Confessor by Terry Goodkind

to fill, so it had been compelled to do so. Zedd understood the principle, he just couldn’t imagine how it could be accomplished.
    While grateful that she had saved Richard’s life, Zedd had not been pleased that such valuable and irreplaceable glass had been destroyed, leaving the containment fieldbreached. Nicci had offered to help with the repairs. Zedd wouldn’t have known how to accomplish such a thing by himself. He wouldn’t have thought that there was anyone alive who would have known how to bend forces in the way she had done, or who would have had the required power to do so. Who would ever have thought that there would be anyone alive who could re-create the glass in those windows? And yet she had.
    It had put Zedd in mind of nothing so much as a queen come down to the royal kitchens to deftly demonstrate how to make a rare bread with a long-forgotten recipe.
    While Zedd had known some very powerful sorceresses, he had never known any who were the equal of Nicci. Some of the things she could do with seeming ease were so confounding that it left him speechless.
    Of course, Nicci was far more than a mere sorceress. As a former Sister of the Dark she knew how to command Subtractive Magic. As a Sister of the Dark, she would have taken the power from a wizard and added it to her own, creating something altogether unique—not something he liked to contemplate.
    To a certain extent she frightened him. Without Richard to show her the value of her own life she would still be devoted to the cause of the Order. With so much of her life a mystery to him, with all that she had done but never spoke of, with all that she had once been a part of, Zedd wasn’t entirely sure of how far he could trust her.
    Richard trusted her, though—trusted her with his life. She had proven worthy of that trust on numerous occasions. Other than himself and Cara, Zedd didn’t know anyone as fiercely devoted to Richard as Nicci. Nicci would without question or a second thought go to the underworld itself if she had to in order to save him.
    Richard had brought this remarkable woman back from the depths of evil, just as he had done with Cara and theother Mord-Sith. Who but Richard could accomplish such a thing? Who but Richard could even think to do such a thing?
    How Zedd missed that boy.
    Nicci glided back into the library, and Zedd saw, then, what was on the table. His ability had told him that it was there, but his ability had not told him what more there was to it.
    Behind him, Cara let out a low whistle. Zedd sympathized with the sentiment.
    The box of Orden, sitting atop one of the massive library tables, absent the decorative covering that once had contained it, was a bewitching black that seemed as if it might suck the light right out of the dawn, a black so black it almost appeared as if the box itself was nothing so much as a void in the world of life. Staring at it felt uncomfortably like looking right into the underworld, the world of the dead.
    But it was the containment spell that had been drawn all around the box that had him alarmed. It had been drawn in blood. There were other charms, other spells, drawn on the tabletop, and they, too, were drawn in blood.
    Zedd recognized some of the elements of the diagrams. He didn’t know of anyone living who could have drawn such charms. Such things were not entirely stable, making them dangerous beyond belief. Any number of spells could kill in an instant if done improperly. These spells, drawn in blood no less, were among the most perilous spells in existence. Employing them successfully was not something Zedd himself, with a lifetime of knowledge, training, and practice, would ever consider attempting.
    Zedd had seen such terrible spells drawn only once before. Those had been drawn by Darken Rahl—Richard’s father—when Darken Rahl had been completing the conjuring involved in opening the boxes of Orden. Opening one of the boxes had cost him his life.
    Around the box itself, in