Usually, the oaks held on to their leaves until at least early winter, and some of them until spring, but up in the mountains icy winds and early storms had already stripped even the oaks bare of their tenacious brown leaves.
Cara stepped out onto a shelf of ledge jutting out over the chasm below. "There," she said as she pointed across the way. "Up there. Do you see?"
Richard shielded his eyes against the warm sunlight as he squinted higher up on the opposite slope. He made a sound deep in his throat to confirm that he saw it. "Nasty place to die."
Kahlan snugged the warm wolf fur up against her ears to protect them from the cold wind. "There's a good place?"
Richard let his hand drop from his brow. "I guess not."
Farther up the slope from where Cara had pointed, the forest ended in a place called the crooked wood. Above that, where no trees could grow, the mountain was naked rock ridges and scree. A little farther up, snow, white as sugar, sparkled in the slanting sunlight. Below the snow and bare rock, the crooked wood was exposed to harsh winds and bitter weather, causing the trees to grow in tortured shapes. The crooked wood was a line of demarcation between the desolation where little more than lichen could survive the forbidding weather, and the forest of trees huddled below.
Richard gestured off to their right. "Let's not waste any time, though.
I don't want to be caught up here come dark."
Kahlan looked out to where the mountain opened onto a grand vista of snowcapped peaks, valleys, and the undulating green of seemingly endless, trackless forests. A roiling blanket of thick clouds had invaded those valleys, stealing in around the mountains, sneaking ever closer. In the distance, some of the snowcapped peaks stood isolated in a cottony gray sea.
Lower down the mountains, below those dense, dark clouds, the weather would be miserable.
Both Richard and Cara awaited Kahlan's word. She didn't like the thought of being exposed in the crooked wood when the icy cold fog and drizzle arrived. "I'm fine, let's go and get it done. Then we can get down lower where we'll be able to find a wayward pine to stay dry tonight. I wouldn't mind sitting beside a hearty little fire sipping hot tea."
Cara blew warm breath into her cupped hands. "That sounds good to me."
It was on the first day Kahlan met Richard, more than a year before, that he had taken her to a wayward pine. Kahlan had never known about such trees in the deep woods of Westland. Wayward pines still held the same mystic quality for her as they did the first time she saw one silhouetted against a darkening sky, taller than all the trees around it. Such mature trees were a friend to travelers far from any conventional shelter.
A big wayward pine's boughs hung down to the ground all around. The needles grew mostly at the outer fringe, leaving the inner branches bare.
Inside, under their dense green skirts, wayward pines provided excellent shelter from harsh weather, Something about the tree's sap made them resistant to fire, so if you were careful, you could have a cozy campfire inside while outside it rained and stormed.
Richard, Kahlan, and Cara often stayed in wayward pines when they were out in the mountains. Those nights getting warm around a small fire within the tree's confines brought them all closer, and gave them time to reflect, to talk, and to tell stories. Some of the stories made them laugh. Some brought a lump to their throats.
After Kahlan's assurance that she was up to it, Richard and Cara nodded and started down the cliff. She had recovered from her terrible wounds, but they still left it up to her to decide if she was prepared for the effort of such a descent and climb and then descent again before they found a sheltered campsite-hopefully in a wayward pine.
Kahlan had been a long time in healing. She had known, of course, that injuries such as she had suffered would take time to heal. Bedridden for so long, her muscles had become withered, weak, and nearly useless. For a long time, it had been hard for her to eat much. She became a skeleton. With the realization of just how weak and helpless she had become, even as she healed, she had inexorably spiraled down into a state of abject depression.
Kahlan had not comprehended completely the punishing effort that would be required if she was to he herself again. Richard and Cara tried to cheer her up, but their efforts seemed distant; they just didn't understand what it was like. Her legs wasted away until they were bony sticks with knobby knees. She felt not just helpless, but ugly. Richard carved animals for her: hawks, foxes, otters, ducks, and even chipmunks. They seemed only a curiosity to her. At the lowest point, Kahlan almost wished she had died along with their child.
Her life became a tasteless gruel. All she saw, day after day, week after week, were the four walls of her sickroom. The pain was exhausting and the monotony numbing. She came to hate the bitter yarrow tea they made her drink, and the smell of the poultice made of tall cinquefoil and yarrow.
When after a time she resisted drinking yarrow, they would sometimes switch to linden, which wasn't so bitter but didn't work as well, yet it did help her sleep. Skullcap often helped when her head hurt, though it was so astringent it make her mouth pucker for a long time after, Sometimes, they switched to a tincture of feverfew to help ease her pain. Kahlan came to hate taking herbs and would often say she didn't hurt, when she did, just to avoid some horrid concoction.
Richard hadn't made the window in the bedroom very big; in the summer heat the room was often sweltering. Kahlan could see only a bit of the sky outside her window, the tops of some trees, and the jagged blue.-gray shape of a mountain in the distance.
Richard wanted to take her outside, but Kahlan begged him not to try because she didn't think it would be worth the pain. It didn't take much convincing for him to be talked out of hurting her. Every kind of day, from sunny and bright to gray and gloomy, came and went. Lying in her little room as time slipped away while she slowly healed, Kahlan thought of it as her "lost summer."
One day, she was parched, and Richard had forgotten to fill the cup and place it where she could reach it on the simple table beside the bed. When she asked for water, Richard came back with the cup and a full waterskin and set them both on the windowsill as he called to Cara, outside. He rushed out, telling Kahlan as he went that he and Cara had to go check the fishing lines and they would be back as soon as they could. Before Kahlan could ask him to put the water closer, he was gone.