The Third Kingdom by Terry Goodkind Page A

Now, take a deep breath.”
    She took two.
    “Better?”
    She nodded as she pushed her thatch of dark hair back from the sides of her face.
    “All right,” Richard said, “now explain to me what happened.”
    Sammie took another steadying breath and then flicked a hand toward Kahlan. “I was connected to her, feeling her pain—you know, the pain of her smaller injuries, like you suggested. I was, well, I was trying to gather up a lot of that pain, collect it, and take it into myself.”
    “I understand,” Richard said as he cautiously released her shoulders. “Then what?”
    Sammie put one hand on a hip as she pressed the trembling fingers of her other hand to her forehead, trying to remember what had happened. “Well, I don’t know exactly. I don’t know how to explain it.”
    “Do your best, child,” Ester urged.
    Sammie glanced at her and then looked up at Richard’s eyes. “Do you know the way the sensation of beginning to do a healing is like being caught up in a flow that draws you in, draws you deeper, seeking more of the trouble within the person?”
    “Yes, I know what you mean,” Richard said. “It’s like you lose your sense of who you are as you become more and more focused on them and their pain. It feels like you are dissolving into the other person, losing yourself as you slip down into who they are. It seems to gather power from you and in that way pulls you onward.”
    Sammie was nodding as he spoke. “That’s what it felt like. When I’ve healed other people, though, I wasn’t pulled in like that. This was stronger than I’ve ever felt before.”
    “That’s most likely because they weren’t as badly hurt. It’s the need that draws you toward it. The more serious the trouble, the stronger the need, so the more powerfully it pulls you in. You don’t need to be afraid of that sensation. From what I know, that’s not unusual.”
    “That wasn’t the frightening part,” Sammie said as she cast a worried look at Kahlan. Her lower lip started quivering again. She seemed transfixed, unable to look away from Kahlan lying so still on the lambskin.
    Richard put a finger under Sammie’s chin and turned her face back toward his. “Go on. Tell me what you saw.”
    Sammie knitted her fingers together as she frowned while recalling the experience. “When I started slipping down into her, I began to be drawn in faster and faster. It took me deeper than I had expected. I realized that I wasn’t trying to go down into her, it was just that something kept pulling me down. It was like losing my footing as I slid down a steep, slippery slope.”
    “I told you, that’s pretty normal.”
    “That’s what I thought at first. But I soon realized that I wasn’t simply going down into her need the way I have with others I’ve healed. I wasn’t just being pulled in. I was being drawn toward something.”
    “Toward something? Toward what?” Richard asked.
    “Something dark. Something dark and sinister. As I got closer, I heard voices.”
    That was something Richard had not expected. “Voices? What kind of voices?”
    “At first I didn’t know what the sound was. At first it was a distant buzzing. As I sank ever faster toward the darkness within her, I realized that what I was hearing were screams.”
    Richard frowned. “Screams? I don’t understand. What do you mean, you were hearing screams? How could you hear screams?”
    Sammie stared off, as if experiencing it again. “It was like a thousand screams all melted together.” She shook her head at her own description, or maybe in an effort to escape the memory. She looked back up at him. “No, not like a thousand. Like a million. Like a million million. It was like an infinite number of screams welling up from a dark place. They were the most horrific, terrifying, anguished screams you can imagine. The kind of screams that seemed as if they might sear the flesh from your bones.”
    Richard couldn’t help glancing back down at Kahlan.