Chapter 17: never give you peace
The coarse and hollow brutality of Kahlan's necessary intentions came thrashing back in a faraway echo of Cara's voice.
(Cara's voice, in her head with near constancy for hours. I need you to touch me with a flickered twist into you're all I want, and I can't. And every bit of the wounded, rapid shift between the two disparate utterances: Kahlan's fault, entirely. Another weight to shoulder. Her eyes ached.)
Despite every shred of colossal and strenuous effort Kahlan had drawn down, the previous night's happening had been absolute in its inevitability. The mutual sheer loss of control had been threatening the space between their bodies for too long, thrumming low and then amplifying in galvanic flashes of wayward touch, throttling their skin and tiny bases of sensation, stretching everything thin before bursting forth. But for all of its slow, ensnaring escalation, the true and substantial manifestation came in a whirl of sudden stars, like everything all at once and nothing altogether. They had gotten so close (too close) that they ended up passing through one another entirely. Like a swift and intent cut with a well-whetted blade - so violent in its quickness that the blow was unnoticeable until it had already been landed and the weapon pulled back into oblivion. Only first perceived in the blood and the shock of bewildered pain dealt in its wake.
A wound.
The reckoning of their wildness (Kahlan's selfish, self-serving wildness) was a wound, fresh and livid. Brought on by that same perilous lapse in judgement Kahlan had been foolish enough to let herself be taken by once already. Her body ached for what it had been long denied, all fire and desperate intensity. Her heart wanted too much that could never strike into fruition, here, despite any of the contrary hopes that had whispered their way in since she crossed the boundary into Westland with the Book of Counted Shadows. No. Her body and what flowed through it, sinking into all of it with fearful ubiquity, was sinister. Her heart was to be given fully to duty, to truth, to perpetuation of the past millennia. She was made for fear and made of fear. Far from the calm and certain safety she felt in Cara's meaningful presence, in Cara's strong arms. Far from how Cara had managed to make her forget this, even if only for transient, crumbling moments.
Because in the face of every shallow and unavoidable thing, love was still something to fear.
(Last night was fear. Mostly in the thought of it never being lived again. Kahlan breathed, maybe less deeply than she had hoped to.)
Cara's voice, then, coming through loud from Kahlan's memory in the utter silence of her solar.
"We need to burn the wound closed."
This was probably a mistake, Kahlan recognized: summoning Cara so soon after the casualty. But what was one more mistake carved out in the torrent which had been pouring from Kahlan's plans? Insignificant, when laid out with the lot. And if that fantastic but disastrous moment of union between them had ended in some strange wound, Cara's advice had merit. A new wound passed over in avoidance would fester, leaving sickness and infection to radiate through all the rest.
This decisive sort of dealing with it would be agonizing in the approaching minutes, but sanctuary in every moment that spiraled along after. A mercy. For the best. For whose best, for what best? For that dutiful space which Kahlan was constantly failing to inhabit.
Her fingers, unruly in the shadow of her meandering thoughts, brushed against the outside of her right thigh, passing over gleaming white silk and the now-familiar scar from Cara's Agiel. The throes that purged her of the polluted blood, of the wracking shivers and nausea, and the woozy feeling that each leaden step was driven less and less by her own strength, was unforgettable. Those ten seconds of blinding pain had saved her.
And now, though relegated to phantoms, it came roaring back, from the skin to the spine to the skull. Kahlan tried against everything to banish the memory of how Cara's eyes had been locked with hers - that night so long ago, the previous night in her bed, and any of the other instances of connection altogether. She tried against everything to not acknowledge how that first promised pain had broken her heart for the Mord-Sith, long before Kahlan realized Cara had a place (a home) within it.
Maybe this coming hurt would purge Kahlan of the delusion in which she had been allowing herself to drown for nearly the past year. Those absurd notions of finding some semblance of normalcy with Richard, with Cara, with anyone, only resulted in heartache. In spite of everything she had been taught since she was small, her capacity to think pragmatically about her duty had diminished. She had been thinking too little, expecting too much. Brooding on what could be if things were different, and imagining unburdening herself of what has always been.
And brooding led to undermining of the self - an inability to leave the past and future both where they lay. Kahlan had been doing nothing but undermining herself for so long.
