Starting off immediately after Wizard’s First Rule, while Zedd contemplated what should be done with the three boxes of Orden, he and Chase and Rachel were attacked by a screeling, an assassin from the Keeper of the underworld. After a good deal of running, Zedd lured it into pool of water in the Garden of Life and then sucked the heat out of the water to freeze the screeling. This gave him enough time to figure out how to kill it. Then he organized the tending of the wounded, and of the guards. Zedd had noticed that there was a stone that had come out of the box of Orden that Darken Rahl had opened, and he suspected he knew it’s purpose, so he gave it to Rachel to wear as a necklace, instructing her to give it to nobody by Richard. Among the wounded was a young servant woman, nearly dead, wearing a stone that marked her as seeing visions of the future. He barely managed to heal her, and she showed him two visions, one of Richard dead in a red coat, and one of Mother Confessor being beheaded. She said that it was essential that Mother Confessor be given to the people to be killed, or the Keeper would overwhelm the living.

Meanwhile, Richard and Kahlan arrived at the Mud People on Scarlet the Dragon and prepared for their wedding and the wife of their host made her a beautiful blue wedding dress. A screeling attacked Richard and Kahlan as he was out showing her how to shoot arrows, which he did extraordinarily well, by means of magic, although he rejected the idea, because he saw magic as the problem of the world. Kahlan surprised herself with lightning, a feature of the Con Dor she had initiated in the previous book, and it killed the screeling. It could have only come if the veil to the underworld was torn, so he requested a spirit gathering to get information from the spirits. An owl fell out of the sky and hit Richard, which the Bird Man interpreted as an omen that there was great danger in the gathering, but Richard insisted he needed guidance.

About this time, three Sisters of Light arrived, and informed him that he had “the gift”, that is, of magic. He refused to countenance it, but they noted that he had started having intense headaches, started sleeping with his eyes open like a wizard, and his dietary preferences had suddenly changed (he could no longer stand meat), and he was forced to acknowledge that they were at least right about that. They said that without training the headaches would kill him, that they trained wizards, and they implored him to put the color they had around his neck to stop the headaches. They said he would have only three chances. He rejected them twice, before the spirit gathering, and each time the Sister that asked apologized to her sisters, they forgave her, and killed her.

At the gathering, the spirits did come, but said that anyone except Richard (who had called the meeting) was free to leave now if they wanted to stay safe. Everyone left except Kahlan. The spirits apologized to Richard, and then Darkan Rahl came, mocked him for breaking Wizard’s Second Rule (do not meddle in things that you do not understand) and marked Richard as the Keeper’s. The mark started sucking his life away and Richard went unconscious. Then Denna came, and said that because Richard had sacrificed for her, she would take his mark on herself and go to the Keeper for eternal pain, but only on the condition that Kahlan ensure that Richard went with the last Sister if they could not find Zedd before she asked; she would not sacrifice herself if it was not going to solve the problem. Kahlan agreed. In the morning, after the door to the spirit house became open, they left to find Sister Verna, making the final offer. Kahlan goaded Richard into accepting the collar, which rejected because a collar represented pain and torture; she essentially said that could not value him if he did not. He accepted, out of love for her, but he felt completely betrayed and that she did not love him. She gave him a lock of her hair to remember her, and that night he threw it into the night to set her free, since that’s what she obviously wanted.

