They would wiggle eagerly on the other side of the glass whenever anyone approached, like puppies happy to see their masters.
The main room had a small fireplace Richard had built with clay from stream banks he'd formed into bricks and dried in the sun, and then cooked in a fire. They had the table he'd made, and chairs constructed of branches intertwined and lashed together. He'd woven the chair bottoms and backs from leathery inner bark.
In the corner of the room was a wooden door over a deep root cellar.
Against the back wall were simple shelves and a big cupboard full of supplies. They'd bought a lot of supplies along the way and carried them either in the carriage with Kahlan or strapped on the back and sides. For the last part of the journey Richard and Cara had lugged everything in, since the carriage couldn't make it over narrow mountain passes where there were no roads. Richard had blazed the trail in.
Cara had her own room opposite theirs. Once up and about, Kahlan was surprised to find that Cara had a collection of rocks. Cara bristled at the term "collection," and asserted that they were there as defensive weapons, should they be attacked and trapped in the house. Kahlan found the rocks-all different colors-suspiciously pretty. Cara insisted they were deadly.
While Kahlan had been bedridden, Richard had slept on a pallet in the main room, or sometimes outside under the stars. A number of times, at first, when she was in so much pain, Kahlan had awakened to see him sitting on the floor beside her bed, dozing as he leaned against the wall, always ready to jump up if she needed anything, or to offer her medicines and herb teas. He hadn't wanted to sleep in bed with her for fear of it hurting her.
She almost would have been willing to endure it for the comfort of his presence beside her. Finally, though, after she was up and about, he was at last able to lie beside her. That first night with him in bed, she had held his big warm hand to her belly as she gazed at Spirit silhouetted in the moonlight, listening to the night calls of birds, bugs, and the songs of the wolves until her eyes closed and she drifted into a peaceful slumber.
It was on the next day that Richard first killed her.
They were at the stream, checking the fishing lines, when he cut two straight willow switches. He tossed one on the ground beside where she sat, and told her it was her sword.
He seemed in a playful mood, and told her to defend herself. Feeling playful herself, Kahlan took up the challenge by suddenly trying to stab him just to put him in his place. He stabbed her first and declared her dead.
She fought him again, more earnestly the second time, and he quickly dispatched her with a convincingly feigned beheading. By the third time she went after him, she was a little irked. She put all her effort into her assault, but he smoothly thwarted her attack and then pressed the tip of his willow-switch sword between her breasts. He announced her dead for a third time out of three.
Thereafter, it became a game Kahlan wanted to win. Richard never let her win, not even just to be nice when she was feeling low because of her slow progress at getting stronger. He repeatedly humbled her in front of Cara. Kahlan knew he was doing it to make her push herself to use her muscles, to forget her aches, to stretch and strengthen her body. Kahlan just wanted to win.
They each carried their willow-switch swords sheathed behind a belt, always at the ready. Every day, she would attack him, or he would attack her, and the fight was on. At first, she was no challenge to him, and he made it clear she was no challenge. That, of course, only made her determined to show him that she was no novice, that it was not so much a battle of strength, but of leverage, advantage, and swiftness. He encouraged her, but never gave her false praise. As the weeks passed, she slowly began making him work for his kills.
Kahlan had been taught to use a sword by her father, King Wyborn. At least, he had been king before Kahlan's mother took him for her mate. King was an insignificant title to a Confessor. King Wyborn of Galea had had two children with his queen and first wife, so Kahlan had both an older half sister and a half brother.
Kahlan wanted very much to make a good show of her training under her father. It was frustrating to know she was far better with a weapon than she was showing Richard. It wasn't so much that she didn't know what to do, but that she simply couldn't do it; her muscles were not yet strong enough, nor would they respond nearly quickly enough.
Something about it, though, was still unsettling: Richard fought in a way Kahlan had never encountered in her training, or in the real combat she had seen. She couldn't define or analyze the difference, but she could feel it, and she didn't know what to do to counter it.
In the beginning, Richard and Kahlan had most of their battles in the meadow outside their house, so that Kahlan wouldn't be as likely to trip over something, and if she did, not as likely to hit her head on anything granite. Cara was their everpresent audience. As time passed, the battles lasted longer, and grew more strenuous. They became furious and exhausting.
A couple of times Kahlan had been so upset by Richard's relentless attitude toward their sword fights that she didn't speak to him for hours afterward, lest she let slip words she didn't really mean and which she knew she would regret.
Richard would then sometimes tell her, "Save your anger for the enemy.
Here it will do you no good; there, it can overcome fear. Use this time now to teach your sword what to do, so later it will do it without conscious thought."
Kahlan well knew that an enemy was never kind. If Richard gave in to kindnessawarded her false pride-it could only serve her ill. As aggravating as such lessons sometimes were, it was impossible to remain angry with Richard for very long, especially because she knew she was really only angry with herself.
Kahlan had been around weapons and men who used them all her life. A few of the better ones, in addition to her father, were on occasion her teachers. None of them had fought like Richard. Richard made fighting with a blade look like art. He gave beauty to the act of dealing death. There was something about it, though, tickling at her, something she knew she still wasn't grasping.
Richard had told her once, before she had been hurt, that he had come to believe that magic itself could be an art form. She had told him she thought that was crazy. Now, she didn't know.