Chapter 18: Leave Me Out With the Waste

It was a manifold bit of consolation that Mikhail tended to avoid asking questions, both in words or by bearing. A mind more inclined to interest certainly would have reacted with less detachment at Kahlan's state as she bid him enter for the second time that morning: ashen-faced with the dried tracks from silent tears striping her cheeks, clutching a small scrap of parchment while an ever-growing stack of petitions in need of her designation lay in disregard on the writing desk. His knock had barely registered through the numb fog billowing in her head; Kahlan had responded to it out of quick habit alone, her own clipped voice feeling like a dismal ghost of something else as it croaked from her throat.

Maybe a fraction of her mind noticed the strangeness of in him heralding yet another arrival that forenoon. But its better weight was fixed on the scrawled reminder held in incredulous fingers, poured all over the inked lines and curves of her own handwriting, nervously-marked and nervously-regarded. Trying, through an aching, preoccupied fog, to elucidate some further meaning from the words left mired in obscurity, after the realization that crashed over her as Cara had departed without a single final glance.

Pain in duty. Duty in pain.

So close, too close, words bursting into salience, striking at her awareness as the equinox lurked weeks away. But the rest of Shota's fragmented warnings still seemed to be scattered in ambiguous nonsense. The incongruent nature of their vague specificity - triplicate divides, burgundy flowers, jagged whites and burning flesh - was frustration manifest, lacing its way through the chilled dismay of only knowing in part. Let alone somehow weaving the piecemeal offerings into the prophecy in the Seventh Codex of Sandragon. It made her mind feel like wool.

This was the world off its kilter, rocked askew by the confusion that had set in since having to carry on without Richard. The confusion passed through generations - of sitting in the First Chair of Aydindril to rule and to accommodate with no guide besides old conventionality. The confusion that had gripped her since Cara's hands had laid claim to her vulnerable but so-minded body.

Pure disbalance, in every way, teetering on the razor-edge between should have been and can never be. And Kahlan, sapped of resolve, having to hold herself upright in the exact center.

Shota had referenced disbalance, too, coloring the delicate space between the living realm and the Underworld. This observation, with unsurprising annoyance, didn't correspond with any of the rest. The Blood of the Fold - likely (maybe...somewhat possibly) Sandragon's predicted enemy - also stood in opposition of the Keeper, to a zealous degree, claiming that all magic in this world was born of his influence. Wouldn't releasing the Chimes from their internment in the Underworld further disrupt this balance? There were too many disparate strands in the web, crossing only at inconsequential and transitory points. The attempt to reconcile them was enough to send Kahlan further into spinning nausea as she whipped between feeling vindicated and feeling still so completely lost.

Time itself felt ripped from its mooring. Each of its beats was strange and drifting. Kahlan had no hint of how much had passed since Cara left, besides the sunlight shining through the windows and taunting her with its heedless bright audacity. The luminous patterns on the marble hadn't moved much. It couldn't have been long. But it felt like eternity stretching on and beyond, dragging Kahlan through the forsaken remains.

The sun's glare and the discordance of time made Kahlan think of the Valley of Perdition. And she wondered if she had somehow staggered her way there and was now trapped in its living nightmare. Crawling through desert sand, desperately chasing footprints as Cara took more and more steps away from her. From them.

But this wasn't a hallucination. They had been there. Cara had saved her life there. That cursed wasteland was locked out of reach, in the Old World. No. Though no less inescapable, this was reality. This was Aydindril, this was her domain, her home. This was supposed to be home. And the soreness in her chest wasn't the product of some ancient enchantment, and Cara had been no phantom as she threw Kahlan's impossible words back in her face. As she demanded an impossible choice and then turned her back.

The pain splintering through her was real.

And right now, her pain had a witness. Mikhail had spoken and she had altogether missed it. With considerable effort, she pulled her gaze from the word hearts on the parchment to regard him, using the heel of her palm to discreetly wipe the stiff tear-salt from her cheek.

"I'm sorry," she sighed, drawing up the dregs of her composure, heavy in speech and in shoulders, "could you say that again? My thoughts were elsewhere."

"Of course, Mother Confessor." Mikhail nodded, still standing at attention with his fist over his chest. Kahlan wordlessly invited him to ease the position, and he repeated himself. "Confessor Dennee is waiting in the corridor. She claims an invitation to mid-morning tea."

It took Kahlan a number of those crooked seconds to absorb what he had said, and then a few more to realize what he meant. When she did, she let out a low groan, fingertips pressed to throbbing temples.

"I can't believe I completely forgot."

Of course Dennee would take advantage of her standing invitation on this specific morning, after all the turmoil broken only by an hour or two of fitful dozing. Kahlan was tired. She was tired in her bones and drained hollow, rendered raw from pushing away her only measure of reprieve. Her only space to safely come unraveled. Tea was absolutely not among her primary concerns.

Mikhail must have read the veiled exasperation coursing beneath her attempt at a neutral response. "I can ask her to leave. Tell her you're tending to a developing urgent matter of state. She won't question me."

