Richard's mouth turned up with the kind of smile that told her that she had just framed the essence of his argument for him. "But they had not been born with that aspect, that attribute, of the gift." He leaned toward her.
"Zedd, besides training them, must have used magic to help them become wizards, right?"
Kahlan frowned at the thought. "I don't know. They never told me about their training to become wizards. That was never germane to their relationship with me or my training."
"But Zedd has Additive Magic," Richard pressed. "Additive can change things, add to them, make them more than they are."
"All right," Kahlan cautiously agreed. "What's the point?"
"The point is that Zedd took people who weren't born with the gift to be wizards and he trained them but-more importantly-he must have also used his power to help them along that path by altering how they were born. He had to have added to their gift to make them more than they were born to be." Richard glanced over at her as his horse stepped around a small, scraggly pine. "He altered people with magic."
Kahlan let out a deep breath as she looked away from Richard and ahead at the gentle spread of grassy hills to either side of them, as she tried to fully grasp the concept of what he was saying.
"I never considered that before, but all right," she finally said. "So, what of it?"
"We thought that only the wizards of old could do such a thing, but, apparently, it's not a lost art nor would it be entirely so far-fetched as I had imagined for the wizards back then to believe they could change what was, into what they thought it ought to be. What I'm saying is that, like what Zedd did to give people that with which they were not born, so too did the wizards of old try to give people born as pillars of Creation a spark of the gift."
Kahlan felt a chill of realization. The implication was staggering. Not just the wizards of old, but Zedd, too, had used magic to alter the very nature of people, the very nature of what they were, how they were born.
She supposed that he had only helped them to achieve what was their greatest ambition in life-their calling-by enhancing what they already had been born with. He helped them to reach their full potential. But that was for men who had the innate potential. While the wizards of long ago probably had done similar things to help people, they had also sometimes used their power for less benevolent reasons.
"So," he said, "the wizards back then, who were experienced in altering people's abilities, thought that these people called the pillars of Creation could be cured."
"Cured of not having been born gifted," she said in a flat tone of incredulity.
"Not exactly. They weren't trying to make them into wizards, but they thought they could at least be cured of not having that infinitesimal spark of the gift that simply enabled them to interact with magic."
Kahlan took a purging breath. "So then what happened?"
"This book was written after the great war had ended-after the barrier had been created and the Old World had been sealed away. It was written after the New World was at peace, or, at least, after the barrier kept the Old World contained.
"But remember what we found out before? That we think that during the war Wizard Ricker and his team had done something to halt Sub-tractive Magic's ability to be passed on to the offspring of wizards? Well, after the war, those born with the gift started becoming increasingly uncommon, and those who were being born were being born without the Subtractive side."
"So, after the war," she said, "those who were born with the gift of both Additive and Subtractive were rapidly becoming nonexistent. We already knew that."
"Right." Richard leaned toward her and lifted the book. "But then, when there are fewer wizards being born, all of a sudden the wizards additionally realize that they have all these pristinely ungifted-breaks altogether in the link to magic-on their hands. Suddenly, on top of the problem of the birth rate of those with the gift to be wizards dropping, they were faced with what they called pillars of Creation."
Kahlan swayed in the saddle as she thought about it, trying to imagine the situation at the Keep at the time. "I can see that they would have been pretty concerned."
His voice lowered meaningfully. "They were desperate."
Kahlan laid her reins over, moving in behind Richard as his horse stepped around an ancient, fallen tree that had been bleached silver from the sweltering sun.
"So, I suppose," Kahlan asked as she walked her horse back up beside him, "that the wizards started to do the same thing Zedd did? Trained those who had the calling-those who wished to be wizards but had not been born with the gift?"