Sister Verna and Richard did not get along. She saw herself and the Sisters and giving the gift of the Creator, of training to use the gift; he saw them taking him prisoner. They had disguised contempt for animals, but he destroyed the painfully design bits for leading the horses, and insisted that she learn to love the horses. He also made friends with a baby short-tailed gar, which looked to him for help after he killed its mother, which was attacking him. He stood watch every evening, and hunted food for it. It turned out to be surprisingly intelligent and could speak a little. Richard took issue with all her rules, and generally ended up doing the opposite. When they crossed the Valley of the Lost (a valley between two wizard towers that was so blighted with spells that neither of the warring wizard armies could complete the wall), Sister Verna ended up getting tricked by a vision, and Richard, having no way of telling where the spells were, let the horses guide them, to Sister Verna’s horror. (He had noticed the horses happily eating on grass that was not there.) Then, when they got to a warrior tribe that insisted that the magic-man kill their sacrifice for the crops, which Sister Verna insisted on him doing, because they had to cross their land and it was the only condition that they allowed them to (which they had been doing for hundreds of years), he instead rescued the woman and engineered an end to the war between her neighboring tribe and them. They continued through her tribe’s land, but thirty elite warriors attacked him at night. The only advice Sister Verna could give him was a prophecy (since he had already quoted one, unbeknowst to him, titling himself as “the bringer of death”; he was not in a good mood about being a prisoner to the Sisters). He ended up harnessing the magic of the Sword of Truth, and found himself guided by the skills of the people who had wielded the sword over the several thousand years of its existence, and when he let himself be guided he was unstoppable, and killed all thirty. The woman he had rescued was pleased, despite her five husband being among the thirty; she was the spirit woman of the tribe, and he had fulfilled a prophecy that he was the one that would give their land back, the Valley of the Lost that the wizards had taken. She said he was her husband, but, still in love with Kahlan, he deflected the topic every time she brought it up.

They finally arrived at the Palace of the Prophets, in what was supposed to be a joyous occasion. Immediately after arriving he announced that he considered himself a prisoner and all them enemies unless they released him from the collar, and that he would kill anyone who got in his way. (They could not take the Sword of Truth, because he had offered it to Sister Verna along the way, which was the one thing he could have done, by the rules, to prevent them from taking it, another thing that frustrated Sister Verna to no end.) Young, pretty Pasha, next in line to become Sister (if she succeeded in training Richard) had been so excited but she cried at how his treatment of them, and his rejection of her sexual advances—and the young Sisters and the townswomen give him no shortage of advances. So he took a softer tack, and said he was in love with another and was not ready yet. He tried to get in touch with his Han (his gift) with each of the six Sisters who were helping him, but felt nothing. He also made friends with all the palace guards, by use of the money which the castle freely plied him with, and mapped out the castle in his mind. On his first night he went to the forbidden forest and practiced with the sword, killing a mrisrith, which delighted the Sister he told, since they had heard rumors of them, but no one had ever survived, so they had never seen one. However, he kept its chameleon cloak that, that blended the wearer into the background. (He also used the mriswith to insist that Sister Verna be reinstated to a Sister from the Novice that she had been demoted to on their arrival.)

He insisted on seeing the Prelate, who always denied him, but he engineered a way in, discovering that she was waiting for him and it had been a test. She had been there when he was a little baby, had given the Book of Counted Shadows to his “father” George. By this time Richard had realized that he was Darkan Rahl’s child, but she informed him that he was also Zedd’s child, by Darkan Rahl raping Zedd’s daughter. She explained the importance of balance: the Creator is on the Life side, but life left unchecked would grow out of control and die; in order to live, life must kill (plants, animals) to eat, and die to avoid growing out of control. The Keeper ruled the underworld and hungered to consume life, and was kept there by the Stone of Tears, among other things, which acted as gravity on that side and weighed him down. She told him he had both Additive Magic (the traditional magic of wizards, of Light) and Subtractive Magic (of the underworld, rare, and the gift of both had been seen in one person for three thousand years). She said he was a war wizard. She also gave him reasons why the situation was not so urgent as he thought. She also said that the Sisters were unable to remove the collar until he was grown in power enough to help them do it.

Richard found the Prophet, who said that the Sisters were doing it wrong, that wizards were supposed to do it, and that they could not ever help him find his Han because of the subtractive magic. He showed Richard how to get in touch with the anger to use his Han. Richard had also befriended Warren, a wizard who mostly lived in the books of prophecy, trying to decipher him. They searched for prophecies about Richard, and Richard helped him explain them. He learned that the situation was indeed urgent, that the Keeper would try to come through the gateway on the winter solstice (the book began on the first day of winter). Furthermore, he discovered from Warren that the Castle was in a time trap, and that by the time he was trained, hundreds of years would have passed on the outside. And he discovered that Kahlan was going to be executed on the solstice. Escape was urgent.