Passion rules reason, Alferon had said. For better or for worse. This was the latter. And passion couldn't reign. Not here. Not with tempests and bloodthirsty militant factions and Seekers and missing swords, nor with criminals and councils and mates and unborn daughters. The wizards were wise and powerful, but they were not Confessors. Kahlan couldn't allow passion to take control.
The hardest measure was often the necessary measure. Kahlan felt the narrow precipice under her feet and willed herself to not step back, no matter how it hurt. A first step forward redirection had to follow. Don't hesitate. It was good advice.
A single, reverberative knock came as an impatient underscore to the imperative. Kahlan realized she had been standing, and had no idea for how long.
"Enter."
Her voice was quiet, but did not waver. Her face had inadvertently slipped into the detached mask of a true Confessor - composed and possessed in spite of all the stirring underneath. With a rush of shame, Kahlan softened her expression, hating that she had almost greeted Cara with that cold of a visage.
The guard Mikhail had inched his way into Kahlan's chambers and was standing at attention, but atypical uneasiness had edged in on his usual stoicism. A twofold wondering crashed over Kahlan. First, she wondered how much the previous evening's guard might have deduced, and how the experience could have been disclosed. Then, immediately and with regretful dread, she wondered what sort of state Cara was in on the other side of the door.
Mikhail cleared his throat, unused to actually announcing Cara's presence after all this time. She was usually just there.
"Your Mord-Sith, here at your call."
The words stung. (He didn't use her name.)
Kahlan nodded, suddenly not trusting her voice.
But she was going to have to use it soon. Because while Mikhail retreated, Cara took his place across the threshold, but no further. Her footsteps on the marble were far too impersonal and bleak a herald for her presence. No matter the preparation, her arrival caused everything inside of Kahlan to topple into a sudden roil.
They were standing so far apart. And every point of distance between them struck Kahlan as senseless and ridiculous after the way their bodies had melded in defiant desire, grasping and pressing and writhing and daring. Before that, even, all of the time sleeping close together, the fleeting moments of fingers entwining, every embrace with foreheads touching just for an instant. Their bodies seemed to comprehend this odd separation. Their bodies seemed to know one another. In actuality, they were treacherous antitheses. Kahlan had spent the last sleepless night resenting her own, more than she had in her twenty-eight years.
It was hard not to react to the dislocation. The space between them twinged with the wound's shadow.
Cara wasn't avoiding her gaze. Kahlan wasn't avoiding Cara's. While their bodies reeled in the silence, their shared intent look remained steady. Cara's eyes were tense, narrowed, eyebrows notched, and this time the perpetual question residing within them was obvious. It was impossible to disregard what was looming there. Kahlan didn't need to be able to read Cara's thoughts to know what that piercing look or those pursed lips meant. Hurt confusion, angered slight. The want to ask why and the want to not be standing in this room existing at once as opposites. All of these blazed into and projected back through Kahlan's fragile disposition, making her throat throb with bitterness at the damage she had already caused.
That was not one of the impossible outcomes which Kahlan longed for. Far from it.
But even through this awkward and delicate discontent, or with her own guilt, Kahlan couldn't push away any of the craving she was harboring. Seeing Cara made Kahlan want her. All the time, even now. To close the gap, to pull her in, to rest her cheek on one of those strong shoulders and just breathe in the dizzy scent of cedarwood, leather, and clean skin, the scent she had half-memorized by now. Just to breathe Cara in and feel her center giving out in that glorious way and to feel assured, feel more than she was, feel something other than hopeless.
Cara was still staring. The furrow in her brow had grown deeper. The emptiness between them shuddered. Kahlan's hands pulsed with the urge to reach. She clasped them in front of her ribs instead. Cara's were at her side, balled into fists.
The resolve for this swift execution was dwindling rapidly. So it was a blessing that Cara spoke first.
"You called for me."
The statement was simple and direct, and it did not come together into a curious inquiry. Her tone was dripping with cold and reticent indignation. Kahlan opened her mouth to reply, but felt all of the brave lines she had prepared fall away, scattering into the corners of the room, as far away from them as possible.
The ones that came out in their stead were quick, unplanned, and hesitant.