"No." Kahlan shook her head. Dennee might not openly question a member of Kahlan's guard, but she would certainly continue to question Kahlan herself. More silent scrutiny, more sidelong gazes rife with suspicion. There had already been too many falsehoods, and Kahlan couldn't lie to her sister any longer. The lies of omission had been deplorable enough. Now that there was nothing left to omit, Kahlan decided with a queasy nag in her throat, it was time to reset and recast her direction. She had to take the tattered reins of her self-control and try to remember how it felt to hold them as tightly as she once had. There was only the hope that the memory and practice were not too far gone. Raking a hand through her hair, Kahlan sighed again. "No, please send her in. Oh, and Mikhail?"

The guard paused his quarter-turn toward the door, beyond which Dennee was undoubtedly growing unsettled. Even this brief back-and-forth had been longer than it should have been. "Yes, Mother Confessor?"

"When you see a scullion," she told him, wringing the weariness from her voice, "please tell them to deliver tea and something sweet? Something readily-available. I don't want to look as unprepared as I am. Honey cakes or curd tarts or…" The inconsequential tedium of what she was saying caused her to trail off. "It truly doesn't matter. I can't even think about it. They'll know what's best."

Mikhail nodded his compliance; the small gesture seamlessly turned into a more reverent bow befitting Kahlan's authority. As he straightened, his dark-eyed gaze met hers with something unfamiliar but mild. A subtle glimmer of understanding, or careful knowing. It was a brief flicker, just a passing blink of a moment - but Kahlan caught it before it was gone, clutching onto that brief bit of subdued kindness for all she was worth. And, for the first time, Kahlan truly wondered who Mikhail was when he wasn't standing rigid and vigilant outside of her door.

If Kahlan was going to temper herself, she had to do so with haste. Only a few heartbeats separated her from Dennee's presence and contemplation. Her little sister knew her too well to ignore the swollen eyes or the sleepless blossoms of shadow underneath them, the knitted brow, the bitten lip. How, every few moments, her breathing would be overcome by an abrupt and rib-creaking sigh. Kahlan's half-torn seams, visible only to those who knew the same burden, would be on full and flawed display.

You're not yourself, Dennee would voice as her worried claim yet again, and she would still be correct.

Kahlan wasn't herself. She wasn't the Confessor she had been honed to become since she was just a young adolescent, pulled from the Valley of Thandor to Aydindril, swept directly into meticulous and firm wardship of Mother Confessor Serena. The path that had been laid for her since the moment she had been weaned and her power began to manifest, restraint and duty taught by her mother, before all the darkness. These women's words, their promises and demands and convictions straining back to time immemorial - Kahlan had lost sight of them. But they were still there. She could salvage their tattered traces and draw them in, tighten her lines and recast her tendencies. She could veer back onto the same bearing she had followed to the Westland boundary, before Richard Cypher's unassuming outstretched hand had interrupted it. Before settling doubt, before embraces and grieving rage in solitude, before Aldermont and Aydindril. Before selfishness became a glimmering option. Before Cara became everything. Before the insolent influence of what do you want?

Mother Confessor Serena's incensed voice swelled up from her memory, almost a reflexive reaction to the forbidden thought. You were taught all your life to know the difference between right and wrong. Kahlan had been blind to it then, but regarding Kahlan's credence, her mentor had spoken without error that day. Her judgement had been impaired by feelings that could never be actualized, justified, or consummated, set against everything she had believed and everything for which she had once striven.

But no longer. Kahlan's mantle was heavy but it was waiting for the permanence of her shoulders. The Midlands needed a capable and rightful Mother Confessor in the times to come. Kahlan needed to comply and do what was right for her people, to silence the phantoms telling her she was less-than.

Just a bit more pretending to get through this tea affair: her current distress was because of Shota. Nothing more. That was not a falsehood. From there, it would just be an endeavor of time and distance. Distance from this morning - from the annihilatory words exchanged and Cara's turned back. Count the seconds of keeping her arm's length until they faded for torture. Cage herself into the suitable shapes that would (might, a chill along her spine) one day be limned in her monolithic likeness on the wall of the Council Chamber, joining every other Mother Confessor who bore these burdens before her.

Some portion of the world would right itself in her adherence to duty. Kahlan would survive it.

And surviving started now. Those few heartbeats had passed in concurrence with that flurry of thoughts. Dennee was standing in front of her. A soft but wary smile touched her features. And while Kahlan saw Dennee in the expression, just as she had once seen Dennee's first smile of infanthood, the lingering strangeness in the shape of her eyes and mouth only served to deepen the silent divide between them. One of Dennee's hands rested idly on the black silk of her dress where it flowed over the swell of her belly, which seemed to become more pronounced every time Kahlan saw her. The promise of a tiny Confessor, healthy and growing. It filled Kahlan with the knotty feeling of both joy for her sister and dread for herself.

Aware of her surrender to fate, Kahlan pondered how long it would be until she, too, was compelled into childing. Not long, she guessed, and the thought toppled into another surge of grimness. Resignation to the musts did not abate all of the fears surrounding them.

Just before the silent taking of appraisal had gone on for too long, Dennee spoke, her voice carrying the lilt of a laugh to cover its faint unease. "Meticulous, isn't he?"

Kahlan had no patience left for the grainy tedium of feeling out a timid greeting. Instead of joining the tentative dance, she touched Dennee's shoulder and quickly but gently drew her in, as she had done countless times since they were both tiny.

