Parallel Affinity

Part 18.

"Cara... Do you know her?" Kahlan said as she took a step towards the Mord'Sith.

To say that she was surprised at the mutual familiarity between Cara and this... person would be an understatement.

Dahlia - the woman had replied when Cara had asked for her name. The Mord'Sith had not uttered a word since. But this peculiar silence had gone on for long enough, Kahlan decided. She deserved to know what was going on, even if Cara didn't seem to share her thoughts, even if she appeared to be lost in a world entirely different — one she seemed to share only with this... Dahlia.

"I do," she said eventually, a moment before Kahlan was about to question her again. "We were friends when we were children."

Kahlan looked from Cara to the other woman. Her sight kept tripping up over the woman's wine-coloured lips. She was beautiful, that much could not be denied.

"Best friends, if I remember correctly," Dahlia interjected. "Closer than even sisters. We went to school together, always played together, shared all of our secrets and couldn't bear to be parted... Right up until they... took you away."

"You are from Stowecroft too?" Kahlan asked.

"Yes..." the husky voice confirmed.

"Then what are you doing all the way here, in Ashford?" the Confessor pressed.

"Cara wasn't the only girl that was taken from our village by the Mord'Sith," Dahlia replied, her locked eye-contact with Cara finally breaking as she succumbed to the pain of her memories. "Some time before they took her, one of my cousins was taken. My parents wanted us to leave Stowecroft immediately after it had happened but I... I remember I cried... I cried a lot. I refused to go and begged them to stay, which in the end they agreed, and we did stay... For a time."

"Why did you do that?" Kahlan frowned.

While Kahlan scrutinised Dahlia from afar, trying to gage her character and intentions, Cara never once took her eyes off the woman on the other side of the bars. She couldn't believe that this was really happening... That Dahlia was really there, materialised in the flesh. She questioned whether she might be dreaming or hallucinating it all... And yet, the girl... The girl she recalled from her long-suppressed past, the girl with the grey eyes and perfect lips, which she suddenly recalled in her mind smiling at her with a childish, toothless grin, seemed too real, too much like the memory she had secretly carried buried deep inside of her heart, and too true to be only a dream.

"I couldn't bear to be parted from my best friend," Dahlia admitted evenly.

She blinked first at Kahlan, then back at Cara. Her expression was nothing less than incredulous as her eyes soaked in every detail of the strong, beautiful woman her childhood friend had grown up to be, just as she had prayed and hoped... Just as she had imagined her to be.

Kahlan took one look at Cara and realised that in that moment, she might as well have been invisible to the Mord'Sith. A pang in her belly stirred. It left her feeling unsettled.

"When they took you away," Dahlia took a step towards the iron bars, closer towards Cara, her voice turning heavy, "I... I wished I could disappear. But the very next day, my parents took me far away from our village, brought me here, out of fear that I would get taken by the Mord'Sith also. And I let them because I thought I would never... Never get to see you again—"

The husky voice broke. Dahlia bowed her head. When she next dared to look up at Cara, the Mord'Sith saw a sparkling tear trailing down pale and rosy cheeks.

"But now... You are here!" her face had twisted into an astonished smile, and a tear escaped from her other eye. "I can barely believe it! It feels like a miracle!"