"Cara." Kahlan winced at the way her mouth formed the syllables of her name so eagerly, so doubtlessly. "How...how are you? Are you-"
An embittered scoff halted the foolish question . "Just great, Mother Confessor. Rarely better, in fact." The thinly-veiled acrimony caused Cara's eyes to flare. "A little confused, I'll admit. I'm wondering why I've been pulled away from my responsibilities. What could you possibly have left to tell me after all you said last night?"
Kahlan balked, but only in a small way. This response was expected, even if actually observing it brought pure dismay. "I'm so sorry."
"I seem to remember that being in the details."
"It's worth saying again. I'll say it over and over, if I have the chance to." Kahlan had done so much wrong. "That's why I summoned you here. I didn't wait to wait too long to discuss-"
"The summons were unnecessary. What is there to discuss?" Cara shrugged, eyes rolling with the typical unaffected nonchalance, but her fists shook with an extra bit of clenching. "You've made your feelings perfectly clear."
"I actually don't think I have, Cara," Kahlan asserted just above a whisper, taking a single step forward. Cara somehow managed to wind herself even tighter at the tiny change in proximity. "I wanted every bit of what happened between us last night. You must know that. I need you to. I wanted more. And when I was touching you…" Kahlan shut her eyes and shivered at the reference to her reckless hand's trembling deeds. "Spirits, Cara, when I was touching you, I didn't want to stop."
"But you did." Cara's comment matched Kahlan's hushed tone, glancing away for the first time and for just a brief moment. When her eyes returned to Kahlan's, they were inscrutable aside from the smallest glint of heaviness reflected by the morning light pouring into the room. "Everything was fine and then you pulled away."
"Because I had to. And I hate every single fragment of that necessity. Please, you have to believe me." And it would be such a relief to this tension if Kahlan could just caress Cara's forearm, or hip, or the small of her back, to communicate this steady truth. But it was impossible for the problem to also be the cure. Kahlan's hands burned with cruel restraint. She kept them contained. "What I let myself do was so dangerous. I could kill you, Cara. You know that. If I lose control, your life would end. And that's an outcome I can't even bear to think about."
Cara's voice grew quieter, but kept its edge. "I'm not afraid of that. Or of you." Her upper lip flinched and Kahlan saw her shoulders stiffen, but none of the veiled thoughts that churned under the gesture. "You never touch me unless you're in control. And I trust…" Her throat rasped around the word and she bristled before her voice became even smaller. "I trust you."
The outpouring of reluctant honesty made the air in Kahlan's solar feel thin and scarce, like a tomb for the both of them. Kahlan, compelled by the too-familiar sensation, drew in a shaking breath and cast out her own fearful truth on the exhale.
"I don't trust myself."
But Cara's particular and unmistakable stubbornness made another hack at Kahlan's backbone.
"I told you I could accept all of the time you needed. All of the space. And I have, over and over again," she said with wisping frustration and sharpening eyes. "I haven't coerced or pressured you. All of this has followed your intention."
That was precisely the problem. Kahlan's intentions were purely incongruous. Trying to force what she wanted and what was required of her into harmony had her cornered on the fringes of control. And Cara's eyes burning into her were only heightening the feeling of having every shred of her under scrutiny.
"I know that." The reminder of her own folly wasn't necessary after it had already been so long-dwelled. "I've meant everything I've said."
Especially not wanting her selfish chaos to hurt Cara. There was plenty of it, wrapped in a shroud of unfamiliarity - the deep, compelling, and confusing feelings for someone apart from Richard, for a woman, for a Mord-Sith, for Cara. Cara had been dragged along in all of it. She had dragged Cara along, causing harm in her terrible attempts to avoid harm. And right now, Cara's body language said bruised. Not her normal loose brazenness, gracefully sweeping limbs and cocked eyebrow and smirk. No. Standing before Kahlan, drawn in on herself just enough for Kahlan to notice: shoulders rolled forward, chin tucked, jaw taut, eyes entirely distant. Looking provoked, looking scorned, looking so small and wild and ready to come asunder, all at once. But still, through it all, exuding eerie calm reticence. Cara was a whirlwind and a paradox, and she was singularly entrancing, and Kahlan was captivated. (She couldn't allow herself to be.)