"Little sister," she breathed, praying that the tremble had stayed out of her throat, closing her eyes and trying to gather some stillness.

Just like her visage, the arms finding their easy way around her weren't Dennee's. Not exactly. But the embrace was. Its familiar warmth was of brief and unexpected comfort; Kahlan felt her pulse slow, her stomach unclench, her bunched muscles go gloriously slack for just a moment. Until she remembered the feeling of another embrace, strong arms encircling her, pulling her from grief, pulling her into bed, pulling her into rare ease with herself. Warmth all over and through her body. Broad, stable, secure. All of these things she had forsaken. Kahlan stiffened again.

Fortunately, Dennee did not notice her bristling and instead spoke through the tight hug. "I'm glad to see you."

"Likewise," Kahlan half-lied, scorning herself for it, warding off the pang of melancholy.

Kahlan made sure Dennee was the one to break the hold. As she did, she raised her gaze to meet Kahlan's. Only a beat of perception passed before her clement smile wilted into a tight, fretful frown.

"Kahlan. You look awful." Dennee's brow notched. Kahlan fought the urge to shrink away as gentle but reluctant fingertips brushed against the livid fatigue-bruise tinging the hollow of her right eye. "Like you haven't had a moment of sleep."

The unvoiced question, the worn-out are you alright, slipped between them. Dennee knew she was struggling; Kahlan had divulged that herself. And now the trepidation demanded yet another explanation. Kahlan steeled herself, prayed to the Creator, and broke into what needed to be her final dalliance with falsehood.

"I think she was right." Kahlan's stomach twisted with the ambiguous she as Cara's cutting words throbbed in her mind. "Shota," she clarified with incisive haste, mostly for herself. "You know her broad warnings, and you know that I believe them. And those signs of testament to her visions' validity? At first they were all so vague, but now, even though it might sound like I'm delirious, they're becoming much more distinct. And real. I was…" A pause, a hurried hesitation. "I was up all night ruminating about it."

Dennee's eyes, gray-green where they should have been bright blue, narrowed. There was no time to react to the thin-lipped doubt that came for Kahlan, direct to center.

"No. That's not it. You're not being honest with me."

Being so blatantly challenged caused a thorny mingling of anger and defensive guilt to well up in Kahlan's core and permeate the rest of her sensation. She latched into it and used it to respond, hoping the former was more resounding than the latter. "So it's come to this, then? Using your power to read me?" she scoffed, letting the indignation pour forth, crossing her arms over her chest.

"I don't need my power here," Dennee replied with ire of her own. She shook her head, never breaking their shared gaze. But the gesture also changed her tone, softening it into a quiet but insistent bid for truth. "I've spent every conscious moment of my life as your sister. Your beloved confidante, and you mine. I've been reflecting on our conversation yesterday, and I know there's more to all of this than you're telling." A deep, resolute breath, sounding like a summoner of words already prepared. "I once kept a secret from you - my first pregnancy. It made me sick then, Kahlan, and even to this day l regret withholding it from you. The thought of something else unspoken between us…" Her thought trailed off into a sigh. "So, please. Just tell me. Maybe I can help you hold at least some of it."

Kahlan's blood was thrumming. Nothing more unspoken between them. Except this. Because if Kahlan revealed what her heart was begging for, it would lead to her downfall. Dennee couldn't understand - there was too much venom in the blood spilled in the past. By speaking freely, Kahlan would marry herself to that atrocity and would lose her sister, too. And for what? For a connection that had already been severed, still thrashing in its fresh demise.

And it wasn't only that. For the Mother Confessor, there were considerations well beyond her sister's scorn. Nothing here is as discreet as you might think it is. Councilor Nielan's sneered warning brought on a surge of dread Kahlan felt in her knucklebones. An out-loud admission of wayward love would ignite an uncontrollable blaze of whispers and surprised judgement. Once spoken, it could never be thrust back into oblivion. Kahlan Amnell, a leader completely out of control and out of her bounds. Twice distracted, twice smitten, twice derelict. Foolish enough to fall once for the Seeker. Damned in double for allowing such burning entanglement with another after - with a woman. Such a complication, such a stark hindrance to her imperative duty to continue her bloodline. The thought of being known in such a way was like drowning in her own heavy depths.

But she had to say something. Dennee's concerned but so deeply-demanding gaze had her back against the wall and she needed to carefully and convincingly speak her way out.

"You're right." Her voice threatened to crack and betray her painstaking stern poise. "You're my sister. And yet it's clear that you don't trust me. I'm so weary of the constant interrogation, Dennee. Because the answer has been and still is everything. It's the warnings and prophecy, it's the Council, it's all of these expectations, it's-"

"It's Cara." Dennee's interruption was abrupt, matter-of-fact, strangely apathetic, cutting straight through Kahlan's wild swinging with a look sharper than a whetted dagger. "Isn't it?"

