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  　Until Jennsen realized that her mother was no longer seeing anything in this world.

  　Jennsen fell against her mother, dissolving in tears and terror. Choking in sobs. Everything had ended. The crazy senseless world had ended.

  　Her arms stretched out toward her mother as she was pulled away.

  　"Jennsen." His mouth was close to her ear. "We have to do what she wanted. "

  　"No! Please oh please no," she wailed.

  　He gently pulled. "Jennsen, do as she asked. We must."

  　Jennsen pounded her fists against the blood-slicked floor. "No!" The world had ended. " Oh please no. No, it can't be."

  　"Jenn, we have to go."

  　"You go," she sobbed. "I don't care. I give up."

  　"No, Jenn, you don't. You can't."

  　His arm around her middle lifted her, set her on her wobbly legs. Numb, Jennsen couldn't move. Nothing was real. Everything was a dream. The world was crumbling to ash.

  　Holding her by her upper arms, he shook her. "Jennsen, we have to get out of here."

  　She turned her head and looked at her mother on the floor. "We have to do something. Please. We have to do something."

  　"Yes, we do. We have to leave before more men show up."

  　His face was dripping. She wondered if it was rain. As if she were watching herself from some great disconnected distance, her own thoughts seemed crazy to her.

  　"Jennsen, listen to me." Her mother had said that. It was important. "Listen to me. We have to get out of here. Your mother was right. We have to go."

  　He turned to the pack beside the lamp on the table at the side of the room. Jennsen slumped to the floor. Her knees hit with a thump. She was empty of everything but the hot coals of agony from which she could not pull away. Why did everything have to be so wrong?

  　Jennsen crawled toward her sleeping mother. She couldn't die. She couldn't. Jennsen loved her too much for her to die.

  　"Jennsen! Grieve later! We have to get out of here!"

  　Out the open door, the rain poured down.

  　"I won't leave her!"

  　"Your mother made a sacrifice for you-so you would have a life. Don't throw away her final act of courage."

  　He was stuffing whatever he could find in a pack. "You have to do as she said. She loves you and wants you to live. She told you to run. I swore I'd help you. We have to leave before they catch us here."

  　She stared at the door. It had been closed. She remembered crashing into it. Now it stood open. Maybe the latch broke...

  　A huge shadow materialized out of the rain, melting through the doorway into the house.

  　The brawny man's eyes fixed on her. Feral fright surged through her. He moved toward her. Faster and faster.

  　Jennsen saw the knife with the ornate "R" sticking from the side of a dead man's neck. The knife her mother told her to take. It wasn't far. Her mother had lost her arm-her life-to kill him.

  　The man, seemingly oblivious of Sebastian, dove for Jennsen. She dove

  　for the knife. Her fingers, greasy with blood, seized the handle. The worked metal gave good grip. Art, with purpose. Deadly art. With teeth gritted, she yanked the blade free and rolled.

  　Before the man reached her, Sebastian growled with the effort of burying his axe in the back of the man's head. The soldier crashed to the floor beside her, his meaty arm falling across her middle.

  　Jennsen, crying out, wriggled out from under the arm as blood grew in a dark pool beneath his head. Sebastian pulled her up.

  　"Get whatever you want to take," he ordered.

  　She moved through the room, walking in a dream. The world had gone mad. Perhaps it was she who had finally gone mad.

  　The voice in her head whispered to her, in its strange language. She found herself listening, almost comforted by it.

  　Tu vash misht. Tu vask misht. Grushdeva du kalt misht.

  　"We have to go," Sebastian said. "Get what you want to take."

  　She couldn't think. She didn't know what to do. She blocked the voice and told herself to do as her mother said to do.

  　She went to the cupboard and rapidly began picking out things that they always took when they traveled-things always at the ready. Traveling clothes were kept in her pack, ready to leave at a moment's notice. She threw herbs, spices, and dried food in on top of them. She pulled other clothes, a brush, a 【创建和谐家园】all mirror, from a simple chest of woven branches.

  　Her hand paused when she started grabbing her mother's clothes for her. She stopped, fingers trembling, focusing on her mother's orders. She couldn't think, so she moved like a trained animal, doing as she had been taught. They'd had to run before.

  　She scanned the room. Four dead D'Harans. One that morning. That made five. A quad plus one. Where were the other three? In the dark outside the door? In the trees? In the dark woods, waiting? Waiting to take her to Lord Rahl to be tortured to death?

  　With both hands, Sebastian seized her wrist. "Jennsen, what are you doing?"

  　She realized she was stabbing at the empty air.

  　She watched as he pried the knife from her fist and returned it to its sheath. He tucked it behind her belt. He scooped up her cloak, which the huge D'Haran soldier had ripped off her as she had first fallen into the nightmare.