"You meant it," Cara murmured in repeat, reserved but also blistered, caught somewhere between a haughty display of disbelief and a timid appeal for reassurance.
"I did." Creator above, if Kahlan couldn't change this, if she couldn't take any of this back, she had to at least make Cara see. Cara knew duty and all of its unrelenting trappings. She had to understand. "But being here-" (being here with Cara was the only thing making being here tolerable, the only measure of effortless peace, the only glimpse of true home) "-being here has made me realize that what we're doing is clearly impossible. No matter how simple it seems or consuming it is. Before this gets away from us, we have to bury it."
Because there was already destruction. Burn the wound closed. Stomp out the smolder and gasp against the smoke. Words repeated, history repeating: Richard in the moonlight, his body battered and abused, listening with sad tolerance to Kahlan's ingrained enumeration of mission, duty, destruction, impossibility.
That same flash of melancholy she remembered in Richard's eyes was reflected in Cara's, now. But while Richard had shaped his reaction into a sad smile, Cara's withered into rigid sullenness. And it hit Kahlan with sudden, staggering force that this wasn't like Cara. But that was because Cara was allowing her to see it, letting the hurt slip through, whether willingly or unwillingly.
Cara opened her mouth to respond, only to close it again after bringing in half a breath. Kahlan rushed to fill in the lip-bitten, weighty silence, with the high hopes that throwing more words out would be a cause for mend.
But before she could, Cara found her own. Unexpected. Pinched, but precise.
"Would you be saying the same thing to Richard, if he was standing where I am?"
The question took Kahlan's air. So did Cara's gaze as it bore into her. The name, exhumed and spoken aloud, seared through both of them at the same time. The miserable truth rattled through with it.
"Yes," Kahlan whispered in reply, not trusting her full voice. She would be saying it to him. She had said it to him and then she absconded from it, from her duty. And now this was the price of her past faltering, for letting those integral defenses fall. "No matter what, no matter who, it's impossible. And it's unfair. It can't be fair for both of us, at least. But Cara, if any of this can only be fair to one of us, I want it to be fair for you."
More silence. Cara stared, betraying not an ounce more of the underneath. Kahlan swallowed at a thick throat. This time, without the fortitude to be silent or an excuse to turn away, Kahlan had to challenge the quiet.
"Sometimes I think you're the only person who really listens, or who understands, or who is taking these warnings of danger truly seriously. For that, I need you here with me. I recognize that you need to carry out your promise to Richard. Aydindril is your home now. You belong here."
The nod Kahlan gave was meant to be one of firm assurance, but felt weak in the hold of Cara's probing look. Clearing her throat and gathering her courage against the prickling in her eyes, she forced herself to go on.
"But, Cara. I look at you standing there and my heart breaks, because you deserve the very best." This was the moment of rending. Tear apart to reform, in the proper way. "You deserve so much more than I can give you."
Speaking the forlorn truth that had been seething for so long in her mind, in her chest, somehow made it even realer. Its plaintive chiming, finally in her own voice, were relief and devastation all at once. Lightened, fleetingly, before everything came crashing back. Before she was forced to witness Cara's confused reaction. Cara had to see the reality in this.
"What do I deserve?" she demanded, hands on her hips, taking one tentative yet explicit step closer. Kahlan needed that decrease in distance, and then more, the same way she needed so many impossible things.
"Happiness." Kahlan nearly shuddered with the effort of pressing on. "Happiness and true fulfillment, in ways which I can neither find for myself nor provide for someone else. And if just one person can be happy here, spirits, Cara, I want it to be you." Hurt before healing. It hurt. So long, just them, now ruptured. This was so difficult, but she also felt entirely a coward. Too much and not enough, at once. "There's no telling what Shota's promised future holds, but for now, you can start to make a life here. You can continue your incredible work with the recruits and being one of my trusted advisors and defenders. And if there's something beyond, you will be brought on as a member of the palace guard. You'll be paid handsomely and can find a companion who can give you the contentment I can't. You can be happy and at peace."
The words rang and lingered; the wound pulsated and then hemorrhaged.