Now while Richard had been with Sister Verna and at the castle, Zedd had gone to find the bone-witch Adie in Westland, and Kahlan had gone to Aydindril in the north, where Zedd had said he would bring Adie. Zed found Adie and they told each other intimate and painful details of their history, but just at the end they were interrupted by some of her skrin bones reanimating themselves. Neither of them could do anything to it, and they fled. Eventually Zedd managed to cast a boundary to the underworld and made it think they had gone there by throwing both of their bone necklaces into it. However, Adie had been wounded with some underworld magic that was sucking away her life, and his attempts to heal her transferred some of it to him. The only person Adie knew was in the wrong corner of the Midlands, but Zedd bought off the best coachman with a lot of gold to drive them there. The woman was able to heal them, but at the expense of their magic (which the underworld magic fed on) and their memory. They might be restored, but it would take an intense emotional shock. Apparently Zedd had informed the coach driver of all this and that he was to take them to Aydindril. He repeatedly re-informed them, like old people with dementia (and they were both not young).

Kahlan, meanwhile was being escorted north by Chandalen and two brothers. Chandalen resented her and Richard for bringing trouble to the village, even though Richard had proven to him that he had good intention by saving the village from an attack (by persuasion and Wizard’s First Rule—people want to believe what they believe, so give them a reason). She chose him because he was the best. They came to a city that had been wiped out, and she found her all the women in the palace of her half-sister, the Queen of the Galaens raped and dead, and the males slaughtered. (Not without exacting a high price first, though, it turned out.) Then they ran into an army of youth of around 18 years about to take vengeance on the army ten times its size. She tried to talk them out of it, but was obliged to pull rank, because their plan was suicidal. Her father had been the previous Queen’s wife, and had taught her all kinds of military strategy. Together with Chandalen, they came up with a strategy to harass the army to death and avoid a confrontation. First, she went alone to try to talk them into it, and when that, unsurprisingly failed, she killed their wizard, caused some panic, and left, luring the people that followed her onto an icy waterfall where they fell to their deaths. That night, before the army could learn about the smaller army, a subset of the army stripped naked and covered themselves in whitewash to be the spirits of the dead that the people of D'Hara, who made up most of the army of the previously unheard of Imperial Order, feared. With Kahlan in the lead, they tore through the camp, hobbling the horses, breaking the weapons, lighting fires, and causing terror. Kahlan made sure that all the officers who escaped the poisoned alchol that had been left for them to find. After a narrow escape, they returned, and she told them how proud she was of them (and they were all impressed with how well she killed with the sword). She was exhausted and needed to sleep. It turned out that one of the brothers of the three Mud People that had been escorting her was a baneling—a person sworn to the Keeper’s service—and had poisoned her, but Chandalen, who had been slowly getting over his grudge, realized what had happened and gave her the antidote.

She realized that she was urgently needed at the council in Aydindril, which she was head of, since there was an army serving the Keeper’s whispers causing war in the Midlands, and she was in charge of keeping it peaceful. But when she arrived, it turned out that the people hated her (they had always been afraid of her power). She was accused of treason, the wizard their stripped her of her power, and threw her into a hole to be raped before she was executed. But she found that her power was not gone, and she “took” a man to protect her. Chandralen arrived in the morning, having fought through the guards, and rescued her. She found Zedd had returned, but when she told him that Richard had gone with the sisters, Zedd had his emotional shock. He remembered; in particular he remembered that the Castle was a time trap and they would never see him again, nor would he be able to help them. The prophecies were clear that he was the only one that could prevent the underworld from consuming the world of life, and she had forced him to go with the Sisters, so he attacked her and brought her to execution herself. But in reality he had cast a death spell to kill the underworld part of him, and the spell required the person to be convinced they would die. But Kahlan found herself alive, and hid out with the woman Zedd had healed at the beginning, and named Lady Bevivier (and given her a large quantity of gold to live the part), as her servant.

Going back to Richard, he engineered an escape, requesting the help of a Sister-teacher whom he got along really well with as a friend, to take off his collar. She took him to the forbidden forest, but she sucked out his life essence into a quillion statue instead. Richard heard her telling a beast behind him that he could have his body after she was done and realized he needed to save himself, so he sucked back his essence and attacked her, eventually winning. Now the Prelate knew that there were Sisters of the Dark (Sisters sworn to the service of the Keeper) in the Castle, and Richard’s machinations set up the conditions for her to discover who they were, and she set those plans in motion. Those Sisters fled (or were killed in the action). Richard had given the red coat that the castle wardrobe had provided him to a friend, who was killed in it, and coming back and seeing it, he did some killing. When Richard came back to his rooms, Pasha was livid at Richard —she had listened to a Sister of the Dark who had advised that using her beautiful body was a service to the Creator—and she flew at him in a rage for all the ungentlemanly way he had been acting around the castle, but she ended up falling of the tower and presumably dying. Sister Verna proved to be a friend, and although she did not have the power to take off the collar, she helped him make his escape, along with Warren, who was looking for an adventure.

