Not since it had been touched by Kahlan like this. And before Cara realized its actions, it had carried her to the mantelpiece. Her hands, the ones that had just felt all of Kahlan's skin, were grasping an abandoned Agiel. Cold and lifeless. Rendered obsolete. A testament to the ultimate casualty. And it took every bit of Cara's remaining effort to simply place the weapon back on the shelf and not hurl it across the room as she wanted to. Because even though there was no shock of pain, she still felt a phantom of the bond. Richard's ghost, still watching, still asking. Asking so much. And despite this other, new pain, she still carried the weight of her duty to Richard Rahl.
Then, new words cut in over Richard's, reflected back in Shota's voice. Cara Mason. What name was hers, now? Bonded to another. Dark of hair, finest of face. An utterance that could not be reconciled with experience. How could bonded and severed exist like this, at once?
And though she tried not to let the words bring forth the image they described (it's not fair), visions of the Kahlan swarmed her head and sunk in, calling on all of these tiny breakings Cara hadn't noticed until now. Until they had altered the very shape of her. The Mother Confessor's hand on her throat, more often than was fathomable - a threat in the Drowning Cave near Ehrengard, a tool of execution in Stowecroft, an weapon of apoplectic grief in their wayward pine. Arms, too, around her, dismantling and intoxicating, in Dunshire and Aldermont and right here, in Aydindril, in the room from which Cara had just made herself scatter. Each embrace, increasing in ease and intensity with every iteration, had been an attestation to some nascent connection, sparking and swelling and changing, changing her, breaking her. And considering every single one of these breakings, why were so many branded by Kahlan's shadow?
(The answer was too clear and Cara's being wavered with it.)
All of it, tonight. That tenderhearted, private little grin, the one Kahlan had begun to share with Cara alone, breaking through the apparent dismalness of her day. Bodies taken to and through the final brink of restraint. Kahlan's corset falling away, all gorgeous skin, eyes alight with both fear and uncontrollable wanting as she yanked Cara into the bed with insistent vehemence. Her mouth parting for a surprised groan as Cara's thigh found its way between her legs. The way Cara saw Kahlan's eyes change in the moment when Kahlan's uncertain but demanding fingers slipped inside of her, and how it felt, and knowing it was wanted and knowing she was wanted, intangible words turned to plain action - that moment of sheer but hapless union.
And then Kahlan, pulling away. Sobbing, withdrawing her hand and her brazen reach and disrupting the melding of all things: bodies, minds, the pure essentiality of connection, every laid-bare vulnerable intention. Every scrap of significance between them cast into schism - a mismatch of wishful expectations and heavy reality.
You've made me feel worthy.
The words were reluctant, and they felt raw as they departed, but they were not coerced. They were measured and deliberate and true, spoken freely, called out plainly from the chest. Cara had wanted to say them. She shouldn't have said them. She wanted to say them and she did say them, proving these things to Kahlan, to herself, some kind of clumsy promise for some kind of more. For better words that she could finally learn to say, not just think and suffer with. That word she was trying to show and to be. Love. She was trying too hard to be the word itself.
And now, there were no more words. Certainly none that could be spoken without her throat ripping itself out. And the ones she had spoken were evidently utterly untrue.
Cara bit at her tongue. She swallowed hard, clenching her fists. Her throat was still there. That was the most she could tell.
Because with each singular moment of wreckage unfurled, here, Cara couldn't shove away the awareness of an obvious and grievous distinctness that colored tonight's particular ruining.
Cara had cut her teeth on abject pain. Through the years, it became her dwelling, her comfort, her pure point of thriving. The thrum of it, high and bold through her system, taking her to the brink of bodily existence, making her better, forming her thoughts and pulling her apart to keep her together.
Cara was broken. She was just shards and ends, all jagged edges, both a constant threat of and reminder of damage.
But every jagged edge could be rounded out. Any could be smoothed to some crooked semblance of evenness.
No. That wasn't even the feeling searing through her.
This was.
By its nature, every jagged edge, left unaltered, had a perfectly-congruent counterpart. And if these disjointed pieces crossed over one another, in the right way, at the right instant, in just the right light, they could become an undisrupted entirety. Not broken anymore, fitted into quiet.
