Free The Pillars of Creation by Terry Goodkind

and rolled.
    Before the man reached her, Sebastian growled with the effort of burying his axe in the back of the man’s head. The soldier crashed to the floor beside her, his meaty arm falling across her middle.
    Jennsen, crying out, wriggled out from under the arm as blood grew in a dark pool beneath his head. Sebastian pulled her up.
    “Get whatever you want to take,” he ordered.
    She moved through the room, walking in a dream. The world had gone mad. Perhaps it was she who had finally gone mad.
    The voice in her head whispered to her, in its strange language. She found herself listening, almost comforted by it.
    Tu vash misht. Tu vask misht. Grushdeva du kalt misht .
    “We have to go,” Sebastian said. “Get what you want to take.”
    She couldn’t think. She didn’t know what to do. She blocked the voice and told herself to do as her mother said to do.
    She went to the cupboard and rapidly began picking out things that they always took when they traveled—things always at the ready. Traveling clothes were kept in her pack, ready to leave at a moment’s notice. She threw herbs, spices, and dried food in on top of them. She pulled other clothes, a brush, a small mirror, from a simple chest of woven branches.
    Her hand paused when she started grabbing her mother’s clothes for her. She stopped, fingers trembling, focusing on her mother’s orders. She couldn’t think, so she moved like a trained animal, doing as she had been taught. They’d had to run before.
    She scanned the room. Four dead D’Harans. One that morning. That made five. A quad plus one. Where were the other three? In the dark outside the door? In the trees? In the dark woods, waiting? Waiting to take her to Lord Rahl to be tortured to death?
    With both hands, Sebastian seized her wrist. “Jennsen, what are you doing?”
    She realized she was stabbing at the empty air.
    She watched as he pried the knife from her fist and returned it to its sheath. He tucked it behind her belt. He scooped up her cloak, which the huge D’Haran soldier had ripped off her as she had first fallen into the nightmare.
    “Hurry up, Jennsen. Grab anything else you want.”
    Sebastian rifled through the dead men’s pockets, pulling out money he found, cramming it in his own pockets. He unstrapped all four knives, none as good as the one he’d tucked behind her belt, the one with the ornate letter “R” on the handle, the one from the fallen dead man, the one her mother had used.
    Sebastian slipped the four knives down the side of the pack as he yelled at her again to hurry. While he took the best sword from one of the men, Jennsen went to the table. She scooped up candles and stuffed them in the pack. Sebastian attached the scabbard of the sword to his weapons belt. Jennsen collected small implements—cooking utensils, pots—pushing them in her pack. She wasn’t really aware of what she was taking. She was just picking up whatever she saw and putting it in.
    Sebastian lifted her pack, took one of her wrists, and stuffed it through the strap, as if he were handling a rag doll. He put her other arm through the other strap he held out for her, then threw her cloak around her shoulders. After he pulled the hood up over her head, he stuffed her red hair in the sides.
    He held her mother’s pack in one hand. He tugged twice and freed his axe from the soldier’s skull. Blood ran down the handle as he hooked the axe on his weapons belt. With the heel of his sword hand against the small of her back, he urged her onward.
    “Anything else?” he asked as they moved toward the door. “Jennsen, do you want anything else from your house before we go?”
    Jennsen looked over her shoulder at her mother on the floor.
    “She’s gone, Jennsen. The good spirits are taking care of her, now. She’s smiling down on you, now.”
    Jennsen looked up at him. “Really? You think so?”
    “Yes. She’s in a better world, now. She told us to go from here. We have to do what she