Richard and the spirit-woman from the tribe, together dispelled the longstanding magic between the Towers of Perdition, turning the valley verdant again and in so doing, restoring it to her people. He dodged the husband issue again by giving her orders on restoring her land and not fighting with her neighbors. It was the solstice. He knew Mother Confessor had to die, and he knew that the Keeper had engineered an open gateway. So he called Scarlet with the one-time use dragon’s tooth she gave him to use at great need, because it was the only way he could go from the far south the the People’s Palace in D'Hara quickly enough. Coming down towards the glass roof of the central Garden of Life, a Sister of the Dark shot lighting at Scarlet, wounding her, but she made it down. Richard found Darkan Rahl in the middle of a spell being drawn in sorcerer’s sand (which we discovered was made of crystallized magic from wizard’s bones, and was found perhaps only in the two towers of Perdition, which were extremely dangerous to enter). Richard had collected some dark sorcerer’s sand from the dark tower while he was lost in the spells on the way to Castle with Sister Verna, and he put the black sand on the white sand of the spell, which shriveled up the white sand and ruined the spell. Chase and Rachel had been lost in the spells, too, and he had found them when the land was restored. Rachel had given him her necklace with the Stone of Tears, which he angrily was going to put around Darkan Rahl to send him to the underworld. Then he remembered that using the stone on someone in anger would tear the veil, so to Darkan Rahl’s great anger, he put it back in Orden’s box, where it presumably went around the Keeper. He stood in the circle and, not knowing how, shot lighting out. Darkan Rahl went back down to the underworld, the Sister of the Dark died, and since it turned out that the center of the Palace was a spell for the Rahl, Richard’s lightning had also killed all the attackers in the service of the Keeper.

Scarlet was too injured to fly to Aydindril, plus she had just laid an egg, tiring her further. So Richard rode as fast as he could, driving all his horses to death and then buying a new one, arriving two weeks later. He found out from Kahlan’s cook that she had been executed, and went in despair. Simultaneously, Zedd was urging her to take a mate, so she was going to take Orsk, a man from the army she had “taken”, but Zedd urged her to think on it. Both Richard and Kahlan had given up praying to the good spirits, since they had not protected them or answered their prayers, but both simultaneously repented and asked about their love. In response, the spirit of Denna appeared to both of them, in their two locations (Kahlan in her half-sister the Queen’s city and Richard in Aydindril). The Keeper had refused her, it turned out, he being disgusted with her sacrifice and it seemed that her actions had earned her a spot in the “good” spirits. She brought them physically in one place for the evening. Rejoicing that the other still loved them, they shared what had happened to each other, and then “were one”. Richard regrew Kahlan’s hair, which had been chopped short as an insult, and ungrew his beard which he had grown as a “prisoner” of the Sisters, as proof that he had both additive and subtractive magic. Denna gave Kahlan a message for Adie, which was her emotional shock and brought her back.

Stone of Tears is an improvement on the first book. There is less internal dialogue, and certainly much more narrative tension, with prophecies about Richard and Kahlan’s death being introduced, but then the circumstances turn out to be different that the prophecy would lead one to expect. (Prophecy, as the Prophet told one of the Sisters, can only be understood with the gift that re-gives the vision from the words, not from the words themselves.) The battle scene is quite entertaining and exciting. Unfortunately, there is still implied rape, and attempted rape, but in general things are toned down from the first book. There is also less philosophy, limited to balance between life and death in a sort of animistic way, and I am not entirely sure if that is meant to be philosophy or just merely an expounding on the mechanics of magic, which had previously been said to be about balance anyway. It is less of a romance novel, although that still comes across strongly, in the theme of perceived betrayal and rejection turning out to have been done in love, and coming to understand that. This is an entertaining read, much improved over the first, although I would not recommend it if you are unhappily single, or if you are looking for Tolkien or Le Guin quality storytelling.