Kahlan's edges were ragged, too - something Cara never would have expected from the Mother Confessor. Not from that white dress that seemed too terrifyingly immaculate for Cara to touch, until she had touched it. Not from that shimmering blue gaze which softened from contempt to gentle and quiet intimacy. But brokenness manifested in many ways. With new clarity that made her nauseous, Cara could see. Kahlan was broken. By unimaginable loss, by the struggle to grasp at the shreds of her duty, by every word of warning falling on deaf ears, by the weight of every burden - of every bit of power and weaponized existence she never asked for - resting on her shoulders alone.
That night, skin to skin, with Kahlan inside of her, both wanting, both sharing, both desperate and vulnerable and angry and somehow rejoicing, Cara had felt their pieces cross. And they had fit. They had fit and then they had tumbled away before the fitting could condense.
This hollow ache, the one moving from Cara's chest to her spine to her throat, wasn't from falling apart.
It was from that split second of wholeness that came from moving over and through Kahlan, from Kahlan moving over and through her, bursting from the congruence of their demolished fragments.
It wasn't pain at the brink of death. It was destruction at the brink of something opposite.
It had rushed over her as a remembering of what she had been lacking since she was so small. A full heart, beating despite its deepest scars. Seeing who she truly was reflected in someone else's face. In Kahlan. Kahlan pulled away. Cara had been trying until her bones had begun to burn with everything she wasn't, and Kahlan had pulled away with a definitive no.
And only a stain of scornful anger remained where these pieces had crossed and aligned.
Anger was a gift. Anger had so many glorious uses. It was to be harnessed, commanded, and sent hurtling back into the world in a flurry of violent physicality. But not anger like this: imprecise, unmeasured, wounded, strewn blindly in every direction yet kept so balled up that Cara's body could have split open. This was anger with a nonsensical target Cara couldn't rationalize in any part of her mind.
This was anger trying to coincide with another form of passion, each attempting to annihilate the other and wracking Cara in the process. Undisguised and uncontrollable collateral damage. Damaged. Always damaged. It didn't matter.
The choice to crumple onto the bed would probably prove to be a useless one, but it was the only one Cara could make. Her vibrating body curled into itself on one side, muscles bunched, jaw clenched, and she cursed the fact that she couldn't even displace some of this churning, biting, helpless hell with the more favorable pain from her Agiel. She wished she could hold an Agiel. She wished she could hold Kahlan. She could have stayed there, in Kahlan's chambers. She should have stayed. She couldn't stay. You're all I want. It was true. Her first thoughts of getting lost in Kahlan's bed were also true. And despite her attempts at worthiness - despite the way the worthiness had begun to feel so much closer, the way Kahlan had begun to feel so much closer - those divides between wanting and deserving and rightfully having had only managed to widen.
Their wayward pine never felt so far away. Alone together. Now, tonight, alone.
Cara's bed was cold and empty. So was her body, heavy and weary on the scarlet bedcover, confused, wanting a reprieve or explanation. But there wasn't one. There were only the impossibilities, carefully enumerated, ramming through her skull. There was only the sound of Kahlan gasping her name in that urgent, demanding tone that made her throb from her blood to her bones. There was only I can't, echoing back in both of their voices at once.
And swirling over Cara's bed like a tempest was the infernal paradox that lived deep in her chest, sending its roots through the rest of her like some foreign body. Kahlan was not hers. That much was more perfectly apparent than ever. Somehow, though - somehow in that infernal, splintering world - Kahlan still had her forever. Cara could feel it as easily as she could feel Kahlan's grasp on her throat. Tethered. Held. Trapped there, shaking, straining to her limits.
As she lay steeping in her ripped-apart rage, Cara tried not to think of Shota. She tried not to think of dark of hair and finest of face, or of how a fate existed in which Kahlan could become another entity that would haunt her in the end.
She made a few fitful attempts to close her eyes. Each time the darkness took over, Cara saw arrows sailing through the moonlight. None made any sort of satisfying purchase - there was no target for them to pierce in sight.
"Well, gentlemen, look who finally decided to join us this morning."
Cara felt her mouth betray an involuntary flinch as she approached the huddle of officers, but she did not allow the reaction to heighten in intensity. Control. Emotions could be bitten back like bile rising in the throat. It was a painstaking but prideful and skillful endeavor, keeping one step ahead of the vehement knot twisting in the pit of her stomach. Until then, it had been an effortful success. She had to succeed, even though it felt like the stone was shifting under her boots each time she advanced.