Hearing the name is what utterly disarmed her. Falling so bluntly from Dennee's lips like it was the most obvious thing any person had ever said, as though Dennee herself had called Cara by her name a thousand times before. It was a violent collision and blurring of the border Kahlan had delineated between those opposite parts of herself - Confessor and woman, adherence to duty and surrender to full-hearted love. The accompanying daggers in Dennee's gaze did their adept work of piercing, of permeating, and Kahlan was seen, she was known, in a terrifying and irrevocable way. It felt like the opposite side of her calling - standing trial for her crimes under infallible judgment. Every hidden tryst, every silent smile, every single fragile and enraptured heart-skip cast into merciless, vivid display. Kahlan's weak-moment delusions - the yearning for a world of just them, so perfectly alone - tore away from her grip, too, setting asunder into the harrowing open. Every fragment of love left abandoned mocked her in her liar's shame.

It was the sudden impact of freezing water, outside and within, slapping her unsuspecting skin and taking over her veins, dripping in numb rivulets from her fingertips and chilling her at the core. The meticulous but depleting facade began to collapse. Kahlan felt herself plummeting inward.

She meant to open her mouth to declare some weak denial. Instead, her face just crumpled. She concealed it quickly with her palm and fingers, searching every corner of herself for even a wisp of remaining composure or dignity. There was none. Shoulders hunching, an innate but futile attempt to hide herself, she couldn't help but let out a tiny sound that was moan, whisper, sigh, and sob all at once.

And though it sounded like it was coming from a league away, Kahlan forced herself to hear every distinct, conflicting strand of Dennee's short reaction. Disbelief. Betrayal. Resignation. Pity. Heartbreak.

"Oh, Kahlan."

It rang with the desire to take hold of Kahlan and to shove her away in the same instant, culminating in total inaction. Dennee, face shadowed, kept her distance. Kahlan's lungs gave a shuddering, stifled heave.

"Dennee, I…" Kahlan's pinched voice failed. What could she even say? She could tell the whole story in explicit terms, letting the full truth free for the first time. She could admit to the sins of letting Cara touch her, of letting Cara love her, and of doing both in overwhelming return. Shed light on the guilt of her wanting body and selfish heart. Recite a list of faults beginning and ending with how her attachments had repeatedly led her to wrecking the highest plans. But none of that needed to be spoken. It was written all over her, like Cara's mouth on her skin, stolen away and satisfied.

"I didn't want to see it," Dennee murmured, looking askance, fumbling hands, eyes shrouded, obviously fighting a more vehement reaction. "I didn't want to let myself even think of it. But I watch you with her. I hear the way you speak of her and to her, and I…" She shook her head with a nervous, humorless laugh that made Kahlan wince. "Spirits, sister. How? What's happened to you? And what of Richard? What is this to his memory?"

It was uncalled for. It was uncalled for and invasive and it stung, deeply, clawing into the insecurities buried deep in Kahlan's center. With a flare of heat at her neck, the pain moved from inside to outside. Kahlan lashed out with a bitter tone and wild eyes.

"Richard has nothing to do with this," she insisted. "Richard is gone, Dennee. Richard is gone and I'm still here, trying to make sense of what he left behind." And for the first time, washed in cruel clarity, Kahlan realized how furious she was with him. For abandoning them here on the brink of the unknown, with nothing to go on but vague words of a sly witch and a millenia-dead prophet. No Sword of Truth. No compass. No easy confidence or stalwart determination or influence as a savior. Nothing but her and Cara - now nothing but her, burning like a candle, depleted day after day. The bubbling resentment tore at her heart, uncompromising in its presence. But through it all, he was still Richard. And Kahlan hated how every one of her thoughts and feelings had to be so very complicated. Nothing was easy, and not would it be. "With everything lost as it was, Cara is what I found. She was the sense I've been able to make. Don't ever presume what he would think of me or how I've coped with this mess. You never knew him like I did. Like we did."

(There was no longer a we to speak of, she remembered, only after she had said it.)

At first, Dennee balked at the way Kahlan had come at her with a temper. But she recovered and bit back. "Fine. But even with Richard aside, what about me?" She opened her arms, testifying her presence there in Kahlan's solar. "Richard is gone, and you're still here. Well, so am I. Did you think of me? I can't fathom how you could hold even a shred of affection for her after what she's done. Creator, Kahlan, how could you?"

"Cara took your life with the same amount of choice you had in taking the body you now inhabit," Kahlan pointed out after a steadying breath. "How can I make you understand? Her autonomy was erased by torture and false pride. But now her choices are hers alone. They reflect her true intentions. And she's chosen good. She's saved countless more lives than she's taken. She doesn't need to suffer through any more atonement." The last word broke from her mind and mouth like spitting out something rotten. "Through all of this, I have to believe that the world is carrying on in this way for a reason. You're here for a reason. So am I, and so is Cara. And if it wasn't for her, I doubt I would be at all."

The ghost of a moment past rippled into her awareness and stopped her speaking. Just a small memory, insignificant in the world's grander scheme, noticed once, half-considered, and then whisked away to join the innumerable seemingly-unremarkable moments just like it. But this one returned from its idle exile with sudden vengeance. Summer blaze, heavy air, Mount Kymermosst jutting higher and higher into the crystal-sky horizon with every heavy hoofbeat of their gallop to Aydindril's walls. Exhausted, dirty, sore, but content. Relieved. The last few instants of their world alone. Through the steady motion, Kahlan had glanced at Cara to watch her ride, all easy rhythm and almost-lazy hold on the reins in spite of their speed. Her blonde hair, still free from its braid, then, was tossed behind her in the wind. Noticing Kahlan's gaze, Cara returned it with a smirk that reluctantly turned into a smile much warmer, much realer, one that touched her eyes with light like from the sun high and heavy above.