Cara's eyes ignited like awakening through haze - wild and clear, incisive and raw. Beautiful. Beautiful enough to be agonizing. Kahlan wanted. Their sudden intensity and departure from guarded taciturnity could have rocked her back onto her heels.
"Stop." Part-hiss, part-snarl, forced through clenched teeth. "I've already told you. I thought you listened. I decide what I can and can't sustain." With one hand on her hip, Cara pointed stiffly at herself with the other, gloved finger straight at her chest. "Don't you dare try to determine that for me. What I can't endure is the thought of being without…"
Her disclosure trailed off, flailing down into gestures of hardly-stifled agitation - the baring of teeth, the heel of one palm pressed to a temple, eyes squinting and then squeezing shut altogether. When they reopened Kahlan could see what rippled behind them; not as a Confessor, but as enraptured, as consumed in disallowed intent, as human, as just woman, so very connected to the other standing too far from her. Kahlan watched in near-awe as the vulnerable but true thoughts yanked themselves from the white-knuckled grip of Cara's resistance and dripped into words, spoken in a way that was both measured with practice and wavering, just around the edges, with the dilemma of spontaneity.
(Kahlan hated that the feeling of being so weightless only came in these forbidden instants.)
"We still live in a hard world," Cara breathed, a renewal in quick assertion, letting go of so much more than Kahlan knew was easy for her. "And I mean what I said, too. I want you. In ways that make me feel so infuriating weak. I've wanted you for longer than I've known it, and longer than I've defied even to consider saying it. You keep saying Aydindril is my home." Another scoff, louder than the first, but reactionary, unsteady. "You're wrong. The constant weight and ache of wanting you is what feels like home."
And even though she shook around the half-bitten syllables, Cara lifted her chin to regard Kahlan with clear expectation.
An expectation Kahlan couldn't rise to meet.
"Cara." Her voice, too, refused to rise above an afflicted hush. "The Galean officer I confessed? At the council meeting yesterday, he nearly became the father of the next Confessor. My daughter. While it's a miracle that he isn't, I can't resist taking a mate forever. That is what I'm resigned to. My avoidance is being noticed and my fidelity is being called into question. Somehow, they know. They know about all that's forming between us. It's only a matter of time until it's used against me."
"But why does that even matter, Kahlan? What is it that you choose?" Cara asked through her gritted teeth. "What do you want?"
"I don't have a choice," Kahlan asserted. She had only been fooling herself to think that even the semblance of one existed. "You understand that. You know it, too, the fate of being tethered to something out of your control, to something you never willed. To duty, beyond your own volition."
Cara gave her head a vehement shake, sending her braid whipping behind her. "No. You're not answering my question." Their eyes locked again. Cara's were glistening. "I'm not asking about duty, or what you feel you have to do for everyone else. You told me that I take in what I give freely of yourself, not what I'm bound by force to give. That I'm worth more than I give to others. I've been trying to see that. So I'm asking you…" Here her voice cracked, and Cara cringed at the rare loss of composure before she gathered enough of its crippled remnants to continue. Her voice, though, remained quiet, a shy trace of itself. "What do you want, Kahlan?"
Cara's reiteration of Kahlan's words should have permeated Kahlan's heart. Should have cleared her vision. Should have made Kahlan want to obliterate everything besides the latch uniting them, to exile everything but them and to weave them into that blissful ceaselessness once more, and for good.
But instead, and unexpectedly, Kahlan reacted with a flash of blind and unrefined anger.
There was so much she wanted.
"I want to not be slowly and spectacularly failing." Her tone was bitter on her own tongue, and the taste of vitriol drove her to spit out every last greedy longing. "I want an end to the persistent scrutiny. I want to be more than a pressured weapon of justice. I want to not fear the childbed or the burden I'll pass to my daughter before the cord is even cut. I want what I say to be heard and heeded and respected, not passed over with an appeasing glance. I want to not be at the center of every calamity, lost in the dark." It was odd to notice in that exact moment that Cara's gaze was bloodshot. Kahlan knew she reflected that weariness, too. In her eyes, in her head, in her shoulders. She was tired. She was so tired and drenched with trouble and every bit of it was pouring out faster than she could breathe. Soon she would be empty. Emptiness would be a mercy. "I want to find strength in my convictions. I want to not be confused and distracted by everything I want, all the time. To not feel so torn between these contrasting and irreconcilable parts of me. I want to be more than I was born for. I want to be more than I am. I want to make sense to myself. Cara, I want to be enough for everyone."