  　"Hurry up, Jennsen. Grab anything else you want."

  　Sebastian rifled through the dead men's pockets, pulling out money he found, cramming it in his own pockets. He unstrapped all four knives, none as good as the one he'd tucked behind her belt, the one with the ornate letter "R" on the handle, the one from the fallen dead man, the one her mother had used.

  　Sebastian slipped the four knives down the side of the pack as he yelled at her again to hurry. While he took the best sword from one of the men, Jennsen went to the table. She scooped up candles and stuffed them in the pack. Sebastian attached the scabbard of the sword to his weapons belt. Jennsen collected 【创建和谐家园】all implements--cooking utensils, pots-pushing them in her pack. She wasn't really aware of what she was taking. She was just picking up whatever she saw and putting it in.

  　Sebastian lifted her pack, took one of her wrists, and stuffed it through the strap, as if he were handling a rag doll. He put her other arm through the other strap he held out for her, then threw her cloak around her shoulders. After he pulled the hood up over her head, he stuffed her red hair in the sides.

  　He held her mother's pack in one hand. He tugged twice and freed his axe from the soldier's skull. Blood ran down the handle as he hooked the axe on his weapons belt. With the heel of his sword hand against the 【创建和谐家园】all of her back, he urged her onward.

  　"Anything else?" he asked as they moved toward the door. "Jennsen, do you want anything else from your house before we go?"

  　Jennsen looked over her shoulder at her mother on the floor.

  　"She's gone, Jennsen. The good spirits are taking care of her, now. She's 【创建和谐家园】iling down on you, now."

  　Jennsen looked up at him. "Really? You think so?"

  　"Yes. She's in a better world, now. She told us to go from here. We have to do what she said."

  　In a better world. Jennsen clung to that idea. Her world held only anguish.

  　She moved toward the door, doing as Sebastian said to do. He scanned in every direction. She simply followed, stepping over bodies, over bloody arms and legs. She was too scared to feel anymore, too heartsick to care. Her thoughts seemed completely muddled. She had always prided herself on her clear thinking. Where had her clear thinking gone?

  　In the rain, he pulled her by her arm toward the path down.

  　"Betty," she said, digging in her heels. "We have to get Betty."

  　He gazed at the path, then toward the cave. "I don't think we need bother with the goat, but I should get my pack, my things."

  　She saw he was standing in the downpour without his cloak. He was soaked to the skin. It occurred to her that she wasn't the only one who wasn't thinking clearly. He was so intent on escaping that he almost left his things. That would be the death of him. She couldn't let him die. Betty would help, but there was one other thing that she remembered. Jennsen ran back in the house.

  　She ignored Sebastian's yells. Inside, she wasted no time rushing to a 【创建和谐家园】all wooden chest just inside the door. She looked at nothing else as she pulled out two bundled sheepskin cloaks-one hers, one her mother's. They kept them there, rolled and tied, at the ready, in case they ever had to leave in a hurry. He watched from the doorway, impatient, but silent when he saw what she was doing. Without looking death in the eye, she rushed back out of her house for the last time.

  　Together, they ran to the cave. The fire was still crackling hot. Betty paced and trembled but was uncharacteristically silent, as if knowing something was terribly wrong.

  　"Dry yourself a bit, first," she said.

  　"We don't have time! We have to get out of here. The others could come at any moment."

  　"You'll freeze to death if you don't. Then what good will running do? Dead is dead." Her own reasoned words surprised her.

  　Jennsen pulled the two rolled sheepskin cloaks from under her wool cloak and started working loose the knots in the thongs. "These will help keep the rain out, but you need to get dry, first, otherwise you won't stay warm enough."

  　He was nodding as he shivered and rubbed his hands before the fire, the sense of what she said finally overcoming his urgency to be gone. She wondered how he managed to do all he had done with a fever and after having taken herbs. Fear, she guessed. Stark-raving fear. That, she understood.

  　Her whole body ached. Not only had she been banged around, but she saw now that her shoulder was bleeding. The cut wasn't bad, but it throbbed. The sustained level of terror had left her drained and exhausted.

  　She wanted only to lie down and cry, but her mother had told her to get away. Only her mother's words motivated her now. Without those last commands, Jennsen would be unable to function. Now she simply did what her mother had told her to do.

  　Betty was beside herself. The distraught goat tried to climb the pen to get to Jennsen. As Sebastian hovered over the fire, Jennsen tied a rope around Betty's neck. The goat was as thankful to be going as a goat could be.

  　They would give Betty a chance to return the favor. When they had gotten away and found at least simple shelter, they would not be able to build a fire on such a wet night. If they could find a dry hole, a spot under a rock ledge, or beneath fallen trees, they would hunker down beside the goat. Betty would keep them both warm so they wouldn't freeze to death.