Cara was stunning. That smile had been captivating, a private show of joy. And now, falling in, the possibility that Kahlan might never see it again, in that form, bestowed upon her and only her with such genuineness.

Bend became break. Kahlan felt the fracture. She let one gasping sob escape before clapping her hand over her mouth, trying to send it back into nothingness.

But.

Muffled, desperate, raw and weighted with stricken truth: "I don't want to be without her."

Here at the end of all of her frayed lines, there was no smothering the tears. With a pitiful noise, Kahlan came to pieces.

And Dennee, now witness to the madness, reached out. Reached through her strident outrage, reached through the shattered glass separating them, reached to the edge. Reached for her sister. Kahlan felt Dennee's arms settle around her and she sunk in, bone-tired with no more capacity for shame, slumping against her and letting her sobs wrack both of their bodies.

"It doesn't matter now," she whimpered into the angle of Dennee's jaw. "What's between us is over. I put an end to it, for the sake of everything. So I can be better. Worthy." No attachment, no possession. No selfish erratic behavior. No fear of letting go for duty. Just the pure presence of dominion and nobility. "I turned her away. And now I don't know who I am here."

Dennee had no response except to hush her with soft, inarticulate sounds, smoothing Kahlan's hair with short, tender strokes. There was a discernible shade of relief in the first noise that couldn't even manage to make Kahlan feel harm. There was too much else crowding her perception.

"I'm not cut out for any of this." Her tears were soaking Dennee's skin. "It's so hard, little sister."

"Hush, and calm down. I know, Kahlan. I know."

Dennee didn't know, Kahlan thought. Not at all. But Kahlan could pretend to believe it, if pretending would satisfy Dennee. Another brick for Kahlan's burden and penance.

"Do you think it was this hard for Magda Searus, or Serena, or…" she croaked, holding on more tightly, each word a new crack in the veneer. "Or for mom?"

Dennee was silent as the question's weight hung all over both of them. Their mother had left them with too soon, with all this power and no way to handle it. With a lifetime of love, but the necessity to hold their duty above it. They were so small then. In Dennee's arms, Kahlan felt small again.

And feeling small made her think of the meadowlark hatchling from her childhood, the one with the broken wing. How she dedicated herself to the tiny unfortunate creature, pouring all of her time and love into nursing it back to health, until it grew even stronger than the rest of its kin and left her. She had wanted to hold on to the bird, to keep it with her, regretting helping it become so capable. It wasn't fair. But she held on to Dennee instead as it flew ever farther away from her, weeping just as openly as she wept now.

The things you love will always come back to you.

If only Kahlan didn't have to make sure to keep them far away.

They stayed that way for a long time, until Kahlan had been spent.

The tea eventually arrived and was allowed to grow cold.

This was only following Kahlan's command, Cara reasoned through a heavy headrush of brooding hostility and admittedly-too-much red wine.

She was drunk, but cognizant, and the moonlight was strange. Muted outside, but somehow brightening as it crept into the window and splayed out over bare flesh. Like it wanted to highlight these actions in some distraught appeal for her to realize what she was doing. But Cara needed no aid in knowing; she was already well-aware.

In the shadowed darkness, she felt Dahlia's lips curl into a self-satisfied smirk against her own. Cara wanted to shout it away, but, not chancing words, chose to bite instead. Dahlia gasped at the sudden sensation of teeth, fingernails digging into skin where hand was trapped between Cara's back and the wall. Only half-breaking the kiss, she murmured, throaty and drenched with heady greed, "I knew you'd be back."

It was meant to provoke. To bore in and pour salt and to prove that Dahlia had known Cara better than Cara knew herself. To remind Cara that she had been an absolute fool. But, again, Cara needed no reminder and gave no response to Dahlia's bait. Words would only damn her to the fate of a thick throat, cracking voice. So she steeped in her muted rage and scorn, letting the words simmer in the friction of their unclothed bodies, and slipped her thigh more fully between Dahlia's, wrestling back whatever threadbare measure of control over this situation she could. She gripped the curve of Dahlia's ass to bring her in closer, earning a breathy moan with the shared rolling grind of their hips. Pressing back, challenging Cara's momentum, Dahlia put aside the smug lines and reclaimed Cara's parted lips, pinning her to the wall with hands on her waist. Trapping her there. Cara, steamed and reeling, opening her mouth against Dahlia's and tried not to taste Kahlan.

Dahlia's words dwindled in the dimness, melting into the other sounds humming at the edge of her awareness. The racket of Ambrosio's below, bustling in the evening hour: raucous laughter, a drinking song, an ale mug hitting the floor or the wall as emphasis. The sighs and hitched whimpers that escaped (only from Dahlia) as their bodies twisted together against the wall. The creaking of the wood as their weight shifted against it with growing intensity and enthusiasm.

And lingering over it all, scorning Cara and threatening her very sanity: the steady beat of Kahlan's pulse.