With a deep, heaving breath, Kahlan caught the scent of cedarwood, and whether it was real or simply wishful imagining, it was overwhelming, an utter headrush. Cara's low voice in her ear, Cara's skin against hers, Cara's true and rare smile marking her heartbeat, cascading through her blood. She wanted Cara. She wanted Cara to understand. She wondered if the silence meant understanding.
"But I'm not," she gasped on the ragged exhale, not waiting for an affirmation. "I can't be. And holding the weight of trying to be enough for everyone renders me not enough for anyone. I'm hardly enough for myself. There's no choice. I can't give you what you're asking for. I don't have the luxury of love. I have a clear and distinct duty: to be a protector of the Midlands and to continue the line of Confessors. And I must uphold it."
The Mother Confessor's edict ricocheted through the room with finality.
Cara recoiled from its stunning, sharp-edged reverberations. Kahlan watched her and thought of the way a person looked at the instant her power raged into them, taking and taking and taking.
And too late, Kahlan realized the damning word she had allowed to slip through.
It had not gone unheard.
Love. The word intrinsic, the word unpretending, the word fearful. The word like an obvious bloodstain, unable to leave in disregard. Concise, fragile, but making their private world stumble with its impact. Again and helplessly, Kahlan was divided in her intentions. Part of her wanted to seize the word up and hasten it back into her own shadows, to spare them of this. The other wanted to leave it in the air, suspended in the too-bright morning sun blazing in through the grand windows - to let it ring out over and over without an end, to allow it to burgeon and fill the room and fill them, etching the walls and their bodies and leaving every possible sign of its existence. Kahlan's pulse raced from her chest to her head to her wrists and she couldn't decide. There was nothing to decide.
More quickly than Kahlan hoped, Cara reclaimed her bearings from the dazed sway, and the look of her features wrenched at Kahlan's gut.
Her face was usually a remarkable and constant font of expression both subtle and unabashed, taking Kahlan's breath with the way it conveyed the deepest parts of her. Now, it showed absolutely nothing. Eyes void of that glinting anger or exasperation or brooding. Lips left uncurled, mouth unturned, brow uncreased. Everything blank. Soulless. Detached. For once, her face was just as inscrutable to Kahlan as her thoughts.
It was nearly the face of a faraway stranger. And it brought back the shame of forever ago. The raising of a lethal hand and a vindictive declaration: I'll get the truth out of her. The first careless fallacy, swelling and drifting from the past into the now.
Cara's voice matched her expression's barrenness.
"What did you just say?"
Inflection gone. Quiet and even, each word given the same emphasis and timbre. It was barely a question. There was truly no wondering about what Kahlan had said. And still she peered with those stony eyes, waiting for an answer to the non-question. Waiting for cold accountability. Waiting for a finishing blow. Kahlan blinked twice, willing away the burning and the way her vision of Cara had begun to swim.
"You heard me. I can't pretend," she stammered, again at a loss, brimming with helplessness like in everything else. "Cara, I don't know what else to-"
Cara turned on her heel so quickly that the motion took Kahlan's speech with it.
"Then say nothing." She spoke to the floor, away from Kahlan. But through the action, her shoulders visibly tightened. "Give your orders and be done. I'll carry them out as I've committed myself to doing. But after you do, do not drag me away from them to bring me here again." Then, slowly, the bite circled in with a vengeance. Acerbity steeped through her articulation of every letter. "The Mother Confessor mustn't be rendered confused. What would the good people of the Midlands think?" She shook her head, brought back the clenched fists, controlled-but-barely. "No room for unworthy distractions, like my presence."
It hurt. It was meant to hurt - that was Kahlan's reluctant aim all along. It was excruciating. Kahlan thought of that night again, injured after wielding the Sword of Truth. The night air chilling the sweat on her already-fevered skin, the torrential shivers, the sick throbbing in her belly. She thought of the screaming pressure of Cara's Agiel against her leg and wished for it instead. But through the distress, there was still the persistent impulse to deny her intent, to comfort and amend. To collapse into Cara and draw out whatever possible measure of that new tenderness she hadn't managed to ruin.