  　Jennsen understood the plaintive calls Betty made toward the house. The goat's ears were at attention. Betty was worried for the woman who wasn't going. Jennsen collected all the carrots and acorns off the shelf, stuffing them in pockets and packs.

  　When Sebastian was as dry as he was going to allow himself to get, they donned their wool cloaks and topped them with the sheepskin. With Jennsen leading Betty by the rope, they started out into the drenching darkness. Sebastian headed for the trail down from the front-the way he had come in.

  　Jennsen seized his arm, stopping him. "They might be waiting down there. "

  　"But we have to get out of here."

  　"I have a better way. We made an escape route."

  　He gazed at her a moment through the fall of icy rain separating them, then, without further protest, followed her into the unknown.

  　CHAPTER 7

  　Oba Schalk snatched the chicken by the neck and lifted it from the nest box. The chicken's head looked tiny above his meaty fist. With his other hand, he fished a warm brown egg from the bottom of the depression in the straw. He gently placed the egg in the basket with the others.

  　Oba didn't set the chicken back down.

  　He grinned as he lifted it closer to his face, watching its head twist from side to side, its beak open and close, open and close. He put his own lips close, so the beak was touching his lips, then, with all his might, he blew in the chicken's open mouth.

  　The chicken squawked and flapped, madly trying to escape the viselike fist. A deep laugh rolled up from Oba's throat.

  　" Oba! Oba, where are you!"

  　When he heard his mother hollering for him, Oba plopped the chicken back on its nest. His mother's voice had come from the nearby barn. Squawking its terror, the chicken fled the henhouse. Oba followed it out of the coop and then trotted toward the door to the barn.

  　The week before, they had had a rare winter downpour. By the following day, the standing water had frozen and the rain had turned to snow. Windswept snow now hid the ice, making for treacherous footing. Despite his size, Oba negotiated the icy conditions without much difficulty. Oba prided himself on being light on his feet.

  　It was important for a person not to let their body or mind become and dull. Oba believed it was important to learn new things. He believed it was important to grow. He thought it was important for a to use what they had learned. That was how people grew.

  　The barn and house were one 【创建和谐家园】all structure made of wattle and woven branches covered with a mixture of clay, straw, and dung. The house and barn were separated by a stone wall. After he'd built house, Oba had made the wall inside by stacking flat gray rocks from the field. He had learned the technique from observing a neighbor stack mocks at the side of his field. The wall was a luxury most homes didn't have.

  　Hearing his mother yell his name again, he tried to think of what he could have done wrong. As he perused his mental list of the chores she'd ordered him to do, he couldn't recall one in the barn that he'd failed to do. Oba wasn't forgetful, and besides, they were chores he did often. There shouldn't be anything in the barn to have set her off.

  　True as all that was, none of it shielded him from incurring his mother's ire. She could think of things that needed doing that had never before needed doing.

  　"Oba! Oba! How many times do I need to call for you!"

  　In his mind's eye, he could see her mean little mouth all pinched up as she said his name, expecting him to appear the instant she screeched for him. The woman had a voice that could unwind a good rope.

  　Oba turned sideways to fit his shoulders through the 【创建和谐家园】all side door into the barn. Rats squeaked and scurried away at his feet. The barn, with a hayloft above, housed their milk cow, two hogs, and two oxen. The cow was still in the barn. The hogs had been turned loose in the oak stand to rut for acorns under the snow. Oba could see the hind ends of both oxen through the larger barn door out to the yard on the other side.

  　His mother stood on the low hill of frozen muck, hands on her hips, the cold 【创建和谐家园】oke of her breath rising from her nostrils like a dragon's fiery snort.

  　Mother was a big-boned woman, broad in the shoulders and hips. Broad everywhere. Even her forehead was broad. He had heard people say that when his mother was younger she had been a handsome woman, and indeed, when he had been a boy, she had had a number of suitors. Year by year, though, the struggles of life had worn away her looks, leaving behind deeply etched lines and sagging folds of flesh. The suitors had long ago stopped coming around.

  　Oba made his way across the black, icy ground inside the barn and stood before her, hands in his pockets. She walloped the side of his shoulder with a stout stick. "Oba." He flinched when she whacked him three times more, each swat punctuating his name. "Oba. Oba. Oba."

  　When he had been young, such a thrashing would have left him black and blue. He was too big and strong, now, for her stick to hurt him. That made her angry, too.

  　While he wasn't bothered much by the stick now that he was grown, the condemnation in her voice whenever she spoke his name still made his ears bum. She reminded him of a spider with a mean little mouth. A black widow spider.

  　He hunched, trying not to look so big. "What is it, Mama?"

  　"Where are you loafing when your mother calls?" Her face screwed up, a plum long ago turned to a prune. "Oba the ox. Oba the dimwit. Oba the oaf. Where were you!"