The sound of the Mother Confessor's pure heart was relentless. Sometimes racing, sometimes slow, all fits and starts in her head. Cara wanted to cut it from her flesh and bone.

In every place, all of the time, Cara could hear it. Could feel it, inescapably. The incessant steady rhythm of it had followed her here, where she was cleaved from what she had been becoming. Hidden in Dahlia's quarters, with Dahlia's hands on her breasts and Dahlia's mouth on her neck. But unlike the last time she was in this tiny room, the sound was not a revelation, nor a tether to peace and self. It simply loomed over her with all of its weight, this infuriating entity she couldn't dispel even after being tossed out.

The constancy of it assaulted her perception, giving rise to ideas the goblets of dark tannic wine couldn't erase. How she was weak (her hips and stomach twitched as Dahlia gave her nipple a teasing pinch). How she had been destined for loss after being folded in every direction. How all of her difficult choices had been in vain, and this wasteful emptiness was what remained.

How, before Kahlan had left her aside, Cara had been doing exactly what she had told her to do: she had been making a life here. One she now had to disentangle from Kahlan's, cast off yet again from where she had once felt like she belonged.

The sound of the Mother Confessor's pure heart was relentless and Cara had to try to drown it out. Douse it in drink until her head swam and lurched. Eradicate these thousand unnamed shapes and bury them in the familiarity of fucking, of sweat and shudder and pleasure, in the familiarity of Dahlia, a once-choice interrupted.

"And I'm glad you are," Dahlia purred in Cara's ear, continuing the one-sided conversation before doing something particularly fiendish with her tongue, sending Cara shivering (more weakness). The smirk returned with intensity, and Cara clenched her own jaw so hard it made her skull ring. "She couldn't make you quiver like that."

Cara, desperate to believe her but unable to attain the faith, continued to palm the backs of Dahlia's thighs, breaking several promises and inviting havoc. It was what she had been built for.

Dahlia's porcelain skin was so warm, so eager and responsive to Cara's spiteful yet ravenous touch. Contradictions everywhere. The world was different. The world was in pieces. And their bodies were different from one another's, too. Dahlia had come into adulthood lithe and lean, while Cara had grown broad and well-muscled - and although Cara could tell that Dahlia's had softened between then in D'Hara and now in Aydindril, their bodies remembered each other well when reintroduced in this lustful way. Never mind the guilt, never mind the hollowness of it all.

A body's response was a body's response. Cara was buzzing, aching, so slick between her thighs. Numbness, too, was numbness.

Choice was choice.

Dahlia folded into Cara, licking up the thews of her neck and then biting down in a way that made Cara nearly snarl, in a way that was sure to leave a bruise. Humming deep in her throat, upper lip twitching, Cara angled her chin to allow Dahlia both permission and more expanse to mark. One more bruise meant nothing when she already had so many, all over and through her. Each one of them cried out a dazed protest at their exposure in the cold moonlight.

Her scars, too, seemed more pronounced in the pale watery gleam. So did Dahlia's. Both were etched with the hard-earned marks of breaking and battle. With their naked bodies held tight together, their scars created an either an elegant pattern or a long and tragic story, in the way they aligned. Cara knew her scars. That one on the shoulder, Cara thought as her fingertips passed over it while Dahlia's lips roamed under the edge of her jaw, she remembered well. She had been there for its bestowal, and wore its twin. She nearly remembered them all. So many just like it, and not merely the ones manifest to the eye.

Kahlan had scars, too, Cara knew. Not many, but enough. Scars on her heart, of her mother and of Richard and of this legacy she had to uphold which had rendered them as nothing. The scar on her thigh, put there by Cara's own doing (and consequent undoing). And the scar on her upper lip - the one that was only visible in just the right light, if one was looking directly where it lay, which Cara often had. But for all the furtive gawking, Cara realized, with a pang of inane regret, that she had no idea of its origin. And now she never would. She should have asked. She should have been better. She should have done anything but gaze at it in silence and imagine brushing it with her thumb before devouring Kahlan's waiting mouth with more passion than either of them could contain.

Not asking, and now never knowing, was just another foolish choice she would have to suffer with.

But that thought didn't last long, nor did the despicably guilty thought of taking Kahlan. Because Dahlia suddenly drew back and grasped Cara's throat, tight, palm pressed against her windpipe, fingers prodding at her jugular. Cara froze, and so did her heart, but Kahlan's didn't. Watching through bewildered unsteady vision, her hands stilled on Dahlia's waist, instinctively holding her away, preparing to fight. And Dahlia stared right back, eyes pointed and glimmering, mouth like stone for one, two, three long seconds until it coiled into a vicious sneer.

"Oh?" Dahlia slowly raised her eyebrows in feigned astonishment. "I thought you enjoyed that sort of thing."

A flare of profound rancor left Cara deaf to the peals of Dahlia's snide laughter. Its spiteful swelter started in her center and rose with each slow-passing second, seizing her lungs on its way, filling her with hate. She hated, and it was boiling her. She hated so many things and most of them had nothing to do with Dahlia. This city and its growing resemblance to a prison. Its oblivious inhabitants, like the ones carrying on downstairs, leaping back into ordinary life despite the world's clear precariousness. Its downright ignorant ruling assembly, for looking for victories in all the wrong places and shunning any whisper of continued peril. The heat crept across her chest, up her neck, raising flush across her skin. Richard and Zedd, too. Cara hated them for leaving. She hated the idea of home and the way all the wine made her feel so slow. And herself. She hated herself for this, and for plenty aside from this, more than she hated most of the others.

