They worked without pause as much as possible. Food was brought in so they wouldn't have to stop. When they could keep their eyes open no longer, they slept for a time on the couches.

Nicci, never far from him, paced through the shadows and shafts of light from the reflector lamps hung on the polished, dark brown, white-veined marble pillars standing at uniform intervals throughout the library. She scanned yet another book, seeing if it was something he needed to read, only to walk back to the shelves and replace it.

Richard's burning urge was to act. He desperately wanted to go after Kahlan. He knew, though, that it wasn't that simple. To really go after her he had to learn how to use the power of Orden before it was too late to ever get her back. He knew that it would be impossible for him to do such a thing on his own. Nicci had, without hesitation, agreed to be his teacher.

The first thing she had done had been to explain the complexities of sterile fields. She wanted him to fully understand the implications. Richard was no expert in magic, and he certainly didn't know how to use his ability at will, but Nicci had made the principles understandable to him. At first, he found it hard to grasp. He couldn't understand what harm such foreknowledge could really do.

Nicci insisted that the wizards who had created Orden to counter a Chainfire event were convinced that foreknowledge of a certain emotional nature would taint the magic they were creating and thus taint Orden itself. Richard had been dubious.

She told him how Zedd was the one who had explained to her that foreknowledge tainting magic was no theory, but that it was true. He had told her that Richard himself had proven it by falling in love with Kahlan without her Confessor's power harming him. Any foreknowledge that it could be done would have destroyed Richard's ability to overcome the problem because her magic, when she first unleashed it on him even without intending to, would have taken him. While he never revealed the solution to Nicci, Zedd did tell her that Richard had to be totally unaware of a solution even existing, or that solution would not have worked, so she was sworn to secrecy on even that small part of it.

Zedd had told Nicci that Richard himself had proven the central question of Ordenic theory-that foreknowledge can affect the functioning of magic. He had proven it with Kahlan.

Richard knew all too well what Nicci was talking about, even if she was in the dark about parts of it. Because of experiencing such a thing firsthand, he recognized the true gravity of the situation. He knew that, just as his foreknowledge of a solution to loving a Confessor would have made that solution fail, Kahlan having foreknowledge of his profound emotional connection to her would make Orden fail.

It was no theory, as the wizards who created Orden had thought. It was true: foreknowledge tainted a sterile field. Richard, of all people, grasped that concept on a visceral level.

To know in his heart, and to also fully comprehend, that he couldn't allow Kahlan to learn about the two of them being in love tied his insides in knots. At the moment, though, that eventuality was only a distant concern. It was one problem that he sincerely hoped to someday have. He had a lot more to learn before he ever reached that point.

Through reading a number of historical accounts in the library and from books some of the Sisters had found that dated back to the time before the great war, Nicci had been able to form a theory about his gift and how it functioned. It wasn't, in her opinion, so much a matter of Richard not growing up learning about magic that made it difficult for him to control his ability, but that the gift of a war wizard actually functioned differently from a sorceress's or a typical wizard's gift. Richard's power wasn't simply tapped, she'd explained, but worked through intent via his feelings in much the same way that the Sword of Truth functioned.

In this sense, the Sword of Truth turned out to be a kind of primer on how his own ability worked. The sword functioned according to what the person wielding it believed. It wouldn't harm a person who they believed to be a friend, but it would destroy anyone they believed was an enemy. The reality didn't matter; it was what the person believed to be true that drove the magic of the sword. That was the critical concept at the center of both the sword and his gift as war wizard.

Feelings-emotions-were the internal sums of what one had collected, observed, experienced, and grasped about life all delivered in an instant: an interior life viewpoint thrust forward as emotion. That didn't mean, however, that those concluding judgments, in and of themselves, were correct. Just as with the sword, his gift worked in conjunction with what he valued. It was incumbent upon the intellect to sift out legitimate values and provide well-reasoned justification to make those emotions not only true but moral.

That was why it was vital that the right person be selected to wield the Sword of Truth. That person had to be someone with the ability to make those judgments for sound reasons.

Also much like the sword, his gift worked through anger. Anger was actually a projection of his values in that it was a reaction to threats to those values. Thus, his gift was ignited by his anger at whatever threatened what he valued-for example those he loved, or even the ultimate human value of life itself.

Nicci had told him that for all she knew he might never learn to control his ability directly, the way other gifted people did. She said that she suspected that the reason for this was that a war wizard's gift was fundamentally different, serving a different purpose than the gift in others, such as the gift to be a healer, or a prophet. The implication in everything she'd learned was that anger was a key element in the ability of a war wizard. After all, war was not properly entered into out of joy or a lust for conquest, but in response to a threat to values.

Of more immediate concern to Richard, however, was learning to use the power of Orden to reverse the Chainfire spell.

Nicci had been shocked to see the designs and symbols Richard had painted on himself and the other men. She recognized that he had combined familiar elements into completely new forms. But she also wanted to know how he had managed to integrate elements pertaining to Orden.

Richard had explained that he had come to learn that some of the parts of the spells Darken Rahl had drawn to open the boxes of Orden were also parts of the dance with death, and he knew the symbols relating to the dance with death quite well.

In a way, that association made sense. Zedd had once told him that the power of Orden was the power of life itself. The dance with death, used with the Sword of Truth, was really about preserving life, and Orden was itself drawn from the power of life and centered around preserving it from the rampages of the Chainfire spell.

In a way, the Sword of Truth, the ability of a war wizard, and the power of Orden were all inextricably linked.

Those links brought to Richard's mind First Wizard Baraccus, the man who had thousands of years before written a book, Secrets of a War Wizard's Power, for Richard. That book was meant to help him in this quest. That book was still hidden in Tamarang, where Richard had stashed it when Six had held him prisoner for a brief time. Richard knew that Zedd had been headed there to see if he could get the spell drawn in the sacred caves removed from Richard. Since Richard's gift had returned, his grandfather had obviously been successful.

Now that Richard was reconnected with his gift, he remembered even word of The Book of Counted Shadows. Nicci was convinced, and had convinced Richard, that the book he had memorized could only have been a false copy that could not be used to open the correct box of Orden.