And besides, Commander Baldwin's teasing jibe did not deserve a response. At worst appraisal, it was mildly irritating and wholly exaggerated. Cara was not late. Cara was never late. She was exactly on time. But exactly on time was probably perceived by the rest as late, as Cara was usually jogging her tenth or eleventh lap around the courtyard as the other officers began to languidly amble in to make arrangements for the day's training. Each morning thus far had been a chance to relish in a certain sense of righteous superiority, smugly celebrating her own stamina, preparedness, and discipline in comparison to her compatriots.
This morning, though, had proven to be more of an infuriating struggle. A sleepless night rolled into a gutted, but numb, sunrise. Then absolute and agonizing indecision - a maddening tightness in her throat as her aching head hesitated between too many impossible choices. And while hesitancy was another verboten state of being, Cara had paced back and forth her bedchambers until the last possible second before making a choice. Continue the work, or stay hidden and fuming?
Her final choice had been to show up for the morning. This was part of culling the thoughts trying to overtake her core. Through the morning mist, Bradley Ryan's tall form came into view across the way, assisting one of the younger boys with his chest plate. Their eyes met, and Bradley grinned a wordless greeting despite the flatness he had to be seeing reflected back. Offering the slightest nod in return, Cara called back her justification for being here. She would be useful, valuable. She would not be seen as fickle or unreliable to those who had grown to follow her for some forsaken reason. Her contracts and accords would be carried out. Even if…
She was suddenly too aware of the pin at her chest. It felt nearly leaden as it pulled her forward, somewhere between a march and a stumble. Kahlan's handwriting flashed into her mind, and Cara had to fight against recalling the words themselves to keep her lungs from seizing.
And it didn't help that Baldwin wasn't letting go of the moronic joke.
"Hard time rising this morning, Mord-Sith?" The young officer had a handsome gray-eyed smirk, but Cara could only think of wiping it right from his face. With the back of her hand, and no ounce of delicacy. She shuddered through the urge as he went on with his casual, lighthearted teasing. "What a monumental day! Consider me surprised at this shocking turn of events. Almost as surprised as I am to see that you're not even fully dressed. The braid is there, but where's your armor? The leathers look incomplete without it."
Cara's jaw hardened, skin crawled as she thought of her corset and neckpiece - still in Kahlan's solar, removed prior to the archery range and then left behind during her later hasty departure.
Baldwin's grin widened at her continued silence. "In fact. Looking at your faraway, weary expression, I just might recognize it. It's one I think we've all worn once or twice, am I wrong?" He gave another one of the commanders - Leiden - a friendly smack on the arm, accompanied by a wag of his eyebrows. "I'm left to wonder: did someone get the best of you last night, Cara? If so, I believe you owe us the details."
Banter was banter, but it was undoubtedly a step too far. The entirety of Cara's perception flashed with vivid, furious red. The bile rose in her throat. This time, she spat it out.
"And you, Baldwin." Her voice became a weapon aimed straight at him as she drew closer. A calm glare masked the wild rage distilled into caustic, clipped words. "I can smell you from here. Nothing like the stench of a common brothel so early in the day. It's clinging to your clothing. Paying your wife a visit while she brings home the coin? I hope she doesn't charge you extra."
It wasn't even gratifying to watch his jaw fall off its hinges. She was just angry, furious, feeling like her bones were about to forcibly eject from her skin. The heat collected on her face in the form of an indignant sneer as Baldwin, now also rightly incensed, squared up to her, chest out, eyes dark. "A mouth on you this morning, too. It would be wise to shut it before you cause a commotion."
The audacity of his foolish choice to advance on a Mord-Sith was almost humorous enough to make Cara forget that she was crumbling to pieces inside, despite her best attempts to keep herself together. She felt the other officers look on in quiet wariness as she puffed her own chest at him, angling her chin to hold and return (in double) his glower.
"I don't cause commotions," she growled in warning, all bared teeth, eyes narrow. "I am one."
Before the simmering tension could escalate further, Prince Fyren's voice rang through the morning air, heralding his arrival with a stern rebuke. "Gentlemen!"
Cara would have bristled even more if it was physically possible. Instead, she let out half a snarl and shifted her gaze to Fyren. He approached with slow, deliberate strides, a straight back, and his hand on the pommel of his sword. Cara swallowed at the foulness threatening to spill from her.
"And Mord-Sith." The addition was decidedly not an apologetic one. Fyren's upper lip was stiff as he glared at the two of them. "Is there a problem?"