For an instant, she tried to hate Kahlan. But the misguided attempt only made Cara hate herself more. With an abrupt flurry of motion, she tried to shrug Dahlia's hand away. Dahlia resisted, holding on all the more tightly.

Face was burning up, then, Cara felt her teeth grit and her upper lip flare beyond the lines of her control. But the expression must have lacked the intimidation it once carried. Because instead of backing away, Dahlia was moving in close again. With a half-lidded smile of victory, her hand slipped from Cara's throat to her jaw, tilting her head with thumb and forefinger on her chin to force a met gaze. Cara stared back, silent, scowling, eyes like live embers ready to rend in the heat.

"Don't be so sensitive, Cara," Dahlia taunted, fingertips of her other hand trailing down Cara's body from sternum to navel, stalling just below, raising gooseflesh despite the absolute anger. "It doesn't become you. Too weak, too simpering. Tell me. How far under your skin have you allowed her to reach? And how can I get the poison out?"

A lifetime of protecting each other from their weaknesses meant that Dahlia knew Cara's too well. More vulnerability to hate. Like being seen straight through and not seen at all, all at once. Cara sighed as Dahlia's fingers flickered so lightly near the apex of her thighs.

At one time, Dahlia's brazen demeanor would have been met with a spirited backhand, trading clever words for violence and a taking back of the upper hand. Now, a world away, it was different. The intent was there, but the inclination felt impotent. For all of the rage, Cara could hardly bring herself to move.

But there were other ways of making Dahlia submit.

Cara caught both of Dahlia's wrists, holding her hands at bay, and leaned close to growl in her ear.

"Kneel."

The word carried too much weight. Hovering over the First Chair. Pulled in by a neck guard strap, ignited from heart to bones and deeper. The memory hadn't faded yet. A fetter of impossibility; magnitude far out of reach. Cara needed to stop holding it but was at a loss as to how. How to stop making everything fill Cara with the infernal feeling of missing her.

Ignorant of the connotation, Dahlia moaned her thrilled deference to the demand and fell to her knees before Cara, palms skimming up her thighs. She grabbed onto Cara's hips and, with gasping desperation, took her with her mouth, all demanding possession. An explicit affirmation. This, only this. Only ever this. A try at a heaving pull back into line, into her - raring skill, confident ministrations. Like a siege engine. And despite everything, Cara's legs spread in abject want of the sensation, a half-willing flag of truce. Every one of her battlements was ablaze.

The muscles of Cara's midsection jumped as Dahlia's tongue, broad and slow, stroked against her throbbing clit. Loath to give Dahlia the satisfaction, she managed to curb any further reaction save for a near-noiseless exhalation, lungs depleting through an open mouth. Another deliberate, penetrating lick and Cara let her weight settle more completely against the wall behind her to avoid the unacceptable risk of her knees folding. Her hands groped there, blindly, for a neutral place to rest and grip; when her tingling fingers failed to find adequate purchase against the wall's splintery surface, she sighed sharply and balled one in a trembling fist by her side, the other cradling the back of Dahlia's head. And though the gesture was reluctant, it still brought Dahlia against her more deeply. Taking the contact as approval, and being half-correct, Dahlia increased her efforts. Cara strained against a groan, managing to hold it to an under-the-breath curse.

Lineated in the diminished light, Dahlia's loose-flowing hair looked several shades darker than it truly was. Cara blinked away, with haste, from watching her, wary of taking in too much of what had been falsely reflected there - what would destroy her. So she did her best to banish the image, walling it off in her mind, closing her eyes and tipping her head back. Focusing on the spontaneous way her hips began to undulate, prying every tiny bit of pleasure possible from Dahlia's appetent, insistent mouth. Latching on to the swirling, already-urgent pressure building in her core, radiating from under Dahlia's well-practiced tongue. Heeding the sensation of slick carnal friction meeting with the bitter agitation still convulsing in her chest. When they glanced off of one another, they mingled, entwining and thinning and causing a fuss before careening up and out, causing Cara's hips to jerk, breath to hitch and then come more quickly until she was entirely panting.

It had been so long. So long since Cara had been touched by someone else in this intentional and assured and consuming way. And it was so good. Objectively. Overwhelmingly. Those steady waves of long-absent pleasure coursed through her, ravaging every last corner of her perception, carrying her to the narrow brink of climax much more rapidly than Dahlia would have remembered. But she still knew the signs - the deep breath, the tensing thighs, the arch of her back - because she took firm hold of Cara's ass and worked all the more vigorously.

