Chainfire: Chainfire Trilogy Part 1

After a long period of reading and memorizing, Richard began to write down what he'd memorized. He would then check it against the book. At first he made a lot of mistakes, but he continually improved. Each time, his father burned the papers. Richard repeated the task untold times. His father often apologized for the burden he was placing on Richard, but Richard never resented it; he considered it an honor to be entrusted by his father with such a great responsibility. Even though he was young and didn't understand all of what he read, he was able to grasp what a profoundly important work it was. He also realized that the book involved complex procedures having to do with magic. Real magic.

In time, Richard eventually wrote the book out from beginning to end a hundred times without error before he was satisfied that he could never forget a single word. He knew not only by the text of the book, but by its idiosyncratic syntax, that any word left out would spell disaster to the knowledge itself.

When he assured his father that the entirety of the work was committed to memory, they put the book back in the hiding place in the rocks and left it for three years. After that time, when Richard was beyond his middle teens, they returned one fall day and uncovered the ancient book. His father said that if Richard could write the whole book, without a single mistake, they could both be satisfied that it had been learned perfectly and they would together bum the book. Richard wrote without hesitation from the beginning to the final word. When he checked his work against the book, it confirmed what he already knew: He had not made a single mistake.

Together he and his father built a fire, stacking on more than enough wood, until the heat drove them back. His father handed him the book and told him that, if he was sure, he should throw the book into the fire. Richard held The Book of Counted Shadows in the crook of his arm, running his fingers over the thick leather cover. He held in his arms not just his father's trust, but the trust of everyone. Feeling the full weight of that responsibility, Richard cast the book into the fire. In that moment, he was no longer a child.

When the book burned it gave off not only heat but cold, and it released streamers of colored light and phantom forms. Richard knew that for the first time he had actually seen magic-not sleight of hand or the stuff of mysticism, but real magic that existed, real magic with its own laws of how it functioned just like everything else that existed. And some of those laws had been in the book he had memorized.

But in the beginning, that day in the woods, when he had been a boy and for the first time lifted open the cover, Richard had, in a way, met Kahlan. The Book of Counted Shadows began with the words Verification of the truth of the words of The Book of Counted Shadows, if spoken by another, rather than read by the one who commands the boxes, can only be insured by the use of a Confessor-

Kahlan was the last Confessor.

The day he met her, Richard had been looking for clues to his father's murder. Darken Rahl had put the boxes of Orden in play and in order to open them he needed the information in The Book of Counted Shadows. He didn't know that by that time the information existed only in Richard's mind, and that to verify it he would need a Confessor: Kahlan.

In a way, Richard and Kahlan had been bound together by that book, and the events surrounding it, from the time Richard had first opened the cover and encountered the strange word "Confessor."

When he met Kahlan in the woods that day, it seemed to him that he had always known her. In a way, he had. In a way, she had played a part in his life, been a part of his thoughts, ever since he had been a boy.

The day he first saw her standing on a path in the Hartland woods, his life suddenly became whole, even though at the time he had not known that she was the last living Confessor. His choice to help her that day had been an act of free will carried out before prophecy had a chance to have its say.

Kahlan was so much a part of him, so much a part of what was the world to him, what was life to him, that he could not imagine going on without her. He had to find her. The time had come to go beyond the problem and seek the solution.

A gust of icy wind made him squint and brought him out of his memories.

"There," he said, pointing.

Cara paused behind him and peered over his shoulder into the swirling snow until she was able to make out the narrow pathway along the edge of the mountainside. When he glanced back she nodded, letting him know that she saw the path skirting the lower fringe of the snowcap.