"No, Head Commander," Baldwin grumbled, probably appreciating the chance to yield from Cara's hostile challenge. He took a predictable step back and let his shoulders go slack for barely a second before standing at attention. Cara did not follow suit. Fists clenching even harder, making the tendons in her wrists tighter until they burned, she let her gaze fall to her boots, hating the feeling of being scolded like a misbehaving dog. Hating most of the gritty feelings creeping through her gut. "We were just discussing our evenings. Right, Cara?"
Mistress Cara, she wanted to bark. But the correction probably would have been punctuated with a fist, and though a solid punch might have offered the slightest satisfaction, it certainly would lend itself to more issues caused than solved. And all these second thoughts and self-control felt wrong. Cara's voice was gravelly as she spoke, choosing not to meet a single gaze.
"Yes. Just talking."
Nothing about it sounded like it had come from her own mouth. Weak. Capitulating. Brought low despite the turmoil under the surface. None of it made sense.
"Good." Fyren nodded with a thin, unconvinced frown before tossing a glance over his shoulder to the crowd of sleepy-eyed boys growing nearby. "I don't tolerate bickering among my recruits, let alone my officers. It would be a shameful and embarrassing example to show. I'm sure you agree."
The veiled admonishment was met with a yes, Head Commander from one and an inarticulate, vaguely-affirmative grunt from the other.
Fyren, however, wasn't finished with the latter.
"A word, Mord-Sith."
Cara let out a huff and spoke her reluctant contrition unprompted, though each word felt like a knife in her windpipe. Just more conceding. So weak. She had been made weak. Kahlan had made her weak. I can't. "I apologize for my tardiness. It won't happen again." Anything to appease the bastard and get on with this toilsome day.
But Fyren simply looked confused by her words. He stroked along his clean jawline with his thumb and forefinger, squinting. "The apology is unnecessary. You are not late." Just a repetition of what Cara already knew. "In truth, it wouldn't have mattered if you were. I was going to say that your squad will be beginning the day alongside mine, under my watch. I just finished speaking with one of the couriers. You've been granted dispensation for the morning - the Mother Confessor has requested your presence in her chambers, without delay."
With that, everything seemed to stop. There was no way for Cara to form any sort of answer through the dread that flooded her veins, mingling with the stinging rage. Her veins were like ice but her face was hot, boiling. This was not control. This was pure spineless nausea in response to a finger in a fresh wound; it was dumb shock reacting with seething anger. This should not have been blindsiding. Kahlan asking for her should not have filled her with dismay.
And yet.
"Oh, has she?" The piercing vitriol escaped unchecked, but Cara was too submerged in the breakdown of all things, wild-eyed in the face of fresh pain cutting close again. Fyren reeled, the officers reeled, the recruits within earshot reeled. Cara did not reel, instead placing her hands on her hips and lunging closer to the Head Commander. "Where's the courier now? Because he can tell the Mother Confessor that I-"
Something brought her harsh declaration to a shuddering halt. Bradley Ryan was watching her, intent and silent, confused but awaiting. Cara felt his gaze and flickered to meet it, and he did not flinch from her. Scrawny little Otto, who had begun to copy every one of Bradley's actions, was looking on too. All of them were, each young man in her squad. They were observing, thinking, comparing, learning. Growing. With her as a model. And it was utterly ridiculous and infuriating and almost-invasive and Cara couldn't continue her words. Not with their eyes on her. Another tether rooting her into these ever-shrinking circles of freedom.
The words that came out instead of the ones she intended were quiet, spoken through gritted teeth after a steadying swallow. In full view of all gathered, she resigned herself to her own dismantling.
What other choice did she have? The paradox howled back in. Had and having, forever. It rippled through her backbone.
"I plan to return quickly." She found enough bearing to give a slight inclination of her chin at her squad members. "Don't be easy on them, Fyren. I hope they don't embarrass me."
The late summer morning felt colder as Cara turned on her heel, pulse echoing in her skull, and started on her way to the Confessors' Palace. Autumn was beginning to feel much closer. The equinox was on its way. But that hardly registered, when everything else felt much farther away. Her legs were numb, her nerves were split, and she had no way to describe her heart. Just another shortcoming to add to the list - another indication of everything she apparently wasn't.
Bradley called after her, cheerful of voice, clueless of everything. "See you this afternoon, Mistress Cara! Expect us to train ten times harder in your absence. I'll see to it."
Cara should have looked back, or thrown him some retort. But she didn't. She was too busy considering the point at which broken could become shattered.