Naked Empire   ::   Goodkind Terry

"Jennsen, why would you feel that way?"

"Those like me are also called 'holes in the world. I guess I can see why, now."

Richard leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. "I know what it's like to feel regret for how you were born, for what you have, or don't have. I hated being born the way I was-with the gift. But I came to realize how senseless such feelings are, how completely wrong it was to think that way."

"But it's different with me," she said as she pushed at the sand with a finger, erasing the little ruts she'd made with the pebble. "There are others like you-wizards or sorceresses with the gift. Everyone else can at least see colors, as you put it. I'm the only one like this."

Richard gazed at his half sister, a beautiful, bright, ungifted half sister that any previous Lord Rahl would have murdered on the spot, and was overcome with a radiant smile. "Jennsen, I think of you as born pure. You're like a new snowflake, different than any other, and startlingly beautiful."

Looking up at him, Jennsen was overcome with a smile of her own. "I never thought of it that way." Her smile withered as she thought about his words. "But still, I'd be destroying-"

"You would be creating, not destroying," Richard said. "Magic exists.

It cannot possess the 'right' to exist. To think so would be to ignore the true nature-the reality-of things. People, if they don't take the lives of others, have the right to live their life. You can't say that because you were born with red hair you supplanted the 'right' of brown hair to be born on your head."

Jennsen giggled at such a concept. It was good to see the smile taking firmer hold. By the look on Tom's face, he agreed.

"So," Jennsen finally asked, "what about this thing we're going to see?"

"If the thing Cara touched has been altered by someone with the gift, then since you can't see the magic, you might see something we can't see:

what lies beneath that magic."

Jennsen rubbed the edge of her boot heel. "And you think that will tell you something important?"

"I don't know. It may be useful, or it may not, but I want to know what you see-with your special vision-without any suggestion from us."

"If you're so worried about it, why did you leave it? Aren't you afraid someone might come across it and take it?"

"I worry about a lot of things," Richard said.

"Even if it really is something altered by magic and she sees it for what it truly is," Cara said, "that doesn't mean that it still isn't what it seems to us, or that it isn't just as dangerous.