Verna idly pulled her journey book from her belt. She didn't know what made her do so, except perhaps that it had been some time since she had last looked for a message from the real Prelate. Ann was having her own crisis of caring ever since Kahlan had laid the blame for so much of what had gone wrong, including being the cause of the war itself, right at the Prelate's feet. Verna thought that Kahlan had been wrong about much of it, but she understood all too well why she thought that Ann had been responsible for tangling up their lives; Verna had felt the same way for a time.
Holding the journey book off to the side with one hand, flipping the pages with a thumb, Verna saw a message flash by.
Rikka swept back into the tent. She plunked a heavy sack down on Verna's desk, right on top of the reports.
"Here!" Rikka said, fury powering her voice.
It was then, when Verna looked up, that she saw for the first time the strange way Rikka was dressed. Verna's mouth fell open. Rikka was not wearing the skintight red leather that the Mord-Sith typically wore, except for occasionally when they were relaxing and then they sometimes wore brown leather, instead. Verna had never seen the woman in anything other than those leather outfits.
Now Rikka had on a dress.
Verna could not remember being so astonished.
Not just a dress, but a pink dress that no decent woman of Rikka's age, probably her late twenties or early thirties, would be caught dead in. The neckline plunged down to reveal ample cleavage. The twin mounds of exposed flesh were shoved up and nearly spilling out the top. Verna was amazed that Rikka's nipples had managed to remain covered, what with the way her breasts heaved with her heated breathing.
"You, too?" Rikka snapped.
Verna finally looked up into Rikka's blazing blue eyes. "Me, too, what?"
"You, too, can't get enough of looking at my chest?"
Verna felt her face go scarlet. She gave her red face an excuse by shaking a finger at the woman.
"What are you doing dressed like that in an army camp! Around all these soldiers! You look like a whore!"
Despite how their leather outfits went all the way up to their necks, the tight leather left little to the imagination. Seeing the woman's flesh, though, was altogether different, and quite shocking.
Verna realized, only then, because she had finally looked up at the woman's face, that Rikka's single braid was undone. Her long blond hair was as free as a horse's mane. Verna had never seen one of the Mord-Sith out in public without her hair done up in the single braid that in large part identified their profession of Mord-Sith.
Even seeing the woman's cleavage exposed was not as shocking as seeing her hair undone. It was that, more than anything, Verna realized, that lent a lewd look to the woman. Something about her braid being undone seemed sacrilegious, even though Verna could not condone a profession dedicated to torture.
Verna remembered, then, that she had asked one of the Mord-Sith, Cara, to do her worst to the young man-a boy, really-who had murdered Warren.
Verna had sat up the entire night listening to that young man scream his life away. His suffering had been monstrous, and yet it had not been nearly enough to suit her.
At times, Verna wondered if in the next life the Keeper of the underworld would have something wholly unpleasant in store for her for all eternity in recompense for what Verna had done. She didn't really care; it had been worth whatever the price might be.
Besides, she decided, if she was to be punished for condemning that man to just retribution, then the very concept of justice would have to be invalid, rendering living a life of good or evil to have no meaning. In fact, for the justice she had meted out to that vile amoral animal walking the world of life in the form of a man who had murdered Warren, she should be rewarded in the afterlife by being eternally in the warmth of the Creator's light, along with the good spirit of Warren, or else there was no justice.
General Meiffert swept into the tent, fists at his sides, coming to a halt beside Rikka. He raked his blond hair back when he saw Verna sitting behind her little desk, and cooled visibly.
He'd had the carpenters nail together the tiny desk for her out of scrap furniture left in an abandoned farm. It was nothing like the desks at the Palace of the Prophets, of course, but it had been given with more concern and meaning behind it than the grandest gold-leafed desk she had ever seen. General Meiffert had been proud at seeing how useful Verna found it.
With a quick glance, he took in Rikka's dress and her hair. "What's this about?"
"Well," Verna said, "I'm not sure. Something about one of Jagang's Sisters scouting a pass."
Rikka folded her bare arms atop her nearly bare bosom. "Not just a Sister, but a Sister of the Dark."