Cara fought it as hard as she could - the urge to release and dismantle. To cross this shameful line, to commit this crime for which she no longer had any reason to answer. But her unruly body took advantage of her mind's preoccupation, the latter too distracted with not thinking of Kahlan and not feeling Kahlan's heart in synchrony with the racing beat of her her own, to exert even a flimsy semblance of control. With just a half-instant to recognize and be sickened by her powerlessness, Cara succumbed. Her orgasm was merciless in its intensity, sending white-hot infernos bursting into nondescript patterns, blinding her with her eyes closed, tearing a strangled groan from her throat. It sounded utterly pathetic, but Cara had no capacity to care, stolen away by the ebb and flow. For one moment, just blissful, euphoric emptiness.

Dahlia supported Cara's wobbling legs, greedily draining her of the aftershocks, of everything, completely.

And then, the moment was over. Reality came sprawling back in before Cara had even caught her breath. She was exactly where she had been before, if not even further behind. With a stream of furious dismay and the want to just hide herself entirely, she tried to withdraw from Dahlia's touch. The wall kept her trapped in place with her shame.

Still on her knees, Dahlia gazed up at Cara through her lashes, wearing an enigmatic smile. Cara could see herself glistening on Dahlia's mouth and chin before she wiped it away with the back of a graceful hand. The grin darkened, and Cara, breathing hard and only somewhat coherent, waited for some barbed comment on her stamina.

"See?" she said, smirk audible in her tone, not breaking eye contact as she nipped once more at the inside of Cara's left thigh. "I still know what gets you heated, what makes your toes curl. I still know you. You're exactly the same, Cara, through and through."

And Cara considered it in that harrowing clarity of her body calming from its peak: maybe Dahlia was right. Maybe she had been frozen in place, just like right now, while the world rushed around her. Maybe those splintering feelings of change and of trying to gradually make herself fit within this place, within Kahlan's heart, weren't pains of growth, but pains of atrophy. None of it had mattered, regardless of what she had hoped change would allow. None of the old burdens lifted - they were simply buried under a new crop of misattributed, mismanaged expectations and the pain of coming too close and coming up empty.

Cara had no words of response, but their presence wouldn't have carried weight, because her jaw was locked, throat was burning. Dahlia was more than happy to fill the silence, with a tone at once relieved and unguarded, sullen and jarring, like every contradiction Cara felt personified before her.

"She hardly knows you." Her grin faded, and she regarded Cara with earnest gravity. "She can't feel for you the way I do, and always have. You know you can never be with her the way we are."

Rising to her full height and pinning Cara by the waist once again, Dahlia kissed her with urgency, a desperate reminder to keep her from fading away. And though Cara only met its passion out of reflex, she could taste herself in Dahlia's open mouth. It made her want to dissolve into the dark. She imagined halting Dahlia with a swift, brutal headbutt, clashing with nauseous fury, bruising their foreheads and ending this for good.

But she also wanted it to go on forever, because this was something to feel. Something to cloak her in indifference as she thought of the word Kahlan had said accidentally, and Dahlia hadn't said at all. Worthiness wrapped in smoke, left out to deteriorate. Love. Kahlan's heartbeat came back with even more insistence, storming something in the base of her skull. It was so loud, grating on whatever lay inside of her, forcing her to think of somewhere she could no longer be.

And if neither the drink nor Dahlia's mouth had helped, she needed to try more.

"On the floor," she rasped when Dahlia paused for air. The bed just reminded her of the one in Kahlan's chambers. Their eyes were locked. Dahlia's were gorgeous but the wrong sort of blue. "Face the mirror."

With a half-mask of coyness for her delight, Dahlia clasped her own lower lip between her teeth and obeyed. She sank to her hands and knees with slow elegance in front of the dressing mirror against the opposite wall. She held Cara's gaze in the reflection. Smoldering right into Cara's sinews and spaces. An invitation to further ruin.

Cara's knees hit the floor behind Dahlia with a bolt of ache that seemed to pass as quickly as it was noticed. There was no space to notice it left in Cara's mind, steady in its hopeless intent to forget, even for a few moments. Moments of pleasure, of pure fucking, of losing herself in something other than Kahlan's eyes, Kahlan's hands, Kahlan's bed. Own hand shaking with need, Cara dragged her fingers through Dahlia's arousal once, twice, hearing her moan, feeling her arch with each pass. Tasting Cara had made her so remarkably wet.

For an instant, it felt almost wonderful to be so wanted.

Then, without preamble, Cara slipped inside of her - deep, rough, all at once. Dahlia cried out with ravishment probably exaggerated. Cara didn't care. She just met Dahlia's needy writhing with an unhesitating thrust, then another, then more, using her own hips to augment the motion. Her free hand splayed its way up Dahlia's spine and gathered her hair in a hard-clenched fist. Wrapping it once around her wrist, Cara pulled, earning a sharp gasp of an impatient word.

"More."

Cara gave herself over to fulfilling it with abandon. Another tug and Dahlia let her neck bend back, bidding Cara deeper.

The reflection of Dahlia's face was mired in ecstasy - eyes shut tight, lips parted, cheeks flushed, responding to every compelling movement Cara made. And Cara watched her, screaming with the need to keep it that way, trying with all her worn-out might to keep a rhythm aside from the one still somehow resounding in her head.

Anything to stay lost in this space. Anything for a reprieve, to feel consummate, in control of all these trajectories.

Anything to keep Dahlia's eyes closed and oblivious to the reticent, disgraceful, numb tears brimming in her own.