But Cara had turned away, and the distance between them was too great.
The release of that directionless compulsion came through Kahlan's mouth instead, hurried and desperate.
"Please don't say that about yourself. Please don't believe that. You're so much more than that. You're so…"
"Please," Cara interrupted, body jerking with the emphatic force of speaking. Her tone matched anything but the word's implication. "Don't finish that sentence." A sharp sigh, laden with unwilling resignation - a sound of concession so upsettingly foreign to Kahlan's ears. "Have my armor sent to my chambers."
Four exacting steps away from Kahlan echoed off of the marble floor before Cara stopped. Pivoted, maybe a quarter of the way, chin creeping over her shoulder, just enough for Kahlan to see a viridian iris slip to the corner of her eye. The almost-look hitched Kahlan's breath.
"I served Richard like any Mord-Sith should." Gruff, rumbling low. "I felt the bond. But before I served him, I chose him. You said it yourself, in your note to me." Kahlan thrummed with the remembering. "And you were right. I'm still choosing him, every day, even as we speak. Both the shadow of the bond and my own continued choice carry me now. I've made other choices, too - maybe foolish ones." A pause. Cara squinted, as though debating whether or not to go on. "You expect your word to just be accepted when it's full of contradictions and cant. You say you don't have a choice? Claiming that is making a choice, Kahlan. You've chosen this, in absolute. Don't pretend you haven't. It's an insult to both of us. Stop saying you're failing when you're doing exactly what you mean to."
Silence, then, settling in with acute heaviness. No more scoffing or sighing. No final mournful bids for understanding. Even Cara's boots made no sound on the marble as they carried her farther away. The brittle space between them stretched and strained until there was so much of it that Kahlan had no idea how to fill it in. Her mouth tasted desolate, dry; too full of shame to protest.
And in a blink, Cara was gone without ceremony or flourish. Like she hadn't been there in the first place. But she had been - she was etched all over Kahlan's hands, Kahlan's bedsheets, Kahlan's heart. (Kahlan's heart was in her throat.)
Half a year ago, the pain of purging had brought about oblivion, with the dark forest clearing tilting and swirling as Kahlan pitched sideways into unconsciousness. When she had come around hours later, lured back by the crackle of tinder (after her fainting, apparently, there was plenty of time to make a fire) and the trilling of insects, she had been sprawled on her carefully-arranged bedroll. Her leg was sore and tender like a deep bruise, but the fever was gone. Cara had been sitting on the other side of the fire, deliberately-not-watching Kahlan; her focus fluttered back to the embers as soon as Kahlan's bleary eyes crossed it. And Kahlan should have swallowed her stupid pride and thanked Cara that night, out loud and with firmness, instead of keeping the gratitude to herself until now, when saying it would be meaningless.
Kahlan had expected the same resultant emptiness with this purge - but it was absent.
To the contrary, she felt overfull and overflowing, lead-chested, sinking slowly at gravity's demand. Everything hovered and encroached and bore down: Richard, the Sword of Truth, The Seventh Codex of Sandragon and its promise of Chimes that would take magic and the shrouded Blood of the Fold who could seek to harness them. Her fate of the childbed, bereft of that connection which made her feel more than she was. Cara's fingers tangling with hers. Cara throwing her words back at her and refusing to understand. Cara turning her back, showing both compelling passion and its utter lack at once. Passion couldn't rule reason. There was no amount of reason to heed.
Stomping out a fire's weary bones like this only created more smoke.
But somehow, through its acrid clouds, there came an instant of nearly farcical lucidity. Time stood, conflicting with itself. Kahlan thought of the scrap of paper still on her writing desk, of her foreboding quill marks scrawled across it. She pictured them and, with cold blood, heard Shota's voice, saw her furs and her arrogant smile through the haze.
Pain in duty and duty in pain.
A harbinger of peril, rearing its cruel head while the ignorant sun shone outside the palace walls. Insult added to injury.
Kahlan found her own hands forming into tight fists.
(This was pain, in all its forms, stealing any